"We Know the Americans"

IT'S the first team," said an impressed U.S. State Department official. It was indeed a strong group that Peking announced last week as its delegation to the United Nations. Lean in numbers, the ten-member delegation was impressively high in rank and long on diplomatic experience --convincing evidence that the Communists regard their newly won seat in the U.N. as a significant opportunity.

The people from the People's Republic are all dedicated revolutionaries, but they are also well-born intellectuals, educated elitists who have traveled widely and are no strangers to the purlieus of diplomacy. All speak English. The head of the delegation, tall, lean, youthful-looking Deputy Foreign Minister Chiao Kuan-hua, 57, can switch when necessary to French or Japanese or Russian or German, the last of which he acquired (along with a Ph.D. in philosophy) at Tuebingen University in the 1930s.

As the chief delegate only to the current U.N. General Assembly, Chiao will be the transient member of Peking's team; even before the assembly session ends next month, he may return to Peking, where, among other things, he has been handling the prickly talks on the Sino-Soviet border dispute. China's permanent U.N. representative will be courtly Ambassador Huang Hua, the only member of the delegation with prior professional service in North America; since April he has been China's ambassador to Canada, a post that he will resign when he takes up his duties in New York. In all, five of Peking's delegates have held posts outside China (in Moscow, London, Cairo, New Delhi and Ghana). Some are veterans of the swings that Chou frequently made through the Third World. The only woman delegate, Wang Hai-yung, 34, has never been outside the Middle Kingdom. But then, Miss Wang has special qualifications: she speaks English, she has been deputy chief of the Foreign Ministry's protocol department and she is reputed to be the niece of none other than Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

Career Diplomat Fu Hao is an expert in Asian affairs. An Chih-yuan was Peking's charge in Moscow when Sino-Soviet relations were descending to their invective-filled worst. Garrulous Tang Ming-chao got a degree from the University of California and edited a small pro-Communist daily in New York City before returning to China in 1949; he has been a greeter of foreign VIPs in Peking and a traveling agitator, plugging the Communist line at one "youth conference" or antiwar rally after another despite his age (he is now 61). Hsiung Hsiang-hui, 52, picked up a degree at Ohio's Case Western Reserve University in the 1940s and a taste for Savile Row suits as Peking's charge in London in the early 1960s.

Even though they have never lived in the U.S., the top men in the delegation are familiar with Americans. Chiao was a capable young aide of Chou En-lai's in the 1940s when Chou was dealing with such Yankee generals as "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell and George C. Marshall. Later, Chiao and his wife, who had been Chou's pretty press spokesman during World War II, were a popular couple in Hong Kong, where they represented Peking's news agency. At the 1961 Geneva Conference on Laos, where he was Chou's chief counselor, Chiao proudly told an Indian delegate: "We know [the Americans] better than you do."

The delegation's ranking experts on the present U.S. leadership are Huang Hua and his deputy Chen Chu. Both have met Henry Kissinger in Peking.

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