"Very Critical"

China's new Premier, Sun Fo, stepped gingerly from a shiny black Packard at the entrance to Nanking's green-tiled Executive Yuan one morning last week. Leaning on a cane to take the weight off his left leg, from which a two-pound tumor had recently been removed, he limped up three flights of stairs to an unheated conference room,'where his cabinet waited formally to assume office.

Twenty-two ministers, bundled in overcoats, sat at a long table, posed briefly for photographers. The Premier was flanked by two of his "policymaking" ministers without portfolio--swarthy ex-Premier Chang Chun and puckish General Chang Chih-chung, both outspoken advocates of peace (and presumably coalition) with the Communists. Temporarily absent were two other policymakers--Sun's predecessor, Geologist Wong Wen-hao, and Conservative Chen Li-fu, chief whipping boy of Communist propagandists.

Sun's Hope. What would the new cabinet's policy be? Earlier in the week Sun Fo had told foreign newsmen: "Surrender? Absolutely no surrender!" In the next breath he had said: "We have to fight on until we can secure an honorable peace." Now, in his first cabinet session, Sun explained further.

"The government's main task," he said, "must be to increase its strength militarily and administratively . . . If we can't fight, we can't talk about peace. The nation will have no chance to survive." The Premier seemed to be saying that Nationalist China was ready for conditional peace, but was determined to struggle on as long as possible against unconditional surrender.

What terms would Nationalist China accept? Chen Li-fu glumly summed up last week: "One of three avenues must open before peace can be explored: the government must make a bid--it hasn't yet formally discussed the possibility. The Communists must make a bid--why should they when they're winning? Failing one of these, a third party must offer mediation--what chance is there of such an offer? And yet our situation is very critical."

The military crisis was not easing. On the central front all action had bogged down in snow and mud. Bad weather prevented government planes from dropping supplies to their forces trapped north of the Huai. South of the river, Nanking's wretched defenders struggled eastward to block a Communist thrust to the Yangtze between the capital and Shanghai.

Fu's Fate. In segmented North China, General Fu Tso-yi continued to play a strange sort of game with the Reds. A Communist broadcast had condemned Fu (along with Chiang Kaishek, Sun Fo, most of the new cabinet and others) as a war criminal, deserving a "just penalty." The broadcast added, however, that Fu "could lessen his fate somewhat" if he would immediately surrender Peiping and Tientsin.

While keeping his bargaining position behind the defenses of the two cities, Soldier Fu showed clearly that he had taken the hint. Last week his troops handed over to the Communists the great industrial and trading center of Kalgan, with all its bulging warehouses and factories intact. No destruction of any kind was carried out. Explained General Fu blandly: "All supplies, factories and manufactured products there . . . are wealth of the people and the property of the nation."

Fu, like millions of other Chinese, seemed to be ready to make a deal with the Reds.

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