Another Chinese Revolution?

Red China is afraid. Waging a war against it are hundreds of thousands of anti-Communist guerrillas. Many of them are equipped and led by the Free Chinese on Formosa, 100 miles off China's coast.

Last week the Chinese Communist leaders were reacting like all Communist leaders who get frightened. From Canton in the south up through Shanghai and Tientsin in the north, Red China echoed to the crack of the executioner's bullet. It was the widest and crudest Communist purge the world had seen since Stalin's war against Russia's middle-class peasants 20 years ago.

In recent months, thousands of Chinese have been executed. Formosa's intelligence apparatus, which has been very reliable, disclosed many of the killings, and execution reports also peppered the pages of the official Communist press. New China News Agency (Communist) announced the execution of 96 persons in Canton and Kwangtung Province in a three-day period, some of them women students. The Wuhan radio (Communist) reported that in two weeks the Red army had "exterminated" more than 16,000 "local bandits." Foochow Reds announced the mass arrest of 247 "secret agents."*

Chiang's Reformed Army. Many of the purge victims are intellectuals and former Nationalist officials who went over to the Communists two years ago in the hope that Mao Tse-tung would give them a "more liberal" government. The irony of their plight is that while the Communist government has been steadily disclosing itself to be a Communist government, Chiang Kai-shek's government on Formosa has made some progress toward 20th Century liberal polity.

The Formosa regime has a long way to go, but it can point proudly to its achievements. Last fall general elections were held, with a genuinely free ballot. With the help of American ECAid, Formosa's economy has improved: electric power output is 25% higher now than at its peak under the efficient Japanese.

Chiang's army also has been reformed. His troops are eating better than before and are being paid regularly; each soldier now has his own pay card to check grafting by commanders, which played so large a part in the demoralization of the old Nationalist armies. An American on Formosa summed up: "Anyone who has watched these men during the past year will admit that they are tremendously improved in morale, training and leadership. They're not yet a modern army. But they look better every day."

Chief need of the armed forces, which total 600,000 men, is equipment: gasoline, ammunition, small arms, artillery and, most of all, spare parts. The Free Chinese air force has good flyers, but most of its 500 planes are worn out. The navy--important in Free China's offshore situation --consists of 100 combat vessels, not more than a third of which are serviceable. Besides spare parts, the.navy's main need is for U.S. technicians: a whole radar complex will fail because one vacuum tube has blown; a U.S. technician could find and fix the trouble in ten minutes.

Four Kinds of Guerrillas. There has been much talk of a Free Chinese invasion of the mainland. Fact is, however, according to Americans on Formosa, there is not likely to be a full-scale invasion in the near future. It would take a year's flow of full U.S. aid before the Free Chinese would be well enough equipped. Chiang would be unwilling to risk the bulk of his armed forces in any operation which was not part of an Asia-wide, multi-nation operation, including the U.S. forces.

But there is a good--and growing--opportunity for the Free Chinese to stab at the coast with Commando-type raids, keeping the Reds militarily off balance, and tremendously encouraging the mainland guerrillas.

The guerrilla movement, in the present flush of revulsion against the Red government, totals more than 1,500,000 men. Its members fall into four categories:

1) A quarter-million former Nationalist troops, trained in combat. Because of their competence, they have drawn the heaviest Red countermeasures; only two years ago their total was 600,000.

2) Former members of the Nationalist Peace Preservation Corps (i.e., militia) who are now guerrillas; number, 800,000.

3) Unorganized and self-armed mainland peasants, totaling a rough half-million ; it is these men more than the others whose efficiency would be multiplied by unified outside direction and supply.

4) Fifty thousand or so local bandits and their followers, whose politics are wholly opportunistic but who could easily be converted--with a supply of U.S. silver bullets--into effective if unreliable antiCommunists.

Underground Generals. The man who directs Free China's operations on the mainland is General Cheng Kaimin, 51, a rugged, energetic officer with a taste for English cigarettes, and a background of study in Moscow, specializing in military intelligence. Much of Cheng's 14-hour days are given over to interviews with guerrilla chieftains and his own agents from the mainland. Some guerrilla chiefs have come from as far away as Mongolia.

Last week one of Cheng's top agents returned to Formosa from a ao-day visit to guerrilla units along the Fukien coast. A lean-faced, hawk-eyed general officer, he has traveled in disguise to five headquarters directing 10,000 guerrillas. Gist of his report: the guerrillas' morale ranged from good to excellent; the condition of their weapons from fair to good. Their living conditions were difficult (23 oz. of rice a day); their help from the peasants was diminishing somewhat as Communist terrorism increased; their spy work in spotting Chinese Red army movements was excellent.

Some of the mainland guerrilla leaders are known to old China hands of the U.S. Guerrilla chief in Inner Mongolia is General Ou Yu-san, former cavalry commander under ex-Nationalist General Fu Tso-yi, who went over to the Reds. In Yunan, along the Burma border, the guerrilla boss is General Li Mi, who commanded the Nationalist Thirteenth Army Group at the hard-fought battle of Suchow in November 1948.

These generals and their opposite numbers back on Formosa think hungrily in terms of U.S. aid. But they have become hardheaded enough to realize that U.S. aid cannot be given on the old basis. One high Chinese Nationalist official put it this way:

"There are two conditions without which all the help in the world will never really help either of us. First, those U.S. officials who come to administer aid must come with a will to make it work. Second, they must get and demand absolute authority on the final use and distribution of the aid." The guerrilla legions with their safe base on Formosa could, with U.S. material help, conduct history's most effective campaign of psychological, military and economic sabotage. By parachute and by junk, thousands of agents could be pumped into the heart of China, there to subvert the Communist government by sabotage and communications disruption.

Back to Yenan? The Communists know this; they have recently taken steps to counteract such moves. Large parts of the populations of Shanghai and Tientsin are being dispersed inland. From the capital of Peking, entire government bureaus are packed off to distant Kansu Province. The Reds' wartime capital in Yenan is being refitted with offices and air-raid shelters. All along the coast, soldiers are building defense points. Radio Peking dwells -- revealingly--on the formation of an anti-guerrilla militia of 5,000,000.

The party of the revolution is afraid of a revolution against it.

* This week Canton Red newspapers reported the arrest of five Roman Catholic nuns from Canada on a charge of "manslaughter." The nuns were blamed for the deaths of 2,168 babies in their care since January 1950. Catholic orphanages in China try to care for abandoned Chinese infants, although many are in a dying condition when found.

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