Worse & Worse

Ten months had passed since Nationalist forces seized Yenan, stronghold of North China's Communists (TIME, March 31). Yenan's fall promised better things to come. But U.S. leaders hemmed & hawed over aid to Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek; inflation and political rivalries gnawed at the morale of his people. Gradually, the initiative passed back to the far-from-whipped Communist armies of Mao Tse-tung.

Last week, with another spring on the way, anti-foreign mobs burned the British Consulate-General in Canton, rioted in Shanghai's streets.* More perilous to the cause of Nationalist China were the gathering Communist offensives all the way from sub-zero Manchuria down to the fertile "rice bowl" of the south.

Shrinking Corridor. The Communists thought they might win the battle for Manchuria in the next six months. A midwinter Communist offensive had narrowed the government's already slender corridor; Mukden and Changchun lay under virtual siege. The railway south of Peiping was broken again; transport planes from Peiping last week began to evacuate government civilian employees from Mukden and Changchun. But Nationalist troops hung on grimly inside the Manchurian corridor. Said their commander in Mukden: "We must hold Manchuria or die."

If the Manchurian corridor were wiped out, Red armies would lunge southward against another Nationalist corridor, which runs along the railway westward from Tientsin through Peiping and Kalgan. For this purpose, the Communists were recruiting and training a powerful offensive army in Manchuria.

To protect the Nationalist hold on the Tientsin-Kalgan corridor, the Generalissimo last November dispatched one of his crack generals, Fu Tso-yi. While Fu prepared an offensive, Communist demolition squads struck swiftly and by night. They made 100 small breaks in the railroad. Fu chased them away and repaired the breaks; but he had lost valuable time.

Broken Cross. More bad news came from the "Chengchow cross," where the east-west Lunghai railroad intersects the rail line running south from Peiping to Hankow. By December, two Communist columns had broken the south and east arms of the cross. (The northern arm had been broken since the end of the Japanese war.) Another Communist army moving southward cut the west arm. The Communists appeared to have made good on their promise to "nail the Nationalists to the Chengchow cross."

Still another Communist offensive, directed by General Liu Po-cheng, the "one-eyed dragon," was taking shape in the vital Yangtze Valley. Nationalist troops moved in & out of Hankow daily; the city's mayor, recalling how the Japanese took Hankow by a surprise attack from the rear in 1937, said hopefully: "I think there is no way for the Communists to come into Hankow." It was not even certain that the Communists would try.

Soft Spot? Already the Yangtze Valley was cut off from wheat and coal from the west. Spearheads of Communist raiders stabbed river defenses west of Hankow, looking for a soft spot southward into the Szechuan and Honan rice fields. If they crossed the Yangtze, they would next try to cut the Canton-Hankow railroad.

At week's end, only one situation in China seemed no worse (and perhaps somewhat better) than usual: in Shanghai, the economic police held the currency black market in control by arresting illegal exchange operators.

* Amidst the turmoil, TIME Correspondent William Gray encountered a remarkable instance of how polite the Chinese can be. Cabled Gray from Shanghai:

My black sedan was stalled in traffic a few minutes before students blocked the streets with a great sign-waving demonstration. They pasted on the front fender a sign: "Down with British Imperialism." I stuck my head out and said: "I'm not British." A bespectacled student in a long blue gown said pleasantly: "I'm sorry." Then he and his friends pasted another sign on the rear door. It said: "Down with British Imperialism and the U.S.A."

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