Uprisings Against the Reds

While Mao Tse-tung's armies took a mauling in Korea, his commissars were having trouble with the home front. Helped by the diversion of Red troops and resources northward, anti-Communist guerrillas had rattled the lid off south China. Lately, in the curious way which Communist governments often take to advertise their difficulties, the Reds described the situation.

After the Central People's Government Council ordered life imprisonment or the death penalty for .21 crimes (including draft-dodging, tax delinquency and the spreading of "false rumors"), Vice Chairman Peng Chen of the Council's Political and Legal Committee gave a surprisingly frank explanation: "Special agents, bandits of America and Chiang Kaishek, have emerged openly from their underground hiding places . . . They are plundering openly, assassinating party cadres . . . even revolting in many places." He cited an impressive example: 3,000 Communist government agents had been killed recently in Kwangsi Province, near the border of Indo-China.

"Leniency," continued Peng, "is a mistake. We must enforce severe suppression. We must kill those who ought to be killed, imprison those who ought to be imprisoned, and control those who ought to be controlled."

Last week, Chinese Communist newspapers announced almost daily executions. Four former Nationalist officers were sentenced to death in Canton. After the failure of a peasant revolt in Shantung, nine of the ringleaders were executed. In Toy-shan, Kwangtung Province, 165 guerrillas were captured. Chinese Red army headquarters said14,781 bandits had been killed last month in the Kwangsi mountains.

Chinese Communists began to see U.S. spies around every corner. To show the public how to detect secret agents, the Shanghai municipal government staged a special anti-espionage exhibit at the Cani-drome, old dog-racing track in the French Concession. The Shanghai police published an illustrated magazine called the Shanghai Public Security Pictorial, with pictures of arrests and executions in recent espionage cases.

In Kwangtung Province, the party hierarchy berated eager party workers for "antagonizing the masses" by desecrating Buddhist idols and temples, "a Don Quixote type of struggle," which enabled "bandits, special agents and village despots" to spread false rumors. The party warned: "To destroy the masses' idols of worship will only bring about public dissatisfaction with the government."

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