The New York Times, by Max Frankel

By Max Frankel

HONOLULU, Feb. 19—Euphoria, tempered by a certain intellectual modesty and cultural deference. That seems to describe the no tot aboard the four jets skipping their way toward a memorable encounter in Peking.

The very idea of the thing —after Korea and Vietnam and “Who lost China?”—accounts for the sense of history, at least a line or two in the books and the snapshots proving who was there.

“Both were ebullient,” said the pool correspondent's report to his colleagues about the President and Mrs. Nixon on the flight out from Washington, “and Mrs. Nixon remarked, ‘Isn't this exciting.’“

But then there is the modesty. For four days, flying the ocean and at Hawaii and Guam retreats, the President is reading China and talking China. Mrs. Nixon was said to be boning up on China. And an unusually serious contingent on the two press charter planes was cramming China. There is the geography of the thing: remember Peking is to Shanghai as Philadelphia is to New Orleans; Ming Dynasty before Ching; Nixon Tsung Tung of Mel Kuo (United States —“beautiful country”); Mao Chu Hsi of Chung Kuo (China —“middle country”).

But behind it all there is that most uncharacteristic deference. The Nixon party has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid giving offense, even in the most minute and in‐house preparations for the journey.

There was, for instance, the mat ter of refueling stops: American territory only—Hawaii and Guam on the way out. Alaska on the way home. By no means an American air base such as Okinawa, not even on the list of alternate landing sites in case Shanghai should be closed. Not even Hong Kong for an alternate. The official diversion, if needed, will be to Canton.

There was the matter of briefing the press on likely agenda items before and during the meetings, as is customary at international conferences. There have been and will be none, says Ronald L. Ziegler, the White House press secretary—”We have an understanding on that.” That, incidentally, is the only agreement or understanding to which anyone will confess.

There was the matter of instructing the traveling party on certain precautions. Don't drink the water came out in the official collection of instructions like this: “The Chinese themselves drink only boiled water, either straight or in the form of tea, and it is suggested that visitors do likewise.” Poor indoor heating was described like this: “Temperatures fluctuate drastically, even in buildings.”

As in no previous Presidential journey, the White House has guarded even the facts of ceremonial arrangements as if they were atomic secrets. No, it could not say who would be at the airport to greet the President. More correctly, it would not say.

And the list of pictured Politburo members in the official briefing book was diminished from 25 to 12 without any reference to the unacknowledged purges that prompted the deletions. Actually the delegation members have been told a good deal about the political turmoil in China and even about the long marital histories of some of their hosts, but even unofficial discussion thereof is being frowned upon.

And some of the secrecy surrounding this journey is without any explanation whatsoever. The entire American contingent in China during the visit, for instance, will be “not much more than 300” but that is the limit of White House precision. The “official” delegation—the Nixons; Secretary of State William P. Rogers; Henry A. Kissinger, the President's adviser on national security; Mr. Ziegler and 10 others—has been described as “only a small working party.” But then there are also 21 unspecified “unofficial” officials from doctors to staff aides, a press office staff of 10 more and a wholly unspecified number of “security and support” people. In addition there are 87 persons aboard the press planes, including 43 television correspondents, cameramen, directors and technicians. Already in China are 13 persons to run the ground communications station for a total “press party” of 100 plus 68 Government communications and technical

Mr. Nixon said in flying to Hawaii that the Chinese originally suggested a press corps of 10 and that Mr. Kissinger had countered by offering to reduce the normal contingent of 350 to 250. The President said his hosts were eager to “do this thing right” in the way of interpreters, facilities and banquet invitations. The White House regards 100 as a happy compromise and decided itself on the 60‐40 split between television's needs and all other media.

Two satellites over the Pacific will service the traveling party with all forms of communication, including a few exotic varieties known only to the White House. Besides the telephone and telegraph channels that the White House will share with the media, Mr. Nixon will have several “backup capabilities,” it is said. including the communications centers on his planes, the Spirit of ‘76, and its alternate, and a so‐called “suitcase satellite” that is a one‐channel feed to another satellite in the skies.

Mr. Nixon will be in instant touch, if he wishes, with his own plane even during the two hours that he spends aboard Premier Chou En‐lai's plane flying from Peking to Hangchow and from Hangchow to Shanghai next weekend.

In an unusual tribute to the land that Americans once sought to lure to Christianity with medical services, While House officials have expressed total confidence in the skill of Chinese doctors and the quality of Chinese hospitals in case of emergency.

“This is one of the safest countries we can be in from the standpoint of security,” said Brig. Gen. Walter Tkach, the President's personal physician, after receiving a colleague's report of an on‐site medical inspection. The President's plane has a small but well‐equipped clinic, including an electric defibrillator in case of a heart emergency, a tracheotomy set and a supply of blood of the President's type, A positive.

Should serious illness strike the President en route, plans have been made for a quick descent and emergency landing at various Pacific outposts. In addition, naval rescue forces have been deployed across the ocean so that none will ever be more than 30 minutes from the Presidential jet, which travels at about 625 miles an hour.

Besides safety, China also promises economy. The reporters traveling by charter will pay between $2,300 and $2,400 for each seat but only $150 for a week's room and board, including what are universally celebrated as gourmet dinners.

“Fortunately I like Chinese food,” the President told correspondents en route. “I can eat Chinese food without gaining weight, of course, the cuisine is so varied.”

Just in case, the President's plane will also carry an ample supply of Mr. Nixon's favorite weight‐watching dish —cottage cheese.

By Max Frankel

President Nixon arrived in Peking this morning to mark the end of a generation of hostility between the United States and China and to begin a new but still undefined relationship between the most powerful and the most populous of nations.

The President received a studiously correct but minimal official welcome as he began his eight‐day visit to China—the tribute due a chief of state but without any acclaim for Government that still does not officially recognize the People's Republic of China.

Besides foreign correspondents and their interpreters and a few dozen Chinese officials, the Americans were met at Peking airport by a 500‐man military honor guard. Two flags, one Chinese, one American, were raised a few minutes before Mr. Nixon's arrival, but there were no special decorations visible in this city, nor were any crowds of citizens, farmers or school children assembled for the welcome, as there usually are for visiting foreign dignitaries who are on good terms with the Chinese.

Overnight Stop in Guam

Mr. and Mrs. Nixon, leading an official party of 15 but total contingent of more than 300 Americans, flew in from the Pacific across the muddy mouth of the Yangtze River and touched down at Shanghai's Hung Chiao Airport just before 9 A.M. (8:00 P.M. Sunday New York time). The President's plane had taken off three hours and 45 minutes earlier from Guam, where Mr. Nixon made a last overnight stopover on the long journey from Washington, which began Thursday.

After having tea and soup with officials and eating a tangerine at the terminal in Shanghai during a one‐hour stay, the President and his party flew on, with a Chinese navigator aboard the plane, across the wintry North China plain and landed in Peking just before 11:30 A.M. (10:30 P.M. Sunday New York time).

Premier Chou En‐lai led the reception committee at the airport. His handshake symbolized the end of American ostracism of his Communist Government.

Mr. Nixon grasped the hand that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spurned at the Geneva Conference in 1954, when the memories of conflict between China and the United States in Korea were still raw and their contest over Indochina had just been joined. Upon Its arrival, the President's plane taxied to the end of the Peking airport in front of the simple stone terminal building. The door swung open and Mr. Nixon stepped out atop the ramp.

He could survey a huge and motionless field. Two Chinese jet planes. almost the same size as the two planes that brought the official American party, were parked conspicuously in his line of sight—they were Ilyushin‐62 four‐engine jets.

In a remote corner off to the President's left was an American air transport plane, probably the one bearing his special back‐up communications gear. All around the airport were large but relatively restrained slogans calling upon the “oppressed” peoples and nations of the world to unite and pay tribute to Marxism‐Leninism and the Chinese Communist party.

Mrs. Nixon Wears Red Coat

Mrs. Nixon wore a fur‐lined cloth coat of bright red—the same color as the giant billboards that ring the airport. She provided the only bright color in the official grouping that strolled past the honor guard.

After the official but informal greetings, the People's Liberation Army band played the anthems of the two nations—”The Star‐Spangled Banner” and “The March of the Volunteers.” Mr. Nixon and his official party reviewed the honor guard.

But there were no welcoming speeches for the small airport assemblage or for the worldwide television audience that could watch the arrival over a specially imported satellite communications system.

The moment that has been so elaborately labeled as historic by the President and by many other Americans passed swiftly into history. The arrival ceremonies were completed within a few minutes and the President and Premier Chou then drove swiftly off through a long avenue of poplars toward the capital on a crisp but clear and sunny winter day.

Premier Chou escorted the President to a black Hung Chi, or Red Flag, limousine, then walked around the car to Mr. Nixon's left and joined him behind drawn silk curtains for the drive into town.

Chinese Officials Listed

The people they passed along the 40‐minute drive are best described as groups of onlookers. Many were cyclists and others held up on the side streets along the route. But many Peking citizens obviously know of the special guest and a total of several thousand stood in random groups on the village lanes and on some of the city streets.

The Chinese Government issued a formal list of 42 persons who constituted the official greeting party at Peking airport.

Besides Premier Chou, only two Politburo members were present. They were Yeh Chienying, vice chairman of the military commission and an old marshal who was present at all the preliminary meetings between Premier Chou and Mr. Henry A. Kissinger, President Nixon's national security adviser, here last year, and Li Hsien‐nien, a Deputy Premier. Mr. Li's wife, Lin Chia‐mei, was official hostess to Mrs. Nixon.

Other officials on hand included Kuo Mo‐jo, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Chi Peng‐fei, the Foreign Minister; his wife, Hsu Hanping; Wu Teh, who was identified as acting chairman of the Peking Municipal Revolutionary Committee; Pai Hsiang‐kuo, the Minister of Foreign Trade; Hsiao Ching‐kuang, the Deputy Defense Minister and Commander of the Navy, and Li Chen, Deputy Minister of Public Security.

A few hours earlier at Shanghai, the President, on his first stop in China, was greeted by about 20 officials, who escorted him into the modern terminal building. There were an American and a Chinese flag on each I side of the terminal door. The President and Mrs. Nixon wore overcoats in the 30‐degree weather, but were hatless.

The first official to greet the President was Deputy Foreign Minister Chiao Kuan‐hua, who led the Chinese delegation to the United Nations last fall. Two other officials from Peking greeted Mr. Nixon in Shanghai. They were Chang Wen‐chin, director of the West European, American and Australasian Affairs Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Wang Hai‐jung, a woman deputy director of protocol in the Foreign Ministry.

Local leaders on hand included Wang Hung‐wen, vice chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee and the city's third-ranking official. The two ranking Shanghai leaders, who are members of the Politburo, Chang Chun‐chiao and his deputy, Yao Wen‐yuan, had already flown to Peking for the official welcome.

Mr. Nixon appeared in high spirits, chatting in informal fashion with the Chinese officials who greeted him. There were no crowds at the Shanghai airport for the President's arrival, and commercial traffic was halted during the plane's stopover.

Mr. Nixon and Mr. Chou and high officials of the two countries are scheduled to meet this afternoon for at least one hour of formal talks. The two leaders will probably trade toasts at an official banquet this evening. But they intend to say next to nothing in public about their consultations until they issue a communique near the end of the eight‐day visit.

Capital Is Spruced Up

The schedule for the rest of the week in Peking and for brief visits to Hangchow and Shanghai next weekend has not been announced. But it appears that the American and Chinese leaders will meet almost every day, including one or two calls by Mr. Nixon on Chairman Mao Tse‐tung, the founder and leader of China's Communist state.

Peking has been spruced up for the Presidential party, but all the repainting and restocking of supplies has been accomplished in the name of the just-concluded spring festival marking the Lunar New Year.

Most—but not all—of the slogans denouncing American imperialism have been replaced by less directly challenging wordings on the billboards

There is no way of knowing however, whether China's energetic new campaign for good relations with non‐Communist nations would not have inspired a similar toning‐down in any case.

There is said to be a general air of relaxation among the Chinese people now that the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution seems spent. The glorification of Chairman Mao has also been de‐emphasized. And while purges have left many senior positions unfilled, the Government seems to be addressing itself once again to the orderly conduct of business at home and abroad.

But there can be no question in Mr. Nixon's mind that he has come to a distant nation, far removed not only physically but also philosophically.

Mr. Mao's portrait stares down upon visitors from prominent positions at both the Shanghai and the Peking airports and from many of the prominent buildings of the capital along the drive to the

Government guest house, where the Nixons will be staying. Also in view in several places are portraits of the universal giants of Communism—Marx, Engels and Lenin—plus the figure no longer worshipped in his own country—Stalin.

Huge red posters adorn the airport buildings, mostly with fairly neutral tributes to the Chinese Communist party and importunings to the “proletariat and the oppressed people and the oppressed nations” to unite. Awaiting the Nixon motorcade beside the road from the Peking airport were a series of calligraphic stanchions proclaiming support for the “struggles of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America” against unnamed colonialists.

Posters and Stanchions

But none of this denies visitors a glimpse of the China behind the slogans. Flying low into Shanghai, the President. could see the vast stretches of rice paddies, green and gray patches around endless clusters of villages, many of whose residents stopped to stare at the gleaming jet aircraft from the West.

On the descent toward Peking, new arrivals find themselves over a bleak plain of wheat country, all ashen and brown, clear to the horizon and seemingly rolled right across the huddled homes of Chinese peasantry.

On the drive into Peking, the homes can be seen a little more plainly among the barren fruit and nut tree orchards. They are squat stone homes, with boards in the windows and mud walls around them. As the road widens, the visitor passes series of brick factory buildings surrounded by rows of low brick houses, all of them a dull dark red that does little to enliven the scene.

Then the main avenue—the wide Changan Boulevard. It appears even broader than it is because most of its houses are hidden behind steel gray walls, with only the tiled roofs peeking over the top.

The Grandeur Conveyed

Only Tiananmen Square—the heart of the city and the country—conveys some of the spectacular grandeur of China, old and new, on this first passage by any official American party in 22 years, apart from the inMr. Kissinger. adviser on national security.

