"You Shall Never Yield..."

(See Cover)

The Communists were overrunning China like lava. Mukden and all Manchuria were gone--and 60% of China's best troops had gone with them. In the great rust-red plain between Nanking and Suchow, the last government armies in Central China confronted an enemy that had beaten them before. U.S. military experts had given Nanking "ten days to three weeks."

In the big cities, the prestige of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had sunk lower than the Yangtze. An American traveler in Shanghai wrote home: "His name is mud in all classes--they feel toward him as Americans felt toward Herbert Hoover in 1933." The U.S. Embassy was evacuating Americans as fast as it could. In the U.S. itself headlines flared the black news. China--and what to do about it--was Page One; Asia's howitzers could now be heard in Kansas City, although the U.S. still had only a very partial notion of how big its stake was in the China war.

Double Miracle? In the vortex of this gathering disaster, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was buoyant and determined. He dodged in & out of his private map room, saw dozens of visitors, counseled his field commanders by long-distance telephone. One day last week he drove through the cold rain to the cavernous National Assembly building, 20 minutes later emerged smiling. He had persuaded liberal Sun Fo, son of China's revered revolutionary leader Sun Yatsen, to become Premier in a new super war cabinet. Asked if the government planned to leave Nanking, Chiang said that no such plan was being considered. He bade Chinese remember the deathbed words of Sun Yatsen: "You shall never yield to the enemy."

Incredibly enough, at week's end, the Gimo's confidence seemed to be working --at least for the moment. The "ten days to three weeks" were up, and the Communists were not yet in Nanking. They had been fought to a standoff in their frontal assault at Suchow and were now shifting for another try, apparently by encirclement, from the south.

The Gimo had done it before. Could he do it again? He sent Madame Chiang off to the U.S. to urge all-out assistance. If the Gimo could hold his country together awhile, and if Madame Chiang could change U.S. policy, it would be a double miracle. If that double miracle did not occur, then an era would have ended.

For China it had been an era of feverish surface progress. "Westernization" had brought plumbing, the beginnings of legislative government and mass education; it had also brought machine guns and Christianity and Karl Marx. Chiang Kai-shek had been a part of all of it; the era's story was his story.

Double Mission. The machine guns fascinated Chiang first; from his youth in Chekiang Province, he wanted to be a soldier. At China's Paoting Military Academy in 1906, he got high marks, though he was the only student who did not wear a queue; in those days queuelessness was a sign of dangerous, republican thoughts. The high marks got him a chance to study at a military school in Tokyo. And here, with other young Chinese, he met Sun Yat-sen on the eve of the October 1911 revolt against the Manchu dynasty. Once the revolution began, Chiang hurried back to China, joined Sun's new Kuomintang (National People's Party). There was plenty of soldiering to be done. Chiang became Sun's trusted lieutenant. He also found time to marry the girl his mother had picked out for him, and to have a son whom he named Chiang Ching-kuo.

Sun Yat-sen put what he was fighting for into his "three principles": Min Tsu (national unity), Min Chuan (political democracy) and Min Sheng (people's livelihood). By 1923, Sun Yat-sen accepted Soviet Russia as an ally because Communist Russia had renounced all the old imperial claims to special "rights" in Manchuria and North China. (Nevertheless, Sun Yat-sen explicitly rejected Marxism for China.) The Russians sent bright young Comintern legmen like Michael Borodin to "cooperate" with Sun Yat-sen at Canton while organizing the Communist Party of China at the same time.

Chiang, too, accepted the Russians at first. He went to Moscow in 1923 to study Russian military setup. He learned enough to organize China's own Whampoa Military Academy when he got back. That was not all he had learned. Chiang wrote:

"I admired in those days the whole revolutionary attitude of the Communists . . . When I arrived in Russia, after making a careful investigation of conditions there, I must admit that all my hopes about the revolution were blasted. I was convinced, that the aims which the Communists struggled for could not be attained through the methods they used."

More Than a Soldier. After Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925, Chiang, leading the Kuomintang army, resolved to break out of the Canton pocket and overthrow the government at Peking. The Nationalist revolution rolled north, defeating one warlord after another. In the Northern Expedition, one of the great military exploits of the century, Chiang showed himself much more than a soldier. Skillfully, he played one warlord off against another. He won the confidence of the commercial class, traditionally distrustful of soldiers; the bankers backed Chiang-as the stabilizing force in China. In July 1928, Chiang triumphantly entered Peking; he was master of China except for a few pockets of resistance.

