Secret Papers About China Are Released by the C.I.A.

The New York Times > Washington: "The Central Intelligence Agency made public on Monday a rich trove of previously classified documents on China, including the supposedly authoritative National Intelligence Estimates issued over the 30-year period of Mao Zedong's rule. Among the most important judgments, Mr. Suettinger wrote, was a consistently accurate assessment that the Communist Party in China was never challenged from 1948 on in its predominance of power on the Chinese mainland.

Other assessments contained in the documents include one written in 1950, on the eve of China's entry into the Korean War. It correctly said that Chinese forces were capable of either halting the northward path of United Nations forces or of "forcing U.N. withdrawal further south through a powerful assault." A pair of Special National Intelligence Estimates on China's response and involvement in the Vietnam War made clear that China would not risk an open confrontation with the Untied States. One of the estimates, issued in 1966, said, "At present levels of American action [in North Vietnam], we continue to believe that China will not commit its ground or air forces to sustained combat against the U.S."

The documents show that American intelligence agencies were slow to recognize the emergence of differences between the Soviet Union and China in what is known as the Sino-Soviet split. As late as 1966, three years before clashes along the border took the relationship to its lowest state, an estimate described an open break in relations between the Soviet Union and China as unlikely. Documents on the emergence and status on China's strategic nuclear forces, the subject of 13 estimates between 1962 and 1974, were heavily censored, Mr. Suettinger writes, but if nothing else, they "reveal that estimating a country's nuclear capabilities - much less intentions - on the basis of a few photographs and other scarce clues has been an imprecise science from the start."