The huge red Gate of Heavenly Peace stands on the right, the stark 100‐acre square to the left, flanked by the Great Hall of the People and other big modern buildings thrown up by the new regime in the nineteen-fifties before it rebelled against Soviet thought and design.

As if to emphasize their new independence—and to reassure anxious allies about the Nixon talks—the Chinese have used this great square as the setting for their three most specific foreign policy slogan displays.

One complains of the “bullying by United States imperialism and by social imperialism” —the latter expression being a euphemism for the Russians. A second “warmly hails the great victories of the three Indochina peoples in their war against United States Imperialism.” And the third promises support to the people of the Arab countries “in their struggle against United States imperialism and Zionism.”

Five miles farther to the west is the Government guest house, actually a walled compound of small buildings in Jade Abyss Pool Park, which once housed Soviet technicians. The house is called Tiao yu Tia, which means Angling Terrace.

Among the more recent guests have been Premier Pham Van Dong of North Vietnam, who came here three months ago t; protect his interests in Chinese-American talks, and, just two weeks ago, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan, a country that China and the United States tried to protect from dismemberment late last year in the first major diplomatic action in which they have shared a joint position.

Separate but overlapping American and Chinese difficulties with the Soviet Union are thought to have provided the final impetus for this visit by Mr. Nixon.

Rogers Also in Party

In two preliminary conferences between Premier Chou and Mr. Kissinger, Peking and Washington appeared to have reached an understanding to begin a search for more communication and even limited coordination of their policies. They agreed to do so despite still strong differences over Taiwan and ways to end the war in Vietnam.

But that seems to be the extent of their understandings so far and there is no reliable evidence yet of the issues that they will stress in this week's get‐acquainted sessions.

Besides Mr. Kissinger, the President also brought Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Marshall Green, the Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs, but their schedules and role in the main talks also remained undefined.

With no embassy in Peking to serve the traveling White House, Mr. Nixon has had to import everything, from a hairdresser for Mrs. Nixon to his own elaborate and multiple communications network. Many planeloads ‘of gear and supplies preceded him into China in recent weeks, and one group of White House officials and private communications experts has been assisting in the technical preparations here since Feb. 1.

Two. planeloads of correspondents and television crews arrived yesterday afternoon to try to satisfy the enormous interest that has been aroused among Americans by Mr. Nixon's unusual journey.

So far, however, they have established only that no such comparable excitement has developed among the Chinese people here. And today's courteous but modest welcome arrangements make it unlikely that any will be generated by the President's hosts.

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Feb. 20 — The first 12 hours of the American invasion of Peking suggests that decent communication between two estranged peoples is not going to be assured simply by costly satellites in the sky, mobile color television crews around the town and the presence—difficult as it was to achieve for so many years—of four dozen news correspondents.

Questions about the meaning of life in China and the purpose of work did not go down nearly as well as the fish, duck, ham and mushroom delicacies at lunch for the press corps when it touched down at the Shanghai airport this afternoon: Neither did more mundane inquiries that the visitors hurled at their hosts to determine whether they had been surprised by the news of Mr. Nixon's visit to China and how else they reacted to the turnabout in relations between the countries.

The reception for the press in both Shanghai and Peking has been gracious and efficient. The carpets down the ramps from their planes were thick and red. The receiving lines of officials in each city were long and cheerful. Identification badges, press cards and communication credit cards were neatly distributed in plastic bags along with a list of special attractions that might be visited, including a People's Liberation Army unit, schools, communes, factories and tourist attractions.

Besides warm words of welcome for the “American friends,” there was a special attempt to get at least a few phone calls and telegrams off to the United States when the men from across the sea first landed.

On the arrival in Peking there stood several platoons of specially recruited interpreters to assist the Correspondents, to translate the slogans on the walls, to advise them what had appeared in the papers, to identify their new Liberation buses and to point out the sights along the President's motorcade route into the capital.

But personal histories were difficult to elicit from the first few random Chinese acquaintances and personal attitudes harder still. Airport lounges and bus rides are not exactly designed for such interviewing, but the visitors felt driven, even in their first hours here, by the knowledge that their eight‐day sojourn would pass quickly. The Americans who had

preceded the Presidential party into China three weeks ago, by contrast, appeared relaxed on the eve of the arrival and seemed to be enjoying the assignment immensely. They have found Chinese officials unfailingly courteous and generous hosts, extremely firm negotiators but hard working and eager to assure a smooth week.

The Americans, in turn, appeared to have taken elaborate and uncharacteristic care to maneuver around Chinese sensibilities.

For instance, the White House advance team helped the information department of the Foreign Ministry design a press and communication center in the Cultural Palace of Nationalities. This center meets virtually every requirement of the coddled American communicators.

The well‐lit hall offers 24-hour telephone and telegraph service and refreshments, 10 ‐soundproof broadcast booths, blackboards and bulletin boards and television monitors and lounges and other assorted conveniences that the resident foreign correspondents found simply staggering.

Yet there was full pride of authorship among the officials of the information department. They described. the facility to the visitors, with elaborate statistics about the measurements of various installations, the number of chairs (154) and the number of microphones (44).

So too with the ground communications station that the. Chinese have imparted to transmit pictures, voices and words by satellite across the Pacific. They also imported American counsel in the running of this station, but it has been their facility in name from the start, and the financial arrangements, it is said, reinforced that point by providing for a nominal but definite Chinese profit at the end of the week.

The hotel rooms in Peking for the visitors—luxurious by local standards but furnished a bit massively by Hilton. standards—were stocked with fruit and candy and cigarettes and tea, and they were served by energetic and solicitous crews on each floor.

President Nixon, it turns out, has been sharing the correspondents alternating interest in housekeeping details and questions of deeper significance.

A canvass of press representatives traveling in his plane from Hawaii to Guam today disclosed the President declared himself fortunate in that he likes to drink tea and often drinks it instead of coffee even at home. He also said he had had no new clothes made for the journey but had a new warm stadium coat with a hood that might be useful. Someone also gave him a fur hat, the President added, which he “may or may not wear.”

“I gave up wearing hats years ago,” Mr. Nixon said.’ ”I saw a picture of myself wearing a hat when I was a Congressman in 1947—never again.”

The President bought a new pair of shoes with ribbed, rubber soles for his visit to, the Great Wall, where the, footing is said to be somewhat tentative. “I never wear boots,” he said, adding, in an aside, “That's how I lost the Texas vote.”

On larger plans for the meetings here,. the President said he hoped to discuss both, practical. and philosophical,. issues with Chairman Mao Tse‐tung and Premier Chou En‐lai.

“Because of a lack of communications, we are a mystery to them as they are a mystery to us,” he said. “It’ would be useful on the part of both sides to discuss sour philosophical backgrounds, differences and some similarities.”

Both Chairman Mao and Premier Chou are men of a philosophical turn of mind„ the President, continued. “My approach to problems of the world is not tactical:, It is essential that American leaders take the long view that our policy be based on a well‐developed, well‐understood philosophy, a framework for our international relations.”

His hosts will determine how much time can be devoted to such subjects, Mr. Nixon concluded, stating that some of the most valuable exchanges in this sense may not he “newsworthy or made public.”

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Tuesday, Feb. 22—President Nixon's week‐long summit conference in China quickly reached a high point yesterday in a surprise meeting with Chairman Mao Tse‐tung.

The session was followed by an exchange of banquet toasts with Premier Chou En‐lai in which both leaders stressed common interests, and by extensive rounds of itinerant glass‐clinking in the Great Hall of the People.

President Nixon and Premier Chou held a second working session this afternoon, sitting down for talks at a long, green table in the great hall.

The meeting with Chairman Mao, the enshrined leader of the Communist rulers of China, lasted an hour and appeared to have been added hurriedly to Mr. Nixon's schedule on his first afternoon here. Both sides later described it as “frank and serious,” but nothing is known about what was said. Major attention was therefore focused on the remarkable banquet given for the visiting Americans by the Premier last night.

Greetings to America

After a banquet dish called shark's fin in three shreds, Premier Chou rose to send greetings across the ocean, by television, to the American people and to describe Mr. Nixon's long journey here as a “positive move” responding to the wishes of the people of both countries.

Mr. Chou said the reasons for 20 years of tension without contacts were “known to all”—meaning primarily American support for an independent Taiwan. He credited both Governments with “common efforts” to improve contacts. And he expressed confidence that further pressure from the people—who “alone” shape world history—would surely bring the day when China and the United States could establish “normal state relations.”

“Now, through the common efforts of China and the United States, the gates to friendly contact have finally been opened,” he said.

President Replies Expansively

Mr. Nixon responded, also in an expansive tone, after the fried and stewed prawns. Rising from Table 1, where he had eaten with chopsticks after his hosts had loaded his plate with a serving of each dish in succession, he described the hospitality as incomparable, the dinner magnificent and the American music, as rendered by the People's Liberation Army band, unsurpassed in any foreign land.

Although the Chinese have made it plain that they still harbor suspicions about American policy and what they call its “imperialism,” the President did his best to bury the American fears of a Chinese menace that he himself had once helped to arouse.

“There is no reason for us to be enemies,” he said. “Neither of us seeks the territory of the other; neither of us seeks domination over the other; neither of us seeks to stretch out our hands and rule the world.”

There were enmities in the past and there are differences today, Mr. Nixon asserted, but the “common interests” of the moment transcend everything else. Using the most vivid image of Chinese, the President said:

“And so let us, in these next five days, start a long march together. Not in lockstep, but on different roads leading to the same goal: the goal of building a world structure of peace and justice in which all may stand together with equal dignity.”

He defined the goal as structure in which all nations would determine their own form of government without interference.

And using a quotation from Mao the President said it was time to seize the day and to seize the hour “for our two peoples to rise to the heights of greatness which can build a new and a better world.”

After each toast before the 800 guests seated at round tables in the huge reception hall, the principal conferees went roaming, thimble‐size glasses in hand, clinking this way and that from table to table and sipping or pretending to, as Mr. Chou is noted for pretending.

Americans Warm Up

The Americans warmed up gradually to this routine. The band offered a bouncy tune and Mr. Nixon, Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Henry A. Kissinger were soon scattered far from their own sumptuous table. The Premier and his principal Politburo colleagues for this visit, Yeh Chien‐ying, who is in charge of the military, and Li Hsiennien, the deputy premier who is in charge of most other domestic matters, moved in orbits of their own.

By the time Mr. Nixon had spoken the magic word “friendship” at the end of his toast, everyone had learned the routine. Powerful spotlights encouraged the cameras forward and the table‐hopping began as if on signal. The army band, which had already drawn applause for “Home on the Range” during the course of spongy bamboo shoots and egg-white consomme, now rendered an original and sweet version of “America the Beautiful” that went on and on and on while the principals smiled, clinked, milled and sipped from sea to shining sea.

It was a particularly striking exercise for the men of the Nixon Administration who had so long and earnestly deplored the diplomacy of mere “atmospherics.” (Mrs. Nixon, in wine‐red dress, stood demurely in her place during these commotions.)

Each of the leading diners offered two or three dozen toasts during each round of wandering. They seemed to be consuming more shoe leather than mao tai — the Chinese sorghum firewater that was in their glasses. But bottle bearers were close at hand and Mr. Kissinger, among others, was seen taking at least two refills.

It was a striking celebration also because it occurred only eight hours after a rather minimal welcome ceremony for the President in Peking. Premier Chou and his colleagues provided an honor guard and high‐ranking welcoming committee of Government leaders, but they allowed no suggestion of popular enthusiasm and only a few signs of public curiosity.

The Presidential party was annoyed not so much by this welcome, aides said, as by news and television accounts that portrayed the arrangements as modest. The group's spokesmen contended that nothing more had been expected. But the party was in fact intensely curious about the caliber of reception the Chinese would stage on its arrival and was informed of the situation by walkie-talkie from the airport only moments before the President's plane touched down in Peking.

Much of this visit had been elaborately planned, with the advance parties camping here since Feb. 1. But much also had been left entirely to the Chinese hosts. So very little had actually been disclosed about the quality of the reception. Moreover, the two governments had agreed to keep their formal schedule of conversations deliberately flexible so that they might be moved or extended as the discussions warranted. In any case, high‐level talk on short notice is part of the regular routine to which foreigners in Peking have long been accustomed.

Disagreements Indicated

In any case, whatever irritations there were passed quickly when Mr. Nixon's hosts arranged for a furtive change of schedule yesterday afternoon and gave the President the relatively rare honor of an opening audience at the home of Chairman Mao.

This was later described as a one‐hour visit, from 3 to 4 P.M. In Communist parlance, “serious and frank discussion,” means more than courteous conversation, but it also means that the talk was punctuated by disagreement. And the White House refused to go beyond that formula of the host to explain how the talk went.

Nor would the White House give the location of Mr. Mao's home. But it is known to be a graceful old one‐story, yellow‐roofed residence along the lakes in the old Imperial City, one of a group of palace buildings formerly occupied by mandarins.

The President went with Mr. Kissinger, his assistant for national security, who arranged the trip in two visits here last year. Sitting with Mr. Mao were Premier Chou, Wang Hai-Jung, the deputy director of protocol, and Miss Tang Wen-shengi an interpreter. The White House did not explain the absence of Secretary Rogers. It said it was fair to assume that tea was served.

Mr. Mao, the 78‐year‐old revolutionary, poet, Marxist theoretician and founder of the People's Republic in 1949, has usually held himself in reserve until well into the program of a distinguished visitor. The President had been planning on an audience and had expected it to turn to more philosophical talk than some of the concrete policy discussions with Premier Chou. Although the top‐level meetings are said to be on no fixed schedule, there is now a distinct possibility that Mr. Nixon will meet with the Chairman a second time, either here or at his vacation home in Hangchow.

The unexpected detour delayed the first Nixon‐Chou conference for 90 minutes, until 6 P.M., and delayed the banquet by a half hour, to 7:30. But the conference was largely an opening formality anyway, for picture‐taking and introductions of the two delegations.

The President and the Premier are to meet in a small group this afternoon while Secretary Rogers and others meet separately with their counterparts.

Press Is Invited

Beads of bulbs lit the tiled roof lines of the colossal Hall of the People last night to signal the celebration inside. Premier Chou had invited the entire American press corps, the airline crews and other technicians traveling with the President. From the Chinese side came their hosts and interpreters and many scholars and journalists, military officers and other distinguished citizens. Most of them appeared to have some professional interest in American affairs.

