City of Victory

"I will accept without evasion the severest punishment, even to the extent of being boiled in oil or having my physical self dismembered into many parts as a so-called war criminal . . . Cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party is most urgently required . . . I hope now to convert the hostilities into peace and save the people. My heart is as clear as pure water."

In Peiping, heady with triumph, Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung last week pondered this telegram from China's Acting President Li Tsung-jen. No victor in China's millennial history had ever received a more humble plea for mercy or a more complete admission of defeat.

All week, Nationalist Nanking and Red Peiping had bargained and bickered over terms. Peiping's Red radio had spurned a new Nationalist petition for an "equal and honorable peace." "Mad and erroneous," it shouted at Nanking. "There is only one way to peace, and that is complete surrender . . ."

Armed guards had thrown a tight cordon around Peiping's Wagon Lits Hotel, where a six-man Nationalist peace delegation sipped tea and sampled the Communist temper. Not even the hostelry's Italian barber Martelliti was allowed to pass the barricade. Not even the delegation's leader, soft-talking General Chang Chih-chung, could soothe the Reds' truculence.

Bypassing the peace delegates, Boss Mao had drafted an ultimatum, sent it south to Nanking by special messenger. Its chief demand: within four days, the Nationalist armies must be transferred to Communist command. Otherwise Red troops, strengthened in the past months by fresh conscripts and regular reinforcements from Manchuria, would strike across the Yangtze.

Shaken by this sudden hiking of Red terms, after both sides had previously agreed to talk over Mao's surrender formula (TIME, Jan. 24), the Nationalists' Li had conferred with his generals, then sent his imploring telegram to Peiping.

Mao could not openly reject the plea. "Your message has been received," he wired back. "Our party is very willing to adopt lenient policies." But his heart was not in his terse reply; his heart was with his troops. At week's end, under able Generals Chen Yi and Lin Piao, they were prodding the Nationalists from their last footholds on the Yangtze's north bank. For the first time in the civil war, Red shells whined across the muddy river into the Nationalist southland.

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