Word: nationalist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Governor Wu spoke, the last Nationalist troops on the mainland were streaming across the border into Indo-China, and the Chinese Communists held uncontested control of the Asian coastline from the Gulf of Tonkin almost to Vladivostok. Only the remnants of the Nationalist armies stood against the certainty that China's Communists would try to take Formosa, thus driving a dangerous wedge between strategic U.S. positions in Japan and Okinawa to the north, and in the Philippines to the south...
...Rout. For the time being, the Nationalists were safe on Formosa. Last October, the Communists had launched the beginning of an invasion when they tried to storm the tiny island of Chin Men, just off the mainland from Amoy and 130 miles across the Strait of Formosa. The attack was a bloody failure. Nationalist troops commanded by trim, V.M.I.-trained General Sun Li-jen, who four months ago was placed in charge of Formosa's defense, routed a Communist assault force of 20,000, returned to Formosa with 7,000 prisoners. Most of the Reds have since been reorganized...
...Formosa, General Sun commands 300,000 troops, is supported by Nationalist China's air force and navy. In numbers, the force seems imposing, but to TIME Correspondent Wilson Fielder last week General Sun frankly conceded that he has a tough job of reorganization ahead of him. Only about half of Sun's troops will take his orders; the others feel themselves bound to generals who reject Sun's authority. Actually, Sun would prefer a smaller, more compact army than he now commands. Unreliable generals have been sacked right & left without regard to traditional face-saving niceties...
Idle or disaffected Nationalist soldiers, whose unruly behavior had outraged Formosans in the past, have been disarmed and put to work preparing defenses on the shallow, sandy beaches that face the mainland; others have been sent to Sun's U.S.-style training camps in the south. The Formosans, who spent 50 years before World War II under Japanese rule, are getting used to the Chinese soldiery. "A country must have soldiers to have peace," said one farmer. "The ones in our village seldom bother us any more...
Signs of Maturity. Protected by the 100-mile-wide Strait of Formosa, separating them from the Communists on the mainland, the Nationalists seem to have a good chance of successfully defending their island redoubt against an assault-providing Formosa's native population does not rise against them. While General Sun is licking Formosa's military defenses into shape, Governor Wu is busy trying to win the loyalty of Formosa's 6,500,000 people, most of whom dislike the Chinese, Nationalist or Communist. To win friends among Formosa's hard-working peasants, Wu is pressing...