High-Flying Terms

In refugee-swollen Shanghai a child collapsed on the steps of a building, too exhausted to unstrap the baby she carried on her back. As she slept, clutching a beggar's cup in her hand, the picture she made was a picture of Nationalist China itself. Last week the bad news that poured into Chiang Kai-shek's tottering capital would have exhausted even the strongest.

Friday, Red Boss Mao Tse-tung loosed a tirade against the "sheer hypocrisy" of Chiang's peace message and countered with eight points of his own that demanded, in effect, unconditional surrender of the Kuomintang regime. In North China, battered Tientsin fell on Saturday, costing the government another 60,000 of its dwindling forces.

A Harsh Answer. For two weeks following his New Year's peace proclamation (TIME, Jan. 10), the Gimo had stubbornly withstood mounting pressure from his subordinates to step aside and hasten negotiations with the Reds. Now, as disaster closed about his government, he had Mao's harsh answer. From mid-afternoon until late at night on the day Communist peace terms were broadcast, Chiang summoned his advisers. He called for T. V. Soong to return from the south. Elder Statesman Carson Chang, author of much of the new constitution which the Reds say must be scrapped, hurried up from Shanghai. While the Gimo conferred, Nanking surged with discussion of the Communist terms.

Said brash Legislator Liu Pu-tung, a strong advocate of peace: "The road to peace has brightened." An army general read the terms. "Surrender?" he snorted. "They are asking far more than surrender." Most officials were cautious, but they thought the door to negotiation--on the Communists' terms, of course--might be opening.

A Lower Price? The Communist terms included: punishment of "war criminals"; uprooting of "traditional institutions" accepted by the Kuomintang; abrogation of "traitorous" treaties (one consistently attacked in Communist propaganda gives the U.S. the right to base naval forces at Tsingtao); convocation of a Political Consultative Conference . . . "to take over all power from the Kuomintang reactionary government"; and reorganization of Chinese armies.

The hope that the Reds would soften their high-flying terms by traditional Chinese bargaining methods was expressed by a postman: "It's just like arguing with a ricksha coolie. First he asks for the highest price and then settles for a lower figure." But it was unlikely that the victory-flushed Communists would observe tradition. What was there to dike the flood of Communism if Chiang and the Reds failed to agree on a price?

At week's end the Communists had set a time limit for a separate surrender of Peiping. With the fall of Tientsin, ECA cut off flour and wheat shipments to Nationalist China under a "watch and see" policy. Red capture of the city freed an estimated 150,000 Communist troops for new operations. It also gave them a direct rail route from North China to new Nationalist lines just 30 miles above Nanking. Defended "by less than 100,000 second-line troops, Chiang's capital was open to a giant pincer attack at two points: Yangtze River crossings east of the city at the mouth of the Grand Canal, or to the west where they also could mass river craft.

This was military logic, but the Reds were not always logical. Thus far they had outgeneraled and outmaneuvered the Nationalists by doing the unexpected. Said one sagacious Chinese: "They have the initiative. They can pick the time and place to strike. We can only wait."

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