MOSCOW V. PEKING: Communist Rivalry Around the World

YOU will not find a crack in the Sino-Soviet union any more than you will find one in a duck's egg," said Red Chi nese Foreign Minister Chen Yi last July. Scarcely five months later, the duck's egg was cracked wide open. Hatched was an ugly little basilisk, confronting Moscow with a threat to its supremacy far graver than Yugoslavia's defection in 1948. The Soviet Union has the political muscle to keep most of the world's 81 Communist parties in line, and superior economic resources to offer poor nations willing to boost themselves by the nearest bootstrap. But the Chinese Communists are far from surrendering to the Kremlin's political and economic dominance, and their divisive influence is felt in Communist parties the world over. A rundown on the rivalry:

Freeze in the Backyard

Nowhere is the struggle more apparent than in Red China's own backyard. Last week nine parties--North Viet Nam, North Korea, Burma, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaya, Australia, New Zealand and Belgium --joined Peking in sending congratulatory telegrams to Tirana for the outcast Albanian Communist Party's 20th anniversary.* The parties in Red China's key neighbor states--Japan and India--did not.

Though the chairman of Japan's Communist Party, Sanzo Nosaka, dates his friendship to Mao Tse-tung back to Mao's struggle in Yenan during the '305, the powerful Secretary-General, Kenji Miyamoto, is a devoted follower of the Kremlin. While Peking issues a trickle of invitations to Japanese leftists, the Soviet Union maintains a steady cultural offensive by welcoming Japanese singers, scientists. Kabuki dancer-actors.

The Indian Communist Party, which like the Japanese was silent during the Party Congress, is more openly split: five members of the party's 25-member central executive committee favor Peking (the center of such sentiment is West Bengal), although General Secretary Ajoy Ghosh is a Khrushchev disciple, and accuses Red China of antagonizing the Indian masses by fomenting border incidents. The freeze in Sino-Indian relations was reflected this week in New Delhi, where the Russians opened a glittering pavilion at an international industrial fair, while the Chinese boycotted the event.

In Indonesia, the militant wing of the party reportedly favors the formation of an underground army against the day when power will be seized by violence, while the majority believes in supporting President Sukarno in the hope that increasing chaos will boost the Communists to power. Meanwhile, the Russians are busy flattering Lenin Peace Prizewinner Sukarno, offering academic scholarships (100, compared with 19 by the Chinese), building and equipping a 200-bed hospital in Djakarta. In Cambodia and Burma, the Chinese Communists are ahead, capitalizing on their racial similarities and on large colonies of local Chinese. While Russian diplomats and technicians try to live in American-style comfort, Peking's agents sleep 40 in a barracks, eat native food. Avoiding the Soviets' impractical showcase gifts (example: an outlandish hotel on the outskirts of Rangoon), the Red Chinese have promised to build the Burmese a mill to make paper from bamboo, erected small textile and plywood plants in Cambodia.

AFRICA

Non-White Solidarity

"We are far less impressed by the Soviets' military and scientific achievements," said a young Moroccan not long ago. "than by the determination of the Chinese, particularly the youth, to achieve decent living for the masses." Throughout Africa, Chinese Communists have repeatedly stressed that their own recent efforts to industrialize a backward, agrarian country have more significance for Africans than the older Soviet example. Since many nationalist leaders do not count the hu man cost of this achievement, the Chinese propaganda tune rings true--and often.

Peking broadcasts 98 hours a week to Africa in six languages, after adding Swahili six weeks ago, compared with 54 1/2 hours by the Russians. Of 132 Chinese Communist delegations that traveled abroad during the first half of the year, more than 20 toured Africa. Traffic in the opposite direction is equally heavy: in the past 18 months, 2,000 politicians, teachers, union leaders have visited Peking in about 300 groups, representing nearly every country on the African continent. As hosts or tourists, the Red Chinese emphasize that they, like the Africans, are non-white former victims of colonial exploitation--a claim with which the Russians cannot compete.

Sino-Soviet propaganda also clashes on a grimmer note: the Chinese willingness to risk war by fanning local revolutions v. Russia's more circumspect path to the same subversive goals. In general, Russians try to identify with new young governments against Western "imperialists," and in their flirtations (as in Egypt) often do so at the expense of local Communist parties. The Chinese preach the more classic doctrine of small, tough party cadres in every country. In the remote Indian Ocean port of Mogadiscio, capital of the new African country of Somalia, a tiny Red Chinese embassy is supporting--reportedly with cash subsidies and guerrilla training--the extremist Great Somali League, which wants to unite all Somalis in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia. The Russians maintain a much larger embassy staff but disavow the pan-Somali movement in order to keep on good terms with Ethiopia, in which they have made an investment of $100 million, their biggest in black Africa.

