OHINA: Province for a Poet

CHINA

Red forces battered and blackmailed their way into Tsinan, capital of Shantung province, last week. The city’s fall put the Communists astride a rail and road net to north & south, east & west. The “North China People’s Government,” recently proclaimed by the Reds, became a reality.

Handsome General Wang Yao-wu, governor of Shantung, had fought a losing battle for more than a year. His troops had struggled against dwindling supplies, semi-starvation, hordes of refugees and crumbling morale. Across the Yellow River, ten miles from Wang’s Tsinan headquarters, wily Communist Commander Chen Yi, a strategist and a poet, had set up a “reception house,” vigorously spread the word that all hungry Nationalist deserters would be welcome.

Persuasive Mail. Last summer. Chen Yi overran the railroad south of Tsinan. Isolated and besieged, Wang strengthened his defenses. He threw a four-ply line of pillboxes and barbed wire around the outskirts of the city, dug a ten-foot moat. After seeing that the ancient brick wall around the inner city was properly sandbagged, he flew down to Nanking. He asked for one more division—with which, he said, Tsinan could be held. While he pleaded, Chen Yi struck.

Hurrying home, Wang put his best troops, under trusted General Wu Hua-wen, on a line defending the capital’s most vital points—the main airfield, the railroad station and the commercial district, all outside the old city wall. Suddenly, on the fourth day of battle, Wu turned traitor, led some 8,000 of his men over into the Communist lines. Tsinan’s outer defenses collapsed.

Why had Wu turned his coat? Some of his close relatives had been captured by the Communists last summer; he had recently received letters from them. Chinese believed that Wu had been “persuaded” by the letters to switch sides.

The Communists swarmed over Tsinan’s business district, where Wang’s reserve munitions were stored. Their plainclothes grenade squads blasted the Gate of Perpetual Safety and smashed into the last Nationalist stronghold.

“When Old Friends Meet.” The Nationalists had lost more than a city of 600,000. Before the fall of Tsinan, Communist tactics had been to stick to the countryside; now they were ready to accept responsibility for one of China’s richest provinces.

The difference between past and future Red policies might be summed up in two of Poet Chen’s verses. Once, as a guerrilla, he had wistfully written:

When old friends meet you and inquire about me,

Tell them to look closely at the desolation in the enemy’s rear.

But Chen had bolder dreams, which might now be in his grasp. He had sung:

Now 1 see my comrades riding home together on horseback.

To whom does the Yangtze Valley belong?

Chen’s 200,000 troops could now turn west—and south toward the Yangtze.