After eight weeks, the Soviet-Chinese border talks in Peking appear to have made no progress. The reason for the deadlock may well be that the Soviets refuse to withdraw their troops from disputed areas of the 4,500-mile border until the Chinese quit insisting on a complete Soviet renunciation of the czarist treaties that ceded vast areas of China to Russia.
With the talks going nowhere, China is preparing for the worst. The latest evidence of Peking’s efforts to condition its huge populace to the possibility of war comes from two U.S. citizens who were seized by Chinese fishing junks last February while yachting between Hong Kong and Macao. Released last week, they told of seeing widespread roadblocks and military activity whenever they were shifted from place to place. From his shuttered room in a rural commune, Simeon Baldwin, Hong Kong-based manager of an aircraft-parts firm, said that he could hear the local army units at bayonet practice. “There is constant talk of defense and you see preparations for war everywhere. My interpreters really believed that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are conspiring to invade China.” Once he asked, “Are you really expecting the Seventh Fleet to come sailing up the Pearl River?” Recalled Baldwin: “They didn’t think that was funny.”
Mountain Refuge. Militia training has been stepped up everywhere. Visitors to the recent Canton trade fair report that a huge tunnel complex has been built beneath the city that will enable downtown residents to flee to the relative safety of White Cloud Hill nine miles away. Washington discounts rumors that the Chinese have chiseled an elaborate command post out of 12,000-ft. mountains in Szechwan province as a refuge for Chairman Mao Tse-tung and his deputy Lin Piao in the event of an attack. But U.S. sources have been told that underground headquarters have been dug in almost every province.
In Peking, mounds of earth from newly burrowed bomb shelters line the streets. When British Chargé d’Affaires John Denson peered too closely into one such hole two weeks ago, a shouting crowd surrounded him for two hours and accused him of spying. The Foreign Ministry brushed aside his protests and suggested that perhaps he should stay home, where he belonged.
Some Sinologists believe that Peking may be using the war preparations as a shock tactic designed to restore order and unity in the wake of Mao’s divisive Cultural Revolution. But they do not discount the possibility that the Chinese are genuinely fearful of war. The Soviets recently created a new Central Asian Command along the border, and have resumed propaganda attacks in Mandarin Chinese broadcasts. Deeply suspicious of collusion between Moscow and the West, some Chinese diplomats suggest that the simultaneous meetings of the NATO and Warsaw Pacts two weeks ago were no coincidence.
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