Ultimatum

The plane from Peiping winged down to the airfield inside Nanking's ancient wall. Nationalist Envoy Huang Shao-hsiung, back from peace talks with the Reds, stepped through the hatch into a clamoring crowd of reporters who besieged him with questions. The man from Peiping parried feebly: "Splendid weather we're having, isn't it?"

The news that Huang carried in a five-inch-thick sheaf of papers for the government was grim. At Acting President Li Tsung-jen's big grey brick house, Nationalist leaders conferred until 2 a.m. Exhausted and ill with high blood pressure, Envoy Huang went to bed. It was no wonder. The Communists did not want peace--they demanded surrender. Their eight points of last January had been expanded by 24 supplementary requests. Most crucial: the Nationalists must allow Red armies to cross the Yangtze.

If the government said yes, Communist troops would enter China's southland both east and west of Nanking, would then wheel coastward to cut off Shanghai. If the government said no, Communist troops were primed to cross the river by assault. In the vital lower Yangtze, they were 400,000 against the Nationalists' 200,000.

This week, the Communist radio blared out an ultimatum: Li had just three days to say yes or no to Mao's "peace" terms. Yes or no, Li Tsung-jen's dream of decent peace and a non-Communist China south of the Yangtze was fading fast.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.