As at the airport, there were no invitations for members of the diplomatic corps. This was to emphasize the “bilateral” and unusual nature of an affair of state between two governments that do not have diplomatic relations.

By drawing his subtle distinctions between the United States Government and the American people, Premier Chou carefully held to this formula. The central and obvious purpose of the Chinese formula has been to suggest that popular pressures are forcing changes in American policy and that the Chinese can encourage the process by meeting with Mr. Nixon without in any way betraying their claims of struggle against American “imperialism.”

Mr. Nixon, by contrast, offered a much looser statement. He himself observed that “more people are seeing and hearing what we say than on any other such occasion in the whole history of the world” and thus he spoke not only to his hosts but to the vast audience beyond — perhaps principally to that audience.

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Tuesday, Feb. 22 —The coming of the Americans has caused two faint cultural tremors here. They are probably insignificant on any seismic Political scale, but they certainly belong in the accounts of this strange visitation.

Taking a first look at the Nixon party in his reception rooms at the Great Hall of the People, and while sitting for photographs, Premier Chou En‐lai was heard to remark to Mr. Nixon: “We have too many elderly people in our Government, so on this point we should learn from you, because you have more young people in your Government.”

Mr. Chou has previously explained the congregation of old men in the Chinese Government by recalling how long they had to wage civil war and revolution before they won the chance to govern. But the young men in Mr. Nixon's advance party had already impressed him, and he obviously felt the disparity once again today: Chairman Mao Tse‐tung is 78 years old; Mr. Chou will be 74 this year. Yeh Chienying and Li Hsien‐nien, his principal Politburo advisers in the Nixon meetings, are 74 and 67. Mr. Nixon. is 59, Secretary of State William P. Rogers is 58 and Henry A. Kissinger, who became the vital link in the new relationship, is 48.

The second tremor was felt on the wires of Hsinhua, the Government press agency. With Americans transmitting live color television pictures of even the colorless airport arrivals and drives into town, the Chinese agency was propelled into remarkably swift announcements on the Nixon party.

Five of its major items reported the comings and goings of the President yesterday, although mostly with no recitations of the persons in attendance. But the news moved over the wires with almost competitive speed, usually unknown here, and at least one item, announcing the evening banquet, was marked “Flash.”

What is unmeasured so far is the impact of China on Americans, both those touring here and the millions looking on from across the ocean.

At least some of the officials in Mr. Nixon's party, however, found themselves reflecting in amazement on the fact that they were dining with men who for all their professional lives have been only names on precious leadership lists and on research dossiers drawn from a variety of distant sources during the painful years of watching China from Hong Kong.

Here suddenly were the “responsible members” of one committee or another. army officers, prominent party officials and others. And besides records in a file, they now had faces and smiles and ambitions and attitudes. They were not exactly forthcoming in these first contacts with any secrets of state or even of person,, but there they. were piling more mushrooms and mustard green and almond junket on the plates of the Americans struggling with their chopsticks.

Then there is the matter of the “Sinification” of American officialdom. The White House press office has become far more inscrutable than any legendary Chinese.

It is not only protecting the secrecy of the private conversations, as had been agreed by the two governments in advance, but it is emulating its hosts in the smallest ways. Because the Chinese do not tell their own people where Chairman Mao lives, the White House refused today to tell its people (though presumably not its intelligence services) where Mr. Mao lives. Because the Chinese do not normally reveal refreshments that Mr. Mao serves to his guests, neither did the White House.

And American officials plainly enjoyed the life‐style of a country where reporters can be told to await the President's departure for meeting with Premier Chou at one door of his guest house while the President actually goes to and from rendezvous with Chairman Mao by another door.

Yet another kind of impact will have to be weighed in assessments of the week's events here. Reporters had their first chance. yesterday to stroll through Peking's shopping streets—at will—and they found themselves the objects of great curiosity and, in the case of a few youngsters, objects of visible fear.

When two American strollers finally stumbled on what looked like an indigenous commotion, therefore, they quickly pushed through the crowds, cameras at the ready, to witness the argument, or the accident or whatever it was. When they reached the center of the crowd, they found themselves staring only into another camera and standing beside Walter Cronkite.

But not all the sights and sound along Hsi Dan Street are fake or imported this week.

There was lively commerce in the little stores selling scarves and handkerchiefs and the ubiquitous blue costumes of the men and women. Sales clerks in abundant numbers unfolded the wares or sent money and sales slips skidding above the customers' heads along crude but swift conveyors of wire and wood to the cash clerks. There are stores with potbellied stoves at the center and equally, crude skillets and grates on the shelves. But the crowds are ogling at the display of a photo studio and at the first test of a newly arrived radio‐record player.

The dolls in a department store are uniformly Caucasian in appearance. The toy AK‐47 rifles look very, real and the Ping Pong balls are pink and blue and yellow as well as white.

The dominant sound of this city seems to be silence, even as mobs of people shuffle along the sidewalks and thousands of bicycles pass in the streets. Only the steady tinkle of a hundred faint bicycle bells suggests movement, until a lone bus or delivery motor tricycle comes along honking a vicious rhythm.

And the dominant colors, well reported by every previous visitor but still startling to behold, are blue, blue and blue—in hats, jackets, coats, shirts, pants. Add the pitch black hair to virtually every face and some brilliant red windburn to the cheeks of many girls and children and the picture is virtually complete. Khaki canvas shoulder bags serve civilians as much as soldiers and white gauze masks, in increasing number, cover many lips and noses against dust and cold. But the background is all gray and so the dominant tone of humanity re

The moppets, dressed to the point of rotundity, provide the only color in gay prints and hats and shoes, but they are destined to outgrow the supply and to mature into blue or khaki. Do they care? Are they supposed to care? Or are they being weaned from the habits of consumerism so as to spare the strain on a poor country's production capacity?

Premier Chou appears no livelier in his gray and blue tunic suits. But up close, as he greeted the Presidential party and posed with the American press and technicians for group photographs in his Great HalI antechamber, the Premier was a well-tailored figure, in the style of a man who does care.

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Wednesday, Feb. 23 —President Nixon and Premier Chou En‐lai met for four hours of policy discussions yesterday afternoon as China finally let her people know that a major event was under way.

Nothing was disclosed about the direction of conversation. But if the excitement in the streets was an indicator, the mood inside the Great Hall of the People was cordial. Certainly cordiality among the leaders of the two nations was evident as they appeared together last evening at the performance of a revolutionary ballet.

The President and the Premier met again this afternoon —this time in Mr. Nixon's guest house rather than in the Great Hall. Gerald Warren, the President's deputy press secretary, said that he had no idea why the location had been changed.

“If the press wants to see any more places, they can apply to the Department of Information,” Premier Chou remarked to newsmen as he sat down with Mr. Nixon. “You don't have much time here.”

Hint to Newsmen

The Premier's reference to the time limit on the President's visit—seven days—was interpreted by many who heard him as a hint that his government might permit some of the newsmen to remain for a more extensive look at China.

Before the talks today, Chinese citizens crowded patiently around downtown newsstands for a copy of Jen-min Jih-pao, the newspaper of the Chinese Communist party, which devoted two of its six pages to an extraordinary layout of pictures, text and dry announcements about the President's arrival, his meeting with Chairman Mao Tse‐tung and his exchange of banquet toasts with Premier Chou.

Chinese officials, editors and interpreters carefully avoided any explanation of this decreed news treatment or of the public reaction. One editor conceded the obvious—that it had been a long time since a visitor to Peking had received such concentrated journalistic notice.

There was visible discontent among Peking residents when the papers sold out at 4 P.M., two hours after distribution. The rare occurrence added to the crush around the billboards on which the papers are displayed in the principal downtown shopping streets.

The Peking radio read the same announcements throughout the day, but it could not furnish what the people so clearly wanted most—a glimpse of the President and Mrs. Nixon and of their senior aides, and of their reception in Chairman Mao's rarely photographed private study.

Pictures of Nixon

There were three large photographs on page 1—of the MaoNixon handshake, the Chairman's book‐strewn study and the Chou‐Nixon handshake at the airport. The Premier's “five principles” of peaceful coexistence were printed conspicuously in a box at the top of the page above a large headline reading, “Chairman Mao Tse-tung Meets President Nixon.”

The second page was also devoted to the visit, with the text of the toasts and four more large pictures. The three other major newspapers on sale here, which are not available to foreigners, were said to have provided similar coverage.

Yesterday afternoon Peking television added a 10‐minute film of Mr. Nixon's activities Monday, including a 90‐second sequence showing the Chairman and the President in animated discussion.

Few Television Sets

There are not many television sets in Chinese homes, so the display was largely symbolic. Most symbolic of all, perhaps, was the fact that Mr. Nixon was shown smiling broadly in almost all cases.

Conspicuous at Premier Chou's side in all the public receptions for the President have been Yeh Chien‐ying, an old army marshal now apparently managing the military and influential also in foreign affairs, and Li Hsien‐nien, the Deputy Premier who has long handled domestic affairs for Mr. Chou.

The Politburo has been depleted by a series of unannounced purges, notably of Lin Piao, the Defense Minister once designated as Mr. Mao's successor, and of the army chief of staff, the navy's political commissar and the air force chief.

The press coverage confirmed in a role of unusual prominence the man who joined Premier Chou for the private talks with Mr. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger this afternoon. He is Chiao Kuan‐hua, a Deputy Foreign Minister and the leader of China's delegation to the United Nations last fall, who has been present on every occasion when Mr. Chou pressed the policy of “coexistence” in international forums—at the Geneva conference on Korea and Indochina in 1954; at the conference of nonaligned nations in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 and at the Geneva conference on Laos.

The others at the intensive discussion between the Premier and the President were Chang Wen‐chin, in charge of European, American and Australian affairs at the Foreign Ministry and Wang. Hai‐jung, the deputy director of protocol, who is said to be Chairman Mao's niece.

The President also brought John H. Holdridge and Winston Lord of the National Security Council staff. The other members of the official delegations, led by Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Foreign Minister Chi Peng‐fel, held a separate conference at the same time. The same groups will meet again tomorrow afternoon.

The four hours of policy discussion were followed, after separate private dinners, by another warm, spirited social gathering of the leaders in another part of the endless Great Hall of the People in the center of Peking.

The occasion was a special performance of “Red Detachment of Women,” one of the eight flag‐waving dance dramas that were elevated to a high ideological pitch during the Cultural Revolution under the tutelage of Chairman Mao's fourth wife, Chiang Ching, a former actress and current member of the Politburo.

Miss Chiang, smiling and chatting amiably, led the Nixons into the Great Hall auditorium.

The ballet, depicting Red Army triumphs over greedy capitalists during the civil war against the Chinese Nationalists, elicited applause from the President. He and other Americans joined the laughter when young girls danced out their exercises in rifle marksmanship.

Premier Chou's wife, Teng Ying‐chao, herself a prominent party official, attended the performance.

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Wednesday, Feb. 23—It was the Nixons’ evening at the theater yesterday, and there was the First Lady sitting beside Chiang Ching (Mrs. Mao Tse‐tung) — both women with modest stage experience — watching the flaming red banners triumph in ballet over the black running dogs of capitalism and the Nationalist Chinese.

Was the world meant to be entertained and enlightened by this smartly cadenced Girl Scout epic or was It meant to watch who was watching out front?

Miss Chiang was the radical mentor of the Chinese arts during the recent Cultural Revolution. She was also the inspiration for radical challengers who are thought to have opposed Premier Chou En‐lai during much of that revolution. But last night, walking purposefully and gracefully into the auditorium of the Great Hall of the People, she was the hostess for the couple from Whittier, Calif., whose taste in ballet and politics had not been pointing all these toward the saga of Wu Chinghua in the den of the landlords.

Henry A. Kissinger, the refugee from Nazi Germany, who had made a specialty of European politics in the service of Nelson A. Rockefeller, was also seated in the front rank and he strolled from the theater at intermission and at the end in animated and jesting conversation with Premier Chou, whom he had personally guided toward this fateful week of negotiations with Richard M. Nixon.

And the leading men of America and Asia were there applauding the dancers, while the dancers on stage, having just smitten the oppressor classes, were applauding the spectators. So the Chinese riddle remained—who was performing for whom?

There are so many performers and audiences in this spectacle that it is impossible to sort them out.

There is the mammoth American television audience. apparently off on another international romance, and not to be deterred by a Presidential party that warns of only minimal results from a week that started in such high spirits and multiple toasts to the Communist leaders.

There is the vast population of China, which remained obediently aloof when the Nixons drove into town but which jammed the sidewalks straining for the newspapers and pictures yesterday when the Government let on that there was a. big show in town after all.

There are the Russians whom the ‘Chinese want to make uncomfortable, and worse, by this Peking display of camaraderie, and whom the Americans want to make uncomfortable—only not too much so—in hopes of softening them up for major agreements later this year.

And if the advance expectations of the American delegation prove reliable, there are multiple audiences right inside the secret summit conferences. Both President Nixon and his hosts were thought to be preparing fairly formal statements on their many differences, so as to reassure nervous allies — in Tokyo or Hanoi — and to leave a record about which they could honestly say that no deals were made at anyone else's expense. But they were also expecting to address each other more flexibly and informally, by gesture, innuendo, implication and perhaps only by omis

This particular part of the drama will be played out not only this week but also for many months, with speeches made and not made. with emissaries sent, with background ‐briefings in Washington and with seasonally adjusted new slogans in Peking's Square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Any setting will do for this sort of thing. Mrs: Nixon went to look at the Summer Palace of the imperial Manchus in the western suburbs yesterday and as she passed through the Gate of Longevity and Goodwill she laughed and said, “That's prophetic.”

Moving along with the usual cluster of aides, hosts and press people, the First Lady wandered near Kun Ming Lake and through the rooms of the last empress, Tzu Hsi; and talked about the small dining room, the need for such a large mirror in the bedroom, and her attitude toward incense (“I would not burn it, I would put it in a drawer”).

