ABSTRACT
In the early morning hours of April 24, 1949, the capital of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China lay prostrate before Communist troops storming across the Yangzi River. Nanking had been abandoned by its Nationalist army garrison. The fall of Nanking was the climax of a civil war mainly fought on remote battlefields rarely reached by journalists. From 1927 to 1937, Chiang had waged a war of extermination against elusive Communist guerrillas led by Mao Tse-tung. Mao and Chiang joined in an uneasy coalition in 1937 to resist Japanese invaders, but the civil war erupted again soon after the end of World War II. Mao was in Peiping, the ancient northern capital formerly known as Peking, and in control of most of the mainland. Peiping was a beguiling walled city. The correspondents in Peiping progressively became more isolated in 1948 as Communist forces descended from Manchuria into north China.
