A Model Red

Any eager young Chinese Communist diplomat would have jumped at the assignment, and crewcut, bespectacled Tung Chi-ping was no exception. The place was Bujumbura, the cool, colorful capital of tiny Burundi (pop. 2,750,000) in the heart of subversion-ripe Central Africa. The embassy itself was located in an entire wing of the Paguidas-Haidemenos Hotel ("hot and cold running water"), and the job was nominally "assistant cultural attache." The duties were far more interesting than mere lecturing on Sung poetry and Ming pottery. Every night, for instance, exciting home movies were shown to select audiences brought in from the Congo and other African countries. The noise on the sound track was largely machine-gun fire and bomb explosions, but that was to be expected, since Peking's men were giving the Africans a short course in revolution.

Willing Waste. What was not to be expected was Tung's real motive for taking the assignment. Last May 26, after only a day on the job, he walked out of the Paguidas-Haidemenos, hailed a taxi, and told the driver: "Quick, the U.S. embassy." Minutes later he became a defector--the second Chinese Communist official ever to seek sanctuary with Americans.

Last week Tung turned up in New York on a Pan American flight from Rome. The State Department denied any role in his escape from Burundi, and Tung himself made it clear that his defection had been his own idea. "I saw the hypocrisy of China long before I decided to defect," he explained. What had disillusioned him was Mao's treatment of intellectuals, who had been asked to criticize the regime and were then denounced as traitors. Equally repellent was Red China's abortive "backyard furnace campaign" of 1958, in which the government cynically asked every neighborhood to smelt steel for the greater industrial glory of the country, then never used it. Said Tung: "I realized in 1958 that the Communists were willing to waste lives and energy for their own purposes."

Fitting Reward. But to escape from Red China Tung knew he would first have to convince his bosses of his complete dedication to the system. "I became very progressive," he says. And indeed, during four years at the Foreign Language Institute at Shanghai, where he excelled in French, Tung was a model Red. He was rewarded with the Bujumbura assignment.

Aside from his desire to live in the West, Tung brought with him 72 pages of notes on Chinese Communist intentions in Africa. "What they care about is the Congo," Tung told reporters. "Mao Tse-tung has said: 'When we can grab the Congo, then we can grab the whole of Africa.'" To find out just where Mao plans to close his fingers, the State Department last week invited Tung down to Washington for some serious talk.

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