US-China relations warm

Last weekend, as I was getting out of a cab at Pennsylvania station, a covey of grasshopper children were leaping around the cab, impatient to get in. Trying to control them was a handsome, wiry man in a safari shirt and shorts, obviously their father. He suddenly gave me a sharp, cordial look and said in a clipped accent, 'Your voice gives you away'. He'd just arrived with his family from South Africa and he made a pleasant remark about these talks.

Two days later, I was taking a ferry across a wide bay on Long Island, a bay that separates the north fork of land from the south fork at the end of the island and as we trundled across the water, I heard from the car behind me a man asking an American how he could hit the main road on the south fork back to New York. He wasn't sure what to do when he reached the south fork and, always willing to help, I suggested that he follow me a mile or two to an intersection and a blinker light where I would take a left turn and he would take a right. He was excessively grateful I thought and I was flattered that it was his pretty daughter who said, 'We know you by your voice. We hear you every Tuesday at home.' Home was Hong Kong.

Now, I tell you this not out of foolish boast but just to say that such small incidents are useful reminders to a British audience as much as to me that I'm talking to many more places than Brighton and Shepherd's Bush. And this gave me pause before going on about the terrible time President Reagan is having getting his budget-cutting bill through Congress. It occurred to me that whoever you are, wherever you are, you undoubtedly have your own troubles about a budget, both national and personal and about inflation.

It makes me think twice about reporting the threatening news that though our inflation has tumbled – slipped would be better – just below ten per cent, it may go up again and this cannot be of shattering interest to listeners whose own annual inflation rate is 20 per cent or 50 per cent or, as it is in several South American countries, 70 and 80 per cent. I must say I fall into a kind of stupor of admiration for Mr Begin when I reflect that he's proudly running for re-election in a country whose annual inflation rate is 115 per cent.

So, instead of recounting the breathtaking details of how Mr Reagan may get this and may not get that, we'd do better to see what, in the end, he does get. As it is, having looked over the papers and been glued to the tube for a night or two, I find myself wanting to talk about a ping-pong player, a water polo player and a tennis player and if any earnest types are getting ready to snort that we're escaping from the world's woes into a bout of summer escapism, let me say with Emerson, 'Not so fast, little man! Tarry awhile and think!'

Last Wednesday, eight Chinese arrived in New York and went downtown to pay a courtesy call on a famous American. They were touring members of the 1981 Chinese ping-pong team and they chose this week to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the day when President Richard M. Nixon received at the White House their predecessors in a ceremony which initiated what was called at the time 'ping-pong diplomacy'.

We had much fun then, as I recall, with the apparent absurdity of the phrase and the visit, but it was the beginning of a revolutionary change in American foreign policy, whereby Richard Nixon, who had come to fame for his almost fanatical hatred and distrust of Communists, alleged Communists and fellow travellers, whether at home or abroad, restored relations between the United States and Communist China, went there and, to the amazement of us all, embraced the Chinese as new friends and allies.

Well, I hardly need to tell you that the Chinese, for one reason or another, have had a soft spot for Nixon ever since. They made no comment at all on his forced abdication and that the man the eight ping-pong players paid their respects to this week was Mr Nixon. All he was reported as saying to them was, 'That little white ball turned out to pack a lot of diplomatic power'.

It was known to the historians as 'the Nixon initiative in China'. It was cautiously, perhaps uncomfortably, followed up by Mr Carter. The discomfort arises from the fact that for three decades, America has been saying, like Mrs Micawber talking about her husband, she would never desert Taiwan. Yet, under Carter, the government withdrew its official recognition of its old ally and dependent and the Chinese will not let up in their campaign to have Taiwan declared a separate nonentity of a nation.

Mr Reagan clearly inherited this embarrassment and, during his campaign, swore passionate fidelity to Taiwan while, at the same time, feeling irresistibly drawn to Communist China as the biggest and, with American help, the most powerful possible ally against Mr Reagan's prime enemy, the Soviet Union. It was assumed that when he became president, Mr Reagan would moderate his rhetoric about the vilainies of the Russians if he was going, as he promised, to sit down sometime with them and try and limit our gigantic nuclear arsenals.

