Zigzags

Nearly six months after they had passed under Communist control, Kwangtung, China's southernmost province, and Canton, its turbulent capital, were still giving China's new masters a persistent headache. And the symptoms, although most acute in Kwangtung, were not limited to one province. Like tiny flash fires, bandit raids and peasant unrest flared through the land south of the Yangtze, illuminated Communist difficulties.

Last week Red General Lin Piao, military boss of six provinces in South and Central China, passed this unpleasant news on to his superiors in Peking. In Kwangtung and two neighboring provinces alone, reported Lin Piao, "there are still 150,000 armed bandits and special agents engaged in continuous sabotage." Much of the trouble, he explained, resulted from the fact that "the staggering majority in these vast, newly liberated areas still have not been organized."

Nicer at First. In Hong Kong, to which he had fled from his village near Canton, squat, moonfaced Ah Hsu, a 25-year-old Kwangtung peasant, offered another view of South China's troubles. "Before liberation," Ah Hsu remembered, "we all hoped the Communists would come, and when they came they seemed much nicer than the Kuomintang people at first." Then the Reds put a levy of 50,000 pounds of rice on the village.

A few months after the first levy was met, a second was announced. This time the quota set for Ah Hsu, classified as a poor peasant, was more than 500 pounds, and failure to raise it would have marked him as "unpatriotic." Said Ah Hsu: "I couldn't produce this much even if they killed me." So, with his wife, he had come to Hong Kong looking for coolie work. "Many of my friends," he said, "have gone north to look for jobs. If worse comes to worst, they say they will join the guerrillas."

Professional Persistence. Although peasants occasionally erupt in rage and send mutilated tax collectors running back to Canton, few have actually joined the guerrillas. The armed bands, picking at exposed Communist garrisons, raiding granaries and river traffic, are for the most part either professional bandits--many of whom have been successively anti-Japanese, anti-Nationalist and anti-Communist--or roaming squads of diehard Nationalist soldiers. But both bandits and Nationalist guerrillas feed on the dissatisfaction of peasants like Ah Hsu.

Faced with opposition, disorganized and relatively impotent as it was, persistent General Lin Piao prepared for what the Communists called "zigzags." In his district, economic recovery would be a secondary objective; land reform must be postponed until next winter and the following spring. But his field army, said Lin Piao, "must continue to increase both in quantity and quality."

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