To Red China--Unless

One month after conceding "in principle" that Americans are entitled to firsthand reporting from Red China (TIME, July 29), Secretary of State John Foster Dulles took the logical next step. Last week he gave permission to 24 news-gathering organizations to send U.S. reporters to the Chinese mainland for the first time since 1949.

It was, nonetheless, a grudging retreat, and its course was mined with restrictions that not only invited continued criticism from the press but limited the scope and effectiveness of the reporting job that Dulles finally conceded to be necessary, or at least inevitable. No cameramen--for press, newsreel or TV--will be allowed into China (although reporters may carry cameras). Representation will be limited to the big newspapers, magazines, wire services and broadcasting companies that 1) can now afford to maintain one "fulltime American correspondent overseas" and 2) are prepared to send one staffer for "six months or longer" to China on a resident basis.

The Meaning of Meaningless. At the same time, Secretary Dulles said that newsmen's passports will be validated only for seven months, "on an experimental basis," thereby putting the U.S. press on notice that it may stay in China on the sufferance of the State Department. During the probationary period, State Department officials explained, they will decide for themselves if Communist restrictions on news gathering make the experiment "meaningless."

Thus, though Secretary Dulles attributed his decision to unspecified "new factors" in the China situation, it was clear that the State Department continued to consider the foreign operations of the press an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Said the pro-Administration New York Herald Tribune: "Inasmuch as the American press has been functioning since before the birth of the Republic and has a special position under the U.S. Constitution, the idea that it should be placed on probation by the State Department is somewhat breathtaking."

Old China Hands. Other editors were quick to agree with the Trib. South Dakota's Republican Sioux Falls Argus Leader (circ. 51,575), which has sent staffers to Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Iron Curtain countries, protested that Secretary Dulles' built-in discrimination against enterprising smaller papers "is intolerable under the American press system." Said Virginius Dabney, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and editor of Virginia's Richmond Times-Dispatch: "I find no justification for a limit on the number of legitimate, accredited correspondents."

Still to be heard from was the government of Red China, which first offered to admit a limited number of U.S. correspondents a year ago, has not since renewed the invitation. On the assumption that the visas would be forthcoming, a number of old China hands began packing their bags. Among them: the Chicago Daily News's Keyes Beech, the Baltimore Sun's Phil Potter, the New York Times's Tillman Durdin, TIME-LIFE'S James Burke (who was a TIME-LIFE correspondent in Peking from 1947 io 1949). This week Radio Peking gave an answer that started some of them unpacking again. The Dulles decision to let U.S. newsmen into China, said the broadcast, is "completely unacceptable to the Chinese people"--unless. The unless: U.S. agreement to invite Chinese Communist correspondents on a reciprocal basis.

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