Diagnosing the Dragon

FOREIGN RELATIONS

They work around the globe, and of ten around the clock. Their raw materials are propaganda sheets and travelers' recollections, railroad timetables, the fragmentary increments of satellite-borne cameras. Their subject is infinitely elusive, yet hardly esoteric. It is Red China. Thanks to its China watchers, and the relatively new art of stethoscoping the Red Dragon, the U.S. has a clear lead over other nations in piercing the hermetic barriers that seal the Chi nese mainland from the outside world.

The State Department and the CIA are only two of six federal agencies that employ China watchers; the White House even has a watcher, Georgia-born Alfred Jenkins, to watch the watchers and digest their draconology for the President. There is even a role for the old-fashioned spy--though 90% of the outside world's information about

China comes not from the undercover agent or the overflying U-2 but from an intense reading of what China says about itself.

The Picture Puzzle. Edward Rice, U.S. consul general in Hong Kong, compares the job to filling in "a picture puzzle from which a good many pieces are missing." His staff of 60 pores over everything from the speeches of high party leaders to reports of steel shipments and Peking opera programs. The typical senior officer, who must spend four to eight hours a day reading through his In box, starts his morning with the night's output of the New China News Agency, 20,000 to 30,000 words containing the previous day's government announcements, speeches and accounts of ceremonies. Then he moves on to the Peking People's Daily, the theoretical journal Red Flag, and the Liberation Army Daily.

Before the day is over, he most likely has digested transcripts of radio broadcasts monitored by the CIA and some of the dozens of technical and specialized publications that Peking puts out. Provincial newspapers, which have to be smuggled out, are prized for what they reveal about the state of the countryside.

"It's not good enough just to read the stuff, of course," says one expert. "You've got to know how to read it, and you have to read it all, day after day. You can't let yourself get bored, and you have to keep the memory drum whirling all the time. When you see something a hundred times over in the same phrase or the same adjective, and they change it, you take note. One variation, or even two, might not mean a thing. So you hold it in your mind and keep reading. If the change is repeated, you know you've got something."

Calling a Bluff. From evidence of excessive wear on the ball bearings of Chinese trains coming into Hong Kong, combined with several other signs of unusual activity, U.S. watchers in 1962 were able to detect large-scale troop movements, reflecting Peking's fears of a Nationalist invasion. The U.S., through its ambassador in Warsaw, was able to assure the Communists that it would not support any such move by Taiwan, thus forestalled a potentially explosive confrontation.

When China attacked India the same year, Washington-based Draconologists Allen Whiting (now deputy consul general in Hong Kong) and Paul Kreisberg were able to predict that the advance would stop short of a full-scale invasion. Tension rose in the State Department as the Indians suffered defeat after defeat, but the Chinese eventually halted almost precisely where the U.S. experts said they would. In 1965, in the midst of the Indian-Pakistani war over Kashmir, China threatened intervention against India. Whiting calmly pronounced the threat nothing more than a bluff--and so it proved to be.

Poster Scribblings. In recent months, draconology has gained a new dimension with the rise of the Red Guards. In Hong Kong and Tokyo, U.S. China watchers have taken to combing the Japanese newspapers, which have nine correspondents in Peking, for rundowns on the latest wall-poster scribblings. Though the vast Japanese intelligence network in China was totally obliterated in 1945, Tokyo has skillfully exploited its growing trade ($638 million in 1966) and other contacts with China to build a surveillance operation that is second only to that of the U.S.

None of the U.S. draconologists has been to the mainland since the Communist conquest in 1949 (though most speak the language, and many were born there, the sons of missionaries). Yet their information about the country is often as good as, or even a little better, than any that Peking's leaders have themselves, thanks to China's primitive statistical system and the tendency of local commissars to exaggerate production figures for their superiors.

In Washington, the China watchers, basking in a new-found esteem, are also the acknowledged experts on Chinese restaurants (their honorable selections: the Yenching Palace and the Peking). They identify themselves with greetings in Mandarin: to "How are you?" one might answer Ma Ma Hu Hu, which means "horse, horse, tiger, tiger," or "pretty lousy." Though they can rarely come up with the tidy conclusions of their Kremlinological colleagues, they doubtless deserve the white button one of them was wearing last week: its four Chinese characters said simply: "We try harder."

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