United Nations: China Battle

Beneath the blue and white dome of the General Assembly, more than 60 speakers are pleading, arguing, threatening their way through the China debate. Once again, for the 12th year, the U.S. is fighting to keep out Red China, the regime that stands formally condemned by the U.N. as an aggressor. Once again, the Communist nations and some neutrals are urging Peking’s admission—though the sincerity of their efforts is in some doubt. Where once the U.S. could muster enough votes to sidetrack the matter from year to year, this time the U.N.’s new members, as well as the U.S.’s own allies, insisted on the debate—and indeed the U.S. position was strong enough to bear discussion. The expected conclusion: despite all the talk. Red China will be kept out again, at least till next year.

Wrathful Hurricane. Russia’s Valerian Zorin started off in his high-pitched voice, demanding that Nationalist China be kicked out of the U.N. and the Reds immediately admitted, without “juridical or procedural complexities.” This was aimed at the U.S. strategy to have Chinese representation be declared an “important question,” which would require a two-thirds vote instead of a simple majority.

Ignoring Red China’s intervention in the Korean war and Viet Nam, to say nothing about Red Chinese brutality in Tibet and on its Indian border, Zorin cried that the U.S. was responsible for “keeping China and the people of China from their rightful seat in the U.N.” He vilified the Nationalists on Formosa as “political outcasts” and “people who represent nobody.” Sneered Zorin: “Take away the American forces on Taiwan [Formosa], put an end to the U.S. occupation of the island, and the clique of Chiang Kai-shek will not stay there another day. It will be wiped away by the hurricane of the people’s wrath!”

Red China, insisted Zorin. “has the right to carry through the liquidation of the Chiang Kai-shek clique by peaceful means and with the use of armed force, and that is within its exclusive competence and nobody else’s.” In fact, Zorin harped so much on Peking’s “right” to wage a shooting war that he plainly did his argument more harm than good, and some listeners began to wonder if Russia were really eager to have Red China seated. At any rate, Zorin’s intemperate approach made the U.S.’s reply all the more convincing.

Unbridled Power. But preceding the U.S., Nationalist China’s Ambassador Tingfu Tsiang went to the rostrum, and Zorin led the other Communist bloc delegates in a walkout from the General Assembly. Tsiang dismissed the Communist regime as “un-Chinese in origin, nature and purpose.” Reviewing the grim record of Red tyranny on the mainland. Tsiang urged that tears be shed “over the suffering” of the Chinese people rather than for “their lack of representation in the U.N.”

Then it was the turn of U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Speaking solemnly, without a trace of his familiar humor, he delivered one of his best speeches since he came to the U.N. The substance of his argument was no different from the established U.S. position, but the temperate earnestness of his style impressed most listeners. He appealed to the neutral nations who mistakenly “believe that the U.N. can somehow accommodate this unbridled power” and warned that they were making a tragic mistake if they yielded to “the claims of an aggressive and unregenerate” Red China, that still acts “in a fashion recalling the early authoritarian Emperors.” It would be, he added, “ignoring the warlike character and aggressive behavior of the rulers who . . . talk of the inevitability of war as an article of faith and refuse to renounce the use of force.”

Conquering Design. Stevenson argued that the admission of Red China would 1) be irreversible. 2) add a “disruptive and demoralizing influence” to the U.N., 3) shake public confidence in the U.N., especially in the U.S., “and this alone would significantly weaken the organization,” and 4) give tacit consent to Red China’s “design to conquer Taiwan and the eleven million people who live there.”

Said Stevenson: “The issue we face is, among other things, whether we intend to abandon the Charter requirement that all United Nations members must be peace-loving . . . What an invitation to aggression the Soviet proposal would be—and what a grievous blow to the good name of the United Nations!”

Ringingly. Stevenson concluded: “It is impossible to speak seriously today of ‘bringing Communist China into the United Nations.’ No basis exists on which such a step could be taken. We believe that we must first do just the opposite: we must instead find a way to bring the United Nations—its law and its spirit—back into the whole territory of China.”