'China Is Ruled By Children Gone Mad9

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31449, 16 August 1967, Page 17

' China Is Ruled By Children Gone Mad 9

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

NEW YORK, August 14. China is ruled by children gone mad, according to a Columbia Broadcasting System correspondent, Morely Safer.

Safer, in a commentary on a television programme filmed in China, said youthful Red Guards had been placed in charge of whole cities.

“The country is ruled by children gone mad, a mixture of hooliganism and blind faith,” Safer said in his hourlong report to be telecast tomorrow night The thoughts of Mao Tsetung, a red-covered pamphlet by the Chairman of the Communist Party in China, and

expounded by the Red Guards, dominated life there, Safer said. Whole cities had been placed under the rule of these mindless disciples, he said. Safer, a Canadian, and a photographer, John Baxter Peters, an Englishman, travelled in China for three weeks in July. C.B.S. said the film they brought out was the first made inside China by a United States news organisation.

Safer said be and Peters got their visas at the Chinese Embassy in Paris for a standard guided tour “and the China we saw was the China our guides wanted us to see. "The China we saw,” he said, “was in a state of continuous demonstration, a make-believe world, an Arwellian nightmare.” At least twice a day, the programme reported, everyone must study and recite the thoughts of Mao.