Towards Unity?

Peace had come. Now China needed unity. Last week Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek acted decisively to unify his country.

Deposed Dragon. First he moved against China's strong war lord, one-eyed General Lung Yun, the rascally "old dragon" of Yunnan. By gun and guile, Lung had ruled that strategic southwestern province of China since 1927. His capital, Kunming, was the biggest U.S. air base in the country, and during the war he had played host to many a U.S. officer and touring bigwig. Last week Chiang deposed the "old dragon" of Yunnan, completing a political conquest of the vast western hinterland.

Six years ago, when Chiang Kai-shek retreated into western China rather than come to terms with the Japanese, he was forced into an area barely under his control and hardly touched by the national revolution. The two principal provinces of west China are Szechwan (pop.: 60 million) and Yunnan (pop.: 11 million). Both were dominated by old-style war lords. In 1941 Chiang ousted the war lord of Szechwan, appointing an honest and progressive governor.

When the Dragon of Yunnan's turn came last week, General Lung was caught with his military pants down: obeying Chiang's orders, a good part of his private army of over 100,000 men was far away, in Indo-China. Chiang ordered Lung to take a face-saving job in Chungking. Lung refused: the Dragon's teeth were not to be pulled so easily. That night rifles cracked in Kunming: next morning a score of bodies lay at the South Gate.

For four days the excitement continued. Soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek's army were all over the place. Only a few companies of Lung's troops did any shooting, and the Dragon never had a chance. On the fourth day Premier T. V. Soong flew down from Chungking. He and the Chinese commander in chief, General Ho Ying-chin, had a morning conference with General Lung, that afternoon escorted the amiable old scoundrel by air to Chungking. General Lu Han, Lung's former aide, took over the Yunnan government for the Generalissimo.

Soon, from nearly every shop and house in Kunming, the national flag of the new China was flying.

Report in the North. Unity in the west had hardly been established before stories of even more drastic unification came out of the Communist area of northern China. They were Communist stories, unconfirmed at week's end by Chiang or anybody else in Chungking. Their substance: while the Generalissimo was negotiating with Communist Mao Tse-tung in Chungking, three of Chiang's armies had attacked Communist forces in Communist-controlled Shansi province, Kwantung, the Yangtze basin, and north of the Yellow River. In some instances, said the Communists, Chiang's troops had invoked the aid of Japanese and puppet forces. Already the Communists, by their own account, had yielded 19 towns.

Chungking dispatches maintained that

1) the reports were distorted reflections of maneuvers for position by both sides. 2) Chiang and Mao were no closer on the fundamental issue--who should control the Communist armies and the Communist state-within-a-state--than they had been at the start. A.P. predicted that the talks would probably end this week. It looked as if Chiang Kai-shek might have to find other means to complete the unification of China.

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