[Footnote 9: See below, p. 193. See also Taylor, George E., _The Struggle for North China_, New York, 1940, in the Inquiry Series of the Institute of Pacific Relations.] THE HANKOW PERIOD The greatest part of the year XXVII (1938) was spent in continuation of slow retreat and heavy frontal resistance. Until October communications with the outside world were wide open through the railroad to Canton. Heavy supplies could arrive by the shipload. Hundreds of Japanese air attacks on the railroad disrupted schedules but never led to serious suspension of service. Leftist influence became overwhelming in Hankow. That city had been the capital of the ill-fated Wu-han Kuomintang-Communist government, which fell with the secession of Chiang to Nanking eleven years before; its connotations still lingered. Even conservative Kuomintang leaders, who had gone to lengths of appeasement at which Neville Chamberlain would have blanched, tried to talk like Negrin or Alvarez del Vayo. In January 1938, two organizations were formed which, along with the Communist zone in the Northwest, were to be among the most active agencies of guerrilla leadership. The first of these was the New Fourth Army (_Hsin-ssŭ-chün_), which emerged in the area just south of the Japanese forces at the Yangtze mouth. It was composed of peasant and student militia, of regular army fragments, and of some Kuomintang volunteers, under the leadership of Communist remnants which had hidden away, banditti-fashion, when the Red Army trekked Northwest. Its emergence was recognized by legal order of the National Military Affairs Commission.[10] The other organization was the Provisional Executive Committee of the Shansi-Chahar-Hopei Border Region (_Chin-ch'a-chi Pien-ch'ü Lin-shih Hsing-chêng Wei-yüan-hui_), established by a conference at Fup'ing, January 8-15, and authorized by central government mandate. This agency also sprang from Leftist organizations--in this case, a bold, determined, student-peasant guerrilla army--which had first developed despite government opposition. It was designed to provide an emergency guerrilla government for those portions of the three provinces which were under occupation by the Japanese. Unoccupied portions of the provinces retained their existing administrations. [Footnote 10: See Epstein, I., work cited, p. 235 _ff._ and _The Chinese Year Book 1938-39_, cited, article by the late P. C. Nyi, "Plans for Political and Economic Hegemony in China"; this includes a full administrative description of the Border Region, p. 254 _ff._ The North China zone is arbitrarily translated "Border Region," to distinguish it from the quondam Chinese Soviet Republic in the Northwest, translated as "Frontier Area."]