Red China: How Good a Thing?

If glee could ever infiltrate that frozen phiz, Chou En-lai would have come on like Danny Kaye. As it was, speaking to four Filipino newsmen in the Great Hall of the People at Peking, Red China’s dyspeptic Premier had a hard time choking back a chortle. What, the visitors asked, did Chou think of Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster? “In one word,” snapped Chou, “it is a good thing.”

That was more than one word, of course, and quite possibly less than objective. To be sure, Peking could hardly be expected to mourn the demise of its archenemy. The Chinese could reasonably assume that the barnyard bellicosity of Sino-Soviet exchanges in the Khrushchev era would now be replaced with a more mannerly dialogue. But demonologists the world over wondered whether K’s exit alone could possibly close the political and ideological abyss between Communism’s rivals.

Basking in the glow of Red China’s first atomic explosion, Peking’s newspapers refrained from anti-Soviet diatribes. Like everyone else, Red China’s boss, Mao Tse-tung, was waiting to see who really was calling the shots in the Kremlin. If, as some reports had it, Mikhail Suslov is Moscow’s new Red Eminence, Mao can have no illusions. Suslov, who confronted China’s top theoretician, Teng Hsiao-ping, during acrimonious exchanges last year, is more deeply hated by the Peking regime than Khrushchev. At the same time, Mao knows that the new Soviet leaders cannot push as hard as Nikita for collective Communist censure of Red China: Moscow’s own sphere of influence, Eastern Europe, is disunited enough without risking new fissures. However, to show that he hadn’t gone mushy overnight, Mao let his Albanian puppets keep up the vituperation.

The truce, if that is what it is, may prove short-lived. Mao can no more afford to temper his violent faith in worldwide war on capitalist imperialism than Khrushchev’s successor can risk repudiating peaceful coexistence and “goulash” Communism. Neither side seems likely to give way in the squabble over the 4,000-mile border that separates them. The Russians can hardly risk resumption of military and economic aid to China, for fear of accelerating Peking’s ability to build delivery systems for its bombs. Of course, if Chou En-lai is to be believed, the world has nothing to worry about. After assuring the Filipino journalists that Peking’s bomb is bigger than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chou added: “Our bomb is small, but from the day of its birth it joined the struggle for peace.”