United Nations: No Admittance

The United Nations regularly undergoes a ritual known as the Red China debate, which since 1961 has always ended with the continued exclusion of Peking from the U.N. This year there was so much talk, so many varied plans and so many headlines about attempts to get Red China into the U.N. that it seemed as if things might be different. They were different, all right, but in a way that surprised many of the commentators. Instead of increasing its support, Red China last week suffered a crushing defeat. Members not only barred Peking by a vote of 57-46 (v. last year’s 47-47 tie), but even knocked down by 62-34 an Italian proposal that a committee be set up to study the question of admission.

The rampages of the Red Guards and Peking’s subversion on almost every continent lost it a lot of votes it had won previously, particularly in Africa. Peking’s entry, warned Thailand’s Ambassador Sukich Nimmanheminda, would be “putting a dangerous tiger in a cage with all of us inside.” The Central African Republic’s Michel Gallin-Douathe, relating how Red China’s subversive agents had been booted out of Bangui, reported to the delegates: “Our wives and children then threw behind the aircraft bearing away the representatives of Peking the flaming ember, symbolic of final departure and of a memory replete with public shame and execration.” Niger’s Ambassador Issoufou Saidou Djermakoye complained that “the Peking government trained hundreds of young Niger nationals so that they might return to their own country to murder their fathers, their sisters and brothers.”

But Nationalist China, which many Red China backers would deprive of its seat on the Security Council, had the last say. “When things look gloomiest for us here,” said a government spokesman, “when our friends seem to be doing us in, we can always count on our enemy, the Chinese Communists, to come to our rescue with some outrageous new action.”