Waiting for Deng Xiaoping

Washington prepares for the China summit

A special White House working group, headed by Presidential Assistant Anne Wexler, met almost daily to pore over final details. Administration officials briefed hundreds of U.S. farmers, businessmen and labor leaders on the minutiae of U.S.-Chinese relations. Presidential aides issued a fat silver briefing folder in which more-or-less familiar Chinese names were rendered almost unrecognizable in Peking's own Chinese transliteration system: Teng Hsiao-p'ing, for example, became Deng Xiaoping.

So Washington prepared last week, with the help of a nine-member Chi nese advance delegation from Peking, for the arrival on Jan. 28 of Chinese Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, the first official visit to Washington by a Chinese Communist leader. The Teng summit posed more delicate problems for the White House than the spelling of names. The Chinese had requested the opportunity of meeting "old friends" in the U.S., including former President Nixon, whose own visit to China in 1972 paved the way for U.S.-Chinese diplomatic normalization. In fact, Teng wanted to stop off at Nixon's home at San Clemente, Calif., a nightmarish thought to Carter's advisers.* As a compromise, the White House invited the former President to the state banquet for Teng in Washington on Jan. 29. Invitations were also sent to former President Gerald Ford and former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and William Rogers. Some initial reactions to the Nixon invitation were almost hysterical. Brooklyn's Democratic Representative Elizabeth Holtzman labeled it "profoundly offensive, repugnant and inexcusable." Even inside the White House, the invitation was not unanimously approved, but Carter insisted that it was "the proper thing to do" in light of Nixon's efforts at improving U.S.-Chinese relations. Others suggested that the presence at the banquet of Nixon and the former Secretaries of State might help Carter win congressional support for his China policy.

Teng's nine-day visit will begin at 2 p.m. on Jan. 28, when a silver Boeing 707 carrying him and his party of 75, including scientists and journalists, touches down at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. Next morning, after a formal welcome that will include a 19-gun salute, Teng and Jimmy Carter will talk for an hour at the White House. There will be more talks between the two leaders on the following day, and then Teng will visit the House and Senate, where he will engage in some personal lobbying for the U.S.'s new China policy and probably reissue his invitation to critics, led by Senator Barry Goldwater, to visit Peking. The Vice Premier also will attend what is being billed as "a performance of American arts" at the Kennedy Center.

After three days in Washington, Teng will begin a jaunt around the country that was mostly designed to satisfy the interests of the scientists in his delegation. Said one U.S. scheduler: "Farms do not seem to do much for him. Technology is his bag." He will be escorted by Leonard Woodcock, who last week was nominated by Carter as U.S. Ambassador to China.

First stop will be Atlanta, where Teng will tour a Ford Motor Co. assembly plant and a solar energy facility at Georgia Tech and dine with several Governors and other dignitaries. Next, in Houston, Teng may call at the NASA Space Center, look at some specimens of the latest oil-drilling technology, and sample a Texas-style barbecue. Finally, he will probably be shown the Boeing 747 assembly line at Everett, Wash., before heading back to China on Feb. 5.

No efforts have been spared to make Teng feel at home. Both at Blair House, where he will stay in Washington, and in the White House itself, elegant brass spittoons have been set out and polished to accommodate his habit of frequent spitting. Downtown Washington will be decorated with American and Chinese flags hanging from light poles.

In Peking last week, Teng also seemed to be preparing carefully for his visit. He disappeared from public sight, presumably to clear his desk and bone up on the U.S. Though he is expected to make some sharply anti-Soviet comments while on U.S. soil, he is unlikely to repeat either the phrasing or the tone of his last public speech in the U.S., at a U.N. forum in 1974. Then he ridiculed U.S. efforts to search for peace, blasted "the two superpowers," and pronounced that, in the world as a whole, "revolution is the main trend." With his skillful sense of self-promotion and public relations, Teng this time will most likely project a far more beneficent image.

* In a curious parallel, during his Japan visit last October, Teng insisted on visiting disgraced former Premier Kakuei Tanaka. architect of Japan's 1972 normalization of relations with China. Tanaka had resigned from office in 1974 under pressure for allegedly having taken $2 million in bribes.

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