Growing More Flexible?

The signals that emanate from Peking are erratic, vague and contradictory. But they hint that after the long isolation and xenophobia of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, China is beginning to take notice of the outside world again. For two years, shrill Maoist Red Guardism ruled, and China seemed almost without a foreign policy. Now, the more moderate professionals appear to be moving back in charge at the Foreign Office in Peking. With their return, China's relations with the world can be expected to become more rational and more flexible. There will likely be no major policy changes, nor is a significant rapprochement with the U.S. envisioned by the China watchers. But there will probably be small steps, changes of form rather than substance, to return China's foreign affairs to the pattern that prevailed before the Cultural Revolution.

Dependents Return. Among the most significant indicators of a reappraisal was Peking's announcement in late November that it wants to reconvene next month the Warsaw ambassadorial talks with the U.S. They were last held a year ago and have since been postponed twice at Chinese insistence. What made the announcement particularly intriguing was Peking's inclusion of the suggestion that Sino-American relations be based on the principle of "peaceful coexistence," a phrase Peking has not used in relation to Washington since 1964. Perhaps the invitation to resume talks with the Americans was no more than an effort to rile the Soviet Union, which fears a Sino-American deal as much as Peking worries about U.S.-Soviet collusion. But there have been other signs as well.

The treatment of foreign diplomats in Peking has markedly improved in recent months. They are allowed to travel outside the capital again, and even such arch-revisionists as the Yugoslavs are treated with courtesy. Two years ago, the dependents of Soviet diplomats were evacuated as Red Guards spat on them at the Peking airport and made them crawl under portraits of Mao Tse-tung; now these Soviet citizens are returning. A recent complaint to India over an attack on the Chinese embassy in New Delhi was stern but matter-of-fact, and there was no counter-demonstration in Peking--in stark contrast to 1967, when at least twelve foreign embassies were besieged by Red Guards at one time or another. There is also evidence that overseas Chinese communities, most notably in Hong Kong and in Burma, have been quietly told to go easy on the kind of zealous Maoism that led to bloody disturbances in both places during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution.

Peace Hoax. Admittedly, these are only straws in the wind. On a more typically dissonant note, Peking exploded an H-bomb last month. Also, it still has only one ambassador (to Cairo) posted abroad. All the other Peking envoys were recalled and humiliated by Red Guards in 1962, and their missions are still headed by charges. Denunciations of the Viet Nam "peace talks hoax" continue, and the Chinese have yet to elaborate on their coexistence formula as regards the U.S. However, all this is still a far cry from 1967, when Red Guards, virtually in control of the Foreign Office, humiliated Foreign Minister Chen Yi so often that, by his own admission, he lost count of the numerous indignities he was made to suffer. It was a time when the Foreign Ministry was ransacked by extremists who stole classified documents, and when one meeting with the then British charge d'affaires, Sir Donald Hopson, had to be held in a restaurant because officials were barred from their own Ministry. At one point in 1967, the temperamental Chen Yi became so angry with his young tormentors that he asked them: "Against whom are you rebelling? Instead of rebelling against me, why don't you go to Viet Nam and rebel against the Americans?"

China watchers believe that Peking's new look at foreign affairs is part of the moderate line that, over the past five or six months, has slowed down what is left of the Cultural Revolution. They surmise that a foreign policy review was included in a Central Committee plenum session in late October, during which the Chinese leaders must have discovered their country embarrassingly and dangerously isolated. Only tiny Albania remained a real ally. Relations with Hanoi had turned icily brittle over North Vietnam's decision to talk peace with the U.S.

Moreover, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during the summer was surely a traumatic event for the Chinese who, after all, share more than 4,000 miles of exposed border with the Russians. It may very well have occurred to the Chinese that the U.S., an enemy for the past 20 years, was considerably more predictable than the Soviet Union, a former friend. As Chen Yi reportedly told one European ambassador in Peking not so very long ago: "The Americans are bastards, but honest bastards. The Russians are liars and traitors."

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