An Opening to the Middle Kingdom

• Share

Reagan skillfully blends politics and diplomacy in China

It was supposed to be an exhibition of capitalism at work, a marketplace near the ancient city of Xian where farmers and other vendors conduct business free of state control. It was in fact a contrivance, a Potemkin-like set where the customers were programmed not to begin buying until after the President and Mrs. Reagan arrived, and to cease as soon as their motorcade departed.

But no matter. Ronald Reagan is an old actor with a fine appreciation for the well-staged media event. By the time he left China last week after a successful six-day visit, Reagan was convinced that his Chinese hosts really were catching the "free-market spirit." So optimistic was he about the prospects for friendship and trade that in one ad lib he referred to the People's Republic as "socalled Communist China," a remarkably benign description coming from a once unrelenting cold warrior who used to call the P.R.C. "Red China." The turnabout is perhaps more Reagan's than China's, but there was little doubt that the governments of both nations have, in Reagan's words, "reached a new level of understanding."

For Reagan, the trip was superb political theater, a perfect antidote to his election-year vulnerabilities. For a solid week on the evening news, he appeared not as the bellicose ideologue who can somehow manage to sleep through crises, but rather as the pragmatic peacemaker who can travel half the globe with nary a yawn or a stumble. Stopping over in Fairbanks, Alaska, on the return flight, he described his trip in terms that sounded suspiciously like a campaign speech. "My visit to China has convinced me that our future is bright," he told 500 community leaders packed into a local auditorium. "America is on the edge of a new era of peace, prosperity and commerce." Sounding a bit like the Great Helmsman, Reagan expansively predicted that Americans can "expect great leaps in their quality of life in the next century." Asked about the political dividends from his journey, Reagan replied: "I don't think it can hurt."

The President managed to turn the trip into a diplomatic double play. For 31 hours, he patiently waited in Fairbanks in order to cross paths with Pope John Paul II, whose plane was refueling there en route to South Korea (see WORLD). Posing with the Pontiff behind a lectern bearing the Presidential Seal, Reagan told a crowd of 5,000 standing in a cold drizzle that his trip to China had been a "long journey for peace." After the two leaders met privately in an airport lounge for 20 minutes, the Pope dropped Reagan off at Air Force One and returned to a runway podium for wa brief liturgy. "He is a | charming person," the "Pontiff later told reporters, "and I am not disagreeable either." But some Vatican officials were irked that the Pope had been used as a political prop. Indeed, a camera crew from the Republican National Committee filmed the encounter, and it will no doubt turn up in television ads aimed at the 26 million Catholic voters in the U.S.