Creaking Axis

On Valentine's Day 1950, as Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung sealed a treaty of "friendship, alliance and mutual security," Comrade Mao predicted that this union of 700 million people would "inevitably influence the future of all mankind." This week the tenth anniversary of that historic union was observed with determined gaiety in Peking with lectures, parades and folklore festivals. Soviet Boss Khrushchev was too busy to take part personally in these solemnities. China's No. 1 ally was, ironically enough, off in India building friendship with China's No. 1 rival for Asian leadership,

Uneasy Neighbors. If there is one proposition on which all the Western intelligence experts agree, it is that more unites the Soviet Union and Communist China than divides them. But what divides them is becoming more and more conspicuous. Ageless national conflicts are already pulling Russia and China in different directions. Under the impact of their exploding population, the Chinese are moving westward and northward into the border lands of Mongolia, Sinkiang and Manchuria (where population has doubled since 1923).

When Toronto's Geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson recently crossed the border, he found that it took five hours. After the Russians had switched the train wheels at Otpor to fit China's narrower-gauge tracks, he reported: "The train crept forward in the dark toward the actual border. It was brilliantly floodlit. Soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets were on guard.

The last Russian I saw was gazing up at the underside of the cars with a floodlight to make sure no one was riding the rods out of the workers' paradise.

"The train continued creeping forward for what seemed an age. The change was complete. Three miles back, every person had been Western and every sign had been in Russian. Now everyone was Oriental and there was not a sign in any language but Chinese. We had entered the Orient as one jumps off a dock into the sea."

Hard Bargains. Western specialists no longer dismiss the differences between Peking and Moscow as some kind of subtle maneuver to confuse the West. But they believe that China's objections to Khrushchev's policy of coexistence with the West are more tactical than strategic.

Russia wants peace to get on with its industrialization. China still needs outside hostility to unite a restless people.

In ten years the Russians have lent the Chinese the somewhat unimpressive sum of $430 million, in deals signed only after months of hard bargaining. Currently the Chinese are shipping the Russians $250 million worth of goods a year more than they receive. Still, when the Chinese proclaim loudest of all that Communist strength now exceeds Western strength, the strength they are bragging about is primarily Russia's--Sputniks and missiles.

To the Rescue. Mao, after Stalin's death, fancied himself the senior philosopher of Communism, a man who had made his own revolution instead of merely inheriting it. At first Mao often intervened grandly in Communist Europe--at one point to back the Poles against Kremlin pressures, later to help Khrushchev when his authority tottered after the Hungarian revolt, and finally to lead the 1958 outcry against Tito's deviation from the true faith. But as the Sino-Soviet pact became ten years old, it was Johnny-Come-Lately Nikita Khrushchev who had to go to China's rescue. It had been a disastrous year for China: troubles in the communes, the bloody repression of Tibet, Peking's maladroit handling of India, its antagonizing of Burma and Indonesia. It now requires Khrushchev's hardest efforts (he got a smaller hello last week in India than did Eisenhower) to try to retrieve Communism's sagging fortunes in Asia.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.