The Frigid Friends

The biggest news out of Red China came from the railway stations. In Peking, Canton, Shanghai and Shenyang, northbound trains were suddenly clogged with unaccustomed passengers. For a fortnight, trainload after trainload of Soviet technicians and their families have been leaving for home with all their belongings --but without any farewell fanfare in the press or happy fraternal rallies at the station. Yugoslav Correspondent Branko Bogunovic, who sent out the story of the exodus, wrote: "The official explanation is that the Soviet experts are leaving after the expiration of their contracts. But other versions are circulating in Peking which throw a different light on the matter."

No one yet suggested that the departure of a few hundred technicians heralded a break between Russia and China comparable to that between Stalin's Russia and Tito's Yugoslavia in 1948. But last week, months after Nikita Khrushchev's first open split with Red China's leaders over basic Communist dogma, the battle was getting hotter--and the relationship colder--than ever. Moscow's Izvestia, scarcely veiling its Red Chinese target, railed against "leftists" and "phrase-mongers" who "assemble and sometimes distort quotations to repeat over and over again that imperialist wars are inevitable," adding that only "fools and dogmatists" could say (as the Chinese have been saying) that Russian advocacy of peaceful coexistence was a sellout to capitalism. Peking's Vice Premier Li Fu-chun promptly retorted that China's Communists "are the real Marxist-Leninists." lashed out at "modern revisionists and those who echo them."

The argument is technically over philosophic distinctions, but in fact is a testing of strength between leaders, neither willing to concede superiority to the other. The signs of mutual displeasure are sometimes small but they are unmistakable. Peking refused to send any delegates to a recent Moscow conference of Orientalists.

Three Russian-language publications on China, including one called Friendship, have suddenly stopped publishing, and Red Chinese bylines have virtually disappeared from Moscow's press.

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