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His best aide on whom rests much of the responsibility for the success of this campaign of attrition is China's No. 1 Guerrilla Fighter, modest, crinkly-eyed Chu Teh, Commander of the 8th Route (former Communist) Army. Once hunted by the Generalissimo, with a price of $100,000 on his bullet-shaped head, while Chiang Kai-shek carried on his ten years of futile war against the Communists, Chu Teh now has under him a force of about 150,000 fervent Communist soldiers, another 300,000 embattled farmers, operating behind the Japanese front lines in Shansi and Shantung provinces.
Moving Day. A new nation cannot be built overnight. Driven by the whip of war, the life of China began to flee west ward soon after the first shots were fired at Peking 18 months ago. Students, long the spark plugs of China's national life, were among the first to go. Whole universities, libraries and laboratories moved bag & baggage, hundreds of miles, to regions which before the war had never seen books or schools. Several institutions were set up in the new capital Chungking (''Heavenly Residence"), others went to Chengtu, Sian, Changsha and far-off Kunming, capital of Szechwan Province.
Most fascinating of new "New China's" educational institutions are those now operating at Yenan, "capital" of the northern, Communist-held territory. At Yenan now are the Anti-Japanese University, the North Shensi Academy (training school for guerrilla-war organizers), the Marxist & Leninist University, the Lo Shun Art Academy, the School of Dramatic Art (directed by Shanghai's top-rank cinemactress). There were few buildings in Yenan to house the schools but in the hard-packed loess hillsides, students gouged cave classrooms and dormitories (see cut). There 4,000 men, 1,000 women, more than there are at Oxford, study Chinese Problems, Military Science, Guerrilla Warfare, listen to lectures on "The policy of the British Government toward Czecho-Slovakia," "The effect of Britain's financial policy on the French franc."
To provide food for the new land, fields of poppies were ploughed under and sown to rice. For raw materials engineers scoured the back country, opened up veins of coal, iron, copper, salt, many small oil wells.
Roads and Rails. Chief problem of the new "New China," almost completely cut off from the sea, is to keep open its routes to the outside world, to obtain supplies, trucks, motor parts, heavy machinery, oil, ammunition. While China's soldiers inched backward from the coastal provinces, China's coolies began the Herculean job of opening four main overland routes to western China.