The Long Island Press of New York published November 3 this report from Blantyre, Malawi: "David Hong says: 'We are providing a humble service.'
"Hong is first secretary in Nationalist China's embassy in Blantyre. He is a hard-working diplomat from a country which is quietly teaching rural Africans how to hoe before they sow...
"The projects shun elaborate farm machinery such as some other nations send to Africa in the name of aid.
"'We are a poor country ourselves and we could not afford to bring in expensive materials even if we thought this was the best way to set about teaching farming methods,' says Hong. 'We started our farming schemes in Africa because agricultural conditions here are almost the same as they were 20 to 30 years ago in Taiwan.'
"Chiang Kai-shek has agricultural ambassadors in 24 African nations from Liberia to Chad, Rwanda to Upper Volta. 'But we have no political ambitions in Africa,' Hong insists.
"'We just want to see rural Africans improve their standard of living and we teach them in the only way we know.'
"Formosa has 50 farm technicians in Malawi. A prerequisite for the assignment is that a man work in the fields beside his African counterparts.
"If Malawi is a yardstick, the policy is paying dividends. President H. Kamuzu Banda, visiting a Chinese-created farm at Kasungu, said the soil had to be the main source of money to develop the country because 'there are no mines.'
"This former British territory of Nyassaland is poor and its main earnings come from money sent home by thousands of Malawians who work in South African gold mines.
"The Chinese emphasize rice, but cabbage and carrots are also grown. Some farming is in remote swampland where malaria is a threat.
"The Chinese have promised to develop the skills of 300 Young Pioneers, Malawi's version of Boy Scouts, a youth movement which has done much to keep teenagers off the streets in bigger towns.
"The incentive to farmers lies in the pocket as well as the stomach. Many people in rural areas endure a mostly cashless existence by subsistence farming but students of Formosan methods can expect to make $384 for a single rice crop on two acres." (Partial text)
Hongkong Standard—Story of Deep Bay
The Hongkong Stardard published November 6 this special report by Kevin Sinclair: "The muddy shore looks like a popular beach after the Sunday crowds have packed their picnic hampers and gone home.
"Discarded football bladders litter the sands, colourful beach rings dangle from the branches of the mangrove trees and boats float a few yards out on the flat surface of Deep Bay.
"Only the rotting bodies spoil the view.
"Across the shallow bay, almost lost in the heat haze, the hills of Po On County climb sharply above the coastal communes of Shea Hau, Sha Tau and Taishek.
"In the hills are hundreds of students, hiding from search parties of PLA soldiers and militiamen and waiting for their chance to make a break for Hongkong—and freedom.
"They come down from the hills on nights when darkness coincides with a low tide, bearing with them their 'passports' across the treacherous waters of Deep Bay. These are pathetic plastic baubles which all too often are punctured on the oyster beds, leaving the refugees to swim or drown.
"These days, the peace of Deep Bay villages is often shattered by the roar of Army helicopters sweeping over the beaches and foothills.
"Marine police jet boats skim over the oyster beds in the hunt for the dead and the dying.
"Along the shores, policemen from Tsimbeitsui and Laufaushan make grim discoveries as the tide goes out, leaving bodies stranded on the muddy shore or tangled in the twisted roots of the mangrove swamps.
"There is another unhappy sight these days along the road that leads from Laufaushan to Tsimbeitsui—the relatives.
"As I walked the narrow, winding road this week, they were parked in their cars at vantage points from where they could look out over the mudflats and the water towards China.
"There was even a special mini-bus service to take them to the area.
"Some had been told in letters from children left behind on the Mainland about escape plans. Others were just hopeful, and worried.
"One of them was Mr. Chan Kwan, a meat salesman, of Sunhing Building, Nathan Road, Tsimshatsui.
"He wanted to look at the bodies fished out of Deep Bay in the past week.
"One of them, he thought, was his son.
"Mr. Chan was waiting at the gates of Tsimbeitsui police post when Inspector Arnold Wilson arrived from Laufaushan police station on one of his many daily visits.
"Mr. Chan explained his mission. Inspector Wilson sympathetically listened to the details and arranged for him to go to Yuenlong where full particulars of the freedom swimmers—alive and dead—are kept.
"Later, Mr. Chan told me one man's story of a divided family.
"'I left China with the rest of my family, my wife and two sons and two daughters, in 1960,' he said.
"'I left my youngest son, Siu-wing, at home in China with his grand parents.
"'He was studying in Canton until last year. Then both grandparents died. Siu-wing wrote to say he was being sent to the country side.'
