Slightly Less Cordial

Wearing sweet-smelling jasmine and a gay sarong, a Burmese beauty queen welcomed Chou En-lai to Rangoon last week, on the second stage of his triumphal swing around Asia. Thousands of well-organized Chinese flourished pictures of Mao Tse-tung, chanted Communist slogans and scattered rose petals as Chou drove into town from the airport. But fewer than 500 Burmese bothered to line the street, and it seemed that Rangoon, 1,100 miles nearer Dienbienphu than India's New Delhi, was not quite so enthusiastic about its Red China visitor.

For nine hours Chou conferred with Burma's able Socialist Premier Nu, who had warned Nehru at the Colombo conference (TIME, May 10) that the Communists in Indo-China and in Burma's own upcountry regions were a little too close for comfort. The two ministers reportedly considered a Red China-Burma non-aggression pact, and in public they hailed their "most friendly and cordial meeting." The pro-government papers eagerly paid tribute to Red China as the Asian power "capable of keeping at bay the capitalist military machine." But in Burma, unlike India, it seemed that there were a few significant doubts. Rangoon's independent Nation argued that a non-aggression pact might have real meaning if it implied Red China's "cessation of support for the Burmese Communist Party, which is an illegal organization; cessation of the campaign now being carried on to subvert the loyalty of the peoples of border areas; cessation of all propaganda tending to undermine democratic processes in this country; and cessation of the attempt on all fronts to build up in this country a fifth column loyal to People's China."

And the day Chou left Rangoon for home, the Burmese army delivered a farewell token of its own: it stormed into headquarters of a Red guerrilla band in Kachin state, less than 50 miles from the Red China border, and killed a couple of Chou's top-ranking agents in Burma.

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