COMMUNIST RIVALS

Red China's Outward Leap

ALONG the main street of Rabat, the newsstands these days are plastered with copies of Peking's monthly picture magazine China in Spanish, Arabic and French--well printed but unrelievedly self-glorifying. In government offices in Rabat, Red Chinese experts discuss expansion of Morocco's tea production. In West Africa's Guinea, technicians from Peking are helping improve the rice yield. Cuban generals in Havana talk weapons and tactics with Chinese army officers. In backward Yemen, 2,000 Red coolies labor in the sweltering heat on a new highway for the Imam. No longer is Russia the sole voice or representation of Communism to the outside world. China's Mao Tse-tung is intent on showing the undecided, the needy and the restless that Russia is not the only Communist power that can offer aid and comfort.

The Challenge. Today Red China has diplomatic relations with 26 non-Communist countries, trade and economic ties with 45 more. Although its own economy barely makes ends meet, Peking even has a foreign-aid program of sorts. The planes into Red China are packed with foreign delegations from every corner of the globe: Cambodian educators to tour the schools, Japanese trade unionists to inspect the factories, South American left-wing journalists and youth leaders to see the banners and hear the speeches.

The junkets are free, the rice wine good, and the propaganda heady for the delegates of emerging young nations whose economic problems and recent revolutionary triumphs seem so similar to those Red China itself has experienced. Yellow skin is also an advantage in places where the classic colonialist enemy bears a clear Caucasian label. Feted in Peking two months ago, Guinea's Sekou Toure seemed more cordially at ease than he was on his later visit to Moscow.

When Red Chinese Ambassador to Cairo Chen Chia-kang arrived in Leopoldville last July to visit the new Patrice Lumumba government, he found an eager ally in Communist-leaning Vice Premier Antoine Gizenga. While Lumumba appealed to the Russians for planes and technicians, Gizenga asked the ambassador for arms and volunteers from China. Chen cautiously offered cash and advice instead, as his Peking colleagues have done in Guinea, Ghana and Morocco. For, though the Red Chinese might be prepared to stir up real strife later, their present limited goal in Africa seems to be quiet infiltration behind the scenes, to gain allies for Peking's struggle for world recognition.

Cables to Peking. In Latin America, where Red Chinese efforts have become spectacular in the past year, these aims are mixed with equal portions of outright subversion. Their base is Fidel Castro's Cuba, where Peking agents now operate a newspaper, show Chinese Communist movies at the biggest theaters, and harangue the 30,000 Havana Chinese (overwhelmingly sympathetic to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists) at streetcorner rallies. In Havana sits Kung Mai, Peking's manager in Latin America for Hsinhua, the New China News Agency. Kung Mai has constructed an intricate web of correspondents and "cultural representatives" through half a dozen major countries in South America. Kung's local correspondent in Buenos Aires now cables more wordage out of Argentina than any other foreign correspondent; through the Cuban embassy in Argentina, Kung's men dispense propaganda leaflets and arrange tours to China (120 visitors in 1958, 250 last year) for Argentine lawyers, doctors, newspapermen and artists. In Uruguay it all began in December 1958 with a Chinese circus. Then came the Sino-Uruguayan Cultural Association and the regular exchange of "cultural groups." Now the government is under heavy pressure from liberal groups to vote for China's admission to the United Nations.

A Song of Coffee. In Bolivia, the Czech embassy distributes Peking's propaganda and possibly cash, and the head of the Bolivia's Miners Union is now en route home from China, sending back to local papers a series of flowery articles of praise. Brazil is a major target, and hundreds of prominent Brazilian leftists have gotten the red-carpet treatment in Peking. One of them is Francisco Juliao, powerful leader of the Red-tinged Peasant Leagues, which battens on the misery of the rural millions in poverty-stricken northeast Brazil. After a Juliao speech, the peasant poor now mutter grimly about land reform and sing, "What harm is there in a ship/Carrying our common Brazilian coffee/And selling it to a China/Where there is no Chiang Kai-shek?"

In most key areas of the world, China's efforts are still overshadowed by Russia, but Peking is clearly struggling for a separate identity. In the Middle East, where Mao's recognition of the Algerian rebel government helped to woo Arab sentiment, Hsinhua has displaced Tass as the chief fountainhead of Communist "news." This year for the first time Red China set up its own big separate industrial exhibition in Baghdad. Many Iraqi nationalists say that it was Peking's Communist agents, not Russia's, who whipped up the local Reds to bloody excesses in the 1958 uprisings. Egypt's Nasser clearly prefers Russians just now, but the Chinese still maintain a large embassy in Cairo and 30 "newspapermen." In 1958 the crown prince of little Yemen came back from the standard junket to Peking with a $16 million long-term loan for construction of a textile plant and a modern highway over the mountains to the desert interior. In the city of Taiz, Red China is building a three-story legation, which will be the biggest diplomatic structure in town.

Red China's ideological dispute with Russia has caused inevitable strains within Communist parties of many a land. From India, where Mao's border forays have produced a chill in Sino-Indian relations, rumors filter out that the local Red leaders are split wide open, most of them reportedly favoring Moscow. Though North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh owes the Chinese a debt for their help in the war that won him his country, he threw his support to Khrushchev and "peaceful coexistence" at the recent Bucharest conference.

Anti-Chinese feeling in Indonesia has frustrated the Chinese, aided the Russians. Under Peking's frightening shadow, Thailand's sturdily pro-Western Marshal Sarit has banned all trade with Red China, but last week accepted an offer of technical aid from Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Nikolaev. But in Burma and Cambodia, both neutralist and nervous, proximity favors Mao's Chinese. Both have taken aid from Peking, are heavily infiltrated with Peking's busy agents. North Korea has used the rivalry to pit one Communist giant against the other, eliciting bids from both.

Just now, the Russians can always outbid the Chinese. They have the power and the wealth. But the Chinese like to talk in centuries where others think in decades.

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