Chou's tripod
CHINA DICK WILSON
The Communist Chinese request for an am- bassadorial meeting with the United States in Warsaw on 20 February, together with a call from Peking for the Americans to conclude with China an 'agreement on the five principles of peaceful co-existence,' was ignored in the Brit- ish press. But it made the headlines in Wash- ington, as well as in Asian cities.
It came after Peking had finally broken its disapproving silence on the 'Paris talks,' as its news agency referred to them, in quotation marks still heavy with reproach. For many months the Chinese did not conceal their anger with Uncle Ho for agreeing to the talks. Prime Minister Chou En-lai obviously had the Viet- namese communists in mind when, at a party for visiting Albanians a few weeks ago, he qualified his belief in the eventual triumph of revolution everywhere with the warning: 'There are unavoidably persons who will waver, fall behind or capitulate.'
Now the unmentionable can be mentioned in China, and it begins to look as if Peking has resigned itself to a cease-fire of some kind in Vietnam. Not a few in the Chinese capital must feel relief, especially among those responsible for economic affairs (who could ill spare the aid convoys across the border) and the generals (who would have to cope with any escalation of the war on to Chinese soil). Possibly the Chinese are now thinking that Washington and Hanoi will settle willy-nilly, and that China had better make sure of a voice in whatever per- manent settlement follows the truce.
The invitation to the Americans also came only a few days after the United Nations Gen, eral Assembly had rejected Peking's supporters on the annual vote for the China seat by fifty- eight to forty-four (with twenty-three absten- tions). The Chinese press followed the debate keenly, and sought to disguise the further erosion of Peking's popularity by the mention of 'several more countries' swinging to her side. In fact the Chinese communists lost the Nigerian vote (understandably. considering eking's attitude to Biafra) and that of Senegal this year, and of the four new UN members only ne (South Yemen) voted for Peking.
Too much should not be read into the new nvitation. The reference to peaceful co-exist- ce is a standard thing with' these Warsaw alks, which did, after all, originate in sound- ngs made by Chou at the Bandung Conference n 1955. One of the five principles of Bandung s non-interference in the internal affairs of her nations, and there is no sign that Peking as softened its insistence that American mili- rY support of the Chiang Kai-shek admin- tration on the Chinese island of Taiwan con-
stitutes the most flagrant contravention of this principle. There is obviously no business to be done on this question at the Warsaw meeting in February.
But the Chinese invitation does suggest a degree of forward thinking in Peking, a con- sideration of possible post-Vietnam postures, which has excited some State Department officials. Its timing and content are shrewd. They suggest a Chinese desire to probe the in- tentions of the incoming Republican admin- istration, and to give it a chance to edge out of Mr Rusk's cul-de-sac. In its initial comments on the Nixon victory the Chinese press gave considerable prominence to the President-elect's promise to reduce American commitments in areas of the world where the us is over-ex- tended. Any action in this direction would be extremely interesting to the Chinese; it would tend to vindicate, in their own eyes. the Maoist analysis of the future balance of, power in Asia. and offer scope for more fence-mending and pressurising throughout the Asian tiers mottele.
Nixon himself has supported continued con- tainment and isolation of China until there is a change of attitude in Peking, but he has spoken quite warmly of keeping the windows open and seeking ultimately to reintegrate China into the world community. (The Johnson administration invited China to send journalists to cover the election campaign, but none went.) All this is speculation. It would be wrong to expect any change of mind on either side at Warsaw. But what can be fairly safely said is that the Chinese invitation constitutes further evidence of a return to normality in the con- duct of Chinese foreign policy. It represents the views of those who are seriously concerned about China's national interest in the post- Vietnam world, as opposed to the strident shrieks of factions struggling for power within China itself. The professionals may be back in charge again at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Indeed one of the surprises of the past few months in Peking has been the growing strength of Chou En-lai. He used to be thought of as the sensible administrator who lacked a power base in the tough jungle of Chinese Communist party factionalism, and whose Confucian man- ners and aristocratic grace made him un- acceptable as a supreme leader of a workers' and peasants' party. But Chou now appears to enjoy a triple power base. It comprises his own government machine (to which most of the civilian admin- istrators are loyal), the public security Ministry of his ally, Hsieh Fu-chih (which gives him secret police support), and a group of senior army commanders who belonged to the Fourth Front Red Army in the days of the Long March, or to Foreign Minister Chen Yi's New Fourth Army in the 1940s, and who formed personal connections with Chou at that time. He is not as powerless as was earlier thought, and he may well be winning out in the succession stakes over the physically ailing Lin Piao and the over- zealous Chiang Ching (Mao's wife).
The release of Anthony Grey would provide further confirmation of this, since the world- wide show of repugnance over his incarceration has made it counter-productive. If something could be devised which Chou could present to his Hong Kong lobby as a concession made possible by Grey's imprisonment, he would surely seize on it. Meanwhile the British Foreign Office's policy of patience remains uninvali- dated. As one of our diplomats puts it, 'When you start competing to see who can be nastier, we always tend to come a worse.'
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