China and the United States

...Came the birth of Ping Pong diplomacy, clear signals from Mao to Nixon, and then the startling speech by Nixon announcing a forthcoming visit to China...

...Stalin was playing upon real fears among the Soviet people, but his objective was to split a democratic Germany away from the rest of the Western world...

...Alas, he let them bloom for just a few weeks, because, given a chance, just a little chance to show bow they really felt, those who spoke out said the regime was rotten...

...Who voted...

...Mao and Chou told Snow otherwise...

...Both PRESIDENT NIXON AND CHAIRMAN MAO have confessed to failure...

...The irony is that Japan spends less than one percent of its gross national product on military purposes and has resisted the pressures from our country to assume more of a military posture...

...President Nixon, with the advice of Henry Kissinger but no consent from the rabid wing of Republicanism, had been planning a deal with China from the beginning of his term in office...

...It seems clear that China will move eventually to take over Taiwan, and with sufficient historical justification...

...Mao had clearly understood the menace represented by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and its accompanying "Brezhnev Doctrine...

...Mao's regime had organized and unleashed the millions of youth who rampaged—at government expense—throughout China...

...That it should not be accomplished at the expense of American-Japanese friendship is clearly a matter of logic and interest...

...The stupid wall between the United States and the most populous nation on earth came down as a result of the "inevitable contradictions" that developed among "Marxist-Leninist" states and systems...

...But today, as even the Japanese Communists attest, there is no such threat from Japan...

...The myth that military expenditures and war are a necessary spur to economic prosperity has been dramatically refuted by the recent economic development of Japan and West Germany...

...An even more bizarre example of how we punish our friends was the action of President Nixon in extending military aid to Pakistan when Chairman Mao was doing exactly the same thing and so helping the slaughter of the Bengalis...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Reporting in any totalitarian society is beset with booby traps...

...The second aspect often eludes even the most sophisticated observers, James Reston for one...

...How was it terminated...

...It is not Chinese...

...Better late than never...

...Surely the rapprochement between the United States and China is long overdue...

...Persisting in that supreme folly we serve only to compel an alliance between Communist China and North Vietnam...

...While neither has admitted to bankruptcy of past policies, both have executed 180-degree turns...

...There was that marvelous interlude in 1957 when Mao allowed a hundred flowers to bloom...

...It is not the Government of China...

...This turning point in the relations among world powers should nevertheless be for the better, considering the absurdity of America's long refusal to concede the existence of a government with effective control over some threequarters of a billion people...

...Without guns, as Lin Piao "informed" Reston...

...It was onlyfollowing that incident that Lin Piao broughtthousands of troops into the capital, and the disarming and breakup of the Red Guards beganin earnest—with heavy casualties...

...The "Great Cultural Revolution," Reston tells us, "was best described by Lin Piao as `a civil war without guns.'" Interviews with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai in Life by Edgar Snow reveal the contrary, that the Chinese Communists remained true to their allegiance to guns...

...The late Alexander Werth, for example, was an experienced reporter who visited Czechoslovakia many times...

...Then, when the Czechs and Slovaks were given an opportunity to show their real feelings in 1968, you could find hardly anyone who supported the old regime...

...And considering also the xenophobia in China, which unleashed rioting youth in the "Great Cultural Revolution...

...The present turn by the Nixon administration at least makes possible such a policy...

...Russia, of course, had suffered grievously from German militarism and aggression...

...When a reporter was told that the head of China's Communist government was taking China back to capitalism, shouldn't he have evinced some curiosity about the evidence at hand...

...When did Reston, or anyone else, do the counting...

...A successful development of a democraticwelfare state in Japan could prove to be a solid obstacle to Chinese Communist influence in Asia...

...But his failure to maintain a balanced view is puzzling in the light of his lifetime of serious journalism...

...One is the transformation of a divided, weak, foreign-dominated, poverty-ridden, backward country into a united, development-oriented, extremely nationalistic, totalitarian power...

...how much more so in the absence of any voting, polls, or a free press...

...This oddly named "Great Cultural Revolution," an application of Mao's version of permanent revolution, awaits intensive study...

...Nevertheless, nothing would suit the Chinese rulers more than to create discord between the United States and Japan...

...The Peiping regimemay be a colonial Russian government—a slavicManchukuo on a larger scale...

...But when a majority of Chinese prisoners of war in Korea refused to return to China, many of these reporters had serious second thoughts...

...Fighting was going on" (emphasis added...

...In the April 30 issue of Life Snow reports Mao's account of the "cultural" revolution: "Later the conflict during the Cultural Revolution developed into war between factions— first with spears, then rifles, then mortars...

...Chester Bowles, former ambassador to India, has revealed how the Johnson administration deliberately withheld sorely needed foodstuff and other products from India because its government opposed U.S...

...The difficulty U.S...

...But it got out of hand...

...Perhaps the most severe dilemma will confront the U.S...

...How many unaccompanied, unpoliced inhabitants of that vast land conveyed their innermost feelings to Reston— and in what language...

...There were reporters (this author is a horrible example) who said what Reston says today about support for the regime, way back in the early 1950s...

...China has indeed been victimized by Japanese militarism and aggression...

...Back to China...

...Since Liu had been Mao's right-hand man and heir apparent, as well as head of the Chinese Communist government, this would be as sensational, if true, as the earlier accusations that Trotsky and other of Lenin's comrades were anxious to restore capitalism to Russia, or the later charge that Tito was not only a capitalist but a fascist imperialist...

...With little equivocation Mao indicated that the danger to his State and his system came from his neighbor in geography and ideology, the Soviet Union...

