To the Rescue

If it had happened to a British diplomat in the 19th Century, a wrathful government would have sent a couple of His Majesty's gunboats to teach the offenders a lesson. But it happened to a U.S. diplomat in the 20th Century, and the U.S., so far, has managed to do next to nothing.

A year ago the Chinese Communists put veteran Diplomat Angus Ward, U.S. consul general in Mukden, under virtual house arrest. Later they refused to let him close the consulate to go home, denounced him as a spy. A month ago they clapped him into jail, alleged that he had beaten a Chinese employee (TIME, Nov. 7). When the U.S. State Department, through Consul General 0. Edmund Clubb in Peiping, sent a note of protest, Red Foreign Minister Chou En-lai did not even receive Clubb: the note had to be left at Chou's door.

By last week, the note was still unanswered, and Washington still did not know what to do. Such shilly-shallying in the face of Peiping's provocation stirred the good, grey New York Times to red-hot anger, which was shared by more & more Americans. Wrote the Times: "Able, honest, faithful and diligent public servants have been stranded in Communist China by our Micawber Far Eastern policy . . . We cannot afford, if we want to retain a shred of prestige anywhere in Asia, to let men such as Angus Ward . . . suffer any further contumely as martyrs to our inability to decide what can and should be done. If the Chinese Communists are illiterate in the language of international diplomacy and decency, we will have to draw them a picture that they can understand. The important thing now is not to make a clever move on the chessboard of chicane, but to resolve upon a rescue."

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