She offered to climb up Longevity Hill to the central pagoda that dominates the landscape, but her hosts demurred, saying it would„ be a strain. And so the party drove on to the Peking Zoo for a quick look at pandas of the kind that will be presented to an American zoo by the Chinese Government. Mrs. Nixon said “Hi there,” to one of the animals, but she made no contact with any of the Chinese sightseers who happened to be on her route.

At the apparently deserted Peking Hotel in the morning, Mrs. Nixon watched the preparation of dozens of Chinese dishes. She chatted easily with her guide through the kitchens, the head of the hotel's revolutionary committee, and with newsmen, and performed briefly with chopsticks. before an American television crew.

Told that it takes three years to train a cook here, and 10 years to make him an excellent chef, Mrs. Nixon said, “I've been trying all my life to cook and I'm still not a very good cook.”

The reporters admitted to China with the President but shut off from the substance of his talks with the Chinese leaders have also taken to the tourist trail. They have been offered choices of communes, schools and other selected activities, most of them places that have welcomed Western visitors in recent years. And they have not yet heard about many of their requests to visit specific individuals for interviews, newspaper offices and other agencies of the Government.

But the results of the early touring are not always as intended, nor are all the experiences routine.

Yesterday morning one group went to a showcase secondary school where the children performed with such intense ritual and declared themselves so consistently ready to do the bidding of Chairman Mao, with no private desires of any kind, that several reporters described themselves as “shaken” and “depressed” by the experience. They said they wished the official party could be exposed to the drill.

Those who signed up to visit a neighborhood committee, expecting some exposure to local government, got much more than they bargained for and more than most resident foreign correspondents have achieved—a visit to several Chinese homes.

In the memory of the Chinese, they have reason to be proud of the blocks of five-story brick houses in the Hoping District just outside the old city wall in the northwest. But sitting on the hard beds of some families in the Hsing Hua Chi neighborhood, the visitors were free to sense at once that the best of lives here remain simple and bare.

Mrs. Yao Chun‐lan, a bright‐eyed woman in her fifties, directs the neighborhood revolutionary committee and her presentation of the basic facts on apartments, budgets, nurseries and work projects showed her to be an engaging but shrewd and firm politician of whom there seemed to be so many here in the most remote corners.

She showed the workshops where neighborhood mothers sew bathing suits for sale to a factory while their children are cared for in another room of the same apartment. A third room has been turned into a clinic kir acupuncture treatment of the arthritic older citizens of the community by retired workers with a few weeks of medical training.

Mrs. Huang Hsu‐fang will ingly showed her apartment when the designated model became too crowded. She and her husband and three children live in one room, while a family of five occupies two other rooms, beside the communal kitchen and washroom.

The Huangs own a huge headboard, slightly padded by blankets and attractively decorated with piled up colored blankets and pillows. What seems to be two smaller beds were in the room but they were covered with cloths, atop which were more blankets, a teapot and cups, and an alarm clock with huge bells for ears. A small transistor radio and a giant thermos jug stood on a dresser. A clothesline ran across the room from the ample window to the door some 16 feet away.

Mrs. Huang's husband works in a factory making bridge sections, she said, 13 miles from home. The family rises at 7 o'clock six days a week and after the elder two children are fed and sent off to school, Mrs. Huang goes to the sewing shop next door, to put in six hours, while her youngest daughter is cared for in its small-room nursery.

In the evening, she said,. the family sometimes holds “political meetings.” Some days are for cleaning and for a stroll in the park in summer or a film or helping the children with their studies. Mrs. Huang says her 10‐year‐old boy is not learning to read fast enough and she enlists other children in the effort to make him study harder. She never strikes him and she prefers persuasion to punishment. She wants her children to become whatever the state wants them to become, she says, and she has no worries that she can remember since Communist Liberation Day in 1949.

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Thursday, Feb. 24 —President Nixon logged four more hours of private conversations with Premier Chou En‐lai yesterday and went off this morning to view the Great Wall of China and the historic Ming tombs.

President and Mrs. Nixon left Peking by car shortly after breakfast on the journey to the wall, which is about 40 miles northwest of the capital. In bright sunshine and with the temperature in the twenties, they toured a restored section of the landmark.

Mr. Nixon, talking with newsmen during a tea break in the one‐hour tour of the wall and the Ming Tombs, said that one result of his trip “may be that walls erected—whether like this physical wall or whether other walls, ideological and philosophical—will not divide peoples of the world, that peoples regardless of differences in philosophy and background will have an opportunity to communicate with each other and know each other.”

‘An Open World’

“As we look at this wall, what is most important is that we have an open world,” he added.

Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Deputy Premier Li Hsien‐nien accompanied the Nixons to the wall.

The meeting with Mr. Chou yesterday was the second in two days of such length and intensity, aimed at what both sides have said will be a sustained program of contacts in different fields between the peoples of the two countries.

After two days of meetings at the Great Hall of the People, Premier Chou went to the Government guest house where Mr. Nixon and his party are staying, for yesterday's session. Only six other officials plus interpreters were in attendance.

The formal talks were followed by yet another kind of social experience here—the Premier's display of his guests before 18,000 spectators in the indoor Capital Stadium for a dazzling exhibition of gymnastics and a dozen fierce rounds of racket combat that go by the name of badminton and table tennis but bear no resemblance to the lazy paddling that most Americans associate with these games.

The summit meetings resume this afternoon, when Mr. Nixon finishes his sightseeing for the day, and will apparently continue daily until Mr. Nixon's departure from China next Monday.

There has been speculation among the press corps that the conferees have already reached “tentative” agreement on exchanges of tourists, cultural attractions, students and news bureaus. The White House had no comment last night on such reports.

There has never been much doubt since the President decided to come to China that some exchanges would ensue from these meetings, so officials could not directly deny the main drift of the reports. But they said that no information about the President's conversations here this week could possibly have come from any reliable source.

Whatever the basis of the reports, a prediction of more trade, more tourists and more exchanges of scientists and students and correspondents seems safe.

The joint desire to arrange more contact became evident in last year's meetings between Mr. Chou and Henry A. Kissinger, the President's adviser on national security, who came here twice to set up the top-level conference. Mr. Nixon and the White House have been talking ever since then about more communication on a wider front and the Chinese signaled their interest by inviting American table tennis players and correspondents in early 1971, even before they received Mr. Kissinger.

The chances are that Mr. Nixon and Mr. Chou are concentrating not on the details of such exchanges but on how far they might go beyond people‐to‐people contact toward some kind of unofficial diplomatic dealing while they lack embassies in each other's capitals.

Taiwan Is Main Obstacle

Beyond that, the talks must deal with the main obstacle to such contacts — the United States’ continuing recognition of the Chinese Nationalist Government in Taiwan and China's claim to sovereignty over the island.

But even this problem was explored in detail last year, as is evident from the comments of both sides. Accordingly, the President and the Premier should now be embarked on a truly broad exchange of viewpoints clearing away the debris of more than 20 years of hostility and isolation.

Judging by what the Premier showed the President this evening at the sports arena, there would be little problem in arranging Chinese athletic shows for Americans. Mr, and Mrs. Nixon and their delegation clearly enjoyed the arena display, from the snappy opening parade of the athletes to the slashing table tennis match at the end in which the three‐time world champion, Chuang Tse-tung, an intimate of the top leadership here, was defeated by the brilliant defensive play of Chang Hsieh‐lin, 23‐21.

Gymnasts swirled and tumbled in breath‐taking configurations on the rings, bars, horses, mats and beams while the applause of the cognoscenti, who really knew when to appreciate a turn, echoed around the giant gym.

Adding to the spectacle were the bright red, yellow and green sweaters and scarves of thousands of youngsters in the stands—the first real escape the visiting Americans have had from the unrelieved blue padding worn by the crowds in the streets.

On their third evening in town, therefore, the Nixons and other guests saw genuine Chinese limbs and silhouettes for the first time. And they saw, as they had at the ballet the night before, that whatever color the Chinese may lack in their ordinary surroundings is surely recompensed by the brilliant hues at their spectacles.

Crowd Applauds Visitors

The arena crowd was the largest encountered by the Nixons here so far and it was decorous in its greeting for the visitors. Seated in blocks apparently assigned to party workers, army, navy and air force units and other groups, including athletic clubs and sports fans, the crowd waited almost demurely for the Nixons entrance and then offered warm applause for the dignitaries, who included Premier Chou and many of his aides.

There was not much obvious craning of necks toward the box of honor, nor did anyone, attempt to crowd against the barriers behind the box in a bid for a greeting or autograph or al wave, American‐style. The athletes applauded the dignitaries at the end and, as is customary here, the dignitaries applauded back.

However well Mr. Nixon may be defending the national interest and honor in his diplomatic talks with the Premier, he must have been shaken, like the other Americans, by the graceful fury and aggressive power of the Chinese badminton players in the men's doubles exhibition.

The President applauded the athletes rhythmically as they marched to their tasks, and spontaneously for many of their tricks. Mr. Kissinger, still clearly the most ebullient member of the American delegation — and presumably a good barometer of the mood of the talks that he has arranged —seemed especially taken by the caliber of the table tennis, with which his name will be forever linked in diplomatic history.

With Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger at the formal conference at the guest house were John H. Holdridge and Winston Lord, of the National Security Council staff. With Premier Chou sat Chiao Kuan‐hua, a Deputy Foreign Minister; Chang Wenchin of the Foreign Ministry; Wang Hai‐jung of the protocol office, Chao Chi‐hua of the Premier's staff and two interpreters, Chi Chao‐chu and Miss Tang Wen‐sheng, who is known to foreigners here as Nancy Tang.

Mrs. Nixon spent the day visiting a commune and the Peking Glassware Factory.

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Thursday, Feb. 24 —There is talk of exchanges in the air—of people, performers, ideas and goods—that makes it timely to consider the difficulties as well as the opportunities such contacts offer to both Americans and Chinese. Starting the relationship, though it took more than 20 years, may turn out to have been the easy part of the exercise.

One fair example is Mrs. Richard M. Nixon's encounter yesterday with the manager and workers at Peking's Glassware Factory, an amalgam of 50 formerly independent handcraft shops that employs more than 500 workers and produces glass toy animals, flowers, fruits and potted plants.

Watching the assembly of glass flowers, the First Lady asked, naturally enough, “Do they use their own judgment on what they mix together? Can they just take a little bit of this and a little bit of this?”

Mrs. Chao Mei‐yun, the roly‐poly chairman of the factory's revolutionary committee, took care of that bit of bourgeois fantasy with simple, firm reply: “They have a certain design.”

They certainly do, not only in flowers, but also in responses to questions in the quasi‐public surroundings in which all conversations so far have had to occur.

At one point Mrs. Nixon asked Mrs. Chao whether the young women worked at the factory for a lifetime or whether they tended to go on to other jobs. The question was routine, perhaps even delivered by rote. But the answer, or rather the non-answer, had that certain design. Before Liberation, said Mrs. Chao, meaning the coming of Communism in 1949, the shops were faced with bankruptcy and there was no steady work. But now there is, she added.

The first problem of contacts here is that the list of approved places for visits is relatively short and that requests to stray from the pattern—say, from reporters wishing to visit a newspaper office—though never denied, seem to be dying of neglect.

Life as the member of a delegation whose program and logistics and escorts can be arranged in advance can be rewarding. But efforts to stray from the flock, to break the routine and above all to communicate person to person instead of people to people, though not forbidden, are often prevented by the hosts’ inflexibility and the travelers’ ignorance.

No one in this land of 800 million people, give or take 50 million, is ever really alone and there is an especially strong urge toward collective security when dealing with foreigners. There is a strong tendency toward speeches, therefore, and also a universal urge to respond to questions with little more than quotations from the trusty chairman, Mao Tse-tung, with or without attribution.

There are certainly signs that many Chinese weary of this routine as quickly as their guests, and do not really deem it a substitute for communication. But coping with the Americans can be a trying experience. At the moment there are 300 of them here who two weeks ago would have paid a healthy ransom for the mere privilege of entering.the People's Republic. And now, after 72 hours on the ground, they are already bending every effort to beat down the next line of barriers.

Needs Keep Growing

They want taxis when there are not enough, because they want to dash from one end of town to the other. They want interpreters, and not only interpreters but the kind that will translate without really watching, and preferably guides whose instant loyalty can be transferred from employer to traveler.

The language itself is an enormous barrier, as even the President and Mrs. Nixon are discovering in their well-planned touring. “N: hao” (Hello), the President said to Premier Chou En‐lai at the start of yesterday's conference, almost as if to underscore the sense of strangeness Americans feel here.

“Ni hao,” a reporter mumbled a hundred times in walking the labyrinthine old quarters of Peking, nodding and smiling toward the puzzled faces and the grinning but fleeing children along the dusty lanes and behind the low but formidable gray walls around each home. Only two men, old men of pre‐Liberation habit, tried to communicate surprise or bewilderment and welcome through the welcome barrier.

“I started to learn Chinese, but I was so busy,” Mrs. Nixon told her interpreter today. “I wanted to. Next time I come back I'll be a real expert.” It will help.

The real barriers seem to be neither linguistic nor official, but genuinely semantic and philosophical.

If the experience of three reporters at Peking University is any clue, these barriers can be breached, but it will take time and effort.

The Chinese are hospitable to a fault—only the swift mastery of “bao le, bao le, bao le” can call a halt to the piling of irresistible delicacies upon your plate. The Chinese are also respectful of any genuine dedication to study—really willing to talk for hours about their views and ideological persuasions even though they are unaccustomed to the brash expressions of curiosity.

These two traits alone would seem to suffice for a beginning, once Americans can come to live here and pursue friendships and insights at a more leisurely pace than the Nixon travelers have had.

Off the Beaten Path

But the stranger will have to know his Mao—not only to avoid mistaking a slogan for an answer but also to break down the explanations by finding contradictions and citing Chinese history to keep the discussion moving. As Premier Chou himself cautioned a visitor last summer, don't pay so much attention to the slogans.

Combining some of their knowledge and their persistence, the three reporters at the university were able to break off from a tour of laboratories and language classes and engage the members of two former, rival Red Guard factions and assorted party cadres and teachers in an extensive conversation about the turmoil that overturned the education system here during the Cultural Revolution. They talked also about the lost frames of reference by which Americans and Chinese might judge each other's society and about the difficulties posed by such terms as “correct line,” “capitalist roaders,” “bourgeois,” “capitalism” and “middle class.”

