Foolish Face

The word "face" loomed large in Secretary of State Dean Acheson's week, and his own face showed that he wasn't happy about it.

There was a peremptory cable from the master of a U.S. freighter: "Was my entry Shanghai legal or illegal: if illegal, I request notice. If legal, insist upon suitable protection." The freighter Sir John Franklin was the second to be fired on in the past two weeks, while trying to run the Nationalist blockade into Chinese Communist ports.

Dean Acheson tried to give an answer of sorts at his weekly press conference. The U.S. did not recognize the Nationalist blockade, he said, because the Nationalists could not make it effective. But the State Department wished fervently that U.S. ships would quit trying to run the blockade. Acheson added that there was a difference between having a legal right and going to all possible lengths to enforce legal rights.

A newsman asked: "Do you consider that the American Government has lost face in China because of recent developments?" The question was broad enough to touch another sore point: U.S. helplessness over the shabby treatment of Consul General Angus Ward (TIME, Nov. 21 et seq.). Acheson flushed with anger. He replied, with heavy irony, that "face" was a particularly foolish Oriental conception which suddenly seems to have seized the American mind, that you can lose wars, you can lose honor and lose everything else, but to lose face seems to be terrible. It was a particular form of Orientalism of which he was not guilty, he said tartly.

At week's end, the State Department released a note of protest to the Nationalist government. It denounced the shelling as "unjustifiable and contrary to the law and practice of nations," and "requested" that the Chinese government issue orders that such incidents did not recur. If face meant some show of consistency, firmness and healthy self-respect, it was an Oriental concept that might be difficult to achieve, but was long overdue in U.S. policy in Asia.

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