The chief pocket was the Communists at Hankow. They had started north with Chiang, but got orders from Moscow in 1927 to become the Kuomintang's master instead of its ally. Through his agents, Chiang learned of the Moscow orders to Borodin almost as soon as Borodin himself. Chiang moved first. His army scattered the Chinese Communists into the hills of Kiangsi and Fukien Provinces. Michael Borodin escaped to Moscow.

For the next ten years, until Chiang Kai-shek threw himself against the Japanese, most of his military strength was spent harrying the Communists from province to province. Chiang made the south too hot for the Communists, but in 1934, led by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh, they marched 6,000 miles from the farthest point in Fukien Province to the red loess hills of Shensi, and set up a Communist capital at Yenan.

By this time Chiang had become a world figure. But to 80% of the Chinese people --the peasants--he was still little known. Their attitude could be expressed in the bitter story of the farmer whose homestead had been overrun by both the Nationalists and the Communists. "Which side," he was asked, "is better?"

"They are both good," deadpanned the peasant. "Only the people are bad."

Strictures & Sleeves. In the same ten years (1927-37), China's Westernization proceeded faster than ever. These were the years of new railways, roads, schools, flood control, famine-fighting agencies. Chiang himself struggled with the problem of how the old traditions (represented by Confucianism) could be blended with the new ideas. He married one of the three Soong sisters, Wellesley-graduated Meiling, a Christian and a daughter of famed "Old Charlie" Soong, who had made his first fortune in printing and selling Chinese Bibles. (Chiang's first wife, who was still living then, was sent back to her village, Chinese-style, to live on a pension.) Chiang himself became a Methodist, but the conversion did not end his study of Confucian principles; he added the Bible to his readings of the Chinese classics.

When it came to preaching to his army, his officials, and to a whole generation of students, Chiang seldom quoted the Bible. He stressed four old traditional ideas: Li ("regulated attitude"), I ("right conduct"), Lien ("honesty") and Chih ("integrity and honor"). Out of these came Chiang's "New Life Movement," which symbolized the new China; it included strictures against everything from bribery to wiping the nose on the sleeve.

He gave especially patient attention to the training of China's new army, lecturing his Whampoa Academy graduates like a Chinese father. There were good reasons. The Communists were still a constant threat to Nationalist China--and Japanese intentions were perfectly plain to Chiang. But in 1931, when Japan occupied Manchuria, Chiang was cautious. He was still building his Whampoa-trained army. Said he: "We exhort the entire nation to maintain a dignified calm."

"Though I Die . . ." Many Chinese, especially northerners, could not accept this apparent detachment in the face of Japan's threat. In December 1936, the Nationalist garrison at Sian, facing Communist guerrilla forces, laid down their arms and refused to fight "fellow Chinese" any longer. Like their commander, Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang ("The Young Marshal"), most of them were from Manchuria, and they wanted to fight the Japanese, if anybody. Chiang flew immediately to Sian to investigate.

The Sian generals demanded that he fight Japan. When he refused to listen to "demands," they made him a prisoner. For two weeks, while the world wondered if he were dead, Chiang stonily refused to deal with his captors. "If you want to shoot me," he said, "do so at once." He raged because his government in Nanking did not blast Sian from the air. "Why don't they bomb us!" he repeated over & over.

When shooting broke out the night of his arrest, Chiang leaped from a rear window in his underwear. He scaled a ten-foot wall, stumbled into a deep moat and wrenched his back but climbed out and ran until he fell again, tripped by brambles in the darkness. He lost his false teeth. When overtaken, he once more insisted on being shot or sent back to Nanking.

The mutineers read Chiang's private diary; there, it appeared, Chiang showed as much determination to fight Japan as they had themselves. A consultation took place among the captors. Communist General Chou En-lai was invited over from the Red positions nearby. His instructions from Moscow: Chiang was to be returned to Nanking.

The Sian generals released the Gimo, but not before he had read them a remarkable lecture: "You have not understood the principles of a revolution ... On the day that I sacrifice my life for the sake of principle, the revolution will be a success . . . and my spirit will live forever. Then multitudes of others will follow me . . . Though I die, the nation will live."

Pledges in Cairo. When the Japanese invaded China proper the following year, multitudes did indeed follow him. They followed him for eight years.

