China Alleges Soviet Threat Against N.Z.C.P.

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30393, 18 March 1964, Page 7

China Alleges Soviet Threat Against N.Z.C.P.

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

TOKYO, March 16. China today renewed Its attack against the Soviet Union, saying it had threatened to exclude the New Zealand Communist Party from the Communist ranks for supporting the Chinese in the Moscow-Peking dispute. The charge was made in a statement quoting Mr V. G. Wilcox, general secretary of the New Zealand Communist Party, who toured Communist China last month. His statement was carried by the New China News Agency, and will appear in Tuesday’s editions of the official “Peking People’s Daily” and the theoretical journal, “Red Flag.”

The broadcast quoted Mr Wilcox as saying that Mr M. A. Suslov, secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, told him during a meeting in Moscow last September that he was wrong in supporting Communist China and Albania. “We bad hoped that you might change. M you change,

you will remain within the ranks of the fraternal world parties of Marxism-Leninism. But if you do not change, then, of course, you will be outside and excluded,” Mr Suslov had told Mr Wilcox. Mr Wilcox had also told Mr Suslov and other Russian leaders that they were adopting an attitude of “great-na-tion chauvinism.”

“But the answer he got in effect amounted to this: ‘Comrade Wilcox, we are very perturbed at the position of the Communist Party of New Zealand and your position in leadership. You are little nation chauvinism,’ ” the broadcast said. Concerning a Soviet demand for stopping the polemics, Mr Wilcox said: “It is our opinion that at this stage open polemics cannot be stopped. The issues are too fundamental, they affect the future not only of our parties but of the whole Socialist world, the future of humanity. “The polemics can only be stopped now if the revisionists give up their revisionism both in words and deeds.**