Teng's Triumphant Tour

"A honeymoon, "says China's leader of his search for aid and allies

March on, brave people of our nation, our Communist Party leads us on our new Long March. Millions as one, we march, march on ...

The strains of the Chinese national anthem sounded first last week on the south lawn of the White House, as summit protocol demands. Then the U.S. Army Band gave an equally rousing version of The Star-Spangled Banner. From a windswept podium on the crest of the low hill, the two leaders exchanged bland welcoming remarks, then mounted a balcony to acknowledge the applauding crowd of some 1,000 dignitaries. Suddenly, Chinese Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing departed from the traditional script. He impulsively grabbed Jimmy Carter's hand and held it high. They looked like a pair of politicians just nominated by a national convention, and there was little doubt about which man thought he was running at the head of the ticket.

No gesture better captured the spirit and mood of Teng's nine-day visit to the U.S. last week. After surviving purges back home, setting his country on a quick-step march toward modernization, and winning diplomatic recognition from the most powerful nation in the West, Teng could be forgiven for indulging in a moment of triumph. His trip to Washington was the first ever by a top-ranking Chinese Communist leader, and it added a personal normalization of relations between the two countries to the diplomatic normalization that took effect on Jan. 1.

Washington responded by staging the most fervent welcome for a foreign visitor since Nikita Khrushchev came calling in 1959. Showing few signs of his 74 years, Teng rushed through a formidable schedule of official and semiofficial events. He talked for 5½ hours with Carter, dined at the White House, lunched with Senators and U.S. reporters, sampled American culture at the Kennedy Center and barnstormed across the country, getting a firsthand look along the way at American enterprise: a Ford plant near

Atlanta, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, a Boeing plant outside Seattle.

It will take months before the full implications of Teng's visit are known. At the very least, his tour marks a dramatic new phase in the relationship between the two giant nations, a phase symbolized last week by the signing of scientific and cultural-exchange agreements, by the prospects of greatly increased trade and of another summit conference in China later this year. Over and over, Teng made it clear that he is urgently looking for American credit and technology to modernize his backward nation. The early signs are that he will get much of what he is seeking.

But in this sudden flowering of Sino-American friendship after 30 years of hostility—including three years of bitter warfare in Korea—there lie serious dangers of increased instability in the East-West balance of power. Teng was amply provocative in his warnings that "the danger of war comes from the Soviet Union," and Carter, perhaps unwisely, joined him in a new denunciation of "hegemony," which the Chinese define as Soviet expansionism.