Guerrillas

The biggest organized Nationalist force still righting the Communists on the Chinese mainland is a guerrilla army some 30,000 strong, under Lieut. General Li Mi, Nationalist-nominated governor of Yunnan province. In 1949, when Nationalist China collapsed, Li escaped from a Communist jail, retreated into Burma with the remnants of the Nationalists' Eighth and Twenty-Sixth Armies. Since then, his guerrillas have harried Red garrisons along the windswept Yunnan-Burma border.

Reports from Burma last week said that several thousands of Li's men recently thrust into lofty Yunnan (see map), at one point stabbing 50 miles deep. Communist regulars counterattacked sharply, last week reportedly engaged the Nationalists in skirmishes on a 6,000-foot-high plateau 200 miles southwest of Kunming, capital of Yunnan. In retaliation for the ready welcome which some of Yunnan's peasants gave the Nationalists, Communist executioners in the province shot 1,500 "traitors".

General Li's forays are unlikely to do more than pinprick Red China. Harassed on its flanks and rear by Burmese government forces (Burma maintains diplomatic relations with Peking), and by Burmese Communists seeking to link up with the Reds in Yunnan, Li's ill-equipped force has little long-range hope of holding out. But Li's pinpricks worried the Communists enough to make them divert thousands of crack troops to Yunnan.

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