Overflowing Revolution

When the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution erupted inside China last year, neighboring nations were not exactly displeased. They hoped that Peking would be so busy coping at home that it would have little time or energy for troublemaking abroad. For a while that proved to be the case--but no longer. Last week Peking was quarreling with no fewer than eight of its neighbors, many of whom have been shaken in recent weeks by Maoist riots, threats and demonstrations--plus retaliatory action by their own citizens. Whether Peking consciously intended it or not, the contagion of the Cultural Revolution has lately spilled over China's borders, infecting overseas Chinese and inflaming their non-Chinese neighbors.

Russia remains, of course, the chief target on China's periphery. The Chinese daily heap abuse on the Russians, and Moscow reported last week that hundreds of chanting Chinese demonstrators had tried to cross the Russian border at Khabarovsk in Siberia ear lier this year, calling on the Soviet guards to disobey their officers as men who had "sold themselves to American imperialism."

But the long list of smaller nations that Peking is now quarreling with suggests a change of direction in Chinese policy, which since the Bandung conference in 1955 has been committed to "peaceful coexistence" with China's neighbors (the 1962 attack on India being a notable exception). Though most Sinologists doubt that the Chinese about-face was intentional in every case, Peking went along with the trouble once it was started, usually by local Communists, and in most cases even egged it on. Items:

>Hong Kong was assailed last week by Peking's promises of more trouble to come: "Let the British imperialists tremble before the Chinese people." The British made more raids on leftist unions and arrested more than 600 people in an effort to prevent a recurrence of the Maoist rioting that has shaken the crown colony off and on for more than two months. Police, aided by British troops, found caches of arms, Molotov cocktails and bottles of acid.

> Burma tried to cope with as many as 500,000 chanting and marching anti-Chinese demonstrators a day. The brawling began after General Ne Win closed two Chinese schools for exces sive Mao-think in the curriculum and Chinese students hit the streets in protest, setting off the anti-Chinese explosion. Peking accused Rangoon of instigating an "outrage of white terror" against the Chinese, for the first time came out in full, open support of the more militant of Burma's two Com munist parties.

> Japan, which has itself been free of Communist disturbances, last week watched the spectacle of its Communist Party's cutting all ties with Communist China and recalling its two representatives from Peking after xenophobic Red Guards had attacked them.

> Outer Mongolia has practically broken off relations with China in the wake of Red Guard attacks on the Mon golian embassy in Peking protesting a mutual-aid pact signed in January by Ulan Bator and Moscow.

>Nepal was the scene of wild rioting after Nepalese Communist students waved pictures of Mao at an exhibit of Chinese photographs in Katmandu earlier this month. Passers-by wanted to know why the students did not also have pictures of King Mahendra, and before long fists were flying. Peking now claims that Nepal is conspiring with "imperialists."

> India is embroiled in another dispute with China, which began when two Indian diplomats were abused and expelled as spies for trying to photograph a roadside shrine in China. In angry response, Indian mobs attacked the Chinese embassy in New Delhi and beat up several Communist diplomats. Peking has since announced that "a Red area of rural revolutionary armed struggle has been established in India"--referring to a rebellious, backward strip of India along the Sikkim border.

For the first time, Peking has publicly praised the Philippine Communist Party and lauded the rebellious Huks as valiant and correct revolutionary fighters. In Indonesia, China is trying to reorganize the decimated Indonesian Communist Party (P.K.I.), utilizing what is left of the Chinese population after last year's massacre. It has long aided the guerrillas in Thailand's northeast, recently drew neutralist Prince Sihanouk's ire for attempting the same thing in Cambodia. And the Chinese have continued, of course, to supply the Pathet Lao guerrillas of Laos with arms, aid and propaganda backing.

There were even signs that China may be having trouble with its North

Vietnamese ally. Coinciding with the arrival in Peking of an economic delegation from Hanoi, the official newspaper Jenmin Jih Pao called on North Viet Nam to choose between Russia and China. "It is imperative to oppose the counter-revolutionary line of the Soviet revisionist ruling group," said the paper. "There is no middle road in the struggle between the two lines."

While it is causing, or at least encouraging, mischief on its borders, China continues to have trouble con trolling the course of the Cultural Revolution at home. Scarcely three weeks ago the party paper, Red Flag, proclaimed that President Liu Shao-chi, symbol of all the revolution is attacking, had at last been pulled down. But last week, amid reports of continuing clashes between groups of Red Guards vying for power, Radio Peking broadcast an appeal to the Peoples' Liberation Army to stand ready "to smash the counterattack" of the President and his followers. It is possible that Mao welcomes the skirmishes abroad to lessen his followers' frustrations at failing to win a decisive battle in the Cultural Revolution.

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