Essay: WHAT THE U.S. KNOWS ABOUT RED CHINA

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EXCEPT for flies, beggars and Americans, Communist China is not a Forbidden Land in the way in which that celebrated term applied to Tibet. In an age of satellite eyes-in-the-sky, it is certainly not Terra Incognita; its huge land mass, slightly bigger than all 50 U.S. states, lies naked before the orbiting cameras. The figurative curtain that it has drawn around itself is not of iron but, more appropriately for the Orient, of pliable bamboo. Yet of all the earth's too many closed societies, that of Red China ranks as the most ominously secretive. This secretiveness, paranoiac in its intensity, is the more worrisome to the world because militant Red China is the global troublemaker with the greatest revolutionary threat.

Red China has brawled with its most powerful neighbors, India and Russia. It has urged on, by word and deed, the war in Viet Nam, has openly supported insurgency in neighboring Thailand and has exported subversion as far away as Africa. Its disciplined, indoctrinated population, which constitutes a quarter of the human race, is told ceaselessly that the U.S. is "the world's chief enemy." To read the intentions of this sullen giant and to formulate its policy toward it, the U.S. obviously and vitally needs to heed the ancient dictum: "Know thine enemy." Knowledge is the basis of policy—but just how much does the U.S. know, and how much can it find out, about a nation of such implacable hostility and resolute secrecy?

Sophisticated Snooping

There are two answers, one expectable, the other surprising. The first is that the U.S. knows not nearly enough, because secrecy inevitably covers with impenetrable shrouds certain facts about China. The second—and surprising—answer is that the U.S. knows more about Red China than does any other nation, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union. Says an expert who has been studying China for more than 20 years: "We know a lot more about some things in China than the Chinese themselves." The practice of "Sinology"* is enjoying a boom in the U.S.: there are now ten major academic centers and 50 lesser centers for China studies, and some $50 million in private grants has recently been made for such studies.

China-watching has become the indispensable underpinning for the evolution of U.S. policy. To get the material they need to form realistic analyses, both Government and academic experts tap numerous and diverse sources, covert and overt. The U.S. maintains its largest consulate in Hong Kong, where a corps of translators collects and analyzes an endless stream of Chinese periodicals, some smuggled out from remote provinces. The compulsive outpourings of Radio Peking and other internal radio stations are monitored by a string of sophisticated snooping devices on China's perimeter. Drone planes, high-flying U-2s and satellite cameras record roads, railways, steel mills, oil wells, nuclear plants, missile ranges and troop movements. U.S. Government analysts early spotted China's gaseous diffusion plant at Lanchow, the plutonium reactor at Paotow, and the atom-bomb test site at Lop Nor in the Taklamakan wastes of Sinkiang. They have predicted well in advance the timing of all three Chinese atomic explosions.