"Like hundreds of thousands of other young people, Siu-wing did not like life in a commune.
"He planned to escape, he told Mr. Chan in regular letters from China.
"Unlike most of the other young people banished from the cities and towns in (Red) China, Siu-wing had a chance to flee.
"He had been assigned to 'learn from the peasants' in Sha Tau commune, just across Deep Bay from Hongkong.
"'He said in his letters he had been learning to swim for a year,' Mr. Chan said. 'He wanted to swim so he could escape.'
"With four other young students exiled to Sha Tau, Siu-wing made his break last Saturday.
"Mr. Chan learned of this last Monday when one of the group who made the swim telephoned him at home. Siu-wing had passed on his father's telephone number to the other freedom swimmers so his family would know what happened to him in case he didn't make it.
"Mr. Chan said the friend of his son and the other swimmers were in the middle of Deep Bay when they lost contact with each other in the cold water.
"Two of them, a boy and a girl, made it together to the beach. Siu-wing and another boy and a girl were nowhere to be found.
"On Tuesday, Mr. Chan and a group of friends began their search along the shores of Deep Bay.
"On Wednesday, they went to the police.
"'I want to know if Sui-wing is alive or dead,' Mr. Chan said.
"In the tiny villages scattered along the shore, villagers told me how they often were awakened in the night by cries for help from the Bay.
"'You hear them calling out,' one villager said. 'They call and call from a long way out.
"'Then there is silence.'
"There were a lot of cries, they said, last Saturday night.
"Some villagers claim, and it is impossible to check, that the soldiers aboard Red gunboats no longer casually shoot freedom swimmers.
"They evidently do not want bodies with bullet wounds to be washed up on the shores of Hongkong.
"The old shoot-to-kill orders have been replaced with a new set of rules.
"Now, fishermen and farmers say. PLA sharpshooters carefully aim at the improvised life belts. When the air hisses out, the swimmers are left to drown.
"The people who live along the shores of Deep Bay do not have any explanations as to why so many young people are suddenly making mass escapes from (Red) China.
"They shrug their shoulders when you ask why people want to escape. 'Who would want to stay?' asked one foki (Cantonese for "waiter") in a Laufaushan restaurant.
"Incredibly, in some of the Deep Bay villages, huts gaily decorated with the Thoughts of Chairman Mao are built close to the beaches where exhausted swimmers clamber ashore after swimming from (Red) China.
"But none of the people who live in these villages make attempts to swim from Hongkong to (Red) China.
"This week, one old farmer took a few minutes off work from tilling his fields to tell me of two young people who made it alive.
"'They were both students,' he said. 'One was 16 and one was 19.
"'They came ashore and said they had escaped. They had relatives in Kowloon and would like to reach them. One of the villagers took them in a bus to find their relatives.'
"People who do this, risk prosecution. It is against the law to aid and abet illegal immigrants. If people find refugees, they should take them to the nearest police station.
"Every day as the tide goes out, policemen from Tsimbeitsui police post begin their patrols along the beaches.
"When the grim crop of death is harvested, Urban Services men load the bodies in coffins and take them to a mortuary.
"Sometimes, relatives like Mr. Chan arrive looking for a son, a husband, a father, a sister or a wife. Sometimes, only sometimes, do they find them.
"Meanwhile, in the hills across the Bay, the students wait for low tide and a moonless night. And, PLA men wait for them in their gunboats.
"From the Mao-decorated huts on the Hongkong side, the sound of singing echoes across the water.
"Deep Bay's Communists' are singing The East Is Red." (Full text)
Human Events—Irony for Trudeau
The Human Events of the United States published November 7 this column by John Chamberlain: "I hope the irony is not lost on Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau of Canada. It was a matter of days before the Ottawa government's recognition of Red China that the extremist Front for the Liberation of Quebec, pursuing Maoist guerrilla tactics, seized a British diplomat and kidnapped and killed Pierre Laporte, the Quebec minister of labor.
"The Canadian government broke the American front when it countenanced easy dealings with revolutionary Cuba, and it is now working at cross purposes with established U.S. policy by its efforts to seat Red China in the United Nations.
"For their pains in trying to make Castro and Mao Tse-tung respectable in the eyes of the world, the Canadians are learning that they are not exempt from the terrorist tactics which Maoists and Castroites regard as standard procedure in all wars of 'national liberation.' It does not matter whether the Front for the Liberation of Quebec has ties with Havana or not; the point is that Maoism, as a state of mind, is spreading everywhere.
