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The U.S. was not Peking's only target last week. When the U.N.'s Social Committee turned to the problem of Bengali refugees in India—a situation that pits two Third World powers against each other—the Chinese came out strongly against India. "They continue to exploit the question of refugees," said China's Fu Hao, and "to carry out subversive activities" against Pakistan.
The Chinese criticism sounded particularly harsh in view of reports that India and China are in fact moving toward more cordial relations. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wrote Chou En-lai to congratulate him on China's entering the U.N., and Chou sent a warm reply: "May the friendship between the peoples of China and India grow and develop daily." It was the first such high-level correspondence since the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict, when the two nations broke off commercial ties and reduced their diplomatic relations to the charge-d'affaires level. Last week there were reports in New Delhi that the two nations would soon exchange ambassadors, which suggests an interesting question: Is China hoping to mediate the Bengal dispute and thus gain influence on the subcontinent, as the Soviets did after their role in settling the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war?
Whatever was happening behind the scenes, the U.N. General Assembly soon reverted to its favorite public activity, speechmaking. The Chinese, all neatly uniformed in Mao tunics, sat in stoic silence as delegate after delegate droned on about a Soviet proposal for an all-nation summit conference on disarmament. The Yugoslav delegate offered his views in English, the Mongolian spoke in Russian, and in the galleries the rows of plastic earphones hummed simultaneously in French and Spanish, like disembodied voices in some Fellini extravaganza.
The Chinese have scheduled their own disarmament speech this week, but they have already upstaged themselves. On the remote Lop Nor proving grounds in Sinkiang region, Chinese technicians detonated their first atomic explosion in more than a year. It was a small bomb, as such things go—the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. That is almost exactly the size of the one that demolished Hiroshima.