President Carter's decision to send his national security affairs adviser to Red China was protested by 27 members of the House of Representatives, including both Republicans and Democrats. They sent a letter to President Carter expressing their concern about Zbigniew Brzezinski's trip.
MAY 17- Red China has decided to reinstate an estimated 100,000 rightists purged in 1957 in a campaign led by Mao Tse-tung, Kyodo news service said.
Senator Richard Schweiker (R-Penn.) called President Jimmy Carter's policy toward the Chinese Communists "inept" and urged his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to reconsider his forthcoming trip to Peiping.
The Heritage Foundation in Washington released a booklet asserting that President Carter does not have the constitutional authority to abrogate the Mutual Defense Treaty with the Republic of China. Senator Barry Goldwater is the author.
MAY 18 - Heavy fighting again has broken out between Cambodia and Vietnam following Red Chinese delivery of tanks and other armor to the Cambodians.
Red China said the recent Soviet armed intrusion into a northeastern border province was "a bloody incident" and that it has evidence to prove that Soviet troops shot Red Chinese in habitants. "Facts amply prove that this intrusion of Soviet troops was by no means a case of in advertent trespass into (Red) Chinese territory, but a military provocation organized by the Soviet side," said "vice foreign minister" Yu Chan.
MAY 19 - Red China has selected a veteran diplomat to become its liaison representative in the United States. Teng Hsiao-ping said Chai Tse-min, a career diplomat whose last post was in Thailand, had been chosen for the Washington post.
MAY 20 - Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, arrived in Peiping and was met by Red Chinese "foreign minister" Huang Hua.
MAY 21 - Zbigniew Brzezinski met with Teng Hsiao-ping. Among others attending the meeting were Leonard Woodcock, chief of the U.S. liaison office in mainland China; Michael Oksenberg, staff member of the U.S. National Security Council; and "foreign minister" Huang Hua.
MAY 22- A new round of struggle in Peiping's top leadership may mean that it will not be long before a showdown takes place between Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-ping, according to the Kung Sheung Daily News in Hongkong.
A wall poster in Peiping has identified Hua Kuo-feng as the principal figure responsible for the suppression of the Tienanmen Square riots.
The Carter administration has not made any new decision on "normalizing relations" with Red China, said State Department spokesman Tom Reston. He said the administration still does not have a timetable for "normalization."
MAY 23 - U .S. Senator Barry Goldwater issued a statement to assail the visit of Zbigniew Brzezinski to the Chinese mainland as a complete denial of President Carter's policy on human rights. He also called the visit a new step in the process of the Carter administration's projected betrayal of Taiwan.
MAY 24 - The New York Times reported that the Japanese are not in a hurry to conclude a "peace and friendship treaty" with Red China. In a Tokyo report, the newspaper said a senior minister in the Japanese government had said that the Chinese Communists "just want to lay down terms. They don't want to negotiate."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, was believed to have been overwhelmed by Chinese Communist "hospitality" and to have made "exorbitant statements" while he was in Peiping, said Fox Butterfield of the New York Times, quoting foreign diplomats in Hongkong.
Describing the flow of Chinese residents from Vietnam as "a pitiful scene," Red China assailed Hanoi for "unwarrantedly" forcing the Chinese to leave their homes and jobs.
Colina MacDougall, a British Red China watcher, reported that Peiping's military commission has recently taken steps to prevent the apparently widespread leakage of secret information. Officials handed secrets to unspecified recipients;' she said.
MAY 25 - A Peiping dispatch in the Toronto Globe and Mail reported that religion is still a closely monitored affair in (Red) China and is "officially discouraged."
The Hongkong government said it has told Red China it is concerned about the influx of immigrants this year. Acting Chief Secretary Philip Haddon-Cave told the Legislative Council that 30,000 legal and illegal immigrants entered Hongkong in the first five months of 1978. "These figures could imply a total gross intake for the year of between 75,000 and 80,000," he said.
MAY 26 - There is no set timetable for "normalization of relations" between Washington and Peiping, and the U.S. government still stands by its treaty commitments to the Republic of China, said John Cannon, public affairs adviser at the State Department's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
MAY 27 - Mark Gayn, columnist for the Toronto Star, said people should not be misled into believing that the Chinese mainland under Communist control is a land of contented people. Gayn said: "We continue to be bombarded with books and articles by either quickie visitors to (Red) China or by Peking's professional propagandists, who keep telling us it is a land of milk, honey and unshakable loyalty to whoever is in power at the moment, and it is a 'nation' without crime. This is silly mythology-in-the-making."
