The Facts of Life

For weeks. Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders have been screaming at each other in the most unabashedly public row between Communist states since Tito's Yugoslavia broke away in 1948. Last week the dispute was officially closed when the two governments and ten other Communist states signed an agreement in Bucharest upholding Nikita Khrushchev's doctrine of peaceful coexistence. Proclaimed Peking's Madame Sun Yatsen: "It is simply a lie" that Red China--as so many Chinese orators and editors had been saying at the top of their voices--opposed coexistence with ''the imperialists."

Beyond the polemics, the practical facts of life dictate that Peking and Moscow will stick together, and that Moscow will generally get its way. The Chinese are dependent on the Soviet Union for their atomic protection, and it is Russia that must provide the heavy machinery without which China cannot pretend to be a great power. Since 1950, the Russians have delivered to China an estimated $4 billion in credits, including 291 industrial projects. They have given China a small experimental nuclear reactor and a cyclotron--but no atomic weapons. The Russians provide all China's jet aircraft, much of its heavy military gear. Nearly all of China's aviation fuel is still brought by rail from the Soviet Union, creating a strategic dependence on Moscow for a prime material of war.

The proud Chinese are making prodigious efforts to repay the Russians for their aid and to free themselves of their need for it (officials "hope" they will be self-sufficient in machine-tool production by 1970). They keep their Soviet technicians apart in a suburb of Peking and forbid their own students in Russia to marry or keep company with Russians. They make the most of their sheer numbers. In the China Quarterly, Professor Robert C. North of Stanford University tells of talking to one gloomy Soviet engineer who had worked out the possibilities as neatly as a chess problem: "Suppose nuclear war breaks out between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Clearly, we destroy each other, and China wins. Suppose, on the other hand, that a war breaks out between the U.S. and China--what happens then? You Americans drop nuclear bombs on China and kill a few million people, and the other 500 million or more dig in. Mao Tse-tung calls on us for support, and so again the Russians and the Americans destroy each other--and China still wins."

The Chinese, irritated by Khrushchev's attempts to deal with capitalist leaders in the West without consulting them, can press the Soviet leadership to act and talk more militantly. Chinese power is growing, and the differences grow as the junior partner grows. But two facts are clear: 1) China is still junior; 2) it is still a partnership.

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