Frustrated & Alone

If it is possible for a nation of 700 million people to have a nervous breakdown, Communist China is perilously close to the breaking point. Its craving for victory in Viet Nam, where it has staked its revolutionary reputation on the success of "the war of national liberation," has been frustrated by the stepped-up American commitment. Traditionally paranoid about foreigners, China has become more isolated and sealed off than any other Communist state (including Stalin's Russia). Led by aging, ethnocentric men with little personal knowledge of the world beyond, it feels encircled and threatened on every side. When it directs its voice to the outside world, its normally strident tones now verge on hysteria.

This is the nation whose intentions are a main topic of speculation in the West, and were frequently invoked at last week's hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (see THE NATION). About to set off its third nuclear blast, supported by a huge army that could bring full-scale war to Southeast Asia if it marched south, Red China is certainly what Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recently called it: "a threat of greatest concern to the U.S." The threat is the more bother some because China's very frustrations make its reactions so odd and unpredictable. But, while the West worries about China, China is building for itself a worrisome string of problems that looks to be nearly as long as the Great Wall.

Pimps & Promises. Its relations with Russia are steadily growing worse. It now refers to the Russians as "pimps of the imperialists," and last week it all but ignored the 16th anniversary of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship--while the Russians marked the occasion by carrying a long Pravda attack on the Chinese. Peking is bristling about Leonid Brezhnev's recent visit to Ulan Bator and the resulting U.S.S.R.-Outer Mongolian treaty, which contains military clauses that China believes are clearly aimed against it. There is mounting evidence that the Soviets will try to practically excommunicate Red China from the world Communist movement at the 23rd Party Congress in Moscow next month, thus isolating the Chinese even further.

Because Peking is beginning to look like a loser, its position is markedly deteriorating just about everywhere. Cuba has slammed the door in its face be cause it welshed on a rice deal (TIME, Feb. 18). Last week in Indonesia, once the brightest Red Chinese hope in Southeast Asia, the deputy chairman of the Communist Party went on trial for leading a revolt against the government, and the now-dominant army leaders huffily withdrew their ambassador to Peking for "consultation." Peking has fallen into disrepute in most of Africa, where it has failed to produce on its big promises of aid. Even hard-lining, Peking-backing Albania (which Chou En-lai called "the flower garden of socialism") is showing symptoms of a turn politically and economically away from China and toward its Eastern European neighbors.

To the Boondocks. As China's reputation in the outer world slides, its internal policies are hardening and its struggles to erase "revisionist" tendencies increasing. The army has been singled out for stepped-up ideological indoctrination, but the campaign is much broader. Mao Tse-tung recently banished 160,000 artists and writers to the boondocks "to remold their thinking." Vicious attacks have just been launched on two top Chinese Communist writers, Playwright Tien Han, 66, who wrote the Red Chinese national anthem, and Historian Wu Han, 56, the former vice mayor of Peking. Tien was accused of writing a play that "preaches an idealistic historical viewpoint," and Wu has confessed to "using idealism and metaphysics" to attack bureaucracy.

China's economy is not doing too badly--it has about recovered to the 1957-58 level after the disastrous "Great Leap Forward"--and its nuclear capability is obviously growing. Experts believe that the Chinese may soon set off a hydrogen explosion in addition to the expected atomic explosion, and that China will try to bypass other delivery means and develop a missile to carry its bombs. But the Chinese are probably testing their bombs as quickly as they make them, will have no atomic arsenal for some time--perhaps not until 1970.

In the interim, Mao & Co. have plenty to worry about. Despite stringent nationwide efforts at birth control, China's population continues to escalate with lemming-like abandon. Self-sufficiency in food production remains a hit-or-miss proposition. China's nascent industry is already cranking overtime to produce war supplies for Viet Nam and small arms for tinhorn revolutionaries from Africa to Latin America. Less rabid Reds in Europe and Asia threaten China with ideological isolation--to Mao, the unkindest cut of all. It is not at all strange, in these circumstances, that a note of persecution has crept into China's propaganda. As Peking's Red Flag saw it, everyone is out to get China--particularly "the Soviet-Japanese-American-Indian alliance."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.