PEKING DEMONSTRATION Chinese Before Soviet Embassy

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31151, 30 August 1966, Page 17

PEKING DEMONSTRATION Chinese Before Soviet Embassy

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter —Copyright?

PEKING, August 29. Chinese troops and police guarded the Soviet Embassy as a twoday demonstration began outside it today.

The demonstrators, most of them wearing the red armband of the Red Guards, formally unveiled a new street plaque officially naming the street leading to the Embassy “Struggle Against Revisionism” street.

The demonstration was well organised with thousands of paraders lined up in the streets around the Embassy in an orderly fashion.

At the same time diplomats revealed that eight foreign nuns who were in a Peking convent taken over by Red Guards last week have been expelled from China. They left Peking by train last night.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry told Western diplomats that the nuns had been expelled for carrying out “illegal espionage activities”

The Ministry official said the eight nuns were in good health when they left Peking and they would cross the border to Hong Kong on Wednesday morning.

The nuns, who had been in China for many years, come from Britain, Canada, Ireland, France, Italy, Poland, Switzerland and Greece. The Foreign Ministry official told diplomats that Peking’s public security office issued the deportation order yesterday on the basis of “many facts uncovered by the masses.”

The nuns were accused of undertaking illegal espionage activities “in the cloak of religion and using the school as a cover.”

They were also alleged to have distributed documents and spread rumours.

200 Children

The convent, which was Peking’s only foreign religious institution, had served as a school for about 200 children of diplomats until the Red Guards occupied it last Thursday, shortly after they had closed Chinese Christian churches.

At the Soviet Embassy the Chinese crowds stood with their backs to the Embassy entrance and faced a speaker’s platform at the far end of the street. About 100 Chinese troops

formed a double line in front of the high wrought-iron grille gates of the Embassy compound. The gates were closed and a few paces in front of them stood huge portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, with Mao Tse-tung. The portraits would block any car trying to drive straight into or out of the Embassy gates. The demonstrators, each carrying a red booklet of quotations from Mao’s works, shouted slogans in unison denouncing “Soviet revisionism.”

They carried gilt-framed portraits of Mao and placards with pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin and others inscribed “to struggle against

imperialism it is necessary to struggle against revisionism.” Men and women police lined this 100-yard stretch of the street. Illegal Immigrant In Hong Kong today the government announced that a party of Chinese villagers called at the Shataukok border police station on Saturday after the arrest of an illegal immigrant from China. “No other people crossed the border except the illegal immigrant and this party which consisted of eight people,” said a statement issued by the Government Information Service Department. “Subsequently, one of the party called again to make further inquiries.”

Closed Frontier

Shataukok is in the closed frontier area in the northeastern tip of the colony. The Sino-Hong Kong boun-

dary is the centre line that runs down the single street in the village. Hong Kong Government spokesmen said the case of the illegal immigrant, understood to have asked for political asylum here, would be dealt with in the “normal way.” A ‘Prelude’ Radio Peking, monitored in Tokyo, today reported the Peking “People’s Daily” as saying that the current cultural revolution was a prelude to political and economic revolutions. In an editorial entitled “Tribute to the Red Guards,” the daily said the cultural revolution did not merely aim at criticising some bourgeois intellectuals but aimed at eliminating old ideas and culture. The cultural revolution was

a success since it had develop--led into mass movements ■ spearheaded by the Red Guards, the daily was quoted -as saying.