The Battering Ram

In the big conference room in Paris' Palais de Chaillot, the U.S. found itself confronting an almost unified opposition. Four years after the Korean armistice, most of its Western allies were itching to get a chunk of the Red Chinese market and unwilling to agree that trade with Red China should be subject to heavier restrictions than trade with Russia. Only Turkey, of all the 15 nations comprising CHIN-COM (the voluntary committee founded during the Korean war to coordinate a selective embargo on Red China) supported the U.S. insistence that the "China differential" should be maintained. At Bermuda two months ago Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had warned Eisenhower that if the U.S. did not agree to major easements, the British government would be forced to "go it alone."

Bowing to pressure, the U.S. was prepared to reduce the number of embargoed items on the China list if the other nations agreed to tighten the escape clauses. But in three weeks of talk the British were adamant. France, West Germany and Japan were equally eager but not so outspoken. The U.S. argued that though China might get the same goods anyway through Russia, the added delay and cost retarded Chinese industrialization and imposed a strain on the trans-Siberian Railroad. The British retorted that most Western goods are transshipped by sea at Gdynia, Poland, are sent in Communist bottoms to Shanghai, bypassing Hong Kong.

The chief concern of all the CHINCOM nations was the effect on U.S. public opinion of any seeming concession to Red China. Then the U.S. embassy in Taipei was sacked by a Nationalist Chinese mob. Reasoning that U.S. annoyance at Formosa would make U.S. reaction more even-tempered, Britain seized the opportunity to announce that it was going to act alone. Two days later British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd told a cheering Commons that though Britain would continue to cooperate with CHINCOM, "in the future we shall adopt the same lists for China and the Soviet bloc."

Britain's new policy would permit British manufacturers to sell machine tools, trucks, bulldozers, locomotives and tires to China. The decision, declared the British National Union of Manufacturers, "should open wide and profitable markets to British exports. The restrictions are but out-of-date diplomatic considerations."

In fact, Britain's decision was as much political as economic. Red China is in the throes of an economic crisis, has cut back its industrial production and is in no position to buy large quantities of anything just now. Better than 80% of its trade is already pledged to Russia and the satellites. Though British exports to China are expected to double, they will still amount to less than 1% of total British exports. But in British terms adherence to the U.S. position had subjected the government to an unbearable political gibe that Britain was simply being a "lackey" to Washington. Said one government official: "We cannot persuade our people that China is a greater danger in the world than Russia-- especially after the events in Hungary. We just cannot explain to British businessmen any longer why they can sell jeeps or tractors or even a tire factory to the Russians but not to the Chinese."

In Washington the State Department declared itself "most disappointed" and added that "a majority of the countries sought a unanimous agreement on the maintenance of a differential." The British privately replied that though a majority had indeed voted in favor of united action, an equal majority was opposed to the U.S. position of maintaining a stiff differential. Concluded Paris' Le Monde: "Britain has played the part of a battering ram, and her partners are going to take advantage of the breach that has been opened."

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