The Life Lines of Dallas published June 7 this book review by Rosalie Gordon on Ken Ling's The Revenge of Heaven: "We are now in the midst of what might be called Phase II of a brainwashing job on Red China.
"Phase I occurred some 25 years ago or so when books were pouring from the presses designed to convince us that the Chinese Reds then busy in their eventually successful steal of the mainland, were not Communists, or were a different kind of Communists, or were mere 'agrarian reformers'; therefore, our government could safely withdraw assistance to the legitimate Nationalist government - which it did, thus helping to deliver millions upon millions of Chinese into Red slavery.
"Now, once again, the books are pouring from the presses - some of them written by the original brainwashers - to convince us that we can 'accommodate,' do business and 'cooperate' with the Communist slave masters of Red China. Now, as then, the liberal review journals see to it that one brainwasher reviews the books of another brainwasher and vice versa (you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours), and in the process, truth goes by the board.
"Not quite entirely, of course. In Phase I, there was a handful of books by authors who had real knowledge of events in (mainland) China. Had we heeded them, we might have saved ourselves and the world much of the travail of the past quarter century in Asia. But those same influential review journals ignored or panned such prophetic books. We can only hope (against hope) that this will not be the fate of The Revenge of Heaven, the journal of a young Chinese who played a large part in Mao Tse-tung's 'cultural revolution' and whose book is one of the finest (horrifying and spine-tingling as it is) accounts extant about what life is really like under the sheer madness of the Communist dictatorship in (mainland) China, the dictatorship about which we are now being brainwashed.
"This is in many respects a most remarkable volume. It reads like a terrifically exciting murder story (it is, only not fictional). Yet it is the result of a rather scholarly collaboration. Ken Ling is a pseudonym for a highly intelligent young Chinese. Dr. Ivan and Miriam London, professor of psychology at Brooklyn College, and research associate in Soviet and Chinese affairs, respectively, and Dr. Ta-ling Lee, historian at Southern Connecticut State College, over a period of nearly three years carried on interviews with Ken Ling and his brother (with whom he escaped from Red China). Out of those interviews emerged a most detailed, deep and frighteningly revealing document combining a picture of Chinese youth, sheer adventure, a tragic love story, and life as it actually is under the Communist Chinese regime. The publisher's blurb does not exaggerate in calling The Revenge of Heaven a sort of Chinese Brothers Karamazov. '
"What, basically, was the original mission of Mao's Red Guards? It was nothing less than to bring about in Communist China, in the '60s, a 1984 society-to destroy completely 'the four olds': old thought, old customs, old cultures, and old habits. Here is the full and horrifying story of how the Red Guards, some of them mere children, went about their mission that resulted in organized murder, robbery, extortion, suicide which brought regimented and organized chaos in their wake.
"We particularly recommend Ken Ling's devastating account to those teachers of our youth who play with revolution from the safety of their classrooms and campuses. Read what the mind-crazed young revolutionaries in (mainland) China did to their teachers.
"There are sections of this book that will tear at your heartstrings; others that will keep you on the edge of your chair; still others that are mind-boggling and stomach-churning. But read them all. It is to be devoutly hoped that no American's stomach is so strong that, having done so, he will still believe that the slave masters of Red China are men whom civilized human beings can 'accommodate' and 'cooperate' with." (Full text)
Stars & Stripes—Security ensures safety
The Pacific Stars & Stripes published June 22 this report by Shullen Shaw: "Taipei International Airport boasts one of the tightest security systems in the world, if not the best.
"There are uniformed policemen, plain-clothes policemen, and security agents stationed in every comer of the newly expanded 300-foot long terminal building. Everyone of them is armed with a loaded pistol.
"Their standing order: 'Shoot to kill anyone who threatens the safety of passengers, visitors and planes.'
"The several hundred employees of various airlines authorized to work at the airport have undergone intensive training in detecting potential trouble-makers.
"Thorough security checks have been made on each of these employees, who need two separate passes to get to the aprons. Unauthorized persons trying to enter the aprons are placed under immediate arrest.
"All baggage, including that going to the luggage holds of planes, hand bags, and wrapped gift parcels of departing passengers are thoroughly searched. Security agents and customs officials are easier with arriving passengers, but they are under surveillance all the time before they leave the customs area.
"Outgoing passengers are subject to body search by policemen and policewomen before they are allowed to board their planes.
