Last Phase

Chungking's million people, who suffered and defied Japanese bombs in the drab, heroic time of World War II, had no will to resist the oncoming Communists. A delegation of silk merchants and other traders went out to the city's suburbs and talked things over with the Red advance guard. That night, with no opposition, troops of the Communists' one-eyed Dragon, wily General Liu Po-cheng, crossed the Yangtze. By morning, the gold-starred Red flag flew over Chungking's whitewashed plaster buildings and its crooked cliffside streets.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek stayed on until the forlorn end, and nearly fell into the Communists' hands: when he finally decided to leave, the road to Pei-shiyi airport was so jammed with refugees that his car could not get through. Chiang walked part of the way, then got a lift in a jeep. The Reds were already in the capital when Chiang's Skymaster took off for Chengtu, some 200 miles farther inland.

In old, easygoing Chengtu, the Nationalists' fourth capital this year, Chiang announced that he was resuming open leadership of the fight against Communism, that resistance would continue in the southwest and behind Communist lines. He invited Acting President Li Tsung-jen to his side. But in Hong Kong, ailing Li declined to return to the war. This Week he flew off to the U.S. for "medical reasons only," though one of his aides added: "If the Acting President could get moral and material aid from our American friends, it would be a windfall to our country."

No windfalls were in sight, and the last phase of Nationalist resistance on the Chinese mainland seemed at hand. Chengtu might be lost in a fortnight. General Pai Chung-hsi's Kwangsi troops, some of the best still left to the Nationalists, were retreating to Hainan Island. The Nationalist government's next stop might be Kangting, in the remote Tibetan borderland of Sikang. More probably it would be Formosa, now not only a Nationalist island citadel off the China coast but also a problem that was pressing for consideration by U.S. statesmen and military strategists (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

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