MAY 28 - Malaysia's home minister, Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie, reminded the Malaysian people that all forms of Communism are equally dangerous to the people, the nation and religion. He referred to the pro-Peiping group of Communists as "white ants and the pro-Moscow group as mistletoe" - a plant parasite, and added: "Both are big enemies of the tree, and both aim to kill the tree. That tree is our country, Malaysia."
Vietnamese officials accused Red China of slander and said false accusations of mistreating Chinese residents in Vietnam "harmed the friendship" between the two.
MAY 29 - Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda said Japan would not compromise with Red China in negotiations for a "peace and friendship" treaty.
Vietnam blasted Red Chinese support for Cambodia, then asked for talks in Peiping within two weeks.
MAY 30 - Despite its willingness to expand trade with the Chinese Communists, West Germany is guarding against any sales of significant military hardware to them, the Baltimore Sun reported.
Red China is not impressed by Soviet-American efforts to reach a new strategic arms limitation agreement. Peiping believes the superpowers are headed for war, probably in Western Europe, "foreign minister" Huang Hua told the United Nations.
MAY 31 - A Soviet leader warned Japan in a newspaper interview published in Tokyo that Moscow would change its policy towards Tokyo if the government signed a "peace and friendship treaty" with Peiping that included a clause denouncing "soviet hegemony."
A Hongkong Communist newspaper said the Soviet Union has set up a guided missile base aimed at Red China in the Vietnamese central highlands.
Determined to shore up his position at the top, Hua Kuo-feng has made a bold bid to gain mastery of the Chinese Communist armed forces, Red China watchers said. Hua made his move before the military chiefs at an all-army political conference in Peiping. He warned against splits, plots or conspiracies and said politics takes first place in the army modernization campaign.
JUNE 1 - Vietnam has put its armed forces on alert and dug tunnels deep in the mountainous north as well as in the central highlands in apparent preparations for war, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review of Hongkong.
Red China is trying to drag the United States and Japan into its preparations for war with the Soviet Union, Soviet Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin told visiting Japanese newspaper executives in Moscow. He warned Japan not to sign a proposed "treaty of friendship" with Red China.
JUNE 3 - Wall posters have appeared in Peiping alleging that four top military men tried to poison Hua Kuo-feng and other leaders, a Japanese report said. The military men named were "vice premier" Chen Hsi-lien; Tien Wei-hsin, deputy director of the general political department of army general headquarters; Chiang Yung-hui, deputy commander of Shenyang units; and Li Kuang-chien, who was not further identified.
Red China has formally put an end to the Red Guards, the spearhead organization of young militants during the "cultural revolution," a Yugoslav report said.
The United States was prepared to make limited attacks on mainland China and "take a risk of war" in defense of Taiwan in the mid-1950s, Secretary of State John Dulles told the Senate in secret testimony newly released in Washington.
Production of major crops on the Chinese mainland was stagnant or declining for the third consecutive year in 1977 and agricultural production and, domestic supplies dropped further behind demand, according to a report of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1977, Red China's grain production, excluding soybeans, was estimated at 270 million tons, 2 million tons below the 1976 level, the report said. Wheat dropped an estimated 4.5 million tons to 40.5 million tons.
JUNE 5 - Teng Hsiao-ping said Peiping has suspended part of its aid to Vietnam because of alleged persecution of Chinese residents, a Japanese report said.
JUNE 6 - Fox Butterfield of the New York Times reported from Hongkong that Red China recently released about 110,000 persons who had been detained since an "anti-rightist" campaign in 1957. He said that there are no accurate estimates of the number of political prisoners in mainland China, but analysts in Hongkong surmise that if 110,000 people detained in 1957 were still being held, the overall total cannot be small.
Vietnam warned Red China its unilateral plan to send ships to pick up Chinese in Vietnam violates Vietnamese sovereignty and insisted Peiping ask permission first.
More than 50 soldiers were killed and more than 200 injured in Kweichow last February 8 as a result of railway sabotage carried out by armed guerrillas, according to an intelligence report reaching Taipei.