The formal briefings at the university, about the “revolution” in education to bring workers and peasants into higher schools, were not nearly so instructive as the private conversation on cultural lag that now poses the same problem for teachers here as the open‐admission concept does in America.

The official accounts of the new line in teacher‐student relations was not nearly so illuminating as the private account of the “chaos” that resulted from officially inspired student uprisings in 1966, the seizures of buildings and combat with fists and iron pipes.

Why was the bloodshed allowed to continue for 10 months without mediation or suppression? Because the conflict made it easier to fully expose enemies who had sneaked into the proletariat.

Then why does Chairman Mao now say that violence is not the way? Because violence is not the way.

How can it be both good and not good? Something can be undesirable but useful.

Are not some factional fights mere struggles for power? Only bourgeois elements fight for individual power; other factions fight for the correct mass line.

But how can a citizen or student know which line Is correct when factions are contending all around him? By the study of Mao.

And if the rivals all speak from Mao? “Things are complicated here;” said one of the hosts as he sent away the waiting bus, offered a magnificent lunch and then led an elaborate post‐lunch discussion of social justice in China and the United States.

Not until four hours into this conversation did the talk lapse into sterile speeches.

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Friday, Feb. 25—President Nixon continued to react with public enthusiasm today toward his Peking visit while his Chinese hosts, although not matching the President's rhetorical buoyancy, continued to give widespread publicity to their extensive dealings with him.

There is no reliable indication yet of how the shared desire for a reconciliation between the United States and China may be translated into specific programs and agreements for future contact. In fact, the syntax of some off‐the‐cuff remarks by Mr. Nixon yesterday could be read as suggestion that tourism and other exchanges might develop more slowly than the President would wish.

The President and Premier Chou En‐lai met again for three hours in a small working group last evening and then for two more hours at a priVate dinner for larger delegations.

This morning the President and Mrs. Nixon, escorted by Yeh Chien‐ying, China's leading military figure, spent about 90 minutes touring the old Imperial Palace, known as the Forbidden City. Hatless and gloveless despite the falling snow, Mr. Nixon chatted with Chinese officials as they led him from palace to palace. Mrs. Nixon wore her blonde mink coat.

Mr. Nixon declined to answer when newsmen asked him how his negotiations with the Chinese were going. He said that he would “talk tonight” while exchanging toasts at a banquet he is to host for the Chinese to reciprocate the festive dinner party that opened the visit Monday.

Mr. Yeh, responding to the same question, said that “it is my hope that people of our two countries and people of the world can enjoy peace and good harmony.”

After the tour of the palace grounds, Mr. Nixon headed for another conference with Premier Chou.

Tomorrow morning, with Premier Chou as his guide, Mr. Nixon is to fly to the historic tourist city of Hangchow, where Chairman Mao Tse‐tung maintains a home and will probably receive the President a second time. In Hangchow, and in Shanghai on Sunday, the two sides are expected to confer further, at least to complete the negotiations on a final communiqué that is expected before the President's departure for home on Monday.

In all, the President and Premier Chou will have spent more than 30 hours together before their departure from the capital, about half of the time in serious private conference. In adding up the hours, the White House staff implied that some of the other time—in automobile rides and at dinners and cultural events—was also given to serious conversation.

Mr. Nixon has been unstinting in his praise of China, her ballet, her gymnasts, her food, her civilization and her potential for development. He has kept on urging more contact, deploring American ignorance of Asia and expressing hope that his visit here will lead to cooperative ventures for “peaceful progress” in the years ahead.

And the Chinese leaders, although they have not matched the President's rhetorical enthusiasms, are continuing to give official sanction to their extensive dealings with him.

The newspapers here continue to give prominence to photographs of Mr. Nixon and Premier Chou enjoying each other's company at various functions. Peking television has given warm accounts of Mrs. Nixon's appreciative tours around town.

Visiting American newsmen are being urged to let nothing mar the unfolding friendship between the peoples of the two countries.

In all these ways, the Chinese people are being encouraged to think in a new style about the United States, and the world is being encouraged to attach considerable importance to the still secret conversations here.

Separate discussions have been held simultaneously by delegations under the leadership of Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Foreign Minister Chi Peng‐fei. These talks are said to be concerned not so much with basic policy questions as with the details and mechanics of future contacts and exchange programs.

It was in his first informal comments to newsmen yesterday, during visits to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs north of Peking, that Mr. Nixon heaped lavish praise on everything he had seen and pronounced his talks so far as both interesting and worthwhile.

He used the symbol of the Great Wall to suggest that a nation with a great past can also have a great future and that the future would be especially bright if the walls of ideology and animosity could be pierced by communication.

The President said he hoped one result of his trip would be that “peoples regardless of their differences and backgrounds and their philosophies, will have an opportunity to communicate with each other, know each other, and to share with each other those particular endeavors that will mean peaceful progress in the years ahead.”

But in referring to the prospects for the greater tourism that he advocated, Mr. Nixon said only that he hoped for it “in the future.” An hour later, he said he hoped that “in the future” his children and their children would be able to visit China. And moments later, he said yet again that he hoped more Chinese would be able to visit the United States, also adding “in the future.”

American officials declined to provide any interpretation of the President's meaning.

The experience in China so far, the President also said, “reminds us that all of us must work for an open world where people of different cultures, different philosophies and so forth may at least have an opportunity to know each other.”

It will be clear in a few days just how far the President has been able to “open” the Chinese part of the world and to what extent his caveats about “the future” may connote a Chinese desire to proceed only slowly.

Although they clearly value the new links with the United States, the Chinese may wish to balance them with some reserve as long as the United States maintains formal relations and defense commitments with the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan. There will be no immediate diplomatic relations between Peking and Washington and that fact may retard the pace and the extent of the exchanges sought by the President.

The Chinese may also wish to practice some restraint until they are satisfied that the United States has disengaged fully from the war in Vietnam. Their reception of the President denotes a confidence that he is pulling back American forces from the Asian continent, but the North Vietnamese and perhaps other Communists probably resent the swiftness of China's turnabout in dealings with Washington.

Mr. Nixon appeared to be trying to soothe Chinese sensibilities when he suggested that Peking could conduct normal business with other nations — which it has only recently assumed — without sacrificing alliances and principles.

“I don't mean to suggest that exchange of people solves the problems of the world or problems between governments,” the President said. “But it so enriches the lives of people to know other civilizations and not to live simply on their own little island.”

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Friday, Feb. 25—The greatness of the Great Wall of China, obviously, is that it can survive anything—even an American political extravaganza.

Perhaps the whole idea started in the President's private briefing book on China, which observed that the monumental ruin in the craggy Pa‐ta Mountains 35 miles from Peking had been rather ineffective for defense but very good for communications.

The briefing‐book writers meant that the wall, in its heyday, could accommodate 10 men abreast moving inland from the sea with their carts and chariots over a span of 2,484 miles. The record needs to be amended with the news that only two of the wall's two‐story towers can accommodate three rival network anchor men, with full crews, several tons of gear, including remote color cameras, several miles of cable and several hundred camera‐toting extras dangling from the battlements.

Thanks to the scouting work by Henry A. Kissinger last October and by a platoon of television executives last month, the artillery of the American media were fully emplaced by the time President Nixon drove up to be memorialized in command of the international high ground.

Walter Cronkite had already filmed his “good evening” from the Great Wall in the brilliant sunshine of a chill winter morn. Eric Sevareid had already pronounced an interpretation of the great conquest. Only 10 minutes of Mr. Nixon's half‐hour inspection tour were to be filmed before the film reels would be rushed back to Peking for swift relay across the ocean from a specially imported ground station by means of specially rented space satellite.

Collaborating forces from the Chinese People's Liberation Army and other recruits had worked through the night to sweep clean the southern approach to the wall through Nankou Pass and to dust off a light snow from the ancient pathways of the monument.

It had somehow been arranged so that the scene would be splendidly lit by a sharp‐angled sun. And true to a 1936 poem by Chairman Mao Tse‐tung, it could he said — and soon seen in American living rooms—that “both sides of the Great Wall [were] one single white immensity.”

The American Commander in Chief, bareheaded—because, he had said, he has hated to be photographed in hats ever since he saw sample in the 1947 campaign for Congress—moved confidently past the firing slits on the wall for several hundred yards, showing by his gaze that he knew the position of every major camera emplacements. He knew faces in the ranks, too, at one point introducing Barbara Walters of N.B.C. to his escort, Deputy Premier Li Hsien‐nien, and explaining that she had been on television in the United States this morning, describing the sports show of the night before.

Brief Threat of Mutiny

There was a momentary threat of mutiny in the air among the media camp followers struggling for a picture of the visitation. In fact, catastrophe was only narrowly averted after the Presidential party inadvertently sealed Mr. Cronkite's escape route to the departing film courier. But H. R. Haldeman, the President's trusted White House associate, helped to clear a path for the bearer of the historic tidings and, with the aid of a commandeered vehicle, the broadcaster caught, up with the film in the Peking studio on time after all.

The President also favored the rear‐guard writing press with a report on his inspection.

“I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall and it had to be built by a great people,” he said. “Many lives, of course, were lost in building it. There was no machinery or equipment at the time, It had to all be done by hand. But under the circumstances it is a certain symbol of what China in the past has been and of China in the future can become.

“As we look at this wall, we do not want walls of any kind between peoples. Many things that have occurred on this trip have made me realize that it was worth coming, but I would say as I look at the wall, it is worth coming 16,000 miles just to stand here and see the wall.”

Asked to comment on other Chinese attractions, Mr. Nixon pronounced the exhibition of athletics to have been fantastic, great and superb. And he described the dance drama “Red Detachment of Women” as “certainly the equal of any ballet I have seen.”

The ballet offered a powerful message (against capitalism and against the Chinese Nationalists) and was “intended for that,” Mr. Nixon noted, but it was also excellent theater and excellent dancing and music and really superb acting. “I was very impressed,” he added.

The President's Chinese hosts cannot be accused of failure to appreciate the dramatic opportunities of this day of high tourism. Strategically placed atop the Great Wall in his path was a group of “typical” tourists who could just happen to be on hand for a cordial greeting before the cameras and to allow a smartly dressed young woman to extend a special hand of welcome.

And when the touring Americans reached the famous Ming Tombs, there were no fewer than three dozen beautifully costumed and choreographed citizens enjoying the park outside the Tomb of Emperor Wan Li, miles from nowhere.

The little girls all wore bright colored ribbons and brilliantly colored coats such as are rarely seen in Peking as they paddled a shuttlecock to and fro. Several teen‐age girls, each with camera, wore equally bright coats and blouses of a type even rarer in the capital.

At tables in the park sat several groupings of adults, most of them listening to transistor radios, the volume of their music ostentatiously loud. The coats of most of the adults were the familiar and ubiquitous blue, but, unmarred by even a wrinkle, they bore no resemblance to the fluffy, padded baggy style of the rest of the populace.

Some girls were playing cards when the Presidential party passed through the park—so intent they hardly noticed the man. “What kind are they playing?” Mrs. Nixon was heard to ask her interpreter.

“Poker.” “Oh.” It was difficult to tell who was playing for whom.

Perhaps the most impressive move of the dramatic day was Mr. Kissinger's decision to let the President, the First Lady, Secretary of State William P. Rogers and other dignitaries stand in the transcontinental limelight without him. He stayed in Peking, working on substantive matters because, of course, he—as the White House later explained—saw the wall on his journeys here to arrange the tour.

Because the Presidential adviser has acquired something of a reputation for mysterious absences and exotic secret diplomatic rendezvous, his spokesman had to go to some length to counteract suspicions that he had slipped away on some new adventure. He worked in seclusion, it was said, and apparently it was so.

His absence from the tourist trail only reinforced the growing impression that he and his staff now manage all the significant policy work for the President while Secretary Rogers and other State Department officials fulfill basically secondary assignments. It was Mr. Kissinger and not the Secretary of State who accompanied the President to the home of Chairman Mao and it is Mr. Kissinger and two of his aides who sit with Mr. Nixon through all the real business sessions of this summit conference.

Lest the visible touring to the wall and the tombs and to the Forbidden City in Peking create the wrong impression, the White House went out of its way to calculate down to the hour and the minute all the 25 hours that President Nixon and Premier Chou En‐lai have spent together in cars, in theater seats, in the stadium and at banquets as well as in the private and formal conferences.

The recitation prompted crucial question from one reporter, speaking more or less for all: “They will rest on the seventh day, won't they?”

Ronald L. Ziegler, the President's press secretary, replied in his most polished Chinese manner that the entire press corps had been invited by the Chinese journalistic community to a nine-course banquet of Peking duck—from fried duck liver and duck hearts with scallions through the baked delicacy itself down to the unreachable end, duck soup.

By Max Frankel

HANGCHOW, Saturday, Feb. 26—The traveling White House announced today that President Nixon and Premier Chou En‐lai had reached an accord on the “basic agreements” that they would enunciate in a communique to be written and published during the President's visit to Shanghai tomorrow.

Ronald L. Ziegler, Mr. Nixon's press secretary, announced the breakthrough in what had apparently been a stalled negotiation on arrival in this city in central China.

He gave no details on the nature of the agreements reached or the subjects that the communique will cover.

Presumably it will represent a summary of the two leaders extensive negotiations in Peking over the last week and also a series of agreements looking forward to some kind of continued diplomatic contact and also unofficial exchanges between China and the United States.

Long Night of Talks

Obviously eager to counteract signs in Peking last night that the two sides had hit a snag in their conversations, Mr. Ziegler disclosed that the President had stayed up until 4 A.M. today receiving reports from subordinates who were negotiating the disputed issues through the night.

The detailed work apparently was done by the President's aide, Henry A. Kissinger, and his counterpart in the week of talks, Huang Hua, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The final communique will also embrace detailed discussions of future contacts between Washington and Peking that were reached in conversations by a separate group of officials, headed by Secretary of State William P. Rogers and the Chinese Foreign Minister, Chi Peng‐fei.

Early Airport Meeting

The two sides obviously wanted to complete their work before Premier Chou and the President left the capital for a weekend of sightseeing and banquets in this lovely lake city and in Shanghai, before Mr. Nixon heads for home on Monday.

