THE NATIONS: Moscow-Peking Axis

As the Red tide engulfed the China mainland (see FOREIGN NEWS), non-Communist capitals from Washington to New Delhi faced an increasingly urgent question: Should they recognize the Chinese Communists?

The British are known to favor recognition, chiefly and frankly because they want to safeguard their large trading interests in China. Advocates of recognition in the U.S., whose China trade has always been relatively small, advance more speculative reasons. Most of them base their position on two assumptions: 1) the Chinese Communists, busy with staggering internal problems, are not likely soon to launch an expansionist policy in Asia; 2) Red Chinese Boss Mao Tse-tung is likely to become an Asian Tito. Therefore, argue the advocates of recognition—many of them in the U.S. State Department, which is still trying to figure out a U.S. policy for Asia—the Chinese Communists ought to be officially acknowledged as China’s rulers, get some form of U.S. assistance to spur a break with Moscow. Last week London’s shrewd Economist analyzed the premises on which this argument is based, found them extremely shaky. The Economist’s analysis gave sharp warning that the China Reds represent a clear and present danger to the West. Excerpts:

Far East Cominform. “An unpleasant shape of things to come in Chinese foreign policy is … gradually emerging . . . The Peking conference of Asian and Australasian trade unions [held Nov. 16-Dec. 1] marked out the main lines on which Chinese Communist activity is to develop. This conference . . . declared its support for the ‘national liberation’ forces in Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, Indo-China and the Philippines … It was finally decided to set up a permanent liaison bureau and secretariat, which . . . would serve as a ‘general staff’ for all the Communist-led revolutionary movements … In fact, the Far East now has its Cominform.

“What is most striking in the new ‘Chinese Cominform’ program is that it is to be applied over a region in which the Chinese imperial monarchy formerly held a kind of paramount position, and in which large Chinese communities have been built up in modern times by emigration from China. It is also the region which, in the abortive Japanese plan for ‘Greater East Asia,’ was to have been . . . included, together with China, in a bloc of states under Japanese hegemony. The propaganda against ‘Anglo-America’ which poured forth from Tokyo only five years ago has now been taken over, sometimes in identical phrases, by Communist China . . .”

Glamourous Gospel. “China remains extremely weak in modern industry and heavy armaments, and the Communists, with all their energy, have little prospect of substantially altering this state of affairs for a long time. There is no danger in the near future of Chinese fleets and armies following the Japanese path of conquest to the Bay of Bengal or the Timor Sea.

“But Communist methods of subversive propaganda and intrigue, with the infiltration of armed bands, might have great success against weak or vacillating opposition in a region already full of disorder and unrest. This is the ideal mode of expansion for a nation which lacks real military strength, but can bring to bear politically the mass weight of a population of four hundred millions, the prestige of a traditional ascendancy and the glamour of a revolutionary gospel . . .

“In talk about the prospects of ‘Titoism’ in China, it is generally assumed that all satellites must be treated alike by the Russians without any degrees of dependence. There have been signs that they are willing to accept from China a much looser form of attachment than is required from the East European satellites. Apart from the vast extent and remoteness of China, the fact that the Chinese Communists have had an army and territory of their own for more than twenty years . . . puts the Chinese in a different category from all other non-Soviet Communists.

“There may be conflicts between Moscow and Peking . . . But for the present there is no detectable heresy, and it looks as if the Moscow-Peking Axis may work about as well as did the Berlin-Rome Axis.”