The Press SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 1951. New Plan For China

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26319, 13 January 1951, Page 6

The Press SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 1951. New Plan For China

The new plan put forward by the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference for a Far Eastern settlement offers the best encouragement yet to the Chinese to enter into negotiations with the West. The proposal to negotiate at Big Power level meets Peiping’s conception of the dignity and importance of the new China; and the programme for negotiation is widened to include two subjects Peiping has said it wants to discuss in conjunction with a Korea settlement—Formosa and the entry of Communist China to the United Nations. Essentially, this is the approach Britain has advised and urged upon the United States. Britain has felt there was little or no chance of getting a just peace on Korea unless the conversations were expanded to take in all the other questions—Formosa, recognition, and membership of the United Nations. The United States, on the other hand, has wanted negotiations to be confined to Korea alone, other matters waiting upon settlement of the issue between the Peiping Government and the United Nations. It is difficult to judge which policy’ is the more likely to succeed. British policy does not assume that the Peiping Government will become a permanent satellite of Moscow and, therefore, does not favour steps that would encourage it to do so. Communist China, Britain has represented, is merely the instrument of Soviet policy for the moment, serving the Soviet purpose of sinking Western resources in Asia. The American Administration is reported not necessarily to differ from the British estimate of future relations between Peiping and Moscow; ,but it sees the next three years as the really critical years and, therefore, does not believe it wise to enter into negotiations under which the important strategic island of Formosa might be exchanged for a few Communist promises about Korea that probably would not be kept. Certainly, the American premises fit more closely into the pattern of Chinese political thinking drawn by the flood of propaganda from Peiping. Whether Peiping be near or far from Moscow at the moment is beside the point that, in the heady air of success at home and in a foreign venture, the Chinese Communists appear to be set on dominating Eastern and Southern Asia. Everything that Peiping says and does gives the impression that the Chinese leaders are even more careless of world peace than the Soviet leaders. The clear and very grave dangers in this Chinese attitude provide, of course, the best of reasons for getting Peiping somehow to a conference table where its claims can be discussed, where the Western nations can again assure China that they want friendly terms with her, and where also, it can be impressed on her that if she persists in attempting conquest by force or by subversion she will be resisted. For this reason a move that offers a chance for another beginning is to be welcomed.