The Japanese captured Nanking, Chiang moved the government upriver to Hankow and fought on; they captured Hankow, he moved to Chungking. When the ports were gone, Chinese coolies carved a Burma Road across the mountains. When the Japanese cut off Burma, after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. flew amounting load of war supplies "over the Hump."

The Japanese offered Chiang peace terms a dozen times; he never accepted. For Chiang's constancy, there was one notable acknowledgment: at Cairo in 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promised the Generalissimo to crush Japan and restore all Chinese territory lost in half a century of struggle with the Japanese. Formally, China became one of the "Big Five." When the war ended, China drew a long breath and turned to reconstruction. The spearhead of Chiang's planned reconstruction of China was Manchuria, with its coal and iron and factories. At the last moment, it was snatched from China's hand.

Part of the price the U.S. had paid Joseph Stalin at Yalta was a promise that the U.S. would support Russia's bid for a "special position" in Manchuria: control of the South Manchurian Railroad, Dairen and Port Arthur. Told about this deal months later, Chiang Kai-shek reluctantly accepted. Further, when the Russians marched into Manchuria, three days after the atom bomb on Hiroshima, they disarmed the Japanese, then handed the arms to the Chinese Communists. Chiang was not surprised. Even when both he and the Reds were arrayed against the Japanese, Chiang used to say: "The Japanese are like a terrible skin disease; but Communism is a cancer."

Arms in Manchuria. The Chinese Reds had fought a thoughtful war against Japan. They avoided direct battle, conserved their strength to use against Chiang. When the Russians opened the door of Manchuria to them after V-J day, they had a renewable arsenal.

The U.S. sent a succession of special envoys, including General George C. Marshall, to mediate between Chiang and Mao Tse-tung. U.S. mediation merely succeeded in holding up Chiang's forces for nine months in 1945-46 while the Reds dug in.

When the Communists seized Changchun, Harbin and Tsisihar, Chiang ordered an all-out offensive. Was he wrong? Was a "military solution" (in the language of U.S. experts in China) ever possible? Or should Chiang have admitted Communists into his government--while allowing them to keep separate, Red-commanded army divisions?

The difference between Chiang Kai-shek and a Western European, such as the late Jan Masaryk, was that Chiang never believed that his Communists were "different." He had known them too long, had sensed better than many men in the West that there was no position of neutrality one could take with Communists. Mao Tse-tung had put it very well: "To use the word 'neutral' is to do nothing but cheat oneself . . ."

Sunrise to Sunset. Chiang had counted on sustained U.S. aid. He had not got it. By last week, in addition to the territory Chiang had lost to the Reds (two-fifths of China), the Nationalists had suffered troop casualties of perhaps 1,800,000 men --a third of them lost as prisoners and turncoats since last July.

Chinese respected the Gimo's indomitable will, his stubborn national pride, but they had a sharp sense, that he--and they --had failed. One measure of that failure, some of them felt, was the performance of Chiang's own Whampoa Academy generals. Said one Chinese bitterly last week: "They are old and tired; in 20 years they have passed from the sunrise to the sunset." Some had turned carpetbagger. In one instance, soldiers defending Mukden watched a planeload of payday currency signed over to an army general and flown back to his bank in Shanghai. The government now knew that it did not have to tolerate abuses like that. It showed that it could learn: at Suchow this week, for the first time since the Japanese war, the troops were paid in silver. Morale, eyewitnesses reported, "bounded up."

Another measure of failure was hoarding and civil corruption. Chiang had called in son Ching-kuo (TIME, Sept. 20) to take charge of harsh drives against black markets in Shanghai. But the drive bogged down, Chinese said, when Chiang's police discovered hoarded goods in the godowns of David Kung, son of Banker H. H. Kung and nephew of Madame Chiang. The Shanghai press screamed for action, but a few days later David Kung with Madame Chiang visited the Gimo. The case was still "under investigation."

Chiang Ching-kuo's frustration put the capstone on his father's well-meaning, ill-devised effort to reform the currency. Chiang had returned from a trip one day last summer and sprung his plan on Chinese bankers. It would tap the last savings of the Chinese people--gold, silver and U.S. $10 bills hidden in mattresses and iron pots all over China. The worthless Chinese currency would be thrown away; new "gold yuan" notes would be issued in exchange for the savings. The bankers were appalled, but they tried to make it work. It did work--too well. In an act of faith, the Chinese people turned in $150 million worth (U.S.) of hard money. The economic result was a trebling of "real money" in circulation--with no more goods to buy with it than before. The political result (as the new currency spiraled higher & higher): almost total disillusionment in the Gimo on the part of his old middle-class supporters.

