Two Billions for Offense?

In December 1950, the U.S. Government forbade U.S. merchant ships to visit Red China's ports. Since then, while the fighting in Korea has gone on, a profitable trade has been carried on between China and the outside world in the ships of other Western nations, some of whom have their own troops fighting the Reds in Korea. If this trade was sometimes mentioned, its extent was not widely recognized. This week, in a well-documented, soberly written report, Senator Joseph McCarthy's subcommittee published some startling findings on this subject.

"Since the outbreak of the Korean war," said the subcommittee, "nonCommunist trade with Red China has exceeded $2 billion. Even after three years of war, this trade is not only flourishing but is increasing . . . In the first quarter of this year, the dollar value of exports from Western Europe to China has been greater than for the first three months of any year since 1948 . . . It is known that China is on a full war economy, and carries on trade only in those items which assist her war effort."

McCarthy's investigators found that, since the beginning of the Korean war, some 450 Western-flag vessels have made 2,000 trips to Chinese ports. Exactly what they carried is anybody's guess. There have been some flagrant examples, however, of traffic in strategic materials. Several ships, after delivering U.S. cargoes of Mutual Security Agency material to Formosa, on later voyages transported oil to China. The most damaging series of shipments is the traffic in natural rubber now going on between Ceylon and China. In return for rice, Ceylon has agreed to send the Chinese 50,000 tons of rubber annually for five years.

The leading target of the McCarthy report was Great Britain, whose flag was flown by 100 of the 162 ships cited for 1953. The British, said the report, have done nothing to crack down on Hong Kong shipping firms, which operate 68 vessels as fronts for their actual owners, the Chinese Communists. Next in line for the subcommittee's strictures were the State Department and MSA. Charged the investigators: "Since the beginning of the Korean war, our Government has had no clear-cut policy on China trade by our allies; they had inadequate factual information as to the kind, extent and effect of the trade; they lacked the forcefulness and vigor necessary to convince our allies that they should ban this trade . . ."

Senator McCarthy, with this report, had scored a solid blow--above the belt for a change.

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