National Affairs: Prisoner Release– & After

For six weeks in Geneva, ambassadors of the U.S and Red China have been deliberating “in regard to limited subjects.” Last week they agreed on one of them. Said Red China’s Ambassador Wang Pingnan to U.S. Ambassador U. Alexis Johnson: “The People’s Republic of China recognizes that Americans … who desire to return to the U.S. are entitled to do so.” Out of Red China will come 41 U.S. citizens—including 26 victims of long jail terms and three of house arrest, eleven who have long been denied exit permits, all illegally detained. For their release the U.S. made a down payment. It agreed that India might enquire into the cases of any of the 117,000 Chinese in the U.S. who might claim to the Indian embassy that they are being prevented from going home. Objects of Captivity. Of the 41 civilians on the bargaining table, 21 are missionaries, six are businessmen, two are students and two are civilian employees of the U.S. Army. Another, who had not applied for an exit permit but was now expected to leave, was Roman Catholic Bishop James E. Walsh, 64. Bishop Walsh had continued church services after the Communist victory: he dared the Communists to persecute him along with younger missionaries, saying: “The others have done no more nor less than I.” Other church folk due to come home: Levi A. Lovegren, 66, supervisor of the Baptist missionaries in western China, imprisoned since January 1951 for “espionage”: Sarah Perkins and Dorothy Middleton Presbyterian missionaries to a colony of lepers at Lienhsien, imprisoned since February 1951 for “sabotage.” Points of Divergence. U.S. Ambassador Johnson is now committed to move on to Point Two of the agenda for Geneva, namely: “settlement of certain other practical matters.” He will canvass the possibility of Red China’s agreement to U.S. principle of “no recourse to force.” The U.S. also wants to explore the chances for a cease-fire in the Formosa Strait. But Ambassador Wang’s Red China defines the “other matters” quite differently: 1) peaceful conquest of Formosa, 2) lifting of the U.S. and UN embargoes on trade with China in strategic materials, 3) membership in the U.N., 4) “strict fulfillment of the 1954 Geneva treaty on Indo-China,” meaning tne surrender of South Viet Nam in July 1956 by the means of rigged and inadequately supervised elections

What the U.S. says next at Geneva and the way in which Red China responds mightdecide whether there is to be a confrontation between senior diplomats at which Red China’s fourfold proposition will be answered. President Eisenhower recently declared: “Now we must find out what they want to talk about. Then there would be a next advance and it might be . . . eventually you have to go to a ministerial level or meeting to get these straightened out.”