SOUTHEAST ASIA AS SEEN FROM PARIS
Barry, Joseph
SOUTHEAST ASIA as seen from Paris by JOSEPH BARRY Paris 'T'HE DOUBLE occurrence of the war -*- in Vietnam and the Red Guard convulsions in China have had an odd and somewhat paradoxical...
...Kiesinger, he reported, was pleased with de Gaulle's promise of closer relations with Bonn than with Moscow, in exchange for a priority of Paris over Washington for Bonn...
...the question was insistently put...
...If the Chinese seem always preparing for war, he maintains, it is for a war not on their neighbors, but in defense of the homeland...
...In 1900, the Chinese reacted with the Boxer Rebellion...
...You are no longer in Europe...
...Roger Pelissier took a long, scholarly look at the "Chinese menace...
...Is China expansionist...
...He told of the last Dowager Empress and her reaction to the arrival of a new British ambassador, loaded with gifts from Queen Victoria...
...American policy," Karol claims, "made them otherwise...
...Before, we used to ask each other, 'What does America think...
...The Czech story, for instance, was coupled in that newspaper with a Reuters report that a telephone call to a Western businessman in Nanking brought a response that the situation was much calmer than reported...
...at French embassy people in Peking has been an odd reward...
...Moreover, de Gaulle has 'dared' advise Hanoi on what to do, as if Vietnam could have any counselor but China...
...We are not further saddled with blame for China...
...The United States must accept the fact that states surrounding China should have good relations with China, but can still retain, as they themselves insist, a national identity and independence—and here American diplomatic and economic support would be greatly welcomed...
...You are too powerful not to think about...
...There was a kind of cynical amusement in the reply of a Far Eastern expert at the French Foreign Ministry...
...Don't you know how unimportant Vietnam is for us...
...On the other hand, American internal politics, one might say, have never been more morbidly fascinating...
...In the 1930's, the Kuomintang, under Chiang Kai-shek, began to recover Chinese sovereignty, which, at the end of the victory of World War II with China as an ally, was finally accepted by the Western powers...
...Yes, Communists against Communists...
...This, Pelissier said, must eventually fail for historical, geographical reasons...
...As for China and the effect of the American presence, he believes China is quite happy to see the United States stuck there and the Soviet Union pouring its substance into the war...
...But your ambassador goes from place to place in West Germany giving little speeches, and people listen to him as if he were from another planet...
...They would fight for unity and independence even if China did not exist, and they would fight China, as they often have, if China threatened them...
...There are only a few on the left who differ...
...That is the way most of the responsible papers over here, such as Le Monde, have been treating them...
...The United States," he began, "wants to be loved...
...In the Nineteenth Century, he went on, these Asian states could be separated totally from China, indeed were separated, by the fact of being colonized by other powers: Outer Mongolia by Russia, Indo-China by France, Korea by Japan...
...foreign policy, or rather, for Europe, our non-policy...
...Even if the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek were in Peking," he pointed out, "you would have the same 'problem' of China trying to achieve a privileged position in Southeast Asia...
...But France has since benefited from that experience, as de Gaulle demonstrated in French Africa...
...The assumption," the French official said, "that in Vietnam the aggressor is Chinese Communism is monstrously, palpably false...
...I had asked him what had happened to the image of America in his country since our heavy-handed involvement in Vietnam...
...He fired a parting shot at the State Department's domino theory...
...The Chinese student march on the Soviet embassy here in Paris, to the chanting of Maoist slogans, and the violent Red Guard demonstrations against the French embassy in Peking protesting Paris police brutality, have shaken French opinion, but not alarmed it...
...The bomb is a defensive development, a deterrent in their eyes, like de Gaulle's force de frappe...
...The credibility rating of Eastern European Communist reporters is astonishingly high these days in the Western press, where China is concerned...
...It is not simply that, for the French, China is culturally the France of the Far East...
...Back at the Quai d'Orsay, another Frenchman scorned Secretary of State Dean Rusk's comparison of Mao to Hitler and American withdrawal to Munich...
...The first, he said, was born as a concept in Germany in the Nineteenth Century...
...Pelissier answered, "It certainly cannot do what America has done: land a half million men thousands of miles from home...
...Its army is based on village and communal militia, organized for defensive guerrilla warfare...
...They seem more relevant than U.S...
...Pelissier: "China is an underdeveloped country...
...Not just militarily, but mentally...
...He is the author of "The People of Paris...
...But a more flexible policy might have helped Mao's opponents and created more flexibility in Peking...
...I have known him for a long time...
...Among the French, partly because all arguments have been exhausted, partly because de Gaulle has spoken for most Frenchmen on Vietnam, and partly because the subject has been smothered in general agreement, American foreign policy is quickly dismissed...
...In that sense, our irrelevance to Europe, and from the European view, is a relief...
...What could possibly compete with such items as the Czech news agency's story that 500,000 workers had poured into Nanking to wipe out Mao's local Red Guards, that prisoners on both sides had "their fingers, noses, and ears chopped off, their tongues cut out...
...As I once urged a French official that France should end the Algerian war as much for the sake of France as for Algeria, so he now presses for the withdrawal of the American army from Vietnam as much for the sake of America as for Vietnam...
...The occupation of Tibet, he claimed, was a special case, because this was territory claimed by China in ancient times, and the action against India was limited to the rectification of a disputed border drawn in the Nineteenth Century by England, obviously to the advantage of its Indian colony...
...They have made the United States—in its thinking, its planning, and its preoccupations—seem almost irrelevant to Europe...
