So Near & So Far

For more than a decade, the morale of Formosa's 2,000,000 Chinese Nationalists has been nourished by the hope that one day they will return to their homeland only 90 miles away across the Formosa Strait. To achieve this goal, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek has kept his powerful army and air force in tiptop shape, and devoured intelligence reports from the mainland. Last week, in a speech celebrating Youth Day, in bustling, prosperous Taipei, he said: "The situation both at home and abroad is such that we can no longer passively wait and see if something will happen. The holy expedition from Formosa to save our people and punish the traitors may come at any time."

Behind Chiang's expectant, fighting mood is the belief that Red China is seething with revolt and is, in fact, "on the verge of collapse." He is certain that morale on the mainland is at its lowest ebb, cites information relayed by a recently defected Communist MIG pilot and letters received on Formosa from peasants in the coastal province of Fukien who pleaded for liberation. Moreover, argues Chiang, the Sino-Soviet split has be come such a bitter personal rivalry between Mao Tse-tung and Khrushchev that the Soviet leader probably would not run the risk of touching off a general nuclear war by coming to Mao's aid. Concludes Chiang: this is the "chance of a lifetime" that may never come again.

Under current treaty arrangements, the U.S. has virtual veto power over the use of force by the Nationalists. But in Washington there was scant support for an invasion. Although State Department experts agreed that severe economic troubles have greatly weakened Mao's regime, most were skeptical that any commando raids by Chiang would touch off a general revolt. The U.S. also could not believe that Khrushchev would sit back and watch the Chinese Communists fall, whatever his disagreements with his rival in Peking. Still, the question of support for the Nationalists was not easily dismissed.

Asked point-blank at his press conference whether the U.S. merely supports the Nationalists or would help them recapture the Communist mainland. President Kennedy was at first reduced to an ungrammatical stutter: "Well, I'm not--I think that I'm not aware of the statement that's been made. We have not been consulted about--as I stated--in the way that the agreements would call for and that, therefore, I would think that there'd be no use in explorations of potential situations."

But the President then added: "Quite obviously, it is the desire of the people of Formosa that they be returned, but we have to consider all the responsibilities and problems which all of us bear."

On the Communist mainland, there was ample indication of the economic crisis cited by Chiang Kaishek, but almost no information about what the Reds were doing about it. China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress, met last week in Peking's crimson-carpeted, air-conditioned Great Hall for the first time in two years, but unlike previous sessions, no foreign diplomats or correspondents were permitted inside.

The mystery was heightened by the fact that the meeting, attended by 1,027 Deputies, was twice delayed: once soon after Premier Chou En-lai stomped out of the 22nd Communist Party Congress in Moscow last fall and again a fortnight ago on the eve of the current session. Best explanation for the secrecy: Peking has no desire to reveal to the world how acute its economic crisis is, nor does it want outsiders to realize the depths of its internecine struggle with Moscow.

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