Month of Decision

From Shanghai last week, after a tour of liberated China, LIFE Correspondent Charles J. V. Murphy cabled:

The drama of the reoccupation of East, South and North China moved toward its climax. The South was completely in hand. In the East--the Yangtze Valley--Government authority was all but complete. Only the North remained out of Nationalist control.

Japanese troops, having played out their last forlorn role, were about to retire to concentration camps. Their commander, General Yasuji Okamura, for many years overlord of all North China, brooded in the gloomy rooms of the Foreign Office in Nanking; his last function is that of "chief liaison officer" between his own stranded army and Chinese headquarters. There were 1,100,000 Japanese soldiers below the Great Wall in China when the war ended--far more than U.S. estimates before V-J day. The last 400,000 troops, who at Chungking's direction have policed railroads and held approaches to principal cities since Aug. 15, are being rounded up and disarmed. Each day the U.S. air forces land between 2,000 and 4,000 Chinese regulars in Peiping--and American pilots count themselves a day nearer home. Each day the American influence in China's military picture diminishes and Nationalist influence rises.

October. With Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek remaining in Chungking, the principal actor in the field is General Ho Ying-chin, commander of all Chinese field forces. U.S. Major General Robert B. McClure, who is in charge of the training program of the Chinese divisions, gave Ho full marks for cooperation and knowledge of his job. "Ho's right on the ball," said General McClure this week, clasping him around the shoulders in a gesture more understandable to Chinese-speaking Ho than McClure's American idiom.

The month of October, while much-publicized peace talks were going on in Chungking, saw plenty of fighting between the Nationalists and Communists. The Communists made bitter and partly successful efforts to seize North China and wreck the Nationalist chance of successful occupation. A fortnight ago in northwest Shansi, bailiwick of aging "Model Governor" Marshal Yen Hsi-shan, a Communist concentration ambushed 10,000 of Marshal Yen's troops, and killed several thousand of them before they could be extricated. Hundreds of miles farther north, many a day's march beyond the scene of Marshal Yen's trouble, in Suiyuan Province, a large force under Governor Fu Tsoyi, commanding general of the Twelfth War Zone, was in pitched battle with Communist forces drawn from Yenan and Hopeh. Government strategists were obviously surprised by the Communist strength, now think that the Communists are trying to break out of Yenan into the friendly valleys of Russian-dominated Outer Mongolia.

But the most serious trouble is not gun fire. For eight weeks now the Communists have worked tirelessly and with much success to chop up China's communications and paralyze Government progress into North China. The Chinese railway net work north of the Yangtze River is cut in innumerable places. The only important road still operating north of the Yellow River is the Tsinan-Tientsin-Peiping line.

The Communists have also wrecked Shantung coal mines which supply the railways.

November. The first two or three weeks of November will be China's weeks of decision. Crack Government armies, mostly U.S.-equipped and U.S.-trained, will have arrived in North China. This week Peiping, Tientsin, and Shantung Province were seeing their first "regulars" in eight years. A wave of optimism, in refreshing contrast with the cynicism of the Western World, has been flooding over China, like the Yellow River at crest. But like that mighty, fertilizing stream, it can make for prosperity or sorrow.

The important new fact in the China puzzle is that Chinese policy, bursting out of its beleaguered mountain fortresses, has physically arrived at the Great Wall. Beyond lies Manchuria -- steel mills, huge reserves of iron ore, coal and magnesite, pulpwood, rich farmland -- all the prizes for which the statesmen and economists have yearned. Of immediate importance, destitution or prosperity in Shanghai depends upon getting coal from the North.

This week the Thirteenth and Fifty-second Chinese Armies embarked on U.S. transports at the extreme south of China and headed up the coast to Manchuria. So far forbidden by Russia to land at the theoretically international port of Dairen, some will land at nearby fishing ports; others will land below the Great Wall and walk into Manchuria. They will either meet Russian policy face to face, or glimpse its retreating back. Under the Sino-Russian treaty of August, Stalin promised to withdraw his Red Army from Manchuria on or about Nov. 15; now it looks as if the Central Government's entry will be delayed until December.

On this date Chiang Kai-shek and 400,000,000 Chinese will know, for the first time, where they stand; whether in the end it is to be peace or war; reconstruction and reform or reprisal. No one expects the Russians to go back on the letter of their word. It is taken for granted, even among Russophobes, that the Red Army will have withdrawn when the Chinese forces arrive. In Chungking the Government has elected to create the impression that all goes smoothly; the Bear will of course turn over the keys to the Manchurian house. But privately there is worry over what may be found under the bed.

Peiping hums with rumors of Palus (Eighth Route Army soldiers) roistering in the streets in comradely association with Red Army soldiers; of Chinese Communist soldiers from Shantung and Hopeh boasting of Japanese rifles, Japanese ammunition lifted from the stockpiles while the Russian guards conveniently looked the other way. Russians are stripping factories of their best machinery and generally throwing their weight around. A fortnight ago a French consular agent and a young American O.S.S. officer were bounced out of Mukden -- for no other reason than that the Russians did not want them around. "Our neighbors," murmured a Peiping man, "do not appear to be governed by the established rules of civility."

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