Work for Peace Alley. What did the people of China think of it all? They did not want Communism, but they did want an end of the war. The peace-at-any-price movement was gaining ground, especially in the cities. Chiang, however, was still respected in the countryside. The armies which had stood their ground at Suchow showed that China was not 99% demoralized, as some Chinese and U.S. businessmen said it was. TIME Correspondent Frederick Gruin took a look last week at the village of Swallow Rock, ,a few miles downstream from Nanking, on the mudflats of the Yangtze. His report:

"The Yangtze flows by, broad, brown, abustle with sampans, its far-off northern bank blurred by haze. The paddyfields are a monotone of patchwork brown, broken by the bright green plantings of winter greens. There is a hum of sound in the village marketplace: banging hammers, barking dogs, the rattle of cartwheels, and above all the plaintive chant of the coolie bearers--the wordless Ai-ho, ai-ho of a bitterly burdened people.

"The village has a narrow cobbled main street called Peace Alley. There are no docks; scores of sampans shove their flat bottoms on to the mudbank. Coolies load rice and bamboo brush into two-wheeled donkey carts. One of the cart drivers, a burly, pock-faced man from Shantung, says he has not heard from his people in a long time--'Perhaps the Communists have destroyed them.' What will he do if the Communists come to Swallow Rock? 'Flee,' he says simply.

"Nearby in the shadow of a smoking brickkiln a crew of workmen dig up Yangtze mud, knead it with blue mortar dust, slap it into forms before baking. What are people saying about the government leaders? One answers: 'They still respect and support the Generalissimo, but some members of his family, such as the Soongs and Kungs, aren't so good. It's a shame they have such money and power.'

"A plump ricedealer agrees. 'The Generalissimo,' he says, 'has been doing his best.' What if the Communists come? 'When the Japs came I fled, but the Communists are Chinese. I'll stay--once in a lifetime is enough for fleeing.' The barber feels the same way: 'A petty barber like me can't know too much about politics. I'm too poor to run away if they come. I'll stay and leave my fate to them.' "

"Can Do" or "Can't Do." In Nanking last week, the Gimo was busy too. His day began, as usual, at 6 a.m., when he rose, scrubbed his face with cold water, and stepped on to the verandah of his simple two-story brick residence for 20 minutes of setting-up exercises.

After that came prayers and reading; then breakfast alone and the day's work. When he had military visitors, he donned his plain, unmedaled khaki uniform; otherwise he wore a dark blue mandarin gown with a black jacket. To save coal, the grate in his study was left unlit most days, and the Gimo wore a skullcap to keep his head warm.

Much of his work was correspondence and official documents. He did not dictate the replies; he merely brushed one or two ideographs in the margin of each--"Can do" or "Can't do"--which gave his secretaries the clue for the answer. Lunch was Western style when foreign guests were present, Chinese style for his countrymen. He was usually abed by 10 p.m. and he was sleeping soundly, he said. The only insomnia he could remember recently was last March, when the surprise election of General Li Tsung-jen to the vice presidency had made him somewhat sleepless. He had cured that by violating one of his Methodist principles: he had downed a little bit of whiskey.

"A Man of War." Chiang Kai-shek is a man of principle, not an opportunist, not a warlord, not (his enemies finally admitted) a grafter. His principles, however, are not always clear or consistent. The conflict between the old and new, unresolved in China, is also unresolved in China's Chiang. He had been right so often, when those around him were wrong, that taking advice did not come easily to him. Three times--from Canton, from Sian, and from Chungking--he had fought his way out of hopeless situations. Such an experience might breed arrogance, and many believe that Chiang is arrogant, narrow, unimaginative--the victim of his own frozen will.

Yet a streak pf humility remains. He showed it recently when he and Madame Chiang, with sons Ching-kuo and Wei-kuo, went over to the Christian church which the Gimo had presented to Nanking. No pastor was present. The Gimo himself preached a little sermon, taking his text from I. Chronicles: "As for me, I had in mine heart to build an house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord . . . But God said unto me, Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war . . ." Jehovah had willed the assignment to Solomon. The Gimo derived the lesson: "Man proposes but God disposes."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.