Collectors of a Debt

Through the festive streets of Rawalpindi clanked five Chinese-built T-59 tanks, dipping their long, angular gun barrels as they passed President Mohammed Ayub Khan's reviewing stand. Then the walls of the capital reverberated to the roar of a Pakistani Air Force flyby, led by four silvery MIG-19s. A flock of American-supplied aircraft trailed cautiously at the rear, mostly B57 bombers, F-86 Sabres and F-104 Starfighters. Ayub's armory had a new look, and he was flaunting it before his SEATO and CENTO allies.

During last summer's Indo-Pakistani border war, Ayub lost some 500 armored vehicles and nearly one-third of his air force. Since the U.S. and Britain —his principal suppliers of weaponry —had refused to replenish Ayub's stores, he turned to Red China, whose leaders were happy to turn a political profit. No sooner had the tank-and-jet performance completed last week's "Pakistan Day" celebrations than the Chinese collected the first installment of Ayub's debt. Into Rawalpindi flew Red Chinese President Liu Shao-chi and Foreign Minister Chen Yi for five days of talks and ceremonies. They were swept through Rawalpindi in a bubble-topped yellow Daimler amid flower-throwing crowds that accorded the Chinese the warmest welcome since Sheik Abdullah, "the Lion of Kashmir," visited two years ago.

Why had the Chinese come visiting? With their ideological enemies, the Russians, dominating Communist headlines at the Soviet 23rd Party Congress in Moscow, Peking had to show that there was at least one "nonaligned" capital where they could visit without fear of insult. Ayub's was it.