U.S. may wish Chinese girl tennis star had gone home

Press, 26 April 1983, Page 15

U.S. may wish Chinese girl tennis star had gone home

From

JONATHAN MIRSKY

in Peking

China’s rage over the granting of political asylum in the United States to a tennis star may turn to apoplexy if Washington decides to do the same for large numbers of Chinese students.

Peking has sent more than 10,000 students to study in the United States. By the end of last year, according to figures published by the United States Immigration and Naturalisation Service, 1030 Chinese — most of them citizens of the People’s Republic — had applied for political asylum. The fact that as many as 10 per cent of its students should be applying for asylum is highly embarrassing to Peking. It may partly explain why it has decided to cut cultural and sporting exchanges, but not educational ones. To sever educational links and then find that more than a thousand students wanted to remain where they are would rebound on Peking, leaving the propaganda advantage clearly in Washington’s court.

However, stopping the cultural and athletic exchanges is more than a shot across Washington’s bows. The next step could be a reduction in diplomatic arrangements, with ambassadors recalled. Peking did just that with the Netherlands in 1981 and warned the Americans at the time that the same thing could happen to them if they persisted in treating Taiwan as more than a province of China. Superficially, the present sanctions may seem absurd. Chinese canoeists will not battle white water in the United States and “Star Wars” and “Kramer vs Kramer” will not pack Peking

cinemas. Yet it marks the end of an era. The romance kindled by Richard Nixon in 1972 is over. It reached its zenith in 1980 when Jimmy Carter’s Defence Secretary, Harold Brown, said in Peking that China and the United States were proceeding on parallel lines, and Chinese generals with long shopping lists examined the American arms locker.

Ronald Reagan changed all that. Military but non-lethal equipment and computers promised by Carter never materialised or arrived late. On the grounds that the Chinese were, after all, Communists, the Defence Department opposed shipping anything to Peking which might be turned into a weapon. The fear was heightened by China’s ability to strike the western United States with its new ICBMs.

Deng Xiaoping had taken the lead in warning visiting Americans about Taiwan and all related issues. Recently he harangued a congressional delegation so brutally that its leader “Tip” O’Neill admitted that he had never fully understood the depth of Chinese passions on the Taiwan issue. What the White House may not grasp is China’s infinite patience on questions of principle. Peking waited from 1949 to 1972 for a Right-wing American President to bend to the view that there is only one China and that all Chinese consider Taiwan to be a part of it. Now that Reagan has apparently broken the American agreement, signed last August, to reduce arms sales to Taiwan, China has accused him of being “juridically impeachable and morally condemnable.” Copyright — London Observer Service.