China: More Signals

AS the American table tennis team jetted home from China last week, their trip was still causing reverberations among U.S. adversaries and allies alike. A somewhat shaken Soviet diplomat offered TIME a dyspeptic view of the whole affair: "Mao invites a bunch of your Ping Pong players, and Chou offers them lemonade, rice cookies and a free trip to the Chinese wall. Mao could not have made a better public relations move even if he had denounced his own sayings and told the world he was Mr. Henry Ford's secret business partner. This is not foreign policy. It just shows that Mr. Mao also knows something about Madison Avenue."

In Tokyo, Japanese businessmen saw a hidden meaning in the fact that some of the U.S. team members had corporate ties, especially their leader, Graham Steenhoven, a Chrysler personnel supervisor. Convinced that Steenhoven carried secret orders to clinch a business deal with Peking, Japanese automen telexed their U.S. offices to find out everything possible about him. Told that he was not listed among Chrysler's top executives, they cabled again: "Impossible, look harder."

Dismissed Dissents. The sudden anxiety created abroad by the table tennis team's visit was mirrored at home by an unexpected dissenter: Vice President Spiro Agnew. Attending the Republican Governors Conference at Williamsburg last week, Agnew summoned nine reporters to a late-night off-the-record chat and argued that the Administration was moving too fast in welcoming Peking's overtures, which he viewed as an easy propaganda victory for China and one, moreover, that undercut Taiwan. After his views leaked out, Agnew aides denied that there was any disagreement between the Vice President and his boss--though clearly there had been. If Agnew hoped to gain politically, he had badly misread the mood of the nation, which heavily favored Nixon's steps toward detente with China. The conservative Detroit News, for instance, which normally supports Agnew, dismissed his dissent as the "nihilism of a know-nothing nabob."

Miss Universe? Meantime the delicate business of diplomatic signaling continued. Secretary of State William Rogers took pains to underscore the Administration's official attitude to Premier Chou En-lai's comment that a "new page" had been opened in Sino-American relations. Said Rogers: "We would hope that it becomes a new chapter." President Nixon pointedly called in Team Leader Steenhoven to congratulate him on his role in the affair. Steenhoven himself waited until he was home in Detroit to announce the next step, an American tour "in the near future" by a Chinese table tennis team.

Reflecting an upsurge of interest by Americans in the new China, other invitations poured into Peking. The New England Amateur Athletic Association invited China to send athletes to the Hoi-yoke, Mass., Marathon on June 6. Chinese competitors were asked to join in everything from the U.S. Open tennis championships to the Miss Universe contest. United Air Lines, somewhat precipitously, applied to the Civil Aeronautics Board for permission to fly to Canton, Shanghai and Peking.

For many Americans, the transition from enmity to warmth on the part of Peking came almost too suddenly to absorb. As NBC's John Rich put it, after traveling with the table tennis team in China, "It made me feel a bit strange, having just come out of Viet Nam a couple of days before, where we had incoming Chinese-made mortar rounds, to sit and toast the host of a dinner on the commune, the chairman of the revolutionary committee. He was a Peoples' Liberation Army officer in his uniform with red stars and all."

Peking's new confidence was evident in the fact that the government had in vited such veteran Far East reporters as the New York Times's Tillman Durdin and Associated Press's John Roderick, who could make comparisons between the brightly lit "sin city" that was Shanghai before the Communist takeover, and the drab but egalitarian Shanghai of today. Durdin found Shanghai "full of energy and drive, but with little of the ebullience and sparkle" that it used to have. "The atmosphere is provincial, where before it was sophisticated and international." Standing in the Shanghai Bund headquarters of the Bank of China, with its array of Mao pictures, Durdin concluded that legendary Financier T.V. Soong, who built the bank in the 1930s, would never recognize "the bizarre mingling of banking with politics."

Unanswered Questions. Roderick picked up what may have been a diplomatic signal: a hint from his hosts that if the U.S. declared that it does not regard Taiwan and the mainland as "two Chinas" then Peking might not demand removal of U.S. troops from Taiwan as a precondition for improved relations.

The importance of the hint could be exaggerated, since Mao and Nixon were communicating through French and other diplomatic channels as long ago as last year. Nixon passed the message that he did indeed intend to withdraw speedily from Viet Nam, to end the impasse between China and the U.S. over Taiwan and to bring Peking into the United Nations. What remains unanswered in the new diplomatic moves is how Peking is squaring its Ping Pong diplomacy with Hanoi. The pace of the war in Indochina will remain a major factor in determining the pace of a Sino-American rapprochement. Even so, Nixon has already said that he would like to visit China. American Author Edgar Snow, writing in LIFE, says that Mao told him as long ago as last fall that Peking would welcome the man that China considers America's chief monopoly capitalist, either as a tourist or as President.

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