p Mao Tse-tung and his group claim they are dependable allies of the national liberation movement. But these are empty words because when it comes to action, when something more than hollow declarations are wanted, they look the other way. On May 29, 1967 U.S. News & World Report wrote that ever since the war in Korea, China had been avoiding a major conflict with the United States despite its 241 loud but hollow threats. As soon as developments begin to head towards a direct clash, as has happened in the Taiwan Strait in 1958, th,e tactics of verbal threats take over. On October 18, 1967 New York Times quoted Professor Alexander Ecstein of the University of Michigan as saying that China was bellicose only on the political level.

p Future historians will be at a loss to explain the attitude of Mao Tse-tung and his group to the US aggression in Vietnam, their rejection of collective action and their slander of Soviet assistance to that country. Essentially, the Maoists are acting much as some West European governments acted when in 1936-37 they obstructed assistance to the Spanish Republicans who were fighting fascism.

p In Diplomacy and Power in Washington-Peking Dealings: 1953-1967, published in Chicago in 1967, Kenneth Young, who was United States Ambassador in Thailand and the American representative in SEATO, writes that despite the official line of hostility towards the USA and the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries, the PRC has in the past 14 years been trying to maintain permanent diplomatic contacts with the USA. Peking and Washington, Young notes, "have dealt with each other far more frequently and much more extensively than is generally known”. At the United States-Chinese talks in Warsaw the discussion of issues such as the crisis in Laos and in Vietnam, he says, allowed the governments of the USA and the PRC to ascertain their intentions towards each other and establish definite limits and avoid miscalculations.

p Or take Peking’s attitude to the conflict between India and Pakistan. Does it conform to the interests of the liberation movement? The military collision between these two countries absorbed material means needed for economic development and the resultant weakening of these countries benefited only the colonialists. It diverted world public opinion from the US aggression in Vietnam. What did Peking do in this situation? It engaged in stirring up trouble, and provoked frontier clashes in the Himalayas in an effort to kindle a big war in Southeast Asia. China was about the only country that gave a hostile reception to the Tashkent Declaration, which laid the foundation for settling the conflict between India and Pakistan.

p Mao Tse-tung and his group gave another ugly display 242 during the Israeli aggression against Arab countries in June 1967. While the peoples of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were resisting the Israeli army, and the USSR and other peaceloving countries were making every effort to put an end to the aggression, Peking engaged in tub-thumping and tried to fan the military conflict although it was perfectly plain that any further protraction of the war could be used to stop the progressive development of Egypt, Syria and some other Arab countries. In a message to Cairo Chinese Premier Chou En-lai hysterically called for the continuation of the war. When the USSR organised the airlift of weapons and ammunition to the Arab countries and rendered every possible assistance in order to replace the losses and abolish the consequences of the Israeli aggression, and when a difficult political and diplomatic struggle was started to secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories occupied by them, Peking propaganda slandered, as it continues to do to this day, the Arab peoples and their true friends. Writing with indignation about the attempts of the Peking leaders to undermine Arab-Soviet friendship, the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar pointed out: "Chinese propaganda is trying to use the present tense situation caused in the Middle East by the Israeli aggression to slander the Soviet Union. <.. .> By its attempts to drive a wedge between the Arab peoples and the Soviet Union, Peking is rendering a direct service to the imperialists, who are seeking to nullify the progressive gains of the peoples of the Arab East.”

It would be legitimate to ask why the Chinese leaders, who pose as champions of the liberation of nations, are doing nothing to settle the problem of British and Portuguese colonial rule in Hongkong and Macao, why they are reconciling themselves to the existence of these colonies on their territory and supplying them with food and water, and why they are not letting the Chinese residing in these territories take action for their reunion with their homeland? The explanation is that Hongkong is a broad channel for China’s economic relations with the capitalist powers and that in recent years China’s net convertible currency receipts from Hongkong and Macao exceeded, according to foreign sources, 1,000 million US dollars annually. For Peking dollars have proved to be more important than the task of abolishing imperialist colonies on Chinese soil.