BUSINESS ABROAD: Red Propaganda Fair

For the biggest overseas industrial exhibition that Red China has yet attempted, the entrance to Tokyo's International Trade Fair Hall was transformed into a five-story reproduction of a Mandarin palace. A pair of ferocious papier-mache lions guarded the doors. On opening day firecrackers sputtered, a red and gold dragon writhed in the streets and clouds of confetti burst over the eager crowds. Then it rained for a week and the lions began to come apart. By last week the enthusiasm for the fair of many of Tokyo's businessmen, who have been clamoring for free trade with China, had also dampened. The new "people's democracy" across the East China Sea had sent some 3,500 products to the fair, including bicycles, pheasant feathers, automatic coal conveyors, tiger skins, machine tools, jade trinkets, generators, fountain pens and even a batch of Shanghai-style dresses with enticing slit skirts, a fashion the Reds banned as "decadent" in their regime's first days.

"Russian Design." But the Japanese quickly noted that many of the items on display were products that Japan herself is trying to peddle abroad, and especially to China, e.g., radios, sewing machines, surgical instruments. This raised Japanese fears that the Chinese Communists mean to compete with Japanese industry, instead of resuming China's prewar practice of swapping its raw materials for Japanese manufactured goods. Chinese consumer goods at cutthroat prices have already turned up in Southeast Asian markets.

The Japanese also discovered that the Chinese had not come to Tokyo primarily to do business but to step up their propaganda campaign for removal of the U.N. and NATO embargoes on trade with Red China and to drive home Peking's pitch that the only way Japan can tap China's coal and iron is to trade strategic items, now banned under the embargoes, rather than consumer goods. Fair officials told would-be buyers that orders could not be taken, politely parried inquiries on prices, deliveries and quantities available. One reason was plain: few of the items on display were in production. The fair catalogue described some of them as "Russian design, but made in China." Others bore the telltale serial number "00001" of a first model. (To meet a commitment to deliver textiles and electrical appliances to Indonesia this year, Peking was forced to buy exactly the same goods from Britain to meet its own domestic needs.)