Foreign News: SCORCHED EARTH, CHILLED HOPES

TIME’S Nanking Correspondent Frederick Gruin returned from the recaptured Kalgan area convinced that Chinese Communists’ defeats have more than military significance, that the Reds may have undermined their own guerrilla potential. His report:

The “new democracy” practiced by China’s Communists in the strategic northwest, vacated by the Japanese more than a year ago, has seemingly ended in a political mistake rivaling their military failure. This is a conclusion hard to escape after a strenuous plane, truck and rail tour of the Chahar Shansi-Suiyuan border region.

Smashed Window. In this area, the economic plexus centering on Kalgan, the Japs built and left largely intact an ambitious and forward-looking economic plant. The Communists fell heir to the prize, which served them as a powerful corridor between Yenan and Manchuria and a “show window” of policy for all the nation. Not only did they fail to defend this area militarily, but as they fell back before the Government armies they kicked in the show window, leaving a destructive disarray appalling in a nation so economically needy as China.

Three weeks after the Communist evacuation, Kalgan was still without electric lights, telephones, running water. The railyards were a graveyard of charred trains and dynamited workers’ dormitories. On one street they named “Liberation,” the retreating Communists set fire to the post office. Across the way, they reduced the telephone exchange (servicing 4,000 lines) to a pile of splintered glass and twisted wire. In the city’s outskirts, they did a first-class wrecker job on a power plant. Besides crippling communications, the Reds wrecked 52 Kalgan factories (including flour, match, soap, and soy-bean sauce), depriving families of 3,000 workers of their livelihood.

“Temporary Hardship.” Ten miles outside of Tatung, a city of 80,000 that withstood a 45-day Communist siege, lie the Kouchuan coal mines and power plant—one of the biggest enterprises of its kind in North China. The Communists took Kouchuan last August, were driven out Oct. 31 after a mild skirmish. They left the same pattern of destruction as in Kalgan: machine shops ruined, foundries and lathes demolished, burned-out roundhouses full of burned-out locomotives, hand tools and hardware broken and scattered in the dust.

This Chinese scorching of the Chinese earth has decreased the value of the conquered cities to the victors, but it has also provided them with a ready-made excuse if suffering this winter cannot be alleviated. Although the Communists politically justify all such destruction as a temporary hardship, temporary has become a sour word to Chinese sick of nine years of war. The immediate effect appears to be a loss of the popular support the Communists would need for guerrilla fighting.

Change of Heart. In the prisoners’ barbed-wire stockade at Kalgan there was further evidence of a historic military phenomenon: the diminishment of morale among even the best soldiers when the road ahead is an ever steepening, rock-strewn patch, the enemy one’s own people. For eight years, since he was 17, Wang Yu-ming had fought with the Communists’ famed Eighth Route Army, had risen from the ranks to the post of deputy company commander and had survived four wounds in battles with the Japanese.

Last September, when Government General Fu Tso-yi marched on Kalgan, Wang and his company of 40 men stood at Tsining, a mud-walled Suiyuan railway and mining town where one of the civil war’s bloodiest encounters took place. After 23 of his company had died and he was forced to retreat, depression gripped Wang. He asked himself and his men: “Why do we Chinese fight against Chinese? Of what avail was this sacrifice at Tsining?”

Summoned for shriving by a commissar (unlike Wang, a Marxist veteran of jthe Communists’ 1934-35 “Long March” to the northwest), Wang confessed his error, but said: “Within me, my heart tells me I can’t fight this civil war.” The commissar pondered. “Comrade,” he finally said, “if your heart tells you this, you must give it a rest. You must think deeply. When your heart changes, you may come back to your post.”

Rest for Wang meant a transfer from combat to a staff job (under surveillance) back in the hills. The commissar called on him regularly. But Wang’s heart remained troubled. “I must think more,” he said. “Fighting Japs I suffered much and gave my blood without regret. I could do so because my heart took part in the struggle. Now my heart forbids.” When Kalgan fell, Wang’s weary heart had not changed. As his unit prepared to retire into the mountains, he straggled behind and sent a message of surrender. A Government detachment picked Wang up, put his heart at ease.