Peking calls for return of tennis star by US

China threatened to cut back on cultural ties with the United States Tuesday unless Washington returns its top woman tennis star, who defected in California last week.

The row over the defection of Hu Na erupted at a time when Chinese-American relations were already at a critical point because of American arms sales to Taiwan. A brief but strongly worded Chinese demand, issued by the Foreign Ministry, reflected both the strain in relations between Washington and Peking and China's embarrassment over the defection of Miss Hu. An additional complication was the fact that Miss Hu's California attorney, C. Y. Lau, has legal partners in Taiwan.