Happy and self-congratulatory, people all over this country are settling into the bleachers as spectators in the great quarrel between Russia and China. Time (Lenin on the cover) and Newsweek (Marx) are selling score-cards predicting which side the various Communist parties will take, at the great showdown. Coverage in the daily press exudes the same sports-page flavor, and perhaps inevitably, one of the contestants is emerging as popular favorite.

Only with hesitance has this rooting interest been developed by the government and instilled by the press. It was a slow process by which the U.S. came to share with the Russians a desire to stabilize the present division of power and influence, and now the reversal of alliances cannot be effected overnight. Thus the mass media had to show tact in taking for truth the pronouncements of men like Mikhail Suslov, once branded as liars. Unable to bring themselves to a specific espousal of the Khrushchev cause, the media have achieved their goal by simply presenting the Khrushchev version of what the dispute is all about: war vs. coexistence, racism vs. socialism, Stalinist rigidity vs. an attempt at democracy.

From the Chinese point of view, these are not the issues at hand. The primary grievance, dating back to the mid-fifties, centers on the inadequacy and finally the withdrawal of Soviet economic aid. The Rumanian delegation that journeyed to Peking several months ago, in the hope of renewing Russo-Chinese dialogue, heard the most vitriolic denunciation of Premier Khrushchev, whom the Chinese blame personally for reneging on the large aid-and-trade agreement that followed Stalin's death. The Rumanians had to insist that Khrushchev is but a responsive politician, attuned to the desires of of a people who, after 45 years of paying for their own industrialization, the War, and then the arms race, are unwilling to make another vast outlay at the expense of their own comfort and prosperity.

Yet like other Eastern Europeans, the Rumanians tend to believe the Chinese assertion that Russia abuses and exploits her neighbors. By laying rhetorical claim to the mantle of Stalin the Chinese seem to have sacrificed this considerable latent support, and imposed a historical confusion on the dispute. Stalin's 30-year career of meddling in the affairs of Chinese Communism won him the enmity, not the admiration, of Mao Tse Tung. As for de-Stalinization, Isaac Deutscher is not the only student of Communist affairs who regards Mao's abortive effort to "let a hundred flowers bloom" as a more sincere attempt to liberalize Chinese society than Khrushchev's own halting program in Russia.

Deutscher makes another significant point, most recently reiterated in the New Statesman of April 17: "In foreign policy [Khrushchev] continues, amid changed circumstances, Stalin's Realpolitik, even if he does it under the cloak of de-Stalinization. He seeks to subordinate international communism, and the revolutionary movements of Asia, Africa and Latin America, to the purposes of Soviet policy and diplomacy."

It seems likely that China's revolt came in reaction to Stalinist-style subordination. As the poorer partner, China industrializing had everything to gain by an equalitarian relationship with industrial Russia. Soviet charges that the Chinese arbitrarily harassed the technicians sent there are hard to believe. The accusation that the Chinese see virtue in poverty is a palpable lie which Soviet spokesmen cannot document by reference to any Chinese publication or statement.

The fundamental Chinese complaint--that Soviet aid was dispensed only for Soviet advantages--should evoke a certain wry sympathy from the West. It is ironic that this country, having spent 15 years warning revolutionaries that alliance with Russia could lead to subordination to Russian intent, has all but cut itself off from communication with the one nation that has come, by historical experience, to agree. Now the U.S. press uncritically reproduces Mikhail Suslov's rejoinder: "The Chinese leaders do all they can to smear the economic assistance which the USSR and other Socialist countries render to the less-developed countries, and try to induce them to question the purpose of the assistance." No effort is being made to show the extent of Soviet intellectual dishonesty in the dispute. The limited critical energies of the media are devoted to ridiculing Chinese isolationist ignorance, an ignorance primarily enforced by U.S. policy.

In fact the U.S. has established the conditions of the present struggle. If it prefers the Soviet position, the administration should realize it has made that position feasible by sustaining diplomatic contact and encouraging the possibilities of cultural and economic contact as well. Similarly, the U.S. has helped mold the Chinese attitude by positioning the Seventh Fleet off China's shores, financing the soldiers on Taiwan, and struggling to maintain military footholds on the fringes of China, in what Senator Morse calls "as futile an effort as this country will ever embark upon."

For all Mr. Kennedy's insistence that ours is an age of interdependence, the current administration and the media serving it have fostered an illusion of spectatorship on the American people. If they are watching and waiting, it can only be for a new chief enemy: a China too poor to develop its industrial and human potential, too threatened to conceive of peace, too isolated to hope for assistance. The alternative is acting, seeking diplomatic entree to bring China into the community of nations.