This anticipated realism would, of course, have required him not to make such a show of admiration and help for the Chinese. So, what happened?

Well, Mr Reagan played the dangerous line of publicly announcing that Soviet Communism was beginning to crumble – a risky dare to the Soviets to prove it ain't so. Then it came out that the United States, for some time, has been manning, in China, and with Chinese technicians, an electronic watchtower on nuclear activity in the Soviet Union. Then, this week, on the president's behalf, Secretary of State Haig announced a quite new policy of selling weapons to China. Talk about bear baiting!

The New York Times' veteran commentator, James Reston, wrote, after these alarming moves, 'There are times when you can feel the temperature rising and cannot avoid hearing the thunder over the Potomac and this is one of them. The administration's misconduct of foreign policy is clearly blowing up a storm.'

So much for the diplomatic power that was packed in that little white ball ten years ago.

Now for the water polo player. I introduce him in this perverse way because of an old and personal prejudice in his favour. On my very first evening at Yale, in the long, long ago, a friendless stranger fresh from England, a knock came on the door of my rooms in Harkness College and there appeared a twinkling, brown-eyed, genial, 19-year-old of athletic build. He'd heard about the lonely Englishman in his college and he simply came to welcome me. He was my first American friend and has remained one ever since.

Water polo? Well, he was the captain of the Yale water polo team. His name is Eugene V. Rostow. 'Rostow' not Rostoe, and as a lifelong Democrat who has, however, strongly believed that America was huffing and puffing and fiddling while the Soviets steadily and massively re-armed, he's been a sort of Cassandra about the state of American security.

President Reagan has nominated him to be the head of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. It seems a strange choice but, for all his knowledge of the Russian arsenal and the American arsenal, Rostow remarked, the day after he was nominated, 'We have to put an end to this madness'. And to the Senate foreign relations committee, he frankly confessed he could not see a hope of sitting down with the Russians before next March. Asked about the administration's ideas about controlling nuclear weapons, he said, 'It may be that a brilliant light will strike our officials but I don't know anyone who knows what it is yet that we want to negotiate about.'

If he means to satisfy both the president and the Senate, he's plainly going to have to exploit all his old skills of plunging and weaving and feinting and still hold on to the ball.

The tennis player is – who else? – no one but John McEnroe. The best of American sportswriters, maybe the best in the language, wonderfully well-informed, an effortless, graceful and witty writer is one Red Smith, now in his seventies. Through all his years, he's been critical but never mean or malicious but this week he was pungently sharp: 'Wimbledon', he wrote, 'that courtly gathering of the beauty and chivalry of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club is also the stage on which a spoiled brat like John McEnroe can demonstrate just how ugly an ugly American can be. He should, of course, have been flung out of the tournament on to his ear but leniency on the part of tennis officials has become something close to vice.'

After ruminating on the dubious consolation that the gentility of British sportsmen has much to teach American soccer and boxing crowds about marksmanship with bottles, beer cans and even more lethal missiles, he remarks that some of the same louts may now watch tennis and that in big money tournaments, the officials have to think of the gate and so allow the brats to get away with murder. But he sees no cause for Wimbledon to act like commercial sponsors. Penalising by awarding points to the opponent, he thinks, is 'something less than a slap on the wrist'.

Then he offers his solution. It is to throw the bums out and do it on the first offence. They should be warned before play starts that the first time they give cause, they will be pitched into the street and no appeal will be heard. Enforce such a rule just two or three times and the slum clearance job would be completed.

If a McEnroe, Connors or Nastase or any seeking to emulate them couldn't compete in the money tournaments, they might have to go to work for a living. True, there is a consitutional guarantee against cruel or unusual punishment but this would be a case of letting the punishment fit the crime.

Bully for Red!

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.

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