CHINA: Glue for the Dragon

Like the best of friends, Mme. Chiang Kai-shek and Mme. Chou En-lai—wife of Communist China’s No. 1 negotiator—joined last week at Chungking’s windy Paishihyi airfield to greet General George C. Marshall and his handsome, hazel-eyed wife, Katherine. Soldier-Diplomat Marshall, after a nightlong Peiping study of Manchuria’s erupting war, was less impressed by tea-drinking at the top levels than by bullets in the boondocks.

In the four weeks since George Marshall had flown home to Washington, the Chinese had fragmented his carefully fitted but lightly glued jigsaw picture of unity. In Manchuria there was large-scale fighting. Marshall, knowing the fragility of his pattern, had gone home for stronger cement. He would need it, if the puzzle were to be reassembled and given any permanent form.

Even as Marshall settled down to a series of conferences, Communists and Nationalists fought fiercely to consolidate local positions in Manchuria before the General’s pacifying personal prestige could still their guns. A 40,000-man Chinese Communist army blasted the small Nationalist garrison out of Changchun, Manchuria’s capital, and halted a relief column near Szepingkai, 70 miles away. Near Nationalist-held Mukden, the Communist-led United Democratic Army ambushed Lieut. General Chao Kung-wu’s 25th Division, turned it back from the coal-and-bauxite-rich city of Penki (Penhsihu) new Communist provisional capital for Liaoning province.

Chungking spokesmen conceded that the great city of Harbin would fall to the Chinese Communists when the Russians pull out this week. For the moment, at least, the Nationalists were confined to the western and northern coastal area of the Liaotung Gulf, save only for the blunted column reaching from Mukden along the Dairen-Harbin railroad toward Changchun. The Communists—with 300,000 troops already in Manchuria—were siphoning in more, by land from the northwest, by sea from Shantung Peninsula to the Liaoning province port of Antung. The Nationalists had two more armies en route, five already in the field.

What George Can’t Do. If General Marshall looked ten years older on his return to China, as some observers thought, it was not from the shock of disillusion. The patient, war-seasoned soldier had again & again emphasized the real U.S. role in China—the establishment of a political and economic climate in which the Chinese themselves might attain unity and strength. In Chungking this week he was not surprised when each side assured him that the other had started the shooting.

The improved cement Marshall brought from Washington—more definite promises of monetary and commercial aid, encouragement of private investment—would help strengthen the Central Government’s efforts to establish its sovereignty and restore order. But Marshall well knew that no foreigner—however great his prestige — could mend a 20-year rift, or could stay indefinitely to enforce a truce. The Chinese themselves must do both, and some recognized the fact.

Said the Shanghai newspaper Wen Hui Jih Pao: “. . . Of course we welcome General Marshall’s return for emergency’s sake. But depending excessively on outside [foreign] strength is not very wise.”