Putting on the Dog

The menu was Cantonese at its most exquisite: four steaming courses of spiced, minced, roasted and boiled puppy. The foreign journalists treated to this hirsute hospitality in Peking last week were well aware that dog meat is a delicacy in China; what seemed curious was that Red China's chilly over lords had suddenly grown so expansive.

There was Liao Cheng-chih, spokesman for the Red Chinese "United Front," jovially granting private interviews to Japanese newsmen; raucous Foreign Minister Chen Yi, the scourge of Western chancelleries, suddenly wreathed in benevolent smiles at a mass press conference; there was the forbidding Gate of Heavenly Peace transformed before their eyes into a carnival of fluttering doves and soaring balloons.

Failures & Debacles. Nominally, the occasion was the 16th anniversary of Red China's "independence," but Peking's play for world headlines over the past three weeks had a subtler purpose than mere celebration. Peking, which early this year seemed to have every thing going its own way, last week stood at something of a nadir in the eyes of the world. A series of ham-handed debacles in Peking's militant foreign policy has set Chinese propagandists to a frantic bit of image polishing abroad.

Latest of the troubles to tarnish Red China's reputation: the abortive coup in Indonesia. Whether or not the men of Peking called the shots, many African and Asian leaders were all too willing to believe that they had. The Indonesian flare-up came hard on the heels of Red China's backdown over the Sikkim "ultimatum" to India (TIME, Sept. 24). By failing to follow through on their martial threats, Peking's leaders lost credibility, just as they have over Viet Nam. After all, fully 14 months have passed since Peking first promised that she would "not stand idly by" while U.S. warplanes struck at North Viet Nam.

Gaffes & Circuses. And there was a worse side. Failures to fulfill martial boasts can be forgiven by peace-loving "nonaligned" nations; welshing on foreign-aid promises can not. During 1964, Red China promised nearly $250 million to nine African states, but little of that money has yet come through. Guinea has seen only a quarter of the $20 million promised since 1960; Mali has got only half of a similar amount. Recently, when Chen Yi swung through Africa trying to line up anti-American support for next month's Afro-Asian conference, he was coolly received at nearly every stop. Money was not the only reason: African leaders were shocked last June at the unseemly swiftness with which Red China recognized the Boumedienne regime in Algiers. The fact that Boumedienne later proved more pro-Western than his predecessor didn't help Peking's reputation for savvy. That gaffe coincided neatly with another made by Premier Chou Enlai, who just before the Algiers coup pronounced Africa "ripe for revolution," thus throwing a scare into African leaders who consider themselves revolutionary enough. As a result, Chen has had to admit publicly that Peking's former African allies could no longer be counted on to deliver the hard, anti-U.S. line expected of them.

The Chinese reputation for subtlety in foreign affairs has also suffered from the antics of an outfit known in Europe as "Lee Wang's Circus," a cadre of 42 Red Chinese spoilers--instant experts on every subject from genetics to nuclear fission. Their mission: to disrupt international conferences, grab the microphone and propagandize loudly against the revisionists, colonialists and imperialists. Fortnight ago, the circus turned up in Budapest for a 54-nation symposium of the left-leaning World Federation of Scientific Workers, managed to reduce the session to a howling cacophony. "The only way to avoid them," said one bitter Hungarian, "is to get your conference sponsored by UNESCO. Then the Chinese automatically boycott it."

Despite these setbacks in prestige, Peking has a familiar way out. The Red Chinese have taken care not to extend any true commitment of men, money or moral support that cannot be hedged at a later date. That, after all, is Peking's eminently scrutable style. "When it comes to putting blue power chips on the table," says a Western China-watcher, "they just don't have very many. They have to run around stirring up trouble to distract attention."

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