After a banquet in Peking last night and the indirect negotiations through the night they met a little earlier than scheduled at the capital airport this morning and apparently put their final approval to the compromise.

Mr. Kissinger, Mr. Chou and other aides will work through the rest of the day here and tomorrow on the way to Shanghai to translate the agreements into communique language and to arrange for accurate translations into the two languages, Mr. Ziegler said.

The news of the compromise—though not of its dimensions and therefore without any sense of who achieved what or how much—came after signs of difficulty were betrayed by the cordial but relatively restrained atmosphere at the closing banquet in Peking.

Traded Toasts

With none of the enthusiasm of their opening night feast there, the President and the Premier traded toasts that stressed their differences during the five days of talks and even implied diverging objectives. But they left the hall still guarding the secrets of their extensive discussions behind flourish of metaphor.

Emphasis Is Different

While Mr. Nixon stressed a desire for more unofficial contacts between Chinese and Americans, Mr. Chou emphasized a prior interest in normal state relations. The issue of Taiwan is known to stand in the way of such diplomatic relations, but it was unclear to what extent the Chinese leader saw it also as an obstacle to informal Government dealings and unofficial exchanges of people and goods.

Mr. Nixon, in his toast, seized on the symbolism of the Great Wall of China, asserting that the meetings “have begun the long process of removing” the wall between the two countries.

He spoke of the talks as a beginning, saying nothing more about the prospects for future contacts and merely reiterating the belief he brought to China that both nations share an interest in peace and building “a new world order.”

Premier Chou said the discussions had been “honest and frank” and therefore beneficial to both sides, but he then offered an elliptical vision of the future:

“The times are advancing and the world changes. We are deeply convinced that the strength of the people is powerful and that whatever zigzags and reverses there will be in the development of history, the general trend of the world is definitely toward light and not darkness.”

Whatever the reason, these toasts and the atmosphere in which they were delivered lacked the air of promise and relaxation of an otherwise identical gathering of the same 800 Chinese and American guests in the Great Hall of the People in the center of Peking last Monday.

After delivering their remarks, the President and the Premier decorously circled their round head table to touch the glasses of 10 members of the opposition delegation. A few more people from nearby tables came over to repeat the routine, but there was none of the random and extended table‐hopping of the first night.

Weariness or the tension of the secret talks or simply the reality of the gulf that remains between the two countries appeared to have had their effect.

There seemed to be some loss of flavor last night even in the banquet food, although the dishes by, the Chinese staff of the Great Hall were intriguing in name and appearance — pea sprouts and pigeon egg soup, three delicacies (sea slugs, sweet and sour Mandarin fish and walnut cream soup, among shrimp balls and chicken) with egg white, duck cubes in spiced sauce, vegetarian macedoine, hors d'oeuvres, assorted pastries, dumplings and fruit.

A few American touches were added to the affair to establish the President and Mrs. Nixon as the hosts, including menus printed under a White House seal, paperweights with the President's autograph as gifts, American cigarettes and White House matchbooks and a Napa Valley champagne for the toasts, for which the People's Liberation Army band again provided the music.

In deference to American custom—or the requirements of American television—Mr. Nixon delayed the toasts from the first to the last main course of the meal, which was cleared precisely at 9 P.M. (8 A.M. Friday, New York time).

The President said nothing that he had not said before setting foot on Chinese soil five days ago and he said less than on his first night in Peking.

“We began our talks recognizing that we have great differences,” the President said. “But we are determined that those differences not prevent us from living together in peace.”

There can be respect without agreement, he added, emphasizing that history rather than war should be the judge of rival ideas.

But the President did not repeat his informal remarks of the previous day, calling for an open world and for tourism and other exchange programs. Nor did he repeat his tribute Monday to China's peaceful intentions and to Chairman Mao's poetic instruction to seize the day and the hour. Mr. Nixon closed with George Washington's farewell, “Cultivate peace and harmony with all.”

Mr. Chou was even briefer.

“There exist great differences of principle between our two sides,” the Premier said. “Through earnest and frank discussion, a clearer knowledge of each other's positions and stands has been gained.”

Chou Is Optimistic

He was banking on the strength “of the people,” the Premier said, in feeling optimistic about the long‐run evolution of history. He knew that the Chinese and American peoples wanted more understanding and friendship and normal state relations, he added, and the Chinese Government, he promised, will work toward that goal. He said nothing about the United States Government.

Only four nights earlier Premier Chou had praised the common efforts of both Governments for finally opening “the gate to friendly contacts.” He had expressed hopes for “a new start” in relations between the United States and China on the basis of his principles of peaceful coexistence, which themselves imply a demand for recognition of Peking's sovereignty over Taiwan.

The President came to China believing that both sides wanted to put the Taiwan problem to one side, for future peaceful resolution, so that they could be free in pursuing their other common interests in East Asia and in relations with the Soviet Union.

Premier Chou received Mr. Nixon, he told interviewers, because he sensed the pressure for change in American policies and because he thought the President needed some concrete agreements to respond to those pressures.

By Max Frankel

PEKING, Feb. 25—The wondrous silence of China's capital was shattered at dawn today by the rhythmic chomp and chop of a thousand hoes and shovels attacking perhaps a half‐inch of snow in the broad Changan Boulevard outside the Hotel of Nationalities. If you listened hard, you could also hear the swoosh and slosh of a thousand straw brooms in the muck. If you looked out, it seemed as if every able-bodied citizen in the neighborhood had come to clear a path for the foreigners.

But the mind was deceived. No foreign imagination could grasp this scene. There were several hundreds of thousands of Peking citizens pouring into the streets, not to clear a path but to hack and sweep their city clean. If someone reports a million, don't bet against it.

By midday, the main streets, which are wider than the Jersey turnpike, were black again, wet but smooth without a trace of slush. Thousands were still brushing at curbside to make neat the piles on the sidewalks and the cone mounds piled to nourish each tree. Countless thousands had moved into each of the branch avenues and hundreds into each side street, moving tons of snow with teaspoons.

Cleaning Like a Housewife

Wrapped against the chill in their padded blue suits and coats, their cloth boots and shoes stained by water, the multitude labored like a housewife cleaning her kitchen floor. Every stray rivulet of slush was retrieved on every pass of every broom. Every crevice between asphalt and curb was swept twice, thrice. Shovels, sticks and bundles of twigs lifted the little mounds of snow over the curbstone. Brooms came back to wipe out the puddles left behind.

There were hoes and shovels only for every tenth person. A few battalions of soldiers of the People's Liberation Army pushed shoulder-height brooms of straw with a two‐foot reach. The men and women toiling in the other groupings were bent over brooms whose handles reached only to the thigh, and spread only about a foot wide. The children of all ages, by school class or job collective or Red Guard detachment, shoved even tinier bundles of straw and chopped up sticks.

Not a Shirker in Town

There did not seem to be a shirker in town. First one group, then another, would break momentarily to let a truck pass over its assigned terrain, spraying hot steam to loosen the bottom layers of snow and ice. But by the time the steam cloud had lifted, a thousand backs were bent again to the task. A diplomat's car, honking frantically, could barely find passage through the laboring crowds and the occupants of the car could barely suppress their guilt at riding coolly past the perspiring city.

What power can turn out such multitudes at the drop of a snowflake? What force can evoke such pride of work and thoroughness? What poverty forces a nation to commit its populace to a task that others perform with a few machines? What wealth of satisfaction results from such a collective and monumental effort?

In the afternoon, the bikes were back again, tinkling along in the silence. In the evening, the foreigners rode to their banquet in the Great Hall of the People, knowing nothing whatever about these people.

What do you talk about at table with the Chinese hosts?

“I saw my first Chinese dog today, out in the suburbs running near a peasant house.”

“Why, don't you know? All the peasants have dogs, for guarding.”

“Against what?”

“Thieves and other bad elements.”

“Is there that much theft and crime?”

A flustered silence. A blush.

“Not much, of course, but there is some.”

“What happens to someone who steals?”

“Depends on what he steals.”

“Let's say a bicycle.”

“Oh, he would be sent back to his collective, at work or at home or school and they would talk to him and make him study. That is much worse than punishment.”

“What if he denies it?”

“That cannot be. They would have evidence and, they would talk with him until he understands what he has done.”

“What if he steals something more valuable, goods or money from the state?”

“The same, I think.”

“Is there no punishment, no prison, no fines?”

“Of course there is punishment, but I know nothing about it—I have never stolen anything.”

“Who finds the evidence and how is a case argued?” “I really don't know. There is death sentence for murder and treason, of course, after the collective has studied the person and judged all his labor and his character and the case and this will be taken into consideration. But I do not know the procedures.”

“How many children do you have?”

“Five. That is a number considered too many today. People try to have only two, three at the most.”

“Are they close as a family, are they friends?”

“Not really. Each one has his own interests and work. My two boys like to play the violin. One girl likes to draw.”

“Are you worried about their relation to each other?”

“Oh, no. They and their children are growing up in an excellent social environment. There is no need to worry. There are no—what do you call them?—hippies. No drugs. There is a good spirit in the country and I do not believe in pushing them very hard. Let each one serve as he can and learn as he can to develop his talents.”

“Are you close to the young reporters that you are training to write the news?”

“Since the Cultural Revolution, we are making a special effort to recruit youngsters from the peasantry and from the countryside.”

“Are they equal to the task?”

“That depends on what you mean. They are often not so well equipped as youngsters from the city to meet the standards of work. That is a problem. But they know the work of the people and the mind of the people and they bring this to us. That is equally important, sometimes more important.”

“How did you become a party member?”

“By studying the work of the people, the thought of the people and becoming dedicated to the struggle for Communism.”

“Do you apply or are you chosen?”

“Of course you must apply. If you do not first wish to serve, you cannot be considered.”

“Who chooses?”

“You have read our party constitution.”

“But is there a committee or a leader in your section of the University?”

“There is a collective.”

“It there a limit on the number who are chosen?”

“No limit of numbers, only a limit to the number who can achieve the dedication to struggle and to serve.”

By Max Frankel

SHANGHAI. Sunday, Feb. 27—President Nixon and Premier Chou En‐lal will proclaim a new but circumscribed relationship between their Governments today, specifying some areas of agreement and some of disagreement and providing a framework for future contacts by their officials and peoples.

After a half‐year of careful preparation, a week of intensive discussion in Peking and a night of apparently tense bargaining, the two leaders and their associates reached compromise on some troubling fundamental issues, thus clearing the way for a formal communique this afternoon.

The document, still in preparation, is expected to be first attempt by the United States and China to look toward a growing and enduring relationship, though still without formal diplomatic recognition and embassies.

Worked Until 5 A.M.

Mr. Nixon and presumably Premier Chou, too, worked indirectly through subordinates on the accord until 5 o'clock yesterday morning in Peking. They met four hours later in a full and final session of their delegations at the Peking airport to shake hands on the deal, then flew together to the China coast for a weekend of sightseeing and banqueting.

The agreement left them in a visibly more relaxed mood, although Mr. Nixon particularly showed signs of fatigue from his long week as guest and negotiator in a strange and long hostile environment, halfway around the world from home.

The President spent yesterday in the scenic resort city of Hangchow, 100 miles southwest of Shanghai, touring with Mrs. Nixon through the cold vistas of West Lake, which man and nature together have copied from a thousand ancient Chinese scrolls.

Later today, still in the company of Premier Chou, the Nixons flew to Shanghai, the port city through which the President entered China Monday. Mr. and Mrs. Nixon were greeted at the Shanghai airport by Chang Chun‐chiao, the chairman of the city's revolutionary committee, and five deputy chairmen of the committee.

Mr. Nixon toured the Shanghai Industrial Exhibition with Premier Chou.

Pushing a button starting printing press, the President said: “This is a machine operated by a single button. You must be careful when you push the button that you push the right button. Sometimes when we push the button, it doesn't turn out alright.”

Mr. Chou agreed. “We must push the button for constructive purposes,” he said.

While in Hangchow, Mr. Nixon summoned reporters to his guest house, a complex of pagodas, pavilions and gazebos in a secluded and lovely site on West Lake, with several ponds and lagoons. The President assembled the reporters in his backyard to pose for a group picture, then let them stand in the cold while he apologized for the unusual secrecy surrounding his meetings with Premier Chou. The President said that this was the price he had to pay for creating an atmosphere of mutual trust” at the start of a new relationship.

Mr. Nixon said he was still not free to disclose or even to characterize the communique, except to say that it would cover “some areas” of agreement as well as disagreement.

“Whatever we have achieved —and you will have to judge that—would have been seriously jeopardized” by premature disclosure or comment, the President said. “Getting here was a long road and it had to he handled with very great discretion. It was a long road also for them”—meaning his Chinese hosts.

It was still unclear, therefore, what more enduring price the President may have had to pay for the agreement here or. what issue had separated the delegations in the closing hours of their bargaining. That final disagreement apparently accounted for the deliberate chill at the closing banquet in Peking Friday night.

Apparently, the last‐minute bargaining involved not only what would be said in the cornpunique, but also what would be left unsaid.

Both governments must account for their dealings to separate groups of friendly nations and allies, some of whom have grown extremely nervous about the emerging Chinese‐American relationship. Peking and Washington must also calculate the effect of their agreement on competitors—notably the Soviet Union. The communique is unlikely, therefore, to be a complete record of all the understandings and intimations that Mr. Nixon and Premier Chou exchanged.

Kissinger in Key Role

But the fact of agreement on a statement about future dealings, no matter how modest, will reinforce the effect of the meeting itself. The President has gone to great lengths to demonstrate a new interest in constructive dealings with China. Chairman Mao Tse‐tung and Premier Chou, by receiving him, have shown themselves equally interested in the new beginning.

Henry A. Kissinger, the President's adviser for national security, had prepared the way for the visit and many of the issues for discussion at the summit during two visits to Peking last year. Predictably, therefore, he has been playing the major role at the President's side and also in direct negotiations to break the impasse at the end.

He came to China this third time in eight months with an obviously respectful and also informal relationship with Premier Chou. He was paired in the formal talks with Chiao Kuan‐hua, a Deputy Foreign Minister and the leader of Peking's delegation to the United Nations last fall. Mr. Chiao also accompanied the touring party this weekend and worked on the final language with Mr. Kissinger.

