The Asian Axis

The four seas are seething,

Clouds lowering and waters raging.

The five continents are rocked

By storm and thunder.

With that quotation from Mao Tse-tung's collected poems, Red Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi hailed Indonesia's withdrawal from the United Nations as not only "a lofty and just revolutionary move," but "the first earth-rending spring thunderbolt of 1965." Clearly the implication was that a second thunderbolt would not be far behind, and last week it came. Communist China's Premier Chou En-lai proposed the creation of a new U.N.--"a revolutionary" one presumably made up of Afro-Asians and free from "the manipulation of U.S. imperialism."

The occasion was a Peking banquet for a 44-man Indonesian delegation headed by Sukarno's Foreign Minister Subandrio. Even in making his proposal, Chou showed Peking's scorn for any form of international organization. China, he said with heavy irony, wants "rival dramas to be staged in competition with that body which calls itself the U.N. How can it be that the U.S. is allowed to stage its own drama, while we are not?"

Few doubted that the Red Chinese would still jump at the chance to join the existing U.N. troupe, if they were allowed to take over Nationalist China's role. For the present, not a single U.N. member, Afro-Asian or other, paid any attention to Peking's challenge, and even such "neutralists" as Tito and Nasser were opposed to the Chinese-Indonesian game. The General Assembly was more interested in achieving some resolution of the U.N.'s continuing financial crisis. At week's end, Subandrio agreed to accept $100 million in aid from Peking plus "military experience"--presumably Mao's guerrilla-warfare manual of arms. A joint communique also attacked unnamed countries "trying to forestall" an international Afro-Asian conference to be held in Algiers in late spring, where Peking may well try to promote its "R.U.N."

It all added up to a new Peking-Djakarta axis that raises some disturbing problems for both East and West. The Russians have invested $1 billion in arms and aid to Indonesia, only to find Sukarno plunging into the Peking camp. And thoughtful U.N. diplomats wonder if such anti-Western nations as Cambodia, Mali and perhaps half a dozen others might not be tempted in time by Peking's U.N., if in fact it ever gets off the ground.

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