"These security measures were put into effect a month ago. Japan Airlines and other airlines lodged strong protests with the airport authorities against the security system which, they held, was harassing their customers.
"But these airlines now have all withdrawn their complaints and agreed such measures are warranted and welcome.
"Nationalist Chinese authorities are constantly studying and searching for still further ways to tighten the security at the airport.
"One of the plans is to train police dogs to sniff out narcotics and explosives.
"The security precautions are maintained 24 hours a day, whether or not there are planes coming and going. If an alarm is sounded, 'in no more than five minutes' 300 specially trained regular troops armed with teargas, light and automatic weapons will cordon off and move in to the terminal building. The additional help will come from the neighboring military airport.
"The airport itself is fenced with barbed wire and regular troops are placed all around.
"Permission for pilots to taxi their planes to the runway for takeoff is at the same time passed to the security troops stationed near the two ends of the runway.
"One U.S. Air Force plane had its tires shot flat when its pilot decided to taxi it too near the end of the runway before permission from the controlling towers was issued to him and the security guards.
"So far no highjackers are known to have boarded planes in Taipei.
"'We intend to keep this record and for once our security measures are appreciated by our international friends,' one airport official said." (Full text)
Los Angeles Times—On the lip of a lion
The Los Angeles Times published June 7 this report by Gavin Young from Quemoy: "It's like living on the lip of a lion. From a promontory here, mainland China is only 25,000 yards away and you feel you could reach out and touch it.
"I watched 200 Nationalist Chinese air force men as they stood before me, hands upstretched to open sea and sky, faces tense with zeal, shouting eternal loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek, newly reelected president of his exiled government in Taiwan. Surely the Communists would hear, be angry, and lob a shell on us? But nothing happened.
"There is no mistaking the anti-Communist fervor of people on this island, civilian locals or military draftees. The commander of the air force had just made a short, rousing speech to these airmen. His message seemed hardly necessary. 'Compromise with communism is unthinkable.' To these men staring down the barrel of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's gun, compromise literally is unthinkable and Mr. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger might not exist.
"It was the same with the gunners I watched stuffing practice shells into an enormous cannon, with the frogmen flapping in and out of the sea on a secluded beach and a unit of tank men practicing Chinese boxing on a basketball court. And yet they were touching, too.
"While the air force general sat there and a team of dragon dancers pranced around among exploding firecrackers, in the rear ranks tough, flat-faced regulars would quickly glance round to see if an officer was looking, then shyly grin and give a friendly, surreptitious wave. Then their faces would be at attention again. The Communists might pulverize the island with high explosives or an atom bomb, but I doubt they could take it short of that. If they did the casual ties would have to be huge.
"Under the rolling, pastoral scene, Quemoy—or Kinmen Island, as they now call it in Mandarin Chinese—is a vast, hollowed-out lump of rock and several million tons of concrete. Indigenous peasants till flowering fields over invisible, multistoried networks of tunnels and bunkers.
"Practically everywhere you look you see bunkers crouching in the undergrowth. It was barren rock 20 years ago or so, now 'there are 83 million trees on the island,' a guiding lieutenant says with a display of improbably precise information—but there certainly are a lot. You have the feeling when driving about Kinmen's 11 by 6 miles that you are only seeing a minute part of it all. The rest lies underground.
"That must be where the soldiers are. You see relatively few above ground, yet the place must be teeming. There is an unexpectedly large number of civilians in the capital town and the strikingly beautiful villages with their soft-red, curving roofs.
"The people of Kinmen are small and darkish. They surround strangers with warm smiles and invite them in for tea through small, low doorways. Considering their isolation (18 hours by boat from Taiwan) you might think they were all dying to get away. Not at all: the population of farmers and shopkeepers, with their pigs and turkeys and 14 cinemas, is growing.
"The Taiwanese army propeller-driven plane dives toward the island from a mere 500 feet over the sea in case the Communists take a potshot. But they have not done that for years. Kinmen has not known a high-explosive shell to fall in anger for about 12 years. The last one did not achieve anything beyond killing a dozen people and it has not been repeated.
So despite the surrounding Communist islands and mainland, life on Kinmen is generally calm and comparatively idyllic. It could change, one supposes, with an unpredictable quirk of political circumstance. But the fact that the Communists across the water in Fukien have let the Kinmen people live in peace for so long obviously implies an agreement of sorts between Taipei and Peking.
