Quick follow up question here. Is there an unbiased rating system for cleanliness, in the aspect of "overall morality", in the military? Wouldn't it be subject to personal definitions of what morality would be to the person creating the rating system?

To clarify, he added the very important caveat of "unless you were a landlord" to his deeming of the People's Liberation Army as doing a good job at minimizing harm to civilians.

There is one pretty good source to support that. Edgar Snow famously went and interviewed Mao and Zhou En Lai on the Long March, and documented Mao's army in his classic Red Star Over China. He painted a picture of a KMT that was corrupt and uncaring towards a starving population, and did have some memorable anecdotes of the People's Army's taking care not to abuse the civilians: at one point marching by an orchard full of ripe apricots and leaving them alone.

Snow was denounced later in the 1950's as being "soft" on the Red Chinese, as having been taken in by Mao and the other leaders. He certainly maintained his affection for the Chinese until the end of his life, and always got a warm reception from the CCP when he visited, and there's no doubt that he saw them as a better alternative to the corruption of the KMT. But he also did not try to gloss over the very constant and uncompromising ideology of the CCP and pretend that they were somehow just a bunch of democrats ( though he seemed to hope they would become that)- a nuance that the red-hunters in the 1950's failed to appreciate, when they were furiously trying to find out how the US could have "lost" China in 1949.

But my info is a bit out of date, here. Perhaps somebody who's a China specialist has a more recent assessment of Snow , can speak up.

Are we including things like Operation Starvation and the strategic bombing campaigns in this count?