Mao Settles the Dust

The Communist victory in China changed the political and strategic map of the world; therefore, it required far-reaching policy decisions by the U.S. Last February Secretary of State Dean Acheson postponed these decisions by saying that he would "wait until the dust settles." Last week China's Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung settled the dust; he made an air-clearing statement that disclosed the U.S. already standing at a crossroads which the State Department had hoped it would not reach until the weather got cooler, say in October.

What Mao did was to explode the hope that the Western democracies could do business with Communist China and thus gradually wean its Red masters away from allegiance to world communism. Mao announced, in effect, that Titoism was not for him. Said he: "We belong to the anti-imperialist front headed by the U.S.S.R., and we can only look for genuine friendly aid from that front and not from the imperialist front."

Mao had a word for those Westerners who believed that Communist China would come hat in hand to Washington and London in search of loans; his word was "naive." He predicted that the West would try to lend his government money "because Western capitalists want to make money and bankers need interest to relieve their own crises."

For those Americans who thought Red China could be "neutralized" by friendly treatment, Mao had an answer: "We also oppose the illusion of a third road. Not only in China, but also in the world, without exception, one either leans to the side of imperialism or the side of socialism. Neutrality is a camouflage."

Mao summed up his position with a familiar Moscow precept, dressed in a Chinese figure of speech: "You have to choose between the alternatives of killing the tiger or being eaten by it."

The Chinese leader cleared up some points that have been debated in the West. For the bemused "liberals" who have protested that the Chinese Communists were mere harmless "agrarian democrats," Mao had news. He said his regime was and for the immediate future would continue to be a "dictatorship." For those who have insisted that the Chinese Reds got no help from Russia, Mao (who should know) said that the victory of the Red revolution in China would have been impossible without the aid of the U.S.S.R. He said that the "masses" in many countries, including the U.S., had relieved reactionary pressure against the Chinese revolution.

In his statement was just about all the world needed to know about the past, present and future attitudes of the Chinese Communist Party. It wiped out 15 years of "liberal" cant about the tame Chinese Communists. Probably it would effectively silence the British and U.S. Shanghai businessmen who were clamoring to their governments to establish diplomatic relations with the Reds. Mr. Acheson had his answer, too.

It was Molotov, rather than Marshall or Bevin, who had finally educated the West on the subject of Communist danger in Europe. In the same way Mao Tse-tung might educate it about the Communist danger in Asia.

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