SHIFT IN PEKING'S ATTITUDE ON SHIPPING SOVIET AID TO VIETNAM?
In a statement issued in Hanoi February 28, the Vietnam News Agency said it had been "authorized" to declare that the reports "spread by American and other Western news agencies" about shipments of matériel being held up in transit across China "are sheer fabrications invented for the most vile purposes." China has given its "wholehearted help in transporting to Vietnam, adequately and according to schedule, aid goods from the Soviet Union and some other countries."
This release was published by the Hsinhua News Agency March 2. Hsinhua also carried a lengthy Peking dispatch on the same subject. This blamed Moscow as the source of the "preposterous anti-China slander." Despite the harshness of the article, it was more restrained than have been other attacks leveled against Brezhnev-Kosygin recently.
The People's Daily in Peking carried a similar article March 2. It, too, took a violent tone, denouncing the "slanders" as "an attempt to drive a wedge into the militant solidarity between the Chinese and Vietnamese peoples." However, the article wound up with the declaration, “We have never failed to transport every little bit of the material in transit through China as our responsibility requires and so long as the Vietnamese comrades wanted."
Opponents of the U.S. aggression in Vietnam will be little interested in allocating the blame in this dispute. What they will want to know is, does this represent complete readiness on the part of Peking to assist in getting supplies to the Vietnamese freedom fighters and the beleaguered Vietnamese workers state? If so, the implied promise to handle shipments in accordance with the norms of international solidarity is to be welcomed as a step in the right direction. It should be followed up by offering the Soviet government a united front in mobilizing such aid.
THE