Chinese room-mate recalled

Press, 7 December 1976, Page 13

Chinese room-mate recalled

By DEREK ROUND NZPA staff correspondent Tokyo China’s new Foreign Minister. Mr Huang Hua. shared a room with a New Zealander, Professor James Bertram, when they were both young students at Peking's Yen Ching University in the 19305. “He was a brilliant student.” Professor Bertram recalls.

Mr Huang was active in the Leftist movement and joined the Communist Party after he graduated, later working for its New China News Agency. He interpreted for the American writer, the late Edgar Snow, when he was gathering material for his book “Red Star Over China,” the first full account of the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. Professor Bertram, who retired earlier this year as professor of English at Victoria University, was also a friend of Snow’s and helped him ' to

smuggle the late premier Chou En-lai’s wife out of Peking by train disguised as a servant when the Japanese entered the city in 1937.

Working as a foreign correspondent, Professor Bertram was one of the first to interview the late Chinese leader Mao Tsetung in the caves at Yenan and his interviews are included in Mao’s selected works. He also became a friend of Dr Sun v. idow, Madam Soong Ching-ling, now senior vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, and worked with her in the China Defence League before the war.

Mr Huang, who speaks fluent English, joined the Chinese Foreign Ministry after the Communists came to power in 1949 and was spokesman for the Chinese delegation at the 1954 Geneva conference on Indo-China, He later served as am-

bassador to Ghana and Egypt and was named as China’s first envov to Canada in 1971.

Mr Huang was appointed ambassador to the United Nations later that year.

Professor Bertram last met him in 1956 when he was visiting Peking as a member of a New Zealand delegation which included Dr Roger Duff, Mr Charles Hilgendorf, a former Labour member of Parliament, Mr Ormond Wilson, and Dr Angus Ross of Otago Univeristy. The dismissed Foreign Minister (Mr Chiao Kuanhua) was well known to a number of New Zealand diplomats and visiting ministers and journalists. The Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) apparently got on well with him during his visit to China earlier this year. Mr Chiao, a talp urbane, former journalist, spent May Day with Mr Muldoon, escorting him on a

boat trip on the lake at the old Summer Palace. According to sources in Peking, Mr Chiao has been criticised among other things for letting Chinese officials take Mr Muldoon to Peking’s Tsinghua University where he heard a long diatribe against posters attacking. Mr Teng. The former Foreign Minister apparently lost his job because he was considered to have supported Chairman Mao’s widow, Chiang Ching, and her “gang of four” in denouncing Mr Teng. Mr Chiao was several times a dinner guest at the New Zealand Embassy and attended a private dinner the first ambassador, Mr Bryce Harland, gave for the then Leader of the Opposition (Sir John Marshall), when he visited Peking in 1974.

At one dinner, Mr Chiao had his first taste of kiwi fruit and took some home in a bag for his wife afterwards.