ur foreign correspondence
AMERICA
The China lobby
JOHN-GRAHAM
Washington, DC 'We need someone to negotiate with the Chinese. Do you speak Polish?' So ran the caption to a cartoon recently in the American press, as the possibility appeared of the Americans once again being able to start up what is euphemistically called a dialogue with the communists on the China mainland. Well, Mr Stoessel, the American Ambaw- dor to Warsaw, has been doing his best for Years and little has come of it. From time to time there is a flutter of interest% when for instance a junior Chinese diplomat crosses the room at some Warsaw reception to pass the time of day with a junior American dip- lomat. The State Department reacts like a hopeful subaltern to a dropped handkerchief; editorials are taken down from their shelves and dusted; the notorious China lobby in Washington, remnant of the Geueral Mac- uthur era and before, makes hysterical noises about the dangers of embracing Mao. e handkerchief is picked up again, and all returns to whit is called normal.
It is, of course, an absurd situation. There is possibly no country in the world with which the United States has had a more special relationship than China. No country whose loss, or defection, was felt more sharp- ly. But today, barely twenty years later, few people here ever think about China in any real sense, few know about modern China, and there cannot really be said to be a China policy. . - n The only excuse for writing about Ameri- can-Chinese relations is that very soon Wash- ington will have to have a policy. This was shown a few weeks ago at the United Nations here there is now a nrajdn'ty favoUr of giving Communist China a seat. China's vote as been steadily growing each year, and in e not too distant future there will be a two rds majority, and that will be enough. ough, at least, to pass the Albanian resolu- on, which would not only seat Communist ina but throw out Formosa.
At that point the United States will have to do something. The point is not many ears hence, but no one in the administration Washington. knows what to do... Corn- unist China used to insist on all sorts of nditions before it would join the United ations: not only the expulsion of Formosa tit condemnation of the United. States, ex- Ision of the United States, and so on. It has leverly changed its tack and now insists only n the removal of Formosa, and this is the ne point on which American policy has ever wavered: Formosa must remain. The rresistible force is gradually approaching e immovable object. The jurists are in for fine time.
The Americans will no doubt remain in an uivocal position vis-à-vis China for years. e obsession and anger of twenty years go have yielded before the great healer, and at is remarkable now is how little people Ilc of the problem. From time to time there a spurt of- interest, usually when the Chinese set off some nuclear device, but in general China no longer means much. The "China office in the &tete Depallment is a forgotten backwater, the China lobby is a joke, even the old Chinese idioms have van- ished from the language. No longer is a situ- ation of total chaos laughingly called a Chinese -fire-drill.
The ostracism is pretty complete. Ameri- can businessmen may not go to China, not even to the Canton fairs. The State Depart- Ment last year relaxed the rules for validating Americans' passports for China, but the Chinese won't let American citizens in. More than a thousand passports have been valid- ated; only three Americans have been allow- ed in. Three, that is, not counting the Black Panthers, of all people, who get in more or less whenever they ask and who are splen- didly received by Mao and his men.
In the old days before the cultural revolu- tion the us used to get a fair amount of in- formation from inside China, mostly from people with European or American connec- tions, missionaries, teachers, even a few scien- tists. and the like. Such people, however, have been extremely tightly watched and sus- pected since that outburst of the 'sixties, many of them live in the -molt straitened of circumstances, and the channels of intelli-. gence dried up. There are still aeroplrnes, of course, with their high-flying cameras, there are still reports from friendly diplomats of other nations of Peking, and there are travel- lers' tales from Hong Kong. But Americans as a whole, and the Government to a less extent, remain ignorant of China, and more ignorant than their counterparts in Europe, whose citizens may go to China to trade and whose governments have official representa- tives in Peking.
What will happen if China decided to open up is anyone's guess, but the belief in Washington is that this is unlikely to happen until the Chinese have settled their problem. with the Russians. The sino-soviet troubles, indeed, seem likely to dominate any discus- sion. They are the cause for a basic change in China's attitude to the outside world— always with the exception of the United States—in the last year, at least according to the few sinologists still in business here. .Their argument is that when the sino-soviet differences turned into a confrontation in 1969. The Chinese suddenly realised just how alone they were in the world. Since then they have sent out ambassadors again, have con- cluded trade agreements with countries such as Pakistan, have gone in for-humanitarian . • .works such as seeding relief packages. even to the countries which have formal diploma- tic relations with Formosa.
This sort of thing would have been un- thinkable even three years ago. If it is a sign of anything, it is a sign that the Chinese gov- ernment, while it may be just as xenophobic as before, has a certain real politik, enough anyway to understand that there can only be one outcome to a struggle with Russia and that a few friends abroad might not hurt.
And there is no doubt that the Russians do not like the way China has gone and is going, and would not mind being able to do something about it. Those stories last year about a preemptive nuclear strike by Mos- cow were not just dreamed up by idle journ- alists. Russian diplomats in various capitals of the world were dropping hints and asking third parties what their reactions to a pre- emptive strike might be. One Soviet diplomat put it to me quite straight: 'What are we supposed to do, wait until they have delivery systems?'
It has the ring of fantasy, and the Russians no doubt have quite as hard a time deciding what to do and think as the Americans. The vote at the United Nations serves notice that the fantasy will not go on for ever. The American people can prob- ably be led either to accommodation or to confrontation by the leadership in Washing- ton. Many, especially in California, would like to trade; many are still afraid of the yellow peril. There is another famous car- toon, showing a stereotype American, harassed by the day's work, climbing into bed. Above his head is. a text .that reads:• `Remember, as you are going to sleep eight hundred million communist Chinese are waking up.'
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