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But north is where the Chinese are going: in ten years the population of Manchuria has doubled to some 45 million, and even desert-dotted Sinkiang has grown by almost a million people. In the Soviet satellite of Outer Mongolia, Peking has succeeded in infiltrating 20,000 Chinese laborers. "What are you worried about?" a Russian engineer asked an American not long ago. "You have the whole Pacific between you and China, while we have nothing but a line drawn on a map."
These tensions, though held within bounds by a common ideology and by Red China's technical ineptness, have clearly been increased by Nikita Khrushchev's U.S. tour last month. In his half-dozen private meetings with Mao last week, as in his public speeches, Khrushchev seemed to be saying that, for the moment at least, he wants to concentrate on relaxing tensions between Moscow and Washington. Presumably, too, he made it clear that, even though Peking has dropped its irritating claim that Red China will reach the final stage of Communism ahead of Russia, Moscow still disapproves of Mao's communes. Khrushchev may even have repeated, in politer fashion, his snorted comment to U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey eleven months ago: "Communes are oldfashioned; they are reactionary. We tried that after the Revolution. It doesn't work."
"They Don't Understand." But whether Nikita's strictures will have much effect on Mao is doubtful. Even before the Soviet leader's big TU-114 landed at Peking Airport last week, Liu Shao-chi had undermined part of Nikita's mission by raging against U.S. support of the Chinese Nationalists and crying, "We Chinese people are determined to liberate our territory of Taiwan, the Pescadores, Quemoy and Matsu." As for abandoning the communes, the Chinese answer is implicit in Liu's unconcealed belief that the trouble with the Russians is that "they don't understand the Chinese."
Neither these nor any other visible points of discord are likely to bring an open breach between Red China and the Soviet Union in the foreseeable future. Peking desperately needs Russia as its only source of military, economic and technical help. Russia cannot afford to lose the alliance with Red China, and with it the claim to leadership of a bloc of nations that covers a quarter of the globe. But with Red China in the hands of men like Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-chi, who believe that economic power can be created and a world won on the basis of fanaticism, slave labor and bellicosity, the tensions between Moscow and Peking seem unlikely to diminish. In days to come, despite the show of solidarity that they staged in Peking last week, both Russia and Red China may even come to look back on the first ten years of Communist power in China as the easiest.
* The size of mainland China's population has long been in dispute. The last official count made by the Nationalists in 1947 gave the figure as 456,500,000. In a "direct census" taken in 1953, Chinese Reds claimed a population of 582,600,000. Some Chinese authorities believe that the true total is much lower.