"The Taiwan Chinese, always polite, do not taunt Prime Minister Trudeau with any 'I told you so's.' But they are properly dismayed by what they consider to be the Canadian government's betrayal of its word.
"Its was just as recently as May 18, 1968, that Mr. Mitchell Sharp, the Canadian minister for external affairs, was saying: 'We won't sacrifice our relations with the government on Taiwan to do it'—that 'it' being recognition of Peking.
"In March 1968 Pierre Trudeau, not yet the prime minister, was quoted as saying that he wouldn't recognize Red China if it involved breaking with Taiwan. Later on in the year, when he wobbled and waffled on the subject of a deal with Peking, he said: 'Our concern is that the government of Taiwan not be disregarded in the process.'
"So much for good intentions. The point is that, just about a month after Michel Beaubien, the spokesman for the Canadian delegation to the 25th session of the U.N. General Assembly, had denied that Canada and Red China had 'successfully completed' negotiations for exchanging ambassadors, the recognition has become a fait accompli. And it has very definitely 'involved breaking with Taiwan.'
"This has fired up the emulative propensities of Sen. Jacob Javits of New York, who wants to see the U.S. abandon its opposition to bringing the Maoists to the House of Glass on New York's East River. Javits, who is very much worried about the guerrilla threat to Israel, must be aware that George Habash, the leader of the Arab Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is a Marxist with Maoist ties. (Habash keeps pictures of Mao and North Viet Nam's General Giap on his office wall.)
"Yet, with his neatly compartmentalized way of looking at the world, Sen. Javits can't see that encouragement of Peking must encourage all the revolutionists in the world who follow the guerrilla precepts that have been urged on 'liberation' movements everywhere by Red China's Lin Piao and by Mao Tse-tung himself...
"It is no secret in the corridors at the U.N. that the Russian Communists, though they give lip service to the idea of admitting Red China to the· U.N., do not really want to see Mao Tse-tung get a world forum by sending a delegation to New York. The Russian Communists would call it an unfriendly act if the U.S. were to follow the example of Canada and shift its vote ... " (Partial text)
Atlanta Journal—Only a hop from home
The Atlanta Journal said October 15: "... Probably the most important aspect of the agreement (Peiping-Canada pact) to the United States is that this means a legitimate ked Chinese delegation will be located in nearby Ottawa which is only a hop from the United States.
"It will be the closest Red Chinese delegation to this nation and this will require a more vigilant security.
"The border "between Canada and the United States is an open one. And we feel no joy at the prospect of Peking's spies and agents moving so close by." (Partial text)
Chicago Tribune—North American base
The Chicago Tribune published October 18 this report by Eugene Griffin from Ottawa: "Canada's recognition of Communist China has given Peking its first diplomatic base in North America and the western hemisphere for subversive and espionage activity.
"The announcement of the recognition this week came as Canadian troops stood armed for battle on Parliament Hill. The troops were defending the lives of Prime Minister Trudeau and members of Parliament against Quebec terrorist revolutionaries whose ideological god is Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
"An editorial cartoon in the Toronto Star, a paper which always has urged establishment of Canadian relations with Red China, depicted Mao with a new figure stuck like a feather in his headband, that of an F.L.Q. terrorist holding a placard with the word Canada on it, with other figures holding the bloody signs of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
"Almost all Canadian papers, despite the Maoist influence among revolutionaries in Montreal and other Canadian cities have welcomed the diplomatic exchange with Peking chiefly as a gesture of Canadian independence from United States policy...
"John G. Diefenbaker, Conservative prime minister from 1957 to 1963, always opposed recognition of Red China. Diefenbaker said this week that Trudeau's action will be taken as Canadian approval of Communism in Southeast Asia...
"Security authorities and students of international affairs see Red China's exchange of diplomats with Canada threatening increased subversion, especially through revolutionary groups in Canada and the United States, and as a propaganda move to weaken American influence...
"Commissioner William Higgitt of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said at a press conference when he assumed command of the force last year that a Red Chinese embassy in Ottawa would undoubtedly be an outpost of the Peking espionage network, which would have to be closely watched by security forces. The (Communist) Chinese who arrive as diplomats, he said, would themselves be agents...
"A royal commission on security last year reported that Canada can be used as a base for subversive activities and espionage operations against the United Stales. It said that Communist powers conduct espionage and subversive operations through diplomatic missions, with modern, sophisticated and effective techniques supported by large resources.
