Attacking China

Moscow blows hot while Peking stays cool

"The Kremlin has just discovered that the world is round," confides one Soviet bureaucrat to another. "How's that?" asks his puzzled colleague. Answer: "All that garbage we've been throwing at the West has finally come back to us from the East."

That pointed little joke reflects the growing alarm in Moscow about China's current global diplomatic offensive, which the Kremlin regards as part of a Peking plan for world domination. In the past three months the decibel level of Moscow's attacks on China has risen to ear-splitting volume, all but drowning out the Soviet press's ritual critiques of Western warmongering and imperialism.

"There is peace on his face but malice in his heart." That was how Pravda characterized Chinese Communist Party Chairman Hua Kuo-feng, whose state visits to Yugoslavia and Rumania last summer sparked the current round of denunciations. Last week the Soviet defense ministry newspaper Red Star declared that "Mao's heirs continue talking about the inevitability of another world war in order to justify extremely dangerous practical actions, namely, Peking's persistent efforts to stop the process of detente." Red Star expressed horror at "China's worship, close to religious ecstasy, of the god of war."

Behind these expressions of outrage are fears in Moscow that Peking may purchase up to $10 billion worth of arms from Western Europe, including antitank and antiaircraft weapons that could be used to resist a Soviet invasion. When Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua flew to London this month for talks with British Prime Minister James Callaghan, Moscow assumed Huang was on an arms-buying expedition. Said Tass: "Those in Britain who are inclined to encourage Peking's aggressive militarism ought not to forget that no rifle has yet been invented which can fire in only one direction."

In addition, the 22.5 million Overseas Chinese are being used as Peking's secret weapons, Tass alleges. According to one dispatch, they are being deployed by Peking as a "fifth column to undermine security and public order in Burma, Malaysia and the Philippines." (Though most of the insurgents in Malaysia are ethnic Chinese, there is little evidence that they are acting under Peking's orders.) The Tokyo-Peking friendship treaty, signed last August to the dismay of Moscow, has been interpreted by Pravda as a diabolical device by China "to force Japan onto the path of its preparations for a third world war." Says the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya: "China is striving to subordinate the African states to its dictates," in hopes of using thinly populated areas of the continent to resettle its excess population.

China's domestic policies have not been spared. Says the Soviet ideological journal Kommunist, China is wracked by "general social disorder, economic chaos and discontent." Tass charged that the Chinese people have suffered "a sharp drop in living standards, while millions have been repressed or exiled." The news agency also accuses Peking of grossly favoring the Han Chinese majority while mistreating its ethnic minorities.

By comparison, Peking has remained cool and laconic in the face of Moscow's heated fulminations. Said the People's Daily: "Let the wind blow and the waves beat. No amount of abuse and vituperation from the Kremlin can hinder the advance of the Chinese people." That is exactly what the Russians are afraid of.

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