If They Have the Heart

Besides Formosa, Nationalist China has another beleaguered island redoubt. Oyster-shaped, about twice the size of New Jersey, with 3,000,000 inhabitants, Hainan Island lies in the South China Sea, only 15 miles from the Red mainland. The Japanese used it as a training ground and springboard for their conquest of Indo-China, Malaya and Singapore. From Hainan last week TIME Correspondent Wilson Fielder reported:

Tiny, thin-faced General Hsueh Yueh is known as China's Little Tiger. Thrice he clawed the Japanese at Changsha in 1941. Now, on tropical Hainan, the Little Tiger watches the weather with a prayerful eye. It is the season for fogs. Usually they roll in from the mainland, and this season they could cover a Communist invasion armada. To prepare Hainan's de fense, Hsueh says he needs "just one month more."

So far the fog has held off. Every day the small Nationalist air force (30 B-25s, P-51s and Mosquitoes) roars from the blacktopped airstrip at Haikow across Hainan Strait to the mainland. With field glasses from the roof of Haikow's Presbyterian Hospital, their bombs can be seen exploding on Luichow Peninsula where the Reds have been massing. The flyers also drop leaflets that urge Luichow fishermen, whose boats the Reds must commandeer, to sail away and avoid destruction rather than become "running dogs of Soviet Russia."

Many fishermen are responding. Under the guns of a Nationalist naval flotilla (a few destroyer escorts and smaller patrol craft), they are bringing their boats to Hainan. The Communists are smarting. "Landing operations," admitted a recently captured Red field order, "may be delayed."

Rifles & Rice. Two months ago the tattered remnant of a beaten Nationalist army started pouring into Hainan from South China. Hungry soldiers roamed Haikow's crooked, dirty streets and sold their rifles for rice. The Little Tiger struggled for discipline. Demoralized troops were moved out of the towns into the countryside, paid in silver dollars (for a change), reorganized and re-equipped. Hsueh now has 160,000 men of varying fitness. His best units are digging in along the white sand beaches of Hainan's northern coast.

Invasion from the mainland is only part of the Red threat. Hiding in the Five Finger Mountains, whose timber-clad ridges reach up 7,000 feet in central

Hainan, are some 25,000 Red guerrillas. They control about 40% of the island.

Hope & Heart. The Chinese came to Hainan in in B.C. For centuries the island was a torrid Siberia where imperial dynasts often dumped political foes. * Between 1939 and 1945 the Japanese transformed Hainan into another kind of imperial base. On the undeveloped, malarial outpost, they established military camps, dredged a deepwater harbor at Yulin on the south coast, developed rich iron mines, built a hydroelectric plant, cement factory and fish cannery. The Japanese enterprises have deteriorated because the Hainanese lack replacement parts and maintenance skill. Hsueh is tearing down one of two arsenals and shipping it to Formosa, "We don't have the money to run it," he claims. "I just hope the Generalissimo will ship us back the arms and ammunition we need to defend ourselves."

One old Hainan hand, a foreigner who has lived on the island for 25 years, gives the Little Tiger credit for the beginning of progress. "Why, the people are actually showing some respect for the soldiers," he says. "If they have the heart to fight, these troops could make it tough for the Communists."

Tough or not, it is only a matter of time before the Reds strike.

* Most celebrated was Su Tung Po (1036-1101), who was exiled for three years to Hainan. Poet, painter, engineer and herbalist, Su fought against the state socialism of Premier Wang An-shih, who favored government monopoly of retail and wholesale trade, government control of transport (horses) and credit (loans to farmers). After eight years, Wang's statism reduced China to economic and political chaos.

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