The China Vote: Choler on the Right

THE U.N. vote admitting mainland China and expelling Taiwan stung many Americans, but none more than Richard Nixon's vocal constituents of the Republican right. Uneasy about the President's policy since his wooing of Peking began, they exploded in choleric anger as the U.N. resolution confirmed their worst fears. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona urged the U.S. to withdraw from the U.N. and expel its headquarters to "some place like Moscow or Peking." California's Governor Ronald Reagan cabled Chiang Kai-shek that the U.N. has been "reduced to the level of a kangaroo court." Said Thomas S. Winter, editor of the rightist magazine Human Events, "Conservatives are furious. I think the Administration hoped it could save Taiwan, but if it was a choice of getting Red China in or sacrificing Taiwan, then I think they wanted Red China."

Hot Pants. The sense of outrage seemed a little tired, a little artificial, but it was not confined to the right. Capitol Hill was boiling all week. The normally mild-mannered Senate minority leader, Pennsylvania Republican Hugh Scott, spoke scornfully of "hotpants principalities" that had opposed the U.S. He and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana concurred in recommending that the U.S. share of U.N. support be cut back from its present 31.52% of the U.N. budget. The Senate later passed a resolution, sponsored by New York Republican-Conservative James Buckley, urging the President to negotiate a reduction of that share to 25%.

The Senator's brother, William F. Buckley Jr., mandarin editor of the National Review, delivered an extraordinary speech in Manhattan that combined eloquence and caustic wit with touches of Chinese opera. Peking, he asserted, "struggles in its endless ordeal against human nature," and executed between 10 million and 50 million people "in the course of giving flesh to the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung." Taiwan, on the other hand, "is the West Berlin of China." The Chinese on Taiwan have a special mission, said Buckley, because "in the years and decades to come, their separated brothers on the mainland will look all the more wistfully to Taiwan in consideration of what it has done for its people, and permitted to its people." The West, he added, "did not have the guts" to overthrow Mao's regime, and the dream that Chiang Kai-shek would reconquer the mainland was, alas, "a little counter-revolutionary vision." Turning to the U.N., he described Albania, sponsor of the successful anti-Taiwan resolution, as "a little, reclusive country composed primarily of rocks and serfs, with here and there a slave master, whose principal export is Maoism." Buckley's recommendation: the President should instruct the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. to abstain forthwith from voting in the General Assembly.

After testing the winds for 21 days, Nixon moved to protect his right flank. The President huddled with Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, then sent him forth to denounce to newsmen "the shocking demonstration and undisguised glee among some of the delegates following the vote" in the U.N. Ziegler warned that the anti-U.S. manifestation "could have a detrimental effect on American public support for the U.N." The demonstration that the President referred to was epitomized by a Tanzanian delegate dancing an impromptu jig after the vote, an image that will rankle in U.N. annals with Nikita Khrushchev's celebrated shoe banging on his delegation's desk in 1960.

The President had a point. It was a sophomoric and unseemly display. Chiang's China was, after all, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council by virtue of its role as a victorious member of the World War II Allies. With a population of 14 million, it has more people than three-fourths of the countries in the U.N.

The Price of Propping. But the "glee factor" was essentially a minor irritation. The fact remained that the setback at the U.N. was largely the U.S.'s own doing. Washington had clung through successive postwar Administrations to an unrealistic policy, and clung to it so insistently and so long that it was too late to engineer a two-China compromise that might have kept both Peking and Taipei in the U.N. More important, Nixon had made too much of his forthcoming visit to Peking for most delegates to take the arm-twisting by the American representatives seriously. The fact that Presidential Aide Henry Kissinger was supping with the Chinese Communists in Peking as the debate took place in New York did not enhance the image of Washington's unswerving devotion to Taipei. Against that background, the President's threat, through Ziegler, that U.S. financial support for the U.N. might be cut back seemed petty.

The vote did not mean, as West Germany's Neue Ruhr Zeitung suggested, that the U.S. "has stepped back to second rank on the international scene." Nor, in fact, is the U.S. defeat at the U.N. likely to do much permanent damage to Nixon's political fortunes at home. Probably to most Americans, the President's China policy is a popular recognition that the situation had long since become absurd; the expulsion of Taiwan is the price of propping it up artificially for too long. If that kind of realism is widespread, then anger should soon fade and the U.S. can get on with its diplomatic business in a drastically changing world.

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