No Third Term

Wearing his light beige uniform without ribbons, in the fashion of generals who have come to political power, President Chiang Kaishek, 71, the man who has guided the Republic of China's destinies for some 30 years, smiled broadly and spoke confidently of the years ahead. He scarcely glanced at a small scrap of paper holding his brief notes, as he addressed the 1,700 members of Nationalist China's Mainland Recovery Planning Board. He stood straight without leaning on the speaker's stand, occasionally sipped from a glass of boiled water.

Halfway through the speech the President calmly announced that in keeping with the constitution of 1947, which has a two-term limit (six years to a term), he did not intend to stand for a third term next year. The audience's response was silence; to cheer might have been regarded as a sign of disrespect. But when Chiang went on to explain that close adherence to the constitution was "one of our weapons in waging war against the Communists," the audience, most of them National Assemblymen, broke into applause.

Chiang had already pointed to a successor last year by adding the premiership to the other duties of his old comrade-at-arms Vice President Chen Cheng (TIME, July 14). But the Gimo himself intends to keep things in hand by retaining the powerful director-generalship of the Kuomintang Party.

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