RED CHINA
(See Cover)
"Communism is not love!" cried Mao Tse-tung. "Communism is a hammer we use to destroy our enemies!"
Mao, the somewhat enigmatic ruler of Red China, has certainly been flailing in all directions with his hammer of late, but nothing much has been destroyed. Even Nikita Khrushchev, Mao's most recent target, has emerged unscathed from Peking's incessant blows. The only thing Mao has done with his paper hammer is to fan new hatreds for himself and his Red regime.
Tiny Allies. Not too long ago, Red China had friends galore. Many of the underdeveloped nations of Asia, and colonial peoples everywhere, listened admiringly to Mao's boastful plans of a swift transition from poverty to plenty. The left wing in Western Europe and the U.S., disenchanted with Stalin's terror, saw Mao as a new and nobler architect of a peoples' socialism. In the United Nations, it seemed only a matter of time before rambunctious Afro-Asian votes overcame U.S. resistance to the idea of taking China's seat away from the Nationalists on Formosa and giving it to the Communist regime.
But Mao finds little sympathy anywhere in the world today. He has embroiled his hard-pressed country in simultaneous feuds with the U.S., the Soviet Union and India, the three most populous nations in the world after his own. In fact, he has plunged China into an isolation so complete that he can count as certain allies only tiny North Korea in Asia and even tinier Albania in Europe.
It seems like sheer lunacy for Mao to challenge the two greatest powers on earth at a time when China's industry and agriculture are still staggering from the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and before he has the armaments to engage in any large-scale contest. But it is entirely possible that Mao may have come to feel that the only way to break China's economic fetters, and still abide by his harsh ideological tenets, lies in a dramatic change in the international political order.
To that end he has emphasized both race and color in his attempt to win friends and alliances. Red China has always dreamed of one day employing Indonesia's oil, Thailand's rice, even Japan's technology, as fuel for a huge Asian alliance that could safely defy the West. And now Mao has been emphasizing color as a way to align the have-not nations of Asia and Africa against the West.
World's 90%. Fortunately, few Asian lands are in a mood to follow Red China. Japan is enjoying an industrial boom and an affluent life comparable to that of Western Europe. Formosa, with significant U.S. aid, has had successive fine harvests in contrast to mainland China, and boasts a battle-ready army of 400,000 men. The Philippines has a stable working democracy these days, and is forging close links with its fellow Malay nations. Malaysia, a state scheduled to be born this month, will federate Malaya, North Borneo, Singapore and Sarawak in an anti-Communist grouping. Indonesia is no more unstable than before. India, brought face-to-face with reality by Red China's 1962 assault, is rebuilding its army with the help of Russia, Britain and the U.S. Even the non-Communist states in trouble—South Korea, South Viet Nam and Burma—are in little danger of a Communist takeover.
Thus the rim of nations that surround the vast mainland of China is