"Blood Is On The Grass"

You have just read the words of one of the world's leading Christian intellectuals, on the occasion of his country's disappearing behind the iron curtain. At the same time, the government associated for so long with that Christian gentleman Chiang Kai Shek, was busy testifying to its humanitarian principles:

"It was on the very day the Kuomintang 'Peace' delegations flew to liberated Peiping," says Jack Pel in the same issue of China Digest, "that the bloody massacre of students took place at Nanking."

The Chinese student movement has always been suspected by the right-wing government. Enmity to culture and thought is always the hall-mark of reactionary and fascist governments, and Chiang's has been no exception.

Even in its death-throes, the Kuomintang delivered a desperate and bloody thrust at the students of the old capital. On April 1 last 6,000 students and staff members from 11 Nanking colleges paraded through the streets of the city in a demonstration for genuine peace. Slogans included "No more American Aid to the Kuomintang!" "No more Conscription!" "Away with Hunger and Oppression!"

After the demonstration, the individual college groups made their way home. Then came the cowardly attack by the military. Beating with clubs, a group of 300 KMT army officers rushed into two small groups of students. Harvest: 3 dead, 16 "disappeared" (i.e. arrested for private beating up), 95 seriously injured. Remember July 1947 in Sydney? and Wellington? That is how it begins. Students demonstrating for peace are never popular with governments built on that unstable economic system which must, in the end, rely on war. When such a government has come to make war a matter of policy, then demonstrating students are murdered.