...Roger Pelissier, a director of the Chinese Center of the Sorbonne's Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, agreed...
...said the German, and paused...
...The Chinese know that kind of action would literally revolt the peripheral states into practically united action against China...
...You are in Vietnam...
...have no time for Europe, and now Europe has no thoughts foi you...
...They resumed the war when they felt cheated of the Geneva accords of 1954, which promised general elections and reunification...
...France," says French correspondent Jean Vincent, recently returned from a tour of duty in the Chinese capital, "is now considered doubly guilty of being the ally of Russia and America, that is, of both revisionism and capitalism...
...He went on: "It is a very strange thing to us that a country like Vietnam can preoccupy you so completely...
...Then, continued Pelissier, the Communists took over from the Kuomintang, began a rapid modernization, split with the Soviet Union, developed a nuclear bomb, "and now both Russia and America cry the 'Chinese menace.' The 'yellow peril' and the 'Communist peril' have become one: the 'Chinese menace.'" "But isn't there one...
...You JOSEPH BARRY, a former columnist for The New York Post, is European correspondent for The Progressive...
...It says so, and it is so...
...There is, of course, a touch of professional bias and more than a touch of French satisfaction that America should come a cropper where the French had previously failed...
...Has America's attempted isolation of Mao's China contributed in a major fashion to the current Chinese convulsion...
...I doubt it...
...What does it plan to do in Europe?' Now we feel it's not thinking or planning anything...
...Karol recalls his friend, the late Aneurin Bevan, remarking after a Labor Party trip to Moscow and Peking in 1954 that he, Bevan, had found the Chinese the most open and moderate of all the Communists he had met...
...We should not be surprised at this any more...
...Finally he said, "We don't think of it any more," then corrected himself...
...In view of Moscow's clash with Peking, however, one would think their reports might be received in the United States with more skepticism...
...America...
...This struck me in a series of recent conversations with German and French friends, people at UNESCO (the United Nations' cultural body still headquartered in Paris), fellow foreign correspondents, and others, official and private...
...You are rich, but it is costing you billions and your prestige...
...Thus it believes that isolating China would make it 'feel bad' and want to change its ways...
...In a similar, historical manner, Pelissier sketched the pre-colonial period of the small states around China as a time when they knew their fate was tied to China's, though they wanted to preserve their identity—and he compared this period to the attitude of Canada and the Caribbean states toward the United States...
...Of course, we do...
...If South Vietnam goes Communist, and eventually it will, it does not necessarily mean Cambodia or the Philippines will go Communist, no more than Finland or Austria...
...The experience of Gaullist France, which broke with the United States in recognizing China, has not been lost on the French...
...The pause was the first hint of the new paradox...
...The Red Guard hysteria is but a moment in a millenium of Chinese history...
...Thus the certainties of a recent time are far less certain now, and everything that goes wrong in the Far East is no longer, in the Parisian view, simply America's fault...
...Just compare them to the people around them...
...We don't want your presents," the Empress said sharply...
...In general there is a somewhat cooler perspective of China from Paris than, perhaps, from the banks of the Potomac...
...Among them is K. S. Karol, a French reporter who spent considerable time last year in China, and whose book, China: The Other Communism, has just been published in six countries...
...Not as much as America," he said, "but they are poorer...
...It feels more menaced than menacing, since it is surrounded by Russia by land and by the United States by sea and land...
...Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese went to war with France before the Communists had even won in China...
...It was Germany's "open door" policy for the penetration of a China already divided among England, France, and other Western powers...
...Our continuing the war in Vietnam and our resumption of the bombing after the lull are regarded as bad enough...
...The Chinese feel superior," said the man at the Quai d'Orsay, "because they are...
...America's isolation of China, the French Sinologue concluded, "did not play a great role in current Chinese developments...
...The Maoist Red Guards shouting "Fascist...
...What is it costing China...
...Possibly because France has long absorbed its own revolution, possibly because time has dulled the messianic edge of the Russian revolution, there is a tendency to give time to the Chinese upheaval...
...Even your relations with Russia—which were always important —are now in terms of Vietnam...
...We don't need your embassy...
...It is the sense of the menace of American power all along the Chinese coast and its southeast border which has incited much of the current Chinese xenophobia...
...Just fighting the war...
...He found the notion a rather ugly combination of the "yellow peril" and the "Communist menace...
...The West, Germany declared, must unite against the Chinese hordes...
...My German friend was covering the Paris talks of Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger and General Charles de Gaulle...
...It was American policy, Karol says, as he earlier contended, which isolated China and made its leaders turn inward...
...But do the Chinese behave like Americans...
...But now it is China's internal politics that have exploded in the press, relegating ours to back pages...
...SOUTHEAST ASIA as seen from Paris by JOSEPH BARRY Paris 'T'HE DOUBLE occurrence of the war -*- in Vietnam and the Red Guard convulsions in China have had an odd and somewhat paradoxical effect here on the Continent...
...Now there has been a Twentieth Century decolonization of most of these states with America still trying to keep them not only separate from, but antagonistic to, China...
...He may be wrong, but just the fact that he reported it in such undisturbed fashion indicates how far he sees that Washington has removed itself from Europe, even West Germany...
...As for the Chinese convulsion itself, there is a consensus among French Sinologues that even here American Far Eastern policy has been largely irrelevant...
...But it can move ten million men around its border...
...Will it...
...Rather, all Sinologues, all students of China one meets, regard its role in Asia as a major, if not dominant one, which America must eventually recognize...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
