Comrades or Competitors?

Russia's Joseph Stalin and China's Mao Tse-tung are comrades in arms, diplomacy and aggression in the Far East. Are they also competitors under the skin?

Last week this perennially intriguing question, full of imponderables for both Communism and the free world, was bobbing about in the news.

"A Wide Split." A New York Times dispatch from Tokyo reported "a wide split in the higher councils of international Communism, with Chinese and Russians vying for control of Korea." The news came mostly from a "U.N. mission in Korea" (not otherwise identified) which had studied the information culled from "high-ranking" Communist P.W.s.

The "split" allegedly went back to post-VJ days when the Russians occupied northern Korea. The first puppet Pyongyang regime had been a coalition of two kinds of Korean comrades. One faction, led by scholarly Kim Tu Bong, had been trained in the Chinese Communists' stronghold in Yenan. The other, under truculent Kim Il Sung, had a Moscow background.

The faction favored by Russia soon got into the saddle. Korea became a Kremlin show--until Kim Il Sung's army was crushed last fall. Then (according to the Times), China-trained Kim Tu Bong called for peace; he was executed. The Chinese Communists, the story went on, waited for Russia's Korean satellite forces to disintegrate; then they marched in from Manchuria, reversed the Red rout without Russian tanks or other heavy materiel, kicked Kim Il Sung on to the sidelines, took over the show in Korea.

This analysis was echoed a couple of days later by Marshal Tito's theoreticians in Belgrade. The government-inspired Review of International Affairs argued that Korea has become an arena where Russia and China are competing for dominance of all Asia. Stalin was ahead until his North Korean puppets collapsed, and that, according to Tito's pundits, was Mao's cue to leap "into the forefront."

"Chinese troops in Korea," speculated the Review, "were not saving the reputation of Moscow but serving the assertion of China as a new factor in Asia. The former Soviet sphere of influence is under the occupation of Chinese troops."

"A Germ of Controversy." A divergence between Peking and Moscow over tactics and controls in Korea (or over the much more important prize of Manchuria) is certainly possible. If these differences, like those between Tito and Stalin, lend themselves to exploitation, it is a chance " that the free world ought not to miss. But, at the moment, any split between the Chinese and Russians seems to be more in wishes than in evidence.

Tito is still a little, lonely heretic in the broad expanse of Communism. He has long looked wistfully for signs of a big fellow-dissenter in China. Even Tito's men saw the point. Last week Yugoslav Foreign Minister Edvard Kardelj qualified the Review of International Affairs with the comment: Chinese and Russian rivalry was merely "a germ of controversy."

The U.N. analysts whose views were reported by the Times have documentation for their findings which is far from full or convincing. On the other hand, the following are hard facts: the Chinese Red army has Russian-made planes; Peking's officers have some 23,000 Russian military advisers at their elbows; Red China's and Red Russia's immediate goals in Asia are the same--destruction of non-Communist governments; Russia has given Red China its fullest support in the U.N.

Red China has openly proclaimed its league with Russia against the U.S.; last week it ordered the seizure of all American assets in China (estimated at more than $100 million worth of mission and business properties). Peking's propagandists hew to the hate-America, love-Russia line. A striking visual example was the recent Red China anniversary parade in Peking. Ranks of marchers bore aloft portraits of Mao (TIME, Nov. 6), and news pictures of the spectacle were apparently released for domestic propaganda. Other marchers carried images of Stalin. Pictures of these latter were sent to Moscow, and reached the West through Sovfoto, the Russian newspicture agency.

The Chinese Communists' march into Korea still seems more like a cooperation of partners than a falling-out of comrades. Any appeasement of Mao, in order to encourage his suspected break with Stalin, might be just what the Moscow-Peking partnership wants.

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