Trading with the Enemy
It may or may not have been an accident that Senator McCarthy published his sub-committee's report on China trade a few days. after Lord Salisbury was safely out of range of Mr. Dulles's ear. At all events, it was unfortunate. The report cites spe&ific cases where strategic goods have been delivered in vessels owned or chartered by British companies. But the main part of its evidence is directed at the general increase in trade of all kinds between the West and Communist China. That there has been an increase is undoubtedly true; indeed the Board of Trade published, on Monday, figures which show that British trade with China in the first five months of 1953 was nearly three times as great as in the corresponding period of last year. The point, as the British Government has repeated ad nauseam, is that while Britain subscribes to the United Nations ban on the export of strategic goods to China, and while she is constantly trying to improve the machinery for enforcing this ban, she believes that non- strategic trade with China is in the best interests of the Western alliance and should increase. The reasons are partly political—it can only be against the Western interest to force Peking into total dependence on Moscow for its economic necessities—and partly economic. Europe, and, for that matter, Japan and the free countries of South East Asia, need to be able to sell in China; to a lesser extent, they need Chinese exports. But Senator McCarthy and, it must be admitted, the large majority of the American public, believe that all trade with China is bad in as much as all trade with the enemy helps him to fight. It is an insidious argument because, in a sense, it is true. There is no clear distinction between strategic and non-strategic goods. The U.S. Admini- stration has in the past accepted the existing arbitrary dividing line; they are now being asked to reject it, at the precise moment when the question in Europe is whether there should be more, rather than less, trade with China after a truce in Korea.
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