...He reported in the Nation and other journals that the overwhelming majority of the people supported the Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia...

...the maintaining, or rebuilding, of friendly relations with New Delhi, Tokyo, and other Asian capitals...

...and above all, the immediate ending of the Vietnam war...

...with respect to Taiwan...

...The other is the obviously negative aspect, a totalitarianism that engulfs a quarter of the human race in China, subjects it to a weird state religion whose deity is Mao, and whose most pungent commandment is that all power comes from the barrel of a gun...

...Reston joins the former Canadian ambassador to China and other recent visitors in informing us that Liu Shao-chi "was leading China back to capitalism...

...Its first essentials would be the recognition of Communist China and its admission to the UN...

...This is extremely reminiscent of how Stalin used to raise the menance of German "revanchism" whenever it suited his purposes, even though Germany was divided and, luckily for West Germany, without any appreciable military establishment...

...Snow remarks in a parenthesis: "I was told by Premier Chou on another occasion that the army suffered thousands of casualties before it took up arms to suppress factional struggles...

...SUCCESSIVE ADMINISTRATIONS in Washington flunked the test of developing a sensible policy toward Asia...

...Reston's reporting on his appendectomy is already a classic of journalism...

...ANY CONSIDERATION OF MODERN CHINA should take into account at least two aspects of the revolution that triumphed in 1949...

...Reston solemnly informs us that "for the time being this Government undoubtedly has the support of the vast majority of the Chinese people...

...Their leaders—some arrested later as counter-revolutionaries—were seeking to seize the files of the Central Committee— and Chou himself...

...Furthermore, the economic needs of China require trade and close relations with Japan even more than with the U.S...

...He even described their ecstasy when eating those incomparable Czech pastries...

...In the July 30 issue of Life Snow wrote about Chou En-lai: Though idolized by youth, he was, for morethan two days and nights, surrounded in his offices in the Great Hall by half a million ultraleftist Red Guards...

...As WE MOVE TO REPAIR the damage done by decades of wrongheaded policy toward China there is a remaining obstacle, perhaps the most serious one of all...

...Snow, apparently, did not press to find out how many casualties the army suffered after it actively entered the fray, and certainly not how many casualties were suffered by the "Red Guards" and other civilians...

...It does not pass the firsttest...

...His Times column of August 27, 1971, makes such sweeping and unsupported assertions that one wonders if this is the sober commentator we've known all these years...

...But in the postwar world, Stalin beat the drums about German "revanchism" even though West Germany revealed no such desires or trends...

...Chou En-lai himself paid tribute to an American journalist, Harrison Salisbury, who had long emphasized the depth of the Sino-Soviet conflict and whose trip to Outer Mongolia and the Far East led COMMENTS AND OPINIONS to a book entitled War Between Russia and China (New York: Norton, 1969...

...aggression in Indochina...

...WITHOUT HARBORING ANY ILLUSION about a strifeless era emerging from the Nixon-Mao meeting, I think there is little doubt that an era of Chinese history is ending, just as the era of the Nixon-McCarthy China policy is ending for our country...

...His interview with Chou En-lai was extremely useful...

...How many of those Shanghai workers who went on strike and battled the "cultural revolutionists," just a few years ago, were involved in the polls Reston took...

...diplomacy has in maintaining old alliances when forging new ones is sadly illustrated by the injuries we have inflicted on India...

...Our line and their line have changed again...

...It had been true...

...But even though Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek agree that Taiwan is a part of China, some 12 million Taiwanese, who apparently abhor both Chiang and Mao, will not be consulted...

...That is the continuation of the war in Indochina based on support of a corrupt authoritarian regime that cannot com COMMENTS AND OPINIONS mand the support of the Vietnamese people...

...Perhaps so, but how does he know...

...Not a single statement, not even a completed sentence by Liu Shao-chi has been published in China since the beginning of the "cultural" revolution in 1966...

...paper, Bantam) . In his interview with Snow, as published in Life and ignored by most journalists, Mao made it absolutely clear that he feared no danger, saw no danger of war with the United States...

...But the colossal miscalculation of American policy can be appreciated as we remember the words uttered more than 20 years ago by Dean Rusk: We do not recognize the authorities in Peipingfor what they pretend to be...

...Although there were many reasons for this change, one factor seems to predominate...

...But whatever interpretation is placed on it, terminating the "revolution" was apparently necessary to prevent chaos from taking over in China...

...If ever a fatuous but also dangerous mistake was made in this country, it was the failure of American leaders to appreciate the significance of the well-nigh insoluble antagonism between Communist China and the Soviet Union...

...Never again did they get a chance to say anything— critical, that is...

...and that, of course, is the SinoSoviet conflict...

...The schools were shut down and transportation was provided for the most obviously organized and directly manipulated mass action in modern history...

...When foreigners reported that China was in great chaos, they were not telling lies...

...Japan, like West Germany, has benefited enormously from its lack of postwar military expenditures...

...Why, then, should the overture to China necessarily mean conflict with Japan...

...In many of Chou En-lai's statements and interviews, emphasis is laid on another threat which the Chinese say they feel—from Japan...

...The Chinese rulers have real fears of Japan, fears that a democratic, nonmilitaristic Japan will continue to make remarkable economic progress and influence all of Asia...

...Reporting popular sentiment under the best of conditions is difficult...

...Something had to give—and did...

...Chou En-lai is trying to do substantially the same thing...

...Not until border warfare broke out between the two "socialist" powers did some observers take notice...

...It is generally conceded that the hope for a nontotalitarian development in Asia depends largely on the success of India's efforts to overcome its terrible poverty...