Political Motivation
The Communist Party of Canada says that Bethune, who joined the party in 1935, acted out of devotion to the Spanish and Chinese Communist movements. Larry Hannant, Bethune's biographer, says Bethune specifically refused to work under Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist government and insisted on helping the Chinese Communists instead. In them, Hanant continues, Bethune found a movement and a people that satisfied his ideal of communism, with a hatred of Japanese militarism, a love for the Communists' allies around the world who shared their struggle, and a lack of personal vanity and ambition. Hannant goes on to speculate that "even as they fulfilled his ideal image of communism," the Chinese Communists also gratified his own bourgeois ego—they revered him."
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