The Short March

Yenan's loess cave dwellings were rapidly emptying. For the second time in a decade, China's Communists were shifting their center of political gravity. In 1934-35 they had staged their famed Long March of 8,500 miles from Central China to the remote Northwest; of 100,000 marchers an exhausted 20,000 survived to set up headquarters at Yenan. Now, more powerful than ever, the Communists were heading north and east to Kalgan.

The highly organized trek (rest places every 15 miles) stretched across some 500 miles of plains, mountains and badlands. Travel time was 30 to 40 days for donkey, mule and pony caravans laden with office files, books and the paraphernalia of entire institutions (like the Medical College, Art Academy and Resistance University).

At Kalgan, their prize of the civil war, the Communists can put their backs against Soviet-dominated Mongolia and Siberia, their faces toward Manchuria and North China. The old city guards the Great Wall at Nankow Pass, which is to China what the Khyber Pass is to India.

While not yet proclaimed as the Red capital, Kalgan has become political and military citadel of the Chinese Communists. Its population (130,000) is almost three times as great as Yenan's. It is the Communists' first industrialized area (coal, iron, electric power, trucks, busses, cigarets, liquors, rubber goods, movies). It is also an arsenal. Left behind by the Japanese, after the Russians chased them out, and obligingly let the Chinese Communists in, was an enormous cache of weapons, including 60 tanks.

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