Generalissimo's Last Straw
China was boiling and popping with revolt last week. But China is mercifully vast. Centres of slaughter and pillage, rapine and rascality were strewn hundreds, thousands of miles apart. And firm in the saddle of his stumpy, strong-sinewed Chinese horse sat the great soldier-statesman who gives cohesion to the most populous and strife-wracked country in the world, His Excellency Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek.
To the man who conquered China, as Chiang did, in a great civil war which raged from Canton to Peiping, six major revolts occasion no appalling dismay. If China were really to be pacified the Generalissimo would have to ride off not in six directions but in sixty, for there were at least that many rascally "generals" insurgent throughout China. But life in the swarming cities, Shanghai, Canton, Peiping, Hankow and the capital, Nanking, went toilsomely and safely on. Swart Generalissimo Chiang wisely chooses to ignore all those local ruckuses which do not challenge his central national authority. (Most of them, he has said, are less significant than a Chicago gang-war.) Nevertheless, there came for Generalissimo Chiang last week an exciting and historic hour.
The really serious threat to his authority has been the spreading power of the Chinese Communist generals whose Soviet Governments rule some 200,000 square miles in fertile Kiangsi Province and thereabouts (see map). He has bought openly as many as 10,000 hospital beds at one clip, bought discreetly proportionate supplies of rifles, machine guns, field pieces, battle planes and munitions. For the heads of No. 1 Communist General Chu Teh and No. 2 Communist General Mao Cheh-tung—both Chinese of good family who received military training abroad—he has offered 80,000 silver dollars apiece, or $100,000 if the head is delivered attached to the body. With 300,000 Nanking soldiers in the field and ready to begin the anti-Red drive under Generalissimo Chiang's personal leadership last week, he suddenly summoned all his generals and advisers to a conference at Nanchang, his field headquarters in Kiangsi facing the Soviet Sore Spots. It was possible, declared the Generalissimo, that he might have to place the entire anti-Red campaign in the hands of his subordinate General Liu Tze and rush off to battle in a zone of still greater danger. Ceremoniously, though they all knew that the Generalissimo had made up his mind where he was going, the Council of Generals reviewed the centres of revolt:
Inner Mongolia was the bloody scene of a furious contest between Generals Tang Yulin and Liu Kwei-tang, reported in dispatches to have devastated the eastern part of the Province of Chahar. But was not this, after all, their "private war"? The Council of Generals took that view. Generalissimo Chiang had neatly solved, they felt, the larger issue presented when Mongol generals under Prince Teh Wang raised the standard of Inner Mongolia for Inner Mongolians (TIME, Oct. 23). To Inner Mongolia the Nanking Government thereupon sent an envoy who ''granted local self-government," but persuaded the Inner Mongols to let Nanking act for themselves in matters of foreign policy. After that last week's Inner Mongolian war could be considered private.