China appeared to back the central government of Yahya Khan. But the primary thrust of China's pronouncements thus far has been to declare the war an “internal matter” and to warm India to keep hands off. In a letter to Yahya Khan, Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai has pledged that China would come to Pakistan's aid if India were to invade. Saying that Yahya Khan's efforts would “regain normalcy” in Pakistan. Chou asserted, “Pakistan unity... is essential to its survival and prosperity."
China's anti-Indian alliance with Pakistan's military regime came soon after the 1962 Sino-Indian War, and since then China has given economic and military aid to Pakistan. Radio Pakistan has recently announced, according to UPI (New Delhi, May 2) that China had made an offer of increased aid “over and above” the long-term $ 210-million aid commitment made during Yahya's visit to Pcking in November 1970. Pakistani leftists complain that the alliance has been a hindrance to the NAP, which has softened its opposition to the government because of it.
China's purpose seems to be to keep the struggle in East Bengali a civil war and so far as is diplomatically possible-to deny India (and behind her the Soviet Union and the US.) the pleasure of supporting a bourgeois East Bengal under Awami League leadership. In his letter to Yahya Khan. Chou, remonstrated that “it is necessary to distinguish the great mass of the people from a clique who only think of sabotaging the Union of Pakistan,” a statement that seems to refer directly to Sheikh Mujibur and the Awami League leadership. Mujibur himself has been quoted as warning that “I alone can save East Pakistan from Communism.” Sometimes called the “Chiang Kaishek of Bangladesh". Mujib is accused by Bengali leftists of being an “American agent” -a term metaphorically if not factually truc.
China will most likely come to the support of Bangladesh when local-not national-leadership has been able to forge a Vietnam-style coalition liberation front. The possibility of China's publically supporting Pakistan against Indian intervention, while privately supplying guns to the Bengalis, cannot be ruled out.
As reports of heavy fighting receded from the news in late April, CBS reported that the West Bengali Naxalites had addressed a message to China explaining that Hast Bengal's liberation movement had become a true people's war, and was not in the hands of the Awami League.
Meanwhile, what it will mean to support united Pakistan in the next few months is somewhat unclear. The army's East Bengal blitzkrieg has cost Pakistan some $ 200 million in delayed and destroyed exports, and the central government has reported a thirty-five percent drop in Pakistan's gold reserves-down to $82 million. With the outflow of foreign exchange averaging about $20 million a month, Pakistan will have to cut its imports sharply, starving the West's factories of raw materials and forcing up already high unemployment.
Reports filtering out of the West (all Pakistan is under press censorship) say that food is short and that tenant farmers in some provincial areas of West Pakistan are refusing to pay their rents. Worker student unrest is reported in West Pakistan's industrial centers, with some strikers being fired on by government troops. In the East. Awami League
