Peking's Wordy Debut

It has been estimated that more than 500 million pages of printed material spew forth each year from United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan. Last week, as a delegation representing Mao Tse-tung's China formally took its place in the great cave of winds known as the General Assembly, it was easy to see why. There were no fewer than 56 welcoming addresses, spinning out for 51 hours.

When the time finally came for the Chinese to make their debut, Deputy Foreign Minister Chiao Kuan-hua walked slowly to the giant green marble rostrum, took off his glasses and began, in calm and deliberate tones, to give his hushed audience the Chinese view of the world:

ENTERING THE U.N. "This proves the bankruptcy of the policy of hostility toward the Chinese people . . . This is the defeat of the plan of the United States Government."

THE STATE OF THE WORLD. "Countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution. This has become an irresistible trend of history."

VIET NAM. "[China] supports the peoples of the three countries of Indochina in their war against U.S. aggression . . . The U.S. Government should withdraw immediately and unconditionally all its armed forces."

TAIWAN. "The Chinese people are determined to liberate Taiwan and no force on earth can stop us from doing so."

SUPERPOWERS. "China belongs to the Third World . . . We are opposed to big nations bullying small ones or strong nations bullying weak ones . . . The superpowers want to be superior to others and lord it over others. At no time will China be a superpower." DISARMAMENT. "China will never participate in the so-called nuclear disarmament talks between the nuclear powers behind the backs of the non-nuclear countries . . . China develops nuclear weapons solely for the purpose of defense."

The U.N. Assembly loudly applauded Chiao's 20-minute speech, and many delegates said that they considered it commendably moderate, at least by the usual standards of Peking invective. Even U.S. Ambassador George Bush said that it was nothing worse than "a forceful exposition of views we cannot agree with and cannot support."

In Washington, however, officials felt that some reply had to be made, if only to prevent Peking from assuming that it could go on to harsher polemics without being challenged. After a full day of consultations with the White House, Bush belatedly issued a new statement scolding Chiao for "intemperate language." While pledging that the U.S. would make "a serious attempt to narrow differences," he said that it was "disturbing" to see the Chinese "firing these empty cannons of rhetoric."

Few officials at the U.N. took Washington's rebuke seriously, since the Chinese speech contained no surprises for anyone informed on international politics. "That speech of Chiao's has a different echo in Tulsa than in New York," explained one official of the U.S. delegation. "What the Chinese said may have been expected by some, but it was new to many Americans."

The U.S. was not Peking's only target last week. When the U.N.'s Social Committee turned to the problem of Bengali refugees in India--a situation that pits two Third World powers against each other--the Chinese came out strongly against India. "They continue to exploit the question of refugees," said China's Fu Hao, and "to carry out subversive activities" against Pakistan.

The Chinese criticism sounded particularly harsh in view of reports that India and China are in fact moving toward more cordial relations. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wrote Chou En-lai to congratulate him on China's entering the U.N., and Chou sent a warm reply: "May the friendship between the peoples of China and India grow and develop daily." It was the first such high-level correspondence since the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict, when the two nations broke off commercial ties and reduced their diplomatic relations to the charge-d'affaires level. Last week there were reports in New Delhi that the two nations would soon exchange ambassadors, which suggests an interesting question: Is China hoping to mediate the Bengal dispute and thus gain influence on the subcontinent, as the Soviets did after their role in settling the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war?

Whatever was happening behind the scenes, the U.N. General Assembly soon reverted to its favorite public activity, speechmaking. The Chinese, all neatly uniformed in Mao tunics, sat in stoic silence as delegate after delegate droned on about a Soviet proposal for an all-nation summit conference on disarmament. The Yugoslav delegate offered his views in English, the Mongolian spoke in Russian, and in the galleries the rows of plastic earphones hummed simultaneously in French and Spanish, like disembodied voices in some Fellini extravaganza.

The Chinese have scheduled their own disarmament speech this week, but they have already upstaged themselves. On the remote Lop Nor proving grounds in Sinkiang region, Chinese technicians detonated their first atomic explosion in more than a year. It was a small bomb, as such things go--the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. That is almost exactly the size of the one that demolished Hiroshima.

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