Peking and Formosa
Reports of Red Army personnel manning anti-aircraft batteries in the Shanghai area have been current, though unconfirmed, for some time ; and now the Nationalist Air Force has begun to encounter opposition in the air from what Chiang Kai-shek's head- quarters on Formosa describe as Russian fighters. Whether the aircraft in question are Russian or (less probably) Japanese and whether they are manned by Russian pilots does not really matter very much. Anything, indeed, which interferes with bombing operations from Formosa is to be welcomed. It may not be right for Russian pilots to defend Shanghai, but it is much less right for Chinese pilots to attack it. From the Interior, meanwhile, comes news of the inevitable aftermath of civil war—famine and banditry. Much of the latter has a political complexion,-and there is no doubt that the Peking Government faces problems of pacification which in some provinces are serious. General Lin Piao recently announced that, apart from these internal security tasks, the Communists' im- mediate military objective is the rapture of Hainan Island, against which (according to reports from Formosa which probably have some basis in fact) small-scale combined operations have already been attempted without success. The disappearance from the immediate agenda of both Tibet and Formosa (both originally targets for this year) is significant.
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