Moscow's and Peking's immediate goals do not necessarily conflict. Sorely limited by its economic capacity. Red China has restricted its large loans to Guinea ($25 million) and Ghana ($20 million), concentrates instead on agrarian assistance such as rice growing in Guinea, tea planting in Morocco. Although this dovetails neatly with heavier caliber Soviet schemes, the combination is not the result of joint planning. Almost no contact between Chinese and Russian Communists has been reported by Western diplomats in Africa. The former usually skulk behind high compound walls or traverse the back country, while Moscow's delegates try never to miss a cocktail party in the capital. One occasion on which both groups met proved disastrous. Last year at Cairo, a platoon of Russian technicians on their way home tried to shake hands with a Peking soccer team bound for Khartoum. The athletes turned their backs.

LATIN AMEHICA

Handbook for Guerrillas

In a luxurious penthouse overlooking Ahumada Street, a main drag of Santiago, Chile, two agents last week received by Morse code from Peking more than 4,000 words in flawless Spanish, relayed the slanted news free to Santiago newspapers. They also mailed without charge a weekly report to hundreds of Chileans. The daily local propaganda campaign, estimated to cost $10,000 a year, is only a fraction of a massive five-year-old drive by Peking to win friends and influence governments throughout Latin America. "If the Red Chinese get fully under way," warns a U.S. expert, "we think that their efforts to penetrate Latin America can be more effective than the Russians'."

In addition to Chile and Peru (whose approximately 20,000 local Chinese residents still lean toward Chiang Kai-shek), Peking's chief targets are Cuba and Brazil. In both countries local Communist parties are controlled by the Kremlin, but signs of sympathy for the Chinese Communists are unmistakable.

At the recent Communist Party Congress in Moscow, old-line Cuban Communist Blas Roca "resolutely supported" Khrushchev's blast at Albania, grinned while Fellow Delegate Rita Diaz ran down the aisle in her militiawoman's regalia, presented Khrushchev with a Cuban flag. Yet the same issue of the Cuban government organ Revolucion that plastered Khrushchev's attack across more than two pages also printed Peking Delegate Chou En-lai's rejoinder in full.

This newspaper display accurately reflected current internal political tension in Cuba. For while Fidel Castro proclaims himself a loyal disciple of Lenin, and dispatches 3,000 Cuban agricultural students to Soviet state farms rather than Chinese communes, Cuban anti-U.S. propaganda sounds more like Peking than Moscow, has never used Khrushchev's slogan of "peaceful coexistence." In any showdown inside the Communist bloc, Peking-style slogans would be no match for Cuba's economic dependence on the Soviet Union. So far, Castro has managed to remain friendly with both Communist titans, but if Khrushchev decides he must force a choice, the resulting purge could shake the Cuban regime to its roots.

Brazilian Communists made their choice five years ago, when Khrushchev launched his destalinization campaign. Veteran Party Boss Luis Carlos Prestes quickly climbed aboard, while a handful of other top leaders refused, were expelled, and openly joined forces with Peking. Early this year Prestes belatedly scheduled a national congress of the Brazilian Communist Party for an unprecedented open debate over Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin, but fear of exacerbating the already open wound forced its cancellation. Last week, after the 22nd Party Congress renewed the controversy, the pressure for public discussion was stronger than ever. Meanwhile, a second species of left-wing extremists made trouble for the orthodox branch of the party. Not long ago, Brazilian police investigating their militant Peasant Leagues in the poverty-stricken northeast found copies of Mao Tse-tung's famous guerrilla warfare handbook, translated into Portuguese, with illustrations in which Chinese faces had been carefully changed to Latin American faces.

The Sino-Soviet rivalry offers some interesting opportunities for the West, but at this stage of the quarrel, any attempt to exploit it risks driving them together. Philosophically, Red Chinese dogmatism and Russian flexibility are disagreements over how best to triumph over capitalism. But the acute jealousy between the two big power rivals is something else, and the question remains: How long can two competing Communist blocs maintain "peaceful coexistence"?

* They were among 24 at the recent 22nd Party Congress in Moscow that did not join Khrushchev in his demands to oust Albania from the Communist camp. The others: Japan, India, Chile, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Portugal, San Marino, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark. Iceland, Great Britain, Canada. Some delegations declined less out of sympathy for Peking than out of a desire not to weaken their local cadres by fresh internal disputes. Other silences were perhaps motivated by the desire, enunciated by Chou Enlai, not to wash dirty Red linen in public.

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