US looks to Far East

Last week I mentioned the popular wisdom that it's a good thing to get away from your own country, or the country you live in, in order not so much to see it the way the foreigner sees it, but by seeing it his way to see it differently yourself. I hope that's not too tricky a note to start on.

Only now, after a couple of weeks of being back in the United States from Mexico, do I recall our days and nights there and appreciate that I wasn't talking about what Mexicans think of Americans, I was talking about what the Mexican government and, in that country, therefore, the press, thinks about Secretary Haig. Ninety-nine Mexicans in a hundred, I'm pretty sure, don't think about America much at all. They think about themselves, just like you and me. This is easily the most salutary shock that can happen to a traveller.

I can remember a time when England – Britain, if you like – was always bang on the front pages of American newspapers because Britain was top dog. What Downing Street or Westminster decided today would cause ructions or sighs of relief in places as far apart as Vancouver and Berlin. When the Queen bestowed her honours, either through the birthday list or the New Year's list, the New York Times would print the names and capsule careers of all the new knights, the new peers who might possibly be known to Americans. Today, the British honours list is not even a news story. It becomes a news item only if a screen or stage star is knighted or a rock singer gets an OBE.

In those same old days when Britannia ruled the waves, and the roost, Englishmen arriving here for the first time routinely expected Americans to fuss over them, to look to them to set the style. These expectations were always doomed unless a given Englishman managed to involve himself in a circle of Anglophile Americans who loved England for all the wrong reasons.

To most of us the first shock was the one I indicated. Americans might like or not like Britons and Britain but they had other things on their minds and the bigger shock came when you moved around and discovered that in very many, in most parts of the country, when somebody talked of the old country, he was most likely thinking of Italy or Germany or Poland or Ireland or one of the countries of Scandinavia.

There was a time, not so long ago, when, in Minnesota, there was practically no point in running for Congress unless your name was Andersen or Andressen or Anderssen. Thirty, forty years ago in Rhode Island, the immigrant Italians disputed the key positions in politics with the old Yankee types as the Irish did in Massachusetts and as the Puerto Ricans in New York are now doing battling for political power with the old entrenched Irish, Jews and Italians.

These sobering thoughts can extend even to one's view of America itself according to which part of the country you're living in. One of the easiest mistakes to slip into – in fact it's the regular fate of foreign correspondents in this country – is to report Washington and New York under the impression that you're reporting the United States. All you have to do to jar this dangerous habit is to move a thousand miles or so away from the east coast and stay put for a while and see a new world open up in which Washington and New York are seen as part of something called the 'east coast establishment'.

Well, all this is by way of saying that if I were back in New York, I would not be seeing things the way I see them from San Francisco and I'm quite sure I would not be going to discuss the two topics I now have in mind. China and Japan.

Of course, anything that happens between Washington and Peking is national news, if not international news, but the west coast – California in particular – has always had one eye cocked for goings-on in China. It imported very much of its early labour from there. The Chinese built the railroad going east that joined the railroad coming west that was built by the Irish and, long before California became a state, seventy, eighty years before, in the 1780s when this state was Mexican, Californians shipped the pelts of the sea otter which abounded off this coast to China and traded them for mercury with which to work the silver mines. And in the late nineteenth century, China was a Christian hunting ground for American missionaries, usually Methodists and most often from California. And here in San Francisco, the Chinese are a more visible oriental presence than in any other American city.

So the other morning, the front-page photograph was not of anything happening in New York or Washington or Hollywood, it was a picture of ex-President Gerald Ford talking with the Chinese foreign minister. What came out of this meeting – which, for all the preliminary protestations that it was a private, fact-finding visit, was of course the visit of a Reagan emissary – what came out of it was that the Chinese are relieved to have from this administration the assurances they've been waiting for, that the Reagan administration recognises Communist China as the sole legitimate Chinese government.

During the presidential campaign, Mr Reagan expressed some flaming indignation about Mr Carter's closing of the American ministry in Taiwan. The Chinese, maybe not being as smart about American presidential campaigns as they are about some other things, had feared that Mr Reagan was going to restore Taiwan to full diplomatic recognition and institute in effect a two-China policy. Mr Ford was able to assure them it is not so. American policy will follow up the relations established in 1978 with the agreement to normalise their relations. In Washington last week, President Reagan told the Chinese ambassador the same thing. Back to normal as soon as possible.

This positive promise, with its implied blow to the hopes of Taiwan, has been given because, the Los Angeles Times' dispatch out of Peking said, because of the strategic significance of the relationship between China and the United States. In other words, however much Secretary Haig may dread the Communist plague infecting native rebellions in the Americas, however much he may warn and castigate the Soviet Union, he's not going to take on two Communist monoliths at the same time. The phrase 'strategic significance' of Chinese/American relations means Moscow, please note!

Japan and the Japanese used to be a topic and a people that you rarely noticed in the United States unless you lived in California where three generations of Japanese have been so conspicuous as a workforce in gardens and in stoop labour on the fruit crops and, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the immigrant Japanese and the American-born Japanese in this state were in a move which many jurists still believe was unconstitutional, they were rounded up and concentrated in what were called relocation centres, in guarded camps behind the Tehachapi Mountains.

Today I suppose you will not see in any other state as many Japanese as you do in California but, in every state of the union, you have simply to stand at a city intersection to credit the fact that one car in five sold in the United States is of Japanese make. This has led to hard times and bitter feelings in Detroit, the motorcar capital of the United States.

Detroit – meaning the automobile makers and the automobile workers – wants protection in the political sense of deliberate restriction by the United States on the importation of Japanese cars and, again, during the campaign when Mr Reagan was in Detroit, he waxed eloquent and with much compassion about the need to do this. After all, every big European country, except Germany, has done it but, yet again, solutions seen from the hustings are simpler far than solutions seen from the White House.

The United States has a bigger stake than any other country in the armed strength of Japan. Only four months ago, while Mr Carter was physically in the White House, though his lease was up, he made bitter complaints to Tokyo about the comparatively puny amount Japan was budgeting for defence this year – a mere $10 billion. The Japanese said it was all they could afford and if the United States restricted Japanese cars by law, they couldn't afford that.

So, Mr Reagan and General Haig have been giving a sympathetic hearing to the Japanese foreign minister, Mr Ito, who's been in Washington this week. He's promised a voluntary curb on exporting Japanese cars to this country and he's urged this administration not to abandon free trade. The most influential voice raised in support this view is that of Mr Paul Volcker who is the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He thinks that the protectionist policy adopted by Britain and France is a very dangerous one. 'I don't think', he said, 'we can make a safety net for everyone. Nobody would adjust and we'd never get rid of inflation if there were no risks in economic life.'

What he has in mind – and he has the primary authority for releasing or restraining the supply of money – what he has in mind is that an import curb on Japanese cars would increase their price by about 50 per cent and what that would do to the price of American cars nobody can know, but we can guess.

Mr Volcker is old enough to have heard of, and to have studied, the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff of the 1920s which was a powerful stimulant to the unreal prosperity that collapsed in 1929 and, in warning not only to the administration, but to the European allies who have embarked on protection, Mr Volcker said, 'Once you start this game, everybody becomes vulnerable. There will follow complaints about American textile exports, American chemical exports to Europe and on and on into, presumably, the valley of the shadow of runaway inflation, an international trade war and the darker shadow of a second Great Depression.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.