Embassy Contests Author’s Views

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32303, 22 May 1970, Page 16

Embassy Contests Author’s Views

(New Zealand Press .Association) WELLINGTON, May 20. The views of the author, Han Suyin, on China were contested in a statement issued today by the Taiwan Embassy in Wellington.

It said the writer had a spoken in a television inter- p view in glowing terms of the social, technological and cul- C tural progress which she tl claimed had been made by it China, and of how much free- n dom and democracy the S people there enjoyed. e: ' But the truth was that the * ( people were being squeezed and impoverished to provide at great expense nuclear armament and missile launchings, the embassy said. The statement asked what would the reaction be in New Zealand if the people’s high living standards were sacrificed to create nuclear weaponry? It also attacked Han Suyin’s claim that there were, signs that the walls of fear, a: ignorance and hysteria about w China were crumbling. si The embassy said that the H speaker did not mention that C these walls, like the Berlin N Wall, were built by the Com- c< munists themselves. “With these walls the ir Chinese Communists hope to st keep the outside world in the tl dark about the truth on the ci China mainland and to create fear and suspicion of the out- st side world in the minds of the vi Chinese people, who are kept w from the truth about the world at large," it said. w The statement said it was C strange, after all the time gi given to Han Suyin’s propaganda on television and radio. c< that no one had approached ir those in New Zealand to get tl the other side of the story, bi “We take it that this was oi

an oversight and not a policy,” said the statement. It said the New Zealand China Society bad engaged in the promotion of the interests of China, and should not be mistaken for the Free Society of New Zealand, either in nature or in identity.