CHINA: Happy Birthday

His armies had given him the city of Antung. His people paraded, ate “longevity noodles,” displayed a million photographs and set off a billion firecrackers. In recently starving Hunan Province, his statue would soon surmount a mountain peak. Over Nanking, formations of Chinese airforce planes spelled out “six ten longevity.”

On a tiny, sun-warmed island in Wusih’s Lake Tai Hu, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek celebrated his 60th birthday with his wife and friends. He said it was the happiest day he had spent in ten years, unmarred even by the clatter and stink of the small steamboat originally chartered to pull the picnic barge to the island.

After Madame Chiang substituted oarsmen, the Gissimo joked that the only thing wrong with the party had been a Western device—that smelly, noisy engine.

Pattern of Joy. But the drowsy peace of Lake Tai Hu was not duplicated everywhere in China—nor was the engine the only Western device to be scrapped. In Nanking, qualified observers agreed that the last forlorn hope for successful U.S. mediation between Nationalist and Communist forces had all but vanished. On the northern shore of Shantung peninsula, rifles sang and mortars whispered as Nationalist troops besieged Communist Chefoo. Across the Yellow Sea in Manchuria, Lieut. General Tu Li-ming’s Government armies were clearing out the peninsula south of captured Antung, preparing for the climactic drive on Harbin (see map). In that target city and in the now-isolated Red capital of Yenan, there was no observance of Chiang Kai-shek’s natal day.

If the Generalissimo was happy, it was not because peace was in sight, but rather because the recent success of his armies has convinced many doubters that China can be unified by military means—as Chiang the Soldier had argued. In Nanking, both generals and politicians—who have not always agreed in the past—were talking of being able to clear main rail lines south of the Great Wall within three months. The generals had told Chiang they could take Harbin at any time.

Time for Decision. This week TIME’S Nanking bureau cabled: “One fact is clear: a new and decisive phase of the civil war has opened. The greatest need for China is peace . . . but now it is possible and indeed likely that if China is to have peace, it can only be assured through a civil war fought to some kind of a decision. Without communications, China cannot survive, and today the plain fact is that until one side or the other clears those railroads, there can be no effective communications. . . . With Nationalist forces in control of the main lines below the Great Wall, with cities free, some measures of recovery can go forward. Continued Communist guerrilla warfare will not permit the Government to relieve a long-suffering people of an overheavy military burden, but it will at the least mean unity.”