Business with the Enemy

Defense Minister Emanuel Shinwell told the House of Commons last week how gallantly the men of Britain's Gloucestershire Regiment had died in Korea (TIME. May 7). Up rose M.P. Raymond Blackburn, independent ex-Laborite,with a searing question: Why had Britain supplied Red China with thousands of tons of iron & steel, vehicles, aircraft parts, rubber? Wasn't it "high time we ceased to supply the people against whom our boys are fighting?"

Caught unprepared, Shinwell sputtered that Blackburn was "inaccurate ... for several months now we have placed an embargo on the export of strategic raw materials to China." But Blackburn was not wrong. He harried Shinwell with data from the government's own Board of Trade. Example: British Malaya had sold 120,000 tons of rubber to Communist China and 40,400 tons to Russia in the first nine months of the Korean war. Tory M.P.s joined the clamor by asking if the U.S. was pressing Britain for a "tightening-up" of the trade with the enemy.

Shinwell, in the past a vociferous critic of the U.S., suddenly appeared as a champion of U.S.-British friendship. Said he: "I do not think these questions are calculated to maintain the good relations between the U.S. and this country." The opposition shouted: "Resign! Resign!" Winston Churchill scornfully rasped: "You do not know anything about it at all." Shinwell snapped back: "I know more about it than you do."

Next day. pale, tight-lipped Prime Minister Clement Attlee said: "There has been a prohibition of all major strategic materials." British shipments to Red China, he insisted, had not included "warships, aircraft or anything of that sort . . ." They did include "bicycles, perambulators ... wire mattresses, nails, tacks, rivets, manhole covers . . ." But he admitted there was no absolute embargo on rubber exports, only a restriction which held shipments to 1948-49 level. And that restriction went into force only 13 days before Chinese troops poured into battle against the gallant Gloucesters.

Britain's effort to do business with Mao Tse-tung & Co. suffered a rebuff. British authorities in Hong Kong had seized an oil tanker whose ownership was in dispute between Red China and the Nationalists. In retaliation, Peking confiscated the property of the British Shell Company of China (which has installations in Shanghai, Canton, Tientsin, Amoy & Hankow). In London, a Tory bigwig huffed: "Palmerston would have sent a gunboat at once." But a Labor policymaker tut-tutted: "We must not be the ones to set the east aflame--or to turn that heat against the west. Patience, unending patience . . ."

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