The Quiet Invasion

Sharply aware of the open penetration of Soviet Communism into the hemisphere through Castro's Cuba, North and South Americans are now awakening to a more subtle infiltration from the Orient. Catching children's eyes in bookstalls across Latin America are engaging editions of Spanish-language stories about happiness in Red China. Grownups can read more sophisticated magazines and drop in at 16 Red China-run "binational centers" set up in nine South American nations. They can tune to the powerful beam of Radio Peking, which recently jumped its broadcasts to 31 1/2 hours a day in Spanish and Portuguese. Or they can simply turn to their daily papers, spotted with news from the New China News Agency, which often operates alongside Fidel Castro's mouthpiece Prensa Latina.

Look-Alikes. The clearest sign of growing Chinese influence appeared two months ago at the Red summit in Moscow, when a four-hour Chinese denunciation of Khrushchev's coexistence policies drew its strongest support from the delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. The basis for such influence is Red China's modulated but persistent argument that the increasingly industrialized Soviet Union bears little resemblance to underdeveloped, poverty-ridden Latin American nations. A much closer lookalike, Latin Americans are told persuasively, is Red China, land of the triumphant peasant revolutionary.

To put the point more emphatically, the Chinese Communists are paying for more and more trips to Red China by Latin American labor leaders, politicians and students. In 1958 the number of visitors was 165; in 1960 it was 470. As soon as the tourist arrives he is greeted by his personal companion, guide and persuader. He is comfortably established in Peking's Peace Hotel, filled with good food in one of the hotel's two restaurants (one European, one Chinese) and then taken to hear the joyful songs of peasants toiling in the communes, to watch workers boosting norms in factories and marvel at pedestrians doing pre-dawn setting-up exercises in the streets. He travels from city to city (each with its own special Peace Hotel) listening to his highly sympathetic, "open-minded" guide point out the similarities between China's agrarian peasant society and Latin America's.

Bonds of Pressure. The propaganda that the tourists absorb about "great leaps forward" is somewhat dissipated by what the visiting Latino can see. But there is no denying the peasantry, and the revolution, and at least a superficial resemblance to much of Latin America.

If just a little of the Red Chinese message sinks in, a small bond of sympathy is formed. And it is such subtle bonds, strengthened, restrengthened and converted into political pressure, that the Chinese Communists count on to bring them such trappings of respectability as admission to the United Nations.

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