Peking Tact

While touring the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, a group of senior Chinese journalists and information officials paused to take pictures of each other.

Looming in their view finders were the modernistic and now familiar contours of the Watergate complex. That was about as close as the Chinese showed any desire to get to Watergate--the real estate or the scandal--in their extraordinary travels across the U.S. But the subject kept following them.

Henry Kissinger touched on Watergate, telling them: "You are here at a time when home policy is more in the news than foreign policy. When you get home, tell your friends that everything they know of our purposes remains intact, that this [Sino-American detente] is a matter of the United States, not this or that transitory event."

American reporters covering the Chinese repeatedly asked their reactions to Watergate and press coverage of the investigation. The responses were most tactful. Replied Wang Chen, 54, deputy director of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's information department:

"Even American journalists are not in a position to say how this will come out." Questioned as to whether U.S. reporters' relentless pursuit of the Watergate scandal might jibe with Mao Tse-tung's injunction that the press should "serve the people," she replied, "I would rather not comment on that."

The Chinese, in fact, seem studiously uninterested in controversy; their role is at least partly diplomatic. The 22 news officials are returning last fall's visit to China of 22 members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. When the tour concludes June 17, the Chinese will have covered 8,000 miles in four weeks and spanned the U.S. from Manhattan to Honolulu.

Headed by Chu Mu-chi, 56, director of the New China News Agency, the delegation has shown an omnivorous appetite for economics, sociology and Americana in general. Mayor John Lindsay treated them to a tour of Harlem streets, where they took time out to chat with sidewalk winos. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley bestowed honorary citizenship on the visitors. In Washington they donned hard hats to interview construction workers. Any mention of statistics brought out pens and notebooks. Informed during an inspection of an Illinois ranch that only 4% of the 220 million U.S. citizens work on farms, Chao Chi-hua, a deputy director in Peking's Foreign Ministry, marveled: "In China, it still takes four people to feed five." Humorously urged by Massachusetts Governor Francis W. Sargent "to spread the word around that the Bay State has the finest lobster and the best Governor," Chu Mu-chi responded diplomatically: "We will never forget the lobster, but unhappily we cannot campaign for a Governor."

When the Chinese get home, their reportage is likely to be friendly. Chu Mu-chi's seven brief dispatches through the New China News Agency have already signaled a new mellowing. "The American people are a great people," he wrote in one story, promising that the Chinese journalists "will make their own contribution" to growing Sino-American friendship.

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