The indications are that the major difficulty turned on the issue of Taiwan, which has stood in the path of diplomatic relations between Washington and Peking since 1950.

Whereas Mr. Nixon has been stressing his desire for exchanges of visitors, goods and ideas with China, Premier Chou has been calling for “normal state relations” based on respect for “territorial integrity and sovereignty.” Thus the President has been asking in effect that the problem of Taiwan be sidestepped for eventual resolution by the Chinese in Taipei and Peking. The Premier has been asking in effect that his claim to Taiwan be recognized soon, even if absorption of the territory takes a long time.

Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Foreign Minister Chi Peng‐fei led separate teams in concurrent talks, reportedly to cope with the specific problems of future diplomatic business and unofficial exchanges.

The conferees departure from Peking was uneventful. The airport conference lasted nearly an hour. Then, after inspecting a 500‐man military honor guard and standing stiffly in a chill wind through the People's Liberation Army band's rendition of the two anthems, the President, the Premier and their aides boarded a Soviet‐made Ilyushin‐18, the Premier's four-engine turboprop plane, for the two‐hour flight to Hangchow.

The Nixons will fly toward home tomorrow morning, laying over in Anchorage, and reaching Washington for what will probably be a very public and televised occasion, at about 9 P.M. Monday, New York time.

By Max Frankel

SHANGHAI—The great spectacle is almost over and a difficult but promising relationship is about to begin.

President Nixon's week in China has ratified a major adjustment in the attitudes of both Peking and Washington. It has been a magnificent week of cultural shocks and diplomatic precedents. It was also a week of assorted efforts at televised political promotion at home.

But now the mystery and much of the fear of China is suddenly gone and at least some of the secrecy surrounding a year of American‐Chinese diplomacy is about to end. In place of desperate lunges toward the diplomatic dark side of the moon by politicians and journalists and television spectaculars at the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, there will slowly emerge an uneasy and circumscribed relationship, virtually the first relationship between China and the United States since they fought each other in Korea 22 years ago.

President Nixon made it plain during the week that he wished to put aside the problem of Taiwan and the absence of formal diplomatic relations so as to have a wide‐ranging exchange with China of people, goods and ideas. Premier Chou En‐lai made it equally plain that he was not satisfied with the absence of “normal state relations” and that he wanted the United States to subscribe to his principles of coexistence, including the principle of territorial integrity and sovereignty under which he has so steadily pressed Peking's claim to Taiwan.

President Nixon, who flew here in the full majesty of the American Presidency, preceded by remote television units and satellites in the sky and followed by a horde of correspondents, security men, communications experts and even a hairdresser for the First Lady, had warned from the start that the tensions of 20 years would not be swept away in eight days. He protected himself further against unexpected twists and turns in the carefully planned conferences by saying that the real results of his mission would not in fact be evident for many years. He seemed satisfied that at home, as well as abroad, the mere spectacle of him in the capital of China would express his devotion to peace even before he had wholly ended the Vietnam war.

The President will campaign for reelection this year on that dedication and on the promise of a generation of peace, and he will now be able to tell wondrous tales and to show magnificent pictures of the unknown peoples and weird shrines of China. But he had a most serious diplomatic purpose as well—to overcome the bitterness, the sense of failure and the climate of retreat of the Vietnam era, to complicate the diplomatic lives of the Russians and force them into new patterns of agreement with him and to draw China into the process of finding a new order in the Pacific.

Until the communique can be analyzed; and more likely not for many months, it will not be entirely clear how many compromises have had to be reached to promote this relationship, how much Mr. Nixon had to give and what he obtained in return. For the moment, therefore, much of the visit can be judged only by its visual and public aspects.

There was the correct but only modest welcome to Peking on Monday. The handshake across the years with Premier Chou, the Star Spangled Banner beautifully rendered by the People's Liberation Army Band, the drive through drab villages and bleak, brick, worker settlements into the vast and empty streets and squares of the capital behind the drawn curtains of a Red Flag limousine. Gracious hospitality but no tribute. Until, suddenly, a change in schedule. An audience with Chairman Mao Tse‐tung, the 78‐year‐old saint and patriarch of Chinese Communism, in his book‐cluttered study — an honor last bestowed on the first day of a visit to the now despised comrade from Moscow, the late Nikita S. Khrushchev.

And then, Monday evening, a legendary banquet at the Great Hall of the People in the square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Carefully worded toasts, but toasts of tribute to good intentions and prospects, delivered live and in color to the world and reinforced six dozen times in a great commotion of glass‐clinking, the President and the Premier marching from place to place and table to table, impresario Henry Kissinger not far behind, all smiles, and the Secretary of State and Mr. Chou's highest associates in the Politburo behind him.

Differences were mentioned, but hopes were stressed. And the knowing readers in China were admitted to those hopes on Tuesday when the newspapers featured large photographs of the Nixons and long accounts of their movements and texts of the toasts. There was a run on those newspapers and in two hours they were sold out.

Onto a ballet of fiery triumph over capitalists and the Chinese Nationalists on Tuesday evening and to the Peking sports stadium on Wednesday. The best he had ever seen, Mr. Nixon said of the ballet. The gymnastics were superb, he added, on Thursday. Everything about China seemed great, especially the food, the hospitality, the civilization of the past and the promise of the future, the people and of course the wall, where he now stood. No more walls, the President said. Let's have an open world.

American television had seized the wall atop the mountains that seal off Peking from the once barbarian, now Russian north and Richard Nixon preened before those cameras, never tiring of saying that his hosts had made it possible “for the story of this histdric visit to be read, seen and heard by more people all over the world than on any previous occasion in history.”

On Friday, the Nixons toured the old Imperial palace — the Forbidden City — jesting about the quaint ways of the emperors of old, walking bareheaded in the snow, and reporting to their hosts that Julie had said by telephone that the television pictures were coming over beautifully. For some reason the Friday afternoon meeting was delayed and cut from three hours to one before the Monday night assembly of 800 returned to the Great Hall to re‐enact the opening banquet at the end of the Peking phase, the major phase, of the visit.

But the romance had drained. The summiteers were weary. Perhaps they were also tense. The clinking of glass es this time was routine. The toasts were threadbare. Mr. Nixon wanted to conquer the wall between the Chinese and American people. Premier Chou thought history promised light rather than darkness, but he wanted “normal state relations” first.

Was this an impasse over the fateful issue of Taiwan that seemed at the start to have been put aside for larger profit? Or was it merely some last‐minute diplomatic sword play—I want this out of the communique; No, I want that kind of communique?

On to Hangchow, the misty lakeside city near China's central coast, in a Chinese plane with the Premier, toward a boat ride on the lake, dinner with the district revolutionary committee. Then Shanghai, the metropolis of 10 million, now wired for sound and color image by the Radio Corporation of America and Comsat.

The improbability of all this must leave its mark on history, and the incongruity too. Premier Chou acknowledged “a new page” no matter what else happened. The Japanese looked nervously on the sunny commotion on the mainland. The North Vietnamese, observing American bombs clear through the week, held to bitter silence. The Russians, the object of it all, were left to guess its meaning.

The giant red billboard stood through arrival and departure at the Peking airport, stoically proclaiming: “Make trouble, fail; make trouble again, fail again; until their doom: this is the nature of all imperialists and reactionaries of the world; this is a Marxist law, and they will never go against it.”

“Observe good faith and justice toward all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all,” said Richard Nixon, quoting George Washington and pointing to the Presidential jet, The Spirit of ‘76.

By Max Frankel

SHANGHAI, Monday, Feb. 28 —President Nixon and Premier Chou En‐lai concluded a week of unusual negotiations here today and parted with an American pledge to arrange a gradual withdrawal of United States forces from Taiwan and a joint pledge for a gradual increase in American‐Chinese contacts and exchanges.

Mr. Nixon, contending that “This was the week that changed the world,” headed home with a conviction that both governments were committed, to “build a bridge” across the Pacific and 22 years of hostility. The President took off from Shanghai at 10:12 A.M. (9:12 P.M. Sunday New York time) and was scheduled to reach Washington, after stopover in Alaska, at 9 P.M. Monday, New York time.

Chou at Airport

Premier Chou saw his guests off at the airport in an informal farewell, warm and high-spirited but without any ceremony. He held to the President's original vow to let their joint communiqué “speak for itself.”

The communique alternated between statements of agreement and separate statements of divergent positions—a technique that is not uncommon in diplomacy but that was employed rather extensively by the two leaders.

The United States committed itself not to challenge the contention of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese that “Taiwan is part of China.” It reported Washington's desire for a peaceful settlement “by the Chinese themselves” and with that “prospect” in mind asserted the President's “ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all United States forces and military installations from Taiwan.”

In the meantime, but without timetable, Mr. Nixon promised progressively to reduce the 8,000‐man American contingent on the island “as the tension in the area diminishes.” Almost all of the American forces in Taiwan are operating in support of the troops in Vietnam, but the Nixon Administration appears now to be earmarking their presence for diplomatic use in the developing relationship with China.

Taiwan Issue Field Crucial

American officials here insisted, however, that the United States would maintain the defense commitment to Taiwan that exists under the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty. But this commitment was not mentioned in the communiqué.

On behalf of the Peking Government, the communiqué said that the Taiwan issue remained “the crucial question obstructing” normal relations with the United States. But it agreed to several steps, also without timetable, toward closer contacts.

The Chinese promised to stay in touch with the United States Government through various official channels, including the occasional dispatch to Peking of a senior American representative for diplomatic discus. sions. They agreed to “facilitate” further unofficial contacts in science, technology, culture, sports and journalism. And they agreed to permit the progressive development of trade with the United States.

These provisions on Taiwan and contacts formed the core of the bargain struck by Mr. Nixon and Premier Chou in 15 hours of formal talks last week, mostly in Peking. The two leaders, in their communique, touched on many other subjects, some of them concrete and some of them rather general. But the success of the collaboration they sought hinged on the central compromise.

The President had wanted an even faster pace of diplomatic and private communications and exchanges. The Premier had wanted a firmer recognition of Peking as the sole and legal government on Taiwan.

Movement by Both Sides

Both sides moved somewhat from past positions, but their concessions were in the realm of future action. Therefore, the degree to which they are actually carried out can be regulated to match the performance of the other side. The withdrawal from Taiwan and the contacts with China were not directly linked in the accord, but Henry A. Kissinger, the President's principal adviser, acknowledged that they could “become interdependent again” at any time.

Mr. Kissinger's use of the word “again’ was the clearest indication of the trade‐off that was arranged. But the President and the Premier had indicated their contending objectives on many other occasions, including the public toasts that they exchanged at alternately warm and restrained banquets through the week.

They parted in high spirits, at least outwardly. They downed a number of thimble-sized drinks in mutual tribute at a dinner here last night and stood to shake hands warmly on impulse when their host at the dinner, Chang Chun‐chiao, the chairman of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, celebrated the agreement in his city.

The desire to cooperate in the search for stability in Asia after the Vietnam war was plainly a major impulse for the meeting in the first place. The communique said both sides had benefited from the candid discussions at a time of “important changes and great upheavals” in the world.

Look to the Future

Mr. Nixon said In his toast, that the fact of agreement here and the future conduct of the two nations were even more important than the letter and the words of the communiqué.

Mr. Kissinger, commenting on the accord at a news conference, took the same approach. He said that the direction of the new relationship was more important than the accomplishments of the last week because the two sides had agreed to begin a process of coordinating when their interests converged and of reducing frictions when their interests differed.

A desire to help each other relieve the pressures generated by the Soviet Union was deemed to be another important stimulus toward agreement. On behalf of China and also as an expression of shared attitudes, the communiqué twice vowed opposition to any effort to establish “hegemony” in the AsiaPacific region.

It did not mention the Soviet Union, which Mr. Nixon will visit late in May, and Mr. Kissinger insisted that the language here was not aimed against any specific country. But this disavowal is widely described by American officials as merely a polite dodge for an effort to suggest to the Soviet Union that China and the United States would not let their relations with Moscow interfere with their own diplomatic prospects.

And presumably, the President and the Premier also found important domestic political advantages in the accord and in the elaborately televised public fellowship that accompanied the negotiations.

‘Generation of Peace’

Mr. Nixon is returning home ready to argue that he had laid the basis for his “generation of peace.” Premier Chou has re-enforced the moderate line by which he is trying to lead China from the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution toward more orderly and profitable development of industry at home and trade and contacts abroad.

The 1,800‐word communiqué, issued last evening after two nights of intensive last‐minute bargaining—presumably over the Taiwan issue—was divided into five separate but unmarked sections.

The first section was a straightforward account of Mr. Nixon's sojourn in China and his meetings with Mr. Chou and Chairman Mao Tse‐tung. Mr. Kissinger said later that the one‐hour talk with Mr. Mao. the 78‐year‐old patriarch of Chinese Communism, had been general but not merely philosophical and that the American delegation had reason to believe that the Chairman was consulted by the Premier “at every step along the way.”

The second section was made up of long and separate statements by the two sides of their divergent views on Indochina, Korea, Japan and South Asia. They offered statements of support for the rival positions of Hanoi and Saigon in the deadlocked negotiations for a settlement in Vietnam. They recited support for South and North Korea, with the United States stressing the need for “relaxation” of tensions and China stressing the aim of “unification.” Neither mentioned its military defense commitments in Korea, where the two countries fought their only war, 22 years ago.

They recorded Washington's preeminent desire for “friendly relations” with Japan, and China's concern about Japanese “militarism.”

And they reaffirmed their separate but overlapping policies in South Asia, alluding to their collaboration in support of a cease‐fire during the recent war between India and Pakistan, a war in which both countries were seen to be leaning toward the defense of Pakistan. The Chinese also deplored “great power rivalry” in the subcontinent.

An agreement on general principles of international conduct made up the third section. Mr. Nixon subscribed fully to the Premier's long‐standing definition of peaceful coexistence, as first defined at the Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations in 1955, and Mr. Chou accepted an American statement that international disputes should be settled without threat or use of force.

This did not amount to a renunciation of the use of force against Taiwan, which Peking deems to be a province of China and therefore a strictly internal problem.