JUNE 7 - Teng Hsiao-ping has ordered the armed forces to reactivate the campaign against the late "defense minister," Lin Piao.
A large Red Chinese military delegation left for Paris en route to Sweden and Italy for official visits.
JUNE 9 - Peiping's decision to arm and train a huge militia is aimed not just at the threat of war but at tightening internal security control, the Washington Post reported. Peiping has begun accelerated training and arming of its primitive but huge militia force of 60 million to 100 million men and women.
The Carter administration has reversed an earlier decision and approved the sale of US$2.8 million worth of military-related equipment to Red China. The initial export application from Daedulus Enterprises of Ann Arbor, Michigan, had been rejected by the Commerce Department, reportedly for fear the Red Chinese could adapt the equipment to intercept U.S. military signals.
JUNE 10 - Workers sentenced to "labor reform" by the Chinese Communists staged a mass escape May 15 in Kwangtung after killing a number of Communist cadres and sabotaging materials for road construction, an intelligence report said.
Soviet Ambassador Vasily Tolstikov left his post in Peiping for Moscow. He had been ambassador to Peiping since October 10, 1970.
JUNE 12 - State Department spokesman Hodding Carter III denied press reports that the United States will "normalize relations" with the Chinese Communists by next February. There is no timetable for "normalization," Carter said.
Senator Robert Dole of Kansas suggested that the U.S. withhold any movement toward "normalization of relations" with Red China until the Peiping regime makes positive efforts to help relieve the persecutions and oppressions that exist in Communist Cambodia.
A German news report on the Wuhan steel mill said worker discipline there left much to be desired. The report said workers were sleeping on the construction site of the plant amid steel plates and machinery.
JUNE 13- Representative Barry Goldwater Jr. of Arizona urged condemnation of the Chinese Communists as human rights violators.
Red China has "gangs of young toughs" who avoid labor in the countryside, despise authority of any kind, make a career of street fighting and admire Stalin and Hitler, according to a report in Spectator magazine by Miriam London, a research assistant in Chinese studies, and her husband Dr. Ivan D. London, professor of psychology at Brooklyn College.
President Carter and his advisers have told an elite private group they will press for "full diplomatic relations" with Peiping based on three conditions safeguarding the future of Taiwan, UPI reported. The three condition were said to be: (1) That U.S. trade and military aid to the government on Taiwan continue after diplomatic relations are established with Red China. (2) That a U.S. trade office be established in Taiwan when the embassy is closed. (3) That Red China must make clear, through a formula yet to be agreed upon, that it would not use force in seeking to reunite Taiwan with the Chinese mainland. The State Department declined comment.
The former vice chairman of the provincial revolutionary committee in northeastern Kirin, Hsu Chao-chang, has been arrested and expelled from the Communist party after being branded "a criminal guilty of every conceivable atrocity," the Kirin provincial radio reported.
Kuo Mo-jo, one of Red China's top writers, died at the age of 86. He was president of the "Chinese Academy of Science."
JUNE 14 - U.S. Senate minority leader Howard Baker said the United States should not sever its diplomatic relations with the Republic of China in order to establish relations with Red China. He also said he is opposed to the policy of the United States "playing the (Red) China card" against the Soviet Union.
A top Communist chieftain in Peiping recently disclosed that incidents of bloodshed have continued and spread since the denouncing of the "gang of four" in October, 1976. According to a report from intelligence agents on the mainland, Yeh Chien-ying, a veteran Communist leader, announced that more than 7,000 troops were killed or seriously wounded in conflicts with the remnants of the "gang of four" in the last two years. More than 1,120,000 remnants of the gang were arrested.
Prolonged drought will compel the Chinese Communists to buy some 2 million metric tons of wheat in the last quarter of this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated.
JUNE 15 - Chinese Communist intelligence agents have been collecting top-secret Japanese information and confidential data through the so-called "friendship bookstores" in Japan, the Sankei Shimbun reported.
Some veteran Western diplomats stationed in Moscow warn against any outright American arms sales to Peiping, fearing that the Soviets would view the move as a major affront and take "retaliatory action of some kind."
Some 1 0,000 Chinese Communist troops have pulled out of an area of northern Laos they occupied for 17 years, the Los Angeles Times reported. The withdrawal was apparently connected with the conflict pitting Cambodia and Red China against Vietnam and Russia.