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As the Chinese Red envoy barked on, the U.S.'s Austin sat, large and unhappy in a rumpled brown suit, wearing his translation phones like a crown of thorns. Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb listened with the urbane equanimity a Foreign Office man must pull on along with his drawers and socks while dressing each morning. Secretary General Trygve Lie, a ponderous, uncomfortable figure in blue, his hand plunged deep inside his coat, seemed a Falstaff, cast, under protest, as Napoleon. Yugoslavia's Ales Bebler, presiding, wore a sleepy, slit-eyed look of boredom. Nationalist China's T. F. Tsiang sat with the uninterested look of one who had known all along what was coming, and finally appeared to be dozing. All except Tsiang had held such high hopes of Wu's visit to Lake Success. They would make a deal with Mao's agent. They would reassure him about the West's intentions. They would disabuse him of the Moscow propaganda line.
Wu's words, however, left no basis for hope that Mao could be dealt with, reassured or weaned away from Moscow. To think of appeasing the master of the rasping, threatening Wu was to think of kissing a buzz saw. What stood revealed after two hours at Lake Success was naked military force.
The Hunter. To Wu's climactic moment at Lake Success, to the triumphant onrush of the Chinese Red army in Korea, the master in Peking had long dedicated himself. In a quarter-century of conspiracy and armed aggression against his own people, Mao Tse-tung has never lost his vision of the Chinese Communist movement as a prelude and vital part of the greater international Communist drive for world rule.
Ten years ago, in The New Democracy, using the jargon of the comrades, Mao wrote: "The world now lives in an era of revolution and war, a new era, where capitalism is definitely dying and socialism is beginning to flourish. In the international environment of the middle of the 20th Century, there are only two ways open to all decent people in the colonies and semi-colonies. They must either go over to the side of the imperialist front or take part in the world revolution. They must choose between these two. There is no other way."
Last year Mao said it again, even more distinctly: "We belong to the anti-imperialist front headed by the U.S.S.R., and we can only look for genuine friendly aid from that front and not from the imperialist front. . . We also oppose the illusion of a third road ... In the world without exception one either leans to the side of imperialism or the side of socialism. Neutrality is a camouflage." He flavored his pronouncement with a Chinese metaphor: "You have to choose between killing the tiger or being eaten by it."
Last week the world could see that Red China, with Red Russia, had gone ahunting after the tiger of freedom. And Mao had even voiced his scorn for the quarry —"a paper tiger."
The Weapon. A hunter needs a weapon. The formidable one that Mao bore, the Chinese Red army, had been forged with Russian connivance in a manner that the West did not yet widely comprehend.