One-Eyed Dragon

Washington intelligence officers think that the new Chinese offensive is commanded by Liu Po-cheng, wily leader of Red China's Second Field Army and, until recently, military boss of southwest China. Liu succeeds Lin Piao, whose Fourth Field Army has been severely mauled in the Korean fighting. (Other U.S. sources in Tokyo believe that Lin is still somewhere in the Red high command.)

Liu, now 51, fought in warlords' armies, became a Communist Party member in 1926. After Chiang Kai-shek's bloody 1927 ouster of the Communists from the Kuomintang, Liu made his way to Moscow, where he studied guerrilla tactics and Far Eastern politics at the Red Army Military Academy. When Russian troops entered Manchuria in 1929 in a dispute over the Chinese Eastern Railroad, he went along; his assignment was to recruit Manchurian volunteers for the Soviet forces. A year later, he slipped into the Shanghai underground, then went on to the interior to join the Chinese Red army in Kiangsi province under Mao Tse-tung. He led the vanguard of the celebrated Long March in 1934-35, which brought the Chinese Reds to the northwest around Yenan.

In his years of combat he was wounded many times, losing an eye and thereby earning the nickname of the "One-Eyed Dragon."

After V-J day, Liu proved himself an able guerrilla tactician; his troops played an important part in the defeat of the Nationalists in eastern and central China.

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