Underlining China

When the Fulbright hearings on Red China ended last week, they had produced little to cause the Administration to change its basic policy. Since Americans are more aware of and more interested in Europe, the sessions did perform a useful function in getting China into the headlines. Chairman J. William Fulbright took what comfort he could from that fact.

What else did the hearings accomplish? Because Hubert Humphrey three weeks ago quoted the testimony of Columbia University Sinologist A. Doak Barnett that the U.S. was interested in "containment without isolation" of Red China, many people assumed that the Administration had made a switch in policy. It was hardly that, because China has not been isolated, and certainly not by the U.S. In testimony last week, Professor George Taylor, a University of Washington Asia expert, pointed out that, far from being isolated, Peking has diplomatic relations with 48 nations. "It is Peking that is trying to isolate us," said Taylor. "She is very much in the international community where it counts, in fact too much."

No Escape. The main point made by the opponents of the Administration during the hearings was that the U.S. is ignoring the Chinese, driving them into implacable enmity and toward inevitably more aggressive policies. Only one of them, however, felt that the U.S. should not be in Viet Nam at all and should let the Chinese reign in their own "sphere of influence." He was the University of Chicago's Hans Morgenthau, a long-term critic of U.S. Viet Nam policies, who declared last week that all of Asia is China's proper sphere and disdained military containment of the Chinese as a step that will lead "sooner or later to war."

Far from being wrong, testified Walter H. Judd, former Minnesota Republican Congressman, U.S. China policy since 1950 has been "hardheaded and realistic." Judd, a former medical missionary in China, insisted that a softer attitude would not only betray the Nationalist Chinese but destroy the faith of U.S. allies elsewhere. He caustically recalled that efforts to placate Japan in the late '30s "did not lead to peace, they led to Pearl Harbor," and snapped that many of the critics who preceded him were advocating that "same general approach to aggression in Asia today."

Though he is against isolating Red China and in favor of universal membership in the U.N., the University of California's Robert A. Scalapino also rejected the arguments that the U.S. should not be fighting in Viet Nam. "By virtue of its strength and resources," he said, "the U.S. cannot escape from a powerful element of unilateralism, and I see no point in naively or romantically railing against this fact." Nonetheless, he urged the Administration to allow itself "a broad range of policy alternatives" in Southeast Asia. "If we continue to live by the all-or-nothing philosophy--either all in or all out--we cannot possibly sustain our values or our interests."

Blunt Reply. Even as the Sinologists finished their testimony, Red China's leaders were making the whole subject seem slightly academic. Peking's official press voice, Jenmin Jih Pao, bluntly discarded a recent suggestion by President Johnson that the two countries exchange visits of newsmen, scientists and scholars. Under the headline OLD TUNE, NEW CONSPIRACY, the newspaper called the idea "a sheer daydream." It accused the U.S. of "feigning eagerness to improve Sino-U.S. relations to detract public attention from its deployments for aggression against China."

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