The Scholars Walk Out

In Kunming, home of China's greatest universities in exile, 20,000 students were on strike. They were demonstrating for civil peace, and in their action they spoke for most of China's inarticulate people.

For eight years the students and their professors, who trekked from Peiping. Tientsin and other northern cities, had lived a lean and patient life in Kunming. When V-J day brought not peace but internal strife, they stirred restlessly.

Their professors petitioned Chiang Kaishek and Mao Tse-tung to settle the domestic quarrel. Last month, in defiance of an official ban, the students paraded in the streets. Soldiers fired rifle volleys in the air to disperse them. The students called a strike. Uniformed rowdies threw hand grenades that killed three students and one professor.

A nation which still puts her scholars before her soldiers audibly protested. Students staged sympathy walkouts in other cities. Kuomintang partisans blamed the incident on "malicious elements." But Generalissimo Chiang, who was opposing Communist extremists in the north, now turned on Kuomintang extremists in Kunming. He dismissed the city's garrison commander, General Kwan Lin-cheng. He sent his Vice Minister of Education, Chu Ching-nung, to make an inquiry and offer amends. For hurling the fatal grenades, two men were executed on the spot of the crime.

Then the Generalissimo, having demonstrated that he, too, wanted civil peace, urged the students to return to their classes. They would not go back, they answered, until the ban on public meetings was lifted.

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