CHINA: Cheers in Peking,Trauma in Taiwan

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CHINA'S Premier Chou En-lai had hardly finished seeing off Richard Nixon at Shanghai airport, waving goodbye with evident weariness and perhaps relief, when he flew back to Peking. There, in pronounced contrast to the quiet scene that had greeted Nixon's arrival a week earlier, Chou received a hero's welcome of unprecedented proportions. As he stepped from his plane wearing a heavy blue overcoat against a biting winter wind, he was met by the entire top echelon of his government, delegations of students, workers and soldiers, and some 5,000 "spectators" who waved bouquets and shouted slogans hailing "Chairman Mao's revolutionary diplomatic line."

The elaborately staged return, with its overtones of triumph, dominated China's front pages and Peking's daily 30-minute newscasts for the better part of the week. Like Richard Nixon's equally staged reception on his return to Washington, it had domestic political purposes. Plainly, the Chou show was designed to arouse popular support for Peking's U.S. rapprochement, which had apparently been an element in the power struggle that all but tore the regime apart last fall.

Diplomatic Zag. The Chinese had reason to be satisfied. As most of the world read it, the communique that Nixon and Chou signed in Shanghai seemed to show some important American "concessions" to Peking on the Taiwan question. For the first time, the U.S. formally adopted the position, held by both Nationalists and Communists, that there is "but one China and that Taiwan is part of China." But coupled with the promise to "ultimately" withdraw all U.S. forces from the island and the lack of any mention of the U.S. defense commitment—a commitment that Nixon later reconfirmed—the communique looked to many nations, particularly in Asia, like a U.S. obeisance to Peking. One Indonesian newspaper called it "a death verdict for Taiwan." To counter that impression, and to allay the fears of the U.S.'s Asian allies, Nixon sent Assistant Secretary of State Marshall Green on an eleven-country post-summit tour of friendly capitals in Asia and the Pacific basin.

Still, almost everywhere, the China trip prompted fresh pondering about the unsettling new shape of world diplomacy and, in some countries, about the future state of ties with the U.S. London read the communique as an indication of a further loosening of America's traditional links to Europe; to many Europeans, it seemed also to foretell a pendular swing of U.S. attention back to the kind of overfascination with China that prevailed up through the Roosevelt years. Moscow darkly suggested that the communique was only "the tip of an iceberg." Saigon puzzled unhappily over the fact that, unlike Japan and South Korea, South Viet Nam was given no specific U.S. pledge of support in the communique. Indonesians voiced the fear that Japan, left out in the cold, might arm itself with nuclear weapons.