Statements on Taiwan

In the fourth section, separate Chinese and American statements were made concerning Taiwan, the first calling for an American withdrawal and the second promising withdrawal by stages, but conditionally. Mr. Kissinger would not specify the “tension in the area” that he said would delay the American force reduction for vet some time.

He had previously indicated that nearly all the troops on Taiwan were necessary mostly in support of war efforts in Vietnam. Before the build‐no in Indochina, there were only a few hundred American troops in Taiwan, engaged in naval activities and on advisory and aid missions to the Chinese Nationalist Government.

But Mr. Kissinger avoided any suggestion today that an end of the fighting in Indochina; would permit—or assure—the promised pullout. On the contrary, the Nixon Administration appears eager to extend the process of withdrawal to retain some leverage in the unfolding relationship with China. Its definitions of policy have already eroded the diplomatic position of the Nationalists—in the United Nations and in many other countries. This is expected to set in motion a form of political erosion on Taiwan and it is doubtful that Mr. Nixon will pull out American forces altogether until he has seen the pace of political change there and in Taiwan's dealings with Peking.

The United States had previously urged the Chinese sides to resolve the Taiwan issue by themselves and had promised not to interfere in this vestige of the Chinese civil wars. But in taking that step toward Peking, the President had also pledged to maintain diplomatic relations with and defense commitments to the Nationalists—pledges that were not mentioned in the communiqué.

Repetition Avoided

They were last made in the President's State of the World Message earlier this month and Mr. Kissinger said they remained active. But it was embarrassing on the Chinese mainland to repeat commitments with such an unpleasant ring to the hosts, he indicated, and so they were left out of the joint declaration. Mr. Kissinger asked that the issue not be ‘raised further in this setting.

He also contended that the gradual withdrawal of American troops had been indicated on “innumerable” previous occasions by the Administration. He could not cite any precedents and reporters remembered only a statement to that effect by him last fall. And the pledge of an eventual total withdrawal of American forces had never been given before.

The fifth section of the communiqué consisted of expressions of agreement that the two nations would promote more exchanges of private groups, more trade and some continuous diplomatic link.

Mr. Kissinger indicated that the Chinese would refuse to send official representatives to Washington as long as the Chinese Nationalists maintained diplomatic status there. For the same reason, the Peking Government appears determined to move more slowly and in largely indirect ways on all forms of exchange and contact.

The communiqué did not mention it directly, but Mr. Kissinger said he thought a “contact point” between Washington and Peking would be established in the “reasonably near future,” though not in the United States. He cited the precedent of the occasional’ and slow‐paced ambassadorial talks between the United States and China in Warsaw over the last 15 years. He appeared to have in mind a more active channel, such as those he developed in Canada and elsewhere to arrange his and the, President's trips here.

The official representatives who would be sent to Peking from time to time” could have ambassadorial or even Cabinet rank, Mr. Kissinger indicated. Now that the President and the Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, and Mr. Kissinger have all been here, such a mission would obviously be well within the bounds of precedent.

Overall, however, Mr. Kissinger contended that the agreement took the two countries far beyond their positions of a year ago when the American table tennis team received its invitation to Peking and when Chairman Mao first indicated through Edgar Snow, the late American journalist, that the President would be received here if he wished to come.

At that time, Mr. Kissinger said, China envisioned only low‐level people‐to‐people exchanges. China's decision to encourage much broader exchanges, to create a diplomatic mechanism for continuing contact and to join the United States in the definition of policy principles were all still “unthinkable” a year ago, he added.

Authority Limited

The talks here last week also ranged beyond his own conversations with Premier Chou, in July and October, Mr. Kissinger said, in that he has none of the President's ability to make commitments and to speak with authority on variety of topics.

This defense of the value of Mr. Nixon's personal involvement was also offered by Ronald L. Ziegler, the President's press secretary, in a television statement before American cameras here. The very fact of the communiqué between the governments “is symbolic of the greater understanding produced” by the participation of Mr. Nixon, Mr. Ziegler said.

The President's concluding comment on the communique was an expression of gratitude for the “gracious hospitality” shown him by the Chinese Government. Encompassed in that remark was gratitude not only for the food and the comfortable quarters made available to the American visitors but also for the security and communications arrangements and the extraordinary efforts to facilitate live‐color transmission of television coverage of many of Mr. Nixon's activities here.

The Chinese allowed hundreds of technicians and newsmen to run through their cities in every direction to manage this technological extravaganza, with the help of two ground stations that fed the television signals to a satellite over the Pacific for relay to New York.

Mr. Nixon's host thus provided him with a massive stage, from the Great Hall of the People in Peking to the Great Wall of China, 35 miles away, and other attractions in Hangchow and Shanghai. Apparently the Chinese understood Mr. Nixon's political desire for exposure at home in this election year and deemed it an accommodation that could be made without significant loss of control in their own territory. They may even have calculated that the vast coverage only further committed the President to a successful outcome here, thus easing their negotiating task somewhat.

No ‘Scoreboard Mentality’

Mr. Kissinger insisted that the American delegation did not look upon the relationship here with a scoreboard mentality, registering points for or against one side or the other on various issues. But the Presidential aide, who has been the impresario for the entire undertaking, was unusually tense in addressing the news conference.

This was probably due in part to the inhibitions imposed by the need to address sensitive subjects on Chinese soil. But the nervousness appeared also to derive from a sense in the American delegation that some of its concessions might not be favorably received at home or in allied capitals.

As one diplomatic reporter observed, the negotiating side that feels it is coming out ahead does not usually disdain a look at the scoreboard.

Also appearing at the news conference was Marshall Green, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia who will now fly to Tokyo, Taipei and other allied capitals in Asia to report on the discussions here and to avoid resentment or charges of diplomatic betrayal.

Mr. Kissinger was the principal “go‐between” at the conference, negotiating difficult issues with Chiao Kuan‐hua, deputy foreign minister, on behalf of the principals. Secretary Rogers and the Chinese Foreign Minister, Chi Peng‐fei, met for a total of 10 hours with their aides to consider more specific aspects of the same issues. They apparently dealt with the problems posed by more extensive contacts without diplomatic recognition and appeared to have concluded that easiest progress would come in places where unofficial groups such as academies of sciences or universities were available to deal directly with their counterparts and without Government involvement in China.

Some of the negotiators were up until 5 A.M. Saturday and again until 3 A.M. yesterday to prepare the final communique. At the very end they were juggling such minor issues as whether the Chinese view of some questions or the American view should be listed ‘first. They decided in the end to run some paragraphs one way in the English version and in a different order in the Chinese text.

Premier Chou called on Mr. Nixon at his guest house for an hour before the departure, just reviewing their conversations and saying good‐by.

Then at the airport, the Premier, in an obviously good mood and appearing to be very pleased with the outcome of the talks, dealt warmly with all the American officials. When Chou said good‐by Marshall Green, who is flying out separately from Shanghai, the Premier, obviously aware of the Assistant Secretary's upcoming mission, said You have a difficult job.”

After the President's plane took off, Mr. Chou surprised the American correspondents by remaining on the airport apron bantering with them for about 10 minutes.

Chou Fields Questions

There were some trivial exchanges. But there were also a couple of half‐serious questions that he fielded alertly.

One newsman said that people hoped to see him at the United Nations or in the United States one day. He indicated that he had no plans to come to the United States, that this was work for his United Nations delegation.

Foreign Ministry officials at the airport would not talk much about the accord, but they did indicate that they thought the discussions a “positive” experience and they seemed happier than that with their outcome.

These officials clearly interpreted the communiqué and the week of talks as yet another step in American disengagement from involvement with Chiang Kai‐shek and the Nationalists.

By Max Frankel

SHANGHAI, Monday, Feb. 28—The last glimpse of China for the American voyagers is through weary eyes. They felt the excitement of Marco Polo, but they had only days where he had years. To be precise, they had eight days to fill a hunger of decades—one day for every 100 million Chinese, most of whom were babies when Americans last strolled these streets.

The streets leave a drab memory—clean drabness, to be sure, and blue drabness when the people are milling in the streets in their ultramarine suits, which is almost always. But how can you call anything drab that has so much life and so many lives and so many unknown ambitions and misfortunes and adventures and dreams?

The census bureau in Washington has now put the number of people in China at 850 million, give or take 50 million, and the life expectancy at 55 or 60, give or take five years.

Chairman Mao Tse‐tung is defying all the figures, living now in his 79th year and insisting that the dream shall be only one: self‐sufficiency or self‐respect or constant revolution and equality, a pure and innocent collective spirit triumphant over ego, individualism and all the recorded experience of societies.

The people leave a disturbing memory, repeating the slogans of Chairman Mao and retreating behind the mask of political conformity. But the same mask ‘makes them inordinately, civil and hospitable and self‐assured. They seem to believe that everything except political power and individual liberty is indeed their business, and they express themselves vigorously and cheerfully across the lines of rank whether the issue is how best to wrap up a package or how to carve a peacock‐shaped radish for a banquet.

“What do the Chinese people laugh at, what jokes do they tell?” a visitor asks.

“You would not ask that question if we had not lost contact for 22 years.”

“Perhaps. But humor can be different in different societies. We eat with forks, you with sticks. It does not make one better than the other.”

“All right, what do you want to know about jokes?”

“Do men make jokes about women?”

“Yes,” nods a man.

“No, never,” says a woman.

“Do you make jokes about Chairman Mao?”

“No. He is a figure of respect and esteem for everyone.”

“Do reporters make jokes about their editors?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do soldiers joke about their officers?”

“Yes, when it is not a time of serious work, or challenging the work of the collective.”

“Then where do you draw the line between officers and editors and the Chairman and the Premier? Against whom can you joke?”

A table of gracious hosts maintained for the next 10 minutes that it could not understand such a silly question.

Inevitably, the memory drifts in China to Moscow. Peking took the worst from the Soviet capital architecturally even more than politically. It has rebelled against Soviet revisionism, against the incentive system there, against consumerism and against individualism. But not against the overbearing statism that makes the individual fearful of his neighbor and his government and makes him feel helpless against the sanctioned opinions of the majority.

The Russians live a vastly more comfortable life, and that concern for comfort is one source of the Chinese resentment against them. Chinese travelers to Moscow a decade ago recall young Russian men seeking illegal dollars in Moscow streets and Soviet children begging any kind of money out in the provinces. Since foreign money and beggars particularly were the dominant symbols of the miserable old days in China, the Chinese found it easy to believe Chairman Mao when he told them that the Russians were now on the road to capitalism.

But the coats and dresses in Shanghai are much more decisively tailored than those in Peking, and the people in Peking are said to admire the clothes in Shanghai. And the best Communist's idea of luxury is more color and more individuality in the dress of his daughter. Poverty does not easily admit to individuality and China is a very poor country and a crowded country. Whether Maoism can survive a new generation that does not remember what came before is the leading question now. Whether it can survive abundance will be the ques tion after that, If the idea is still around to be questioned.

There is no easy comparison with the Soviet Union because the Russian Revolution, besides beihg European and proletarian, is too remote for any living memory and has killed off a whole middle generation, between old Bolsheviks and young Communist leaders, which might have borne the memory of the bad old days and taught respect among the young for their parents, for authority.

“I understand philosophy, but computers are too complicated for me,” President Nixon said to Premier Chou during a tour of Shanghai's industrial exhibition yesterday.

“I don't understand them either, but you have to pay attention to them,” said the Premier.

“Books are better than TV,” said the President moments later, apparently unconcerned about all the television cameras and correspondents he had brought to China to educate his people. “You can read five times as fast as you can listen to TV,” he said. The Premier agreed.

“Art is my weakness,” said the President, looking now at some art objects. He looked through a magnifying glass at a small piece of ivory the size of a rice grain bearing an engraved poem by Chairman Mao, “Ode to the Plum Blossom.”

“Are women more intelligent than men?” asked the President of the Premier on seeing women technicians in the exhibits and advertising his question as “delicate.”

“In the majority of work, what men can do, women can do,” said the Premier. He pointed out that one of the interpreters assigned to the Nixon party could do her job so well because her husband performs more domestic chores than his wife.

“Be sure your husband doesn't stay home and look at TV,” said the President to the interpreter.

At a dinner Saturday night in Hangchow, Mr. Nixon closed his toast to friendship with a tribute to that interpreter, Tang Wen‐sheng. At the first mention of praise for her, the English interpreter for Premier Chou, Chang Fan‐chih, jumped from her seat and hastened to the microphone. She was ready for the translation when the President finished, sparing her colleague the embarrassment of speaking well of herself on behalf of Mr. Nixon.

A few nights before that, the advance party of American security men in Hangchow sought out the pick‐up team of Chinese security personnel for a game of basketball at a gymnasium near the guest house they were to guard. Cultural exchange was under way again. Everyone talked about not keeping score and just playing for the fun of it, but the points were counted anyway, and the Americans were leading at halftime. Suddenly, for the second half, there emerged three rather tall new Chinese security men on the host team. The hosts emerged victorious, 70‐59.

“That's very dangerous,” Mrs. Nixon said to Chang Hong, her fifth‐grade student guide in an orange jumper, as she was being shown an exhibition of old‐style swordplay at the Shanghai Children's Palace today.

“Oh, that's not a real sword,” said the assured 12‐year‐old.

As they moved on, with James Michener, the author, chronicling the tour on behalf of some of his colleagues in the weary press corps, Mrs. Nixon encountered large posters stressing that recreation also has a purpose in China. “Strive for progress, all boys and girls of China,” one of them read.

“We study very hard in this place,” said Chang Hong. “We learn everything we can and then go back to our schools and teach the others, as Chairman Mao told us.” Mrs. Nixon and the little girl moved on to hear beginners’ orchestra playing “Can She Bake A Cherry Pie, Billy Boy"—just as the People's Liberation Army band had played it for the Nixons in the Great Hall of the People in Peking last week. But an officious adult led the group on, into a dead end of the building's corridor.

“The children knew the way but the others got us lost,” said Chang Hong to Mrs. Nixon, who kissed the girl.

And there was the merry puppet show, in which hidden children manipulated the dolls with great skill. As they were about to leave the room, Chang Hong took Mrs. Nixon by the hand and led her behind the stage.

“See,” she said. “They're real people!”

China is very exhausting.