RED CHINA: About-Face

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In a sudden change of plans, Red China's Premier Chou En-lai this week postponed a scheduled visit to Nepal and cut short his tour of India to rush back to Peking. Probable explanation: before his trip to Moscow next week Chou had to catch up on an unexpected shift in the Chinese Communist line.

For months China's Red bosses had been emphasizing the dangers of "great-nation chauvinism," i.e., rigid Soviet rule of other Communist nations, and they had expressed sympathy for Poland's demands for greater independence. Last week, however, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party did an about-face, announced that while great-nation chauvinism was still a problem, "it is also necessary to overcome nationalist tendencies in smaller countries."

Following Moscow's cue, the Chinese Reds put the blame for these deplorable tendencies on Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito. And when it came to pinpointing the nature of Tito's heresy, the Chinese Communists did not hesitate to make a charge that no Russian leader currently dares to make in public. "In our opinion," said the Central Committee, "Stalin's mistakes take second place to his achievements . . . [Tito] took up a wrong attitude when he set up so-called Stalinism, the Stalinist course and Stalinist elements as objects of attack . . . This can only lead to a split in the Communist movement."

Evidently, Red China's bosses had become convinced that further intramural quarreling is a luxury that the badly rent Communist world cannot afford. Whatever their motives, their attack came as a shattering surprise to Belgrade, where Tito had been counting on China as a major ally in his fight for "independent Communism." The Kremlin's hard-line Politburocrats have gathered pledges of support from all the satellites except Poland, and from the big Communist Parties of France and Italy, leaving Yugoslavia and Poland almost isolated in insisting on "separate ways to socialism." Nervously, Tito's henchmen considered the possibility that Soviet isolation of Yugoslavia might even extend to a rupture of the "state relations" signed by Khrushchev and withdrawal of the economic aid (some $500 million in loans and credits) that the Soviet bloc has granted Yugoslavia since last spring.