FOREIGN RELATIONS: Appointment in Peking

The days of U.S. harassments and humiliations in Communist China were not yet over.

The four Chinese Communist officials and their police escort were just 50 minutes late in keeping the appointment. Shortly before 10 o'clock one morning last week, they took possession of the office of U.S. Consul General O. Edmund Clubb in the spacious U.S. legation compound in Peking, precisely as they had said they would, seven days earlier.

They had warned him first by issuing a military proclamation: the People's Government was claiming all military barracks of foreign powers. Consul Clubb had written daily protests pointing out that his office hadn't been used as a barracks since 1947, and as diplomatic quarters it was protected by treaty. All his protests were returned, unacknowledged, and looking as though they had been opened and read. Then Washington warned Peking that the U.S. would answer seizure of its consulate by removing all U.S. consular officials from China. Again no response.

The coup was businesslike and icy on both sides. Nobody was arrested. Consul General Clubb destroyed some of his codes and dispatches, moved the rest without interference into his residence next door. In Washington, the Department of State signaled for the orderly closing down of consulates in Peking, Tientsin, Shanghai, Tsingtao and Nanking. Nobody was sure when or how the 135 members of the consular families would be granted exit permits. For the first time in 105 years, the U.S. would shortly be without listening posts in China.

In announcing the shutdown, ponderous, portly W. Walton Butterworth, State's Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, called the Chinese action "more . . . tribal law than international law."

The Communists' bad behavior did settle one debate—or rather, make it irrelevant. Why should the U.S. worry about whether or not to recognize Communist China, when the Communists themselves didn't seem to wish it, or to care what the U.S. thought?