CHINA: Last Stand

China’s fugitive Nationalist government tarried at Chengtu just ten days. The night before it fled once more from the oncoming Reds, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek called a cabinet session. Decisions: 1) resistance to the Communists on the mainland would go underground; 2) headquarters for some 600,000 Nationalist irregulars would be established in the rugged Tibetan border province of Sikang; 3) the Nationalist capital would move to Taipei on the island redoubt of Formosa.

Time for Remembrance. Next morning Premier Yen Hsi-shan flew off from Chengtu. His plane bypassed Kunming, capital of Yunnan. There only a few weeks ago the Nationalists had hoped to make their last stand. But to land last week would have been dangerous; Yunnan’s Governor Lu Han was going over to the Communists, and his troops had turned their caps inside out to hide the Nationalist insignia and show their new allegiance. Lu had even tried to persuade some Szechwanese generals to seize Chiang in Chengtu and hold him for the Reds.

The plot against the Generalissimo failed, and two days after Premier Yen’s departure, Chiang himself abandoned the land on which he had fought for half a lifetime, headed for the new capital 90 miles off the China coast.

For the stubborn, aging (63) leader, the flight across the sampan-flecked Strait of Formosa was a time for bitter remembrance. For China, and the world, it was the end of an era. A quarter of a century ago, with Sun Yat-sen’s mantle on his shoulders, young Chiang had marched up the mainland to Nanking and into a new Nationalist China. He had embraced Christianity. According to his lights, he had sought to guide his nation into the mainstream of modern civilization. He had broken the warlords, checked an early international Communist conspiracy, survived Japanese aggression—only to go down before a later, greater Communist conspiracy and the corruption which grew up in his own war-torn regime. No national leader had fought armed Communism longer or more tenaciously.

The Greatest Threat. Chiang would try to fight on from Formosa, though the U.S. and British governments had written off the strategic island. Actually, Formosa (the size of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, pop. 7,200,000) could be a strong redoubt; it is one of Asia’s most prosperous areas, carefully developed by the Japanese in half a century of colonial rule. Its paddy fields can grow three rice crops a year. It has large sugar and tea plantations, banana groves,, camphor forests. Its Jap-built industry includes sugar mills, waterworks, hydroelectric stations, an aluminum plant.

On Formosa, the Nationalists at last held a good defensive position. Chiang had an estimated 300,000 troops on the island, small air and naval forces to garrison and guard it, and the Communists lacked an air force and navy to help them hurdle the moat that surrounds the island. But Chiang could not count on the loyalty of Formosa’s people, disgusted by Nationalist carpetbaggers who rushed to Formosa after the war’s end. Probably the greatest threat facing the Nationalists on Formosa was Red fifth-column tactics within the island stronghold.