Defeat

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on February 7, 1949.)

It had been the Year of the Rat -- and the year of the Communists. In the Chinese calendar, the old year stood for misfortune and deceit. A few surreptitious firecrackers, still forbidden under martial law, last week heralded the New Year of the Ox, which signified hard work and persistence. In present-day China, inevitably, it also signified sorrow and loss.

Communist armies stood outside Nanking last week. Nationalist troops gave no sign of preparing to defend the Yangtze. Nanking's sprawling government buildings were almost empty. A coolie, asleep in a ministerial chair, opened one eye and told a stray English caller: "Minister, he gone two days now. Not know where."

Acting President Li Tsung-jen made a gallant gesture: with the Reds only a few miles away, he gave a brilliant reception for Nanking's foreign diplomatic corps. The city was feverish with people in flight. Its main street swarmed with donkey carts, pedicabs, rickshas swaying under high-piled loads of furniture, straw baskets, boxes and bundles. In the railway station, refugees spent their New Year's Eve stretched out on piles of miserable baggage, waiting for trains that did not come.

Nanking people who remained tried to celebrate the New Year as best they could. In the back rooms of their stores, shopkeepers lit candles on their red altars for ceremonial offerings to the gods. Barbershops were doing a rush business, and fortune tellers were so sought after that they made appointments days in advance. Nanking's miserable colony of refugees from Communist areas was sprinkled with red paper signs asking health & wealth from the gods. An old man who had fled Suchow three months ago tapped tobacco from some cigarette butts into his pipe and said: "At home in Suchow I would be burning incense to the gods. Now look at me."

Peiping, which General Fu Tso-yi had surrendered to the Reds last fortnight, was nervously expecting the Communists to take over. Anti-Communist signs had been hastily removed from walls; Communist proclamations appeared mysteriously instead. Policemen were especially polite -- anyone in the streets might be a Red spy. Out of the open city gates, disarmed Nationalist troops marched by the thousands.

A few days later, 20,000 smartly uniformed Communist troops marched in, with two brass bands. They had left their Russian trucks outside the city, displaying only the U.S. ones which they had captured from Chiang's armies. Picked Nationalist soldiers grimly guarded the Reds' line of march. Beneath pictures of Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung (none of Joseph Stalin), sound trucks blared: "Long live the liberation!" Crowds watched the Reds in silence.