A very high degree of direct popular government has been achieved. Over wide areas, the average age of the _hsien_ magistrates is in the twenties. Recruitment to the Region of numerous professors and students from Peiping has helped to fill the need for trained personnel, and has assisted in maintaining the area as a genuine multi-group affair rather than a Communist front. Communists, although present and highly esteemed, do not hold the highest formal offices. (For further consideration of the United Front problem, see below, p. 123.) The New Fourth Army (_Hsin-ssŭ-chün_), third of the special zones, was formed by re-consolidation of the small mutually isolated Soviet areas left behind when the main Communist forces made the celebrated Long March. When first assembling under the truce, these Red units faced a certain amount of difficulty from the provincial military who did not grasp the United Front idea, but the Military Affairs Commission recognized them. The Army did not establish a government except through its Political Department, which coordinated political work of the volunteer village committees.[18] [Footnote 18: On the New Fourth Army, see Epstein, I., _The People's War_, cited above, p. 260 _ff._ Agnes Smedley, the well-known pro-Communist writer, has lived among the New Fourth recently. Another foreign visitor has been Jack Belton, of the Shanghai _Evening Post_. Publicity for the New Fourth Army, reduced to an absolute minimum by Chungking, is handled by an independent agency, the New China Information Committee (not to be confused with the semi-official China Information Committee) in Hong Kong. The China Defense League, in which the moving spirit is Mme. Sun Yat-sen, also in Hong Kong, acts as an agency for receiving gifts, etc., for the Army.] According to available reports, the Army stands far to the Left of the Border Region. Formally United Front, its proportion of Communists is much higher and Communist control more telling. Operating in East Central China--the Anhwei-Kiangsu-Kiangsi-Fukien-Chekiang area--which provided the base of ten years' Communist insurrection and was long the home of the Chinese Soviet Republic, the New Fourth Army Zone represents a recrudescence of Soviet activities under different names and with a different military objective. This fact has caused intense dissatisfaction among some Kuomintang generals, who spent half their careers trying to root out Communism in that same area. They do not mind the Communist zone in the Northwest, where an effective informal _cordon sanitaire_ can be drawn, but renewed Communist activity in the Yangtze valley impresses them as an evil not much less than pro-Japanese treason.