"Moist material has been found among revolutionary cells raided or penetrated by security agents in Canada. The Red Chinese press has also reported on Maoist activity here, in articles either written in Peking or by the Red Chinese correspondent resident in Ottawa. Meetings have been reported in support of the 'revolutionary struggle' and 'the widespread dissemination of Mao Tse-tung thought' in Vancouver and Toronto as well as in Montreal." (Partial text)
Washington Post—Beginning of the end
The Washington Post published October 17 this column by William S. White: "Canada's decision to establish full—not to say floridly embellished—diplomatic relations with Communist China spells the beginning of the end of the long and thus far successful efforts of the United States to keep a two-time aggressor out of the United Nations...
"Step by step, as did de Gaulle in France, Trudeau's government has gone out of its way to obstruct and harass the very nation—the United States-that in the end shields his own country. Particularly long remembered here will be his notable hospitality to American draft-dodgers and deserters from Vietnam. In this, to drop the Gaullic analogy, he has made of Canada a kind of Sweden of the North American continent.
"Nobody, of course, questions Canada's full legal right to snuggle up to Red China. And nobody questions, to paraphrase an old song about an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, that Canada has an awful lot of wheat to be sold. But the fact is that the Canadians have all along been happily selling their wheat to the Chinese Reds—more than 500 million bushels since 1963—without any necessity of giving the backing of recognition to the world's—foremost bandit nation.
"Stripped of decorum and protocol, in short, Trudeau's step is seen here as pointlessly provocative, particularly as to its timing. For we are on the eve of the annual struggle in the United Nations over the admission of Communist China, which is in violation of its charter in about every possible way. It thus hardly seems cricket—or ice hockey, if the Canadians would prefer that term— to select this moment to kick old Uncle on the shins.
"Above and beyond all this, however, what has occurred is a classic illustration of the real and seemingly unbridgeable difficulty in the maintenance of good relations on 'the longest unfortified border in the world.' (The phrase, of course, is a meaningless stereotype. The plain reality is that this is the longest defended border in the world really to be defended by only one side—the United States.)
"This real difficulty is, simply, an inferiority complex among many—but by no means all—Canadians toward the United States for which Trudeau's action is a sort of self-therapy. If sticking out his hand to a blood-covered regime which is conducting a proxy war against American and South Vietnamese troops and which conducted a very real war against American troops in Korea should serve as a genuine catharsis for this neurosis then the whole business might turn out to be a good thing after all.
"What is more likely to happen, however, is that once Communist China gets into the U.N. a critical mass of American opinion will turn irrevocably against that organization. Already, that tower in Manhattan has far fewer friends, among both public and politicians, than appears on the surface.
"What price then Prime Minister Trudeau's muscle-flexing? (Partial text)
San Diego Union—Ominous shadows
The San Diego Union said October 19: "The fact that the United Nations felt obligated to observe its 25th birthday twice this year—once in June on the anniversary of the signing of the charter and again in October when the charter came into effect—speaks volumes about the organization...
"Nevertheless, the pomp surrounding the 25th anniversary ceremonies in New York cannot dispel the many ominous shadows at the United Nations—shadows that soon will cast gloom over today's gaiety.
"Among the foremost is the acknowledged confrontation that will occur again this year on the basis of a petition by 18 western nations for the admission of Communist China.
"Even the resolution is typical of the complexities surrounding this very important question. Communist China has never applied for admission to the United Nations, as is required by the charter. Further, Communist China is not eligible for membership. She will not abide by the conditions for membership; through intermediaries she makes impossible conditions for entry, such as the expulsion of the Republic of China, and Red China can in no sense be termed 'peace loving.'
"Still the U.N. solemnly votes on the procedural question every year. Last year the vote was 71 for and 48 against the proposition of whether admission of Red China was an important question that required a two-thirds vote. A subsequent ballot tallied 56 members in favor and 48 against an Albanian resolution which would expel the Republic of China and give its seat on the Security Council and in the General Assembly to Peking. Earlier the General Assembly had rejected by a vote of 66 to 48 an Italian resolution which would have laid the groundwork for two Chinas in the U.N.
"So far the United States of America has been successful in persuading tile majority of peace-loving nations that it would be folly to seat an intransigent bandit nation in a world body dedicated to peace, expelling at the same time the Republic of China, which is a bulwark of peace.
"Our task will be more difficult this year. The recognition of Red China by Canada, increasing diplomatic activity by Peking ... will have a moderating influence at the U.N.
"We must convince the Free World that nothing has changed. Red China today is not any more peace loving than she was a decade ago, nor does she want intercourse with the world except on her own unyielding terms..." (Partial text)