Ripples from the Summit

IN Tokyo, crowds gathered outside department-store display windows along the Ginza to watch live TV coverage from Peking. In Seoul, the summit glowed from sets in jampacked downtown teahouses. The presidential trip was the biggest news item in Rome since the Italian team made the finals of the 1970 World Cup soccer matches; in Uganda, it rivaled the excitement of Apollo 15. For Southeast Asia's overseas Chinese populations, the event held a special quality. A bank on Singapore's Collyer Quay sold out a supply of 500 special $4 commemorative coins in a matter of minutes; within hours, the coins were briskly trading at $100 apiece.

Until the precise content of the talks were known, the effects of the Peking summit on the rest of the world could be assessed only tentatively. In the capitals of Southeast Asia, the unexpected warmth of Peking's welcome to Nixon stirred an undefined apprehension--the feeling, in the words of one Manila newspaper, that "when the big fish swim together, many little fish get swallowed up." Officially, the leaders of Western Europe had little to say about the trip, but they were obviously concerned about how their dealings with Soviet-bloc countries might be affected by the U.S.-Chinese rapprochement. The inward-looking Arab states of the Middle East were almost alone in giving only passing press and government attention to the events in Peking.

As of last week, the waves generated by the summit were plainly visible in only four key areas:

THE SOVIET BLOC. Reflecting the deep-seated Soviet fears of Peking, Moscow greeted the summit with the strongest barrage of anti-Chinese propaganda since the Sino-Soviet border clashes in 1969. For the benefit of Hanoi, which the Russians have been assiduously courting in recent months, the Soviet press offered--as proof of U.S.-Chinese "connivance" in the war --the fact that American warplanes continued to attack targets in North Viet Nam even as the Peking summit progressed. One Moscow newscast began with a few minutes of video tape of Nixon and Chou in Peking, then cut to footage of an attack on a Viet Nam village by U.S. planes. Other East-bloc capitals followed Moscow's lead. The Czech party paper Rude Pr`avo snarled that both the U.S. and China were obviously "willing to ally themselves with the devil."

For all that, the Russians and their allies studiously avoided a direct attack on the U.S. Evidently, they were taking no chances of upsetting Nixon's scheduled Moscow summit meeting with Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev in May. In private, the Russians were not so restrained. To a reporter, one Soviet diplomat in Washington complained: "Look how Nixon is trying to exploit our differences with Peking. This is a very dangerous game for you and for everyone."

JAPAN. The Peking summit cast yet another long shadow on the career of Premier Eisaku Sato, who has been the chief political casualty of Washington's recent surprises in trade and diplomacy. In the drawing room of his Tokyo residence, Sato glumly watched the live telecast of Nixon's arrival in Peking. Halfway through the proceedings, he observed sarcastically that "if he [Nixon] calls it the event of the century, it must be so." At the end of the telecast, Sato added unhappily: "Peking has done a pretty good job of it."

The Peking trip seems certain to intensify Tokyo's desire for greater independence from U.S. policy. Last week Tokyo continued talks with Moscow on possible Japanese participation in the construction of a 4,200-mile pipeline that would bring Siberian oil to ports on the Sea of Japan--and, not so incidentally, to the Russian troops perched along China's northern borders. Said Foreign Minister Takeo Fukuda with a smile: "If the Americans and Chinese are busy talking with each other, we're busy talking to the Russians." Given Japan's close links with the U.S. economy, such talk cannot be taken too seriously--yet. Essentially, Japan is suffering from hurt feelings about having been "left behind" by Nixon's China diplomacy. But the U.S. would be paying a high price for its approach to China if it eventually drove Japan, the world's third-ranking economic power, toward Moscow.

TAIWAN. At first, the Nationalist regime seemed totally unruffled by the events in Peking. After the People's Republic of China was admitted to the U.N., anti-Peking banners appeared outside the U.S. embassy in Taipei. Last week there was not a demonstrator in sight.

Nevertheless there was deep concern about the summit. Taiwan's newspapers, under the regime's orders, were careful not to publish photographs showing Nixon shaking hands or otherwise looking too chummy with Peking's leaders. In a speech to the 1,374-member national assembly, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek* took an oblique swipe at Washington by chiding governments that have been undertaking "appeasing actions" in Peking. More directly, his government began issuing morale-stiffening statements warning that Nixon's visit to "the Chinese Communist bandits" could lead to a test of "national will." The implication was that Taipei, despite repeated assurances from Washington, had new doubts about U.S. willingness to stick by the Taiwan defense treaty.

SOUTH VIET NAM. In public and private, President Nguyen Van Thieu has professed complete confidence in the Administration's assurances--many of them personally delivered by Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker--that the U.S. President was not about to sell out Thieu's regime while in Peking. But Thieu's sanguine view of the summit contrasted sharply with the reaction in Hanoi (which accused Nixon of "dark plotting" in Peking) and among many war-wise and cynical South Vietnamese. In Saigon, Nixon's trip stirred pessimism and a mild revival of Thieu's political opposition. Critics of the regime protested that Saigon was "crazy" to continue the war "while the U.S. secretly deals with Peking and Hanoi to safely withdraw her troops."

Even Thieu's supporters were finding that argument difficult to rebut. Doc Lap, a Saigon newspaper that has generally supported the government in the past, expressed the mood in a poem addressed to Nixon:

But suddenly, like thunder,

You so abruptly turned away from

your tough position.

The wind has not yet blown, and already you changed direction By secretly going along with the

fat Chinese storekeepers.

And you easily go there To deal and exchange with Mao!

*Chiang, 84, offered to step down from the presidency, as he does every six years when the assembly meets, but he is certain to be re-elected.

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