China: Feuding Factions

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Factional fighting continues to wrack China, raising havoc with its economy and making efficient, day-to-day government almost impossible. Frustrated administrators and planners in Peking, concerned that outright anarchy seems to be approaching, have appealed repeatedly for peace. Yet the internal struggle between extremists and moderates not only persists but has apparently intensified. Last week, from strategic Kwangsi region in southern China, came reports of some of the most ferocious strife yet.

The vital rail line from China to Hanoi runs through Kwangsi, and working on the railroad has hardly been a pleasant task of late. At Kweilin, Liuchow and Nanning, railway men have been too busy fighting one another to highball war supplies southward to Ho Chi Minh. Armed peasants and soldiers have joined in factional battles along the lines, using automatic weapons, mortars and even napalm. Engineers are understandably edgy about taking trains into the crossfire.

Urgent Directives. Other hazards have bedeviled traffic on the line. A speeding train was derailed at Liuchow and the station wrecked. Rails have been ripped from bridges and barricades set up to block the right of way. Ammunition trains headed for Hanoi have been looted by the warring factions. The Peking-Nanning "express" was recently held up four days by fighting and finally ordered back to Peking, only to be stopped forcibly for 31 hours at Linchuan, where 1,000 passengers and 100 soldier-guards were searched and robbed. Some were arrested and others shot by the feuding groups.

As the supply pipeline to Hanoi dried up, Peking telegraphed a "specially urgent" directive to Kwangsi officials, ordering a halt to the fighting. When that brought no results, Premier Chou En-lai telephoned personally to demand that "firing along the lines must be stopped immediately." The fighting has since died down somewhat, but the situation is still not normal. Supplies are getting through to North Viet Nam again, but fighting in Kwangsi goes on.

The antagonists are the "Alliance Command," a moderate majority faction loyal to Wei Kuo-ching, political commissar for the Kwangsi military region, and the far-left "April 22" organization, backed by Mao's shrill, acerbic wife, Chiang Ching. So far, the Alliance has had all the best of it. The April 22 strongholds in major Kwangsi cities have been shot up, with help from peasant militia and the army units siding with the Alliance Command. April 22 protested to Peking that since the first of the year, the Alliance Command has killed hundreds of their members, arrested thousands, and reduced their representation on the newly formed revolutionary committees in the region. When April 22 units fled to neighboring Kwangtung province, they fared no better, were "blindfolded, stripped and savagely tortured" by conservatives there.

Such treatment infuriated Chiang Ching, who used her influence to have Wei summoned to Peking, presumably for a dressing down. But Wei is both powerful and popular in Kwangsi as leader of the eight-million-strong Chuang nationality group there. Army units in the province are solidly behind him, and it seems doubtful that Peking can bring sufficient pressure to make Wei ease up on his persecution of Chiang Ching's April 22 zealots.