CHINA: Opening Doors

China’s dynamic troubleshooter, Premier T. V. Soong, hurried home from the United Nations World Security Conference. In Chungking his brother-in-law, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, swore him in as President of the Executive Yuan. T.V. was now Premier as well as Foreign Minister, China’s No. 2 man.

Two days later T.V. was off on what might be the most important mission of his career: a flying trip to Moscow to warm up the Chungking Government’s chill relations with the Russians. With him traveled a bevy of Chinese specialists in Manchurian, Sinkiang and Russian affairs, including stocky, husky-voiced Chiang Ching-kuo, Generalissimo Chiang’s elder son (by his first wife). At week’s end the mission deplaned at Moscow, where Generalissimo Stalin promptly received T.V.

None in the Chinese party was more at home in Moscow than Chiang Ching-kuo. He had lived twelve of his 34 years (from 1925 to 1937) in the Russian capital, where his father had sent him to study at the Military Academy and the Sun Yat-sen University. After Chiang Kai-shek split with the Chinese Communists,

Ching-kuo proclaimed in Pravda: “I [am] a wholehearted Communist. . . . My father is the enemy of the whole Chinese people and therefore the implacable enemy of his son.” No Communist now, he is chief of the Kuomintang Youth Corps and widely regarded as a progressive-minded young man.

Mission to Yenan. In Chungking a delegation from the People’s Political Council called on Generalissimo Chiang, petitioned him for permission to send a nonpartisan good-will committee to Communist China. The Generalissimo agreed. “This,” he said, “is the reopening of the door.” Though the Communists had voted to boycott the P.P.C. (TIME, July 2), they promptly sent a welcoming telegram to the good-willers. A seven-man P.P.C. mission prepared to set off for Yenan. Its first objective: to arrange a new Kuomin-tang-Communist committee that would resume unity negotiations.