"Such an agreement would not be admitted. Still, they are agreeing, at least, to shout if not to shoot. And if the nearness of the mainland is amazing, the mutual barrage of propaganda is downright astounding.
"I stood on a rocky tip of Kinmen overlooking a bright, blue sea studded with green and brown islands. It might have been the Aegean. In fact, what followed could have come from a film of The Odyssey by Fellini.
"Suddenly through the silence crashed a great, hoarse, metallic voice. Across the perfect strip of water, the odd fishing boat, the seagulls, apparently from nowhere, monstrous guttural Chinese monosyllables filled the sky. The effect was enormously inhuman and barbaric, like an ancient god roaring in a cave.
"But when I crept into a rock tunnel I found two small bespectacled Chinese, a girl and a pale young man, in a tiny studio. They shouted into a microphone. Occasionally they put on a record of military music, sat back and took a sip of green tea.
"What was all the talk about? I asked a major. 'We are conveying,' he said in correct tones, 'President Chiang's concern about the people on the mainland.'
"What are they shouting back at you? 'At this instance they are saying that Shanghai, after 22 years of Communist rule, is a great industrial base.' Pretty unenchanting stuff, one could not help thinking." (Partial text)
Sunday Oregonian—What's the decade?
The Sunday Oregonian published June 4 this report by Leonard Pratt from Taipei: "Sometimes in Taiwan it's hard to figure out what decade you're in.
"Military police walk the streets. Neon signs fight for space above traffic jammed streets, and shop windows are full of bright goods. The old and the new in the life of Taiwan's people continually ebb and flow, one occasionally submerging the other entirely for a time.
"Fresh-faced young girls at a secretarial school in Taipei regularly practice bayonet drill under the stem eye of an aging army major. In class they study computers while back home their fathers are still using water buffalo in the rice paddies. The water buffalo may work fields only 100 yards from the shrieking after-burner of a supersonic fighter waiting to take off.
"On Quemoy, the Nationalist-held island off the (mainland) China coast that is the symbol of Chiang Kai-shek's promise to overthrow Mao Tse-tung, young soldiers twist to a rock band during a break in work on the island's fortifications.
"Taiwan is more colorful than Mao's (mainland) China and takes its ideology less seriously.
"On national holidays government buildings are besieged by well scheduled demonstrations of devotion. But the demonstrations are ignored by thousands thronging the modem buses and trains en route to beach or mountain resorts, parks or zoos.
"So far as people come into contact with the government, life is regimented. Uniformed school children march to rifle practice and bow their heads to paintings of Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic. The millions associated with the military rise to loudspeakers blaring martial music and the latest anti-Communist bulletins.
"The grandchildren of Taiwan's rulers are swinging in to an age Sun Yat-sen never dreamed of, exchanging the trappings of the past for the gear of a mod present imported from Japan and the United States.
"Taiwan is moving out of the countryside into the cities and, like most such nations, baseball is everywhere.
"The early morning hush of Confucian temple is broken by the crack of a bat, and the flying ball threatens to knock down a row of ancestor tablets. Baseball in the streets, baseball in abandoned rice paddies, even baseball next to air raid shelters on Quemoy.
"Suddenly prosperity has had its negative side.
"At the government's much vaunted Export Processing Zone in the south port of Kaohsiung, thousands of girls straight from the farms labor to support the economy and win themselves a dowry at $35 a month. Tune that intermediate frequency transformer, stitch that cuff, polish that guitar ... 40,000 pretty maids all in a row creating 30 per cent of Taiwan's foreign exchange profits every year.
"Wages are low, but the demand for modem goods is high. Many compromise by living poorly but buying expensively, squatting in abandoned homes with new television sets.
"The countryside is quieter, but no less caught in a conflict between Confucius and Twiggy than are the cities.
"About one-third of farm houses have television.
"The modern world has even invaded those most crucial Chinese ceremonies, weddings and funerals.
" 'When we get married these days, a girl is expected to provide a motorbike or a television as part of her dowry,' one Taiwanese girl said. 'Anything else isn't really enough.'
"And when modern Taiwanese burn paper funeral houses to send to their dead ancestors, the houses always include small paper models of a television set, washing machine or a car. Those who want to be sure of their departed's pleasure might even throw in a paper helicopter or two." (Partial text)