Daily News from the Front

In the pale dawn on Quemoy Island one day last week, the Red artillery barrage from the mainland just five miles away abruptly ended. On deserted Restoration Road in Quemoy City, the uneasy silence was pierced only by the cough of a diesel engine in the offices of the Cheng Ch'i Chung Hua Jih Pao (Righteous China Daily News), the island's only newspaper. All night long the engine had wheezed, supplying erratic power for the lights by which Chinese compositors handset four tabloid-size pages of type. The little engine rested briefly while a workman slipped the power take-off belt from the generator to an ancient flat-bed press. Then it snuffled back to life, to begin the daily press run of 7,000 copies.

Like Quemoy 's 100,000-man garrison, Cheng Ch'i is a refugee from the China mainland having fled Kiangsi province in 1949 before the conquering Red tide. It has not missed an edition since. Supported by the Quemoy Military Defense Command, the seven-days-a-week paper reserves most of its run--5,500 copies--for free distribution to troops, sells the balance (at 1-c- a copy, 25-c- a month) to villagers in Quemoy, oyster fishermen in North Mountain, sweet potato and millet farmers in South Mountain. About $250 in monthly advertising revenue comes from Formosa merchants eager to fill front-line mail orders.

Cheng Ch'i's world news is provided by radio cable from Nationalist China's Central News Agency in Taipei; many of its features come from 40 uniformed correspondents in forward posts; its local news is gathered by two fulltime reporters. Counting delivery boys, Cheng Ch'i's staff numbers 70. Average salary: $10 a month, plus free firewood, rice, cooking oil, salt, clothing and cigarettes.

Red Chinese artillery, which has lobbed 575,000 shells into Quemoy since August, has posed nightmare problems to Director Tsao Yi-fan, 48, and Editor Huang Pang-fu, 35. Three months ago Cheng Ch'i's two-story headquarters in downtown Quemoy City took a direct hit, but the paper came out next day right on schedule. Subscribers on the outlying islands--Little Quemoy, Tatan and Erhtan--must now depend on irregular deliveries by carrier frogmen. On Quemoy proper, delivery boys peddle the paper by jeep and bicycle and on foot, generally get the job done by midmorning despite the every-other-day bombardment. Casualties to date: one carrier boy slightly injured by shrapnel, one decommissioned jeep.

On special occasions, Cheng Ch'i's indomitable editors have even delivered sample copies to the mainland--stuffed inside 155-mm. artillery shells.

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