Overseas Chinese fax home news of turmoil

Press, 12 June 1989, Page 10

Overseas Chinese fax home news of turmoil

NZPA-Reuter Hong Kong Chinese all over the world have launched a frenzied media blitz to send news to compatriots at home who say they are starved of information about the turmoil in their own country.

The full range of modern communications, including computers and facsimile machines, is being used to tell Chinese about the crackdown on student-led protesters. Some techniques are unorthodox: the Taiwanese Government has begun floating balloons carrying newspapers, cassettes, radios, food and medicine across the water to the mainland.

Chinese students in the United States are using personal computers to send home reports of the Government’s bloody suppression of pro-demo-cracy demonstrators. In Hong Kong, a daily newspaper prints a special section each day with a summary of events in China and asks readers

to send it north of the border by fax. “We have to spread information to the whole country to make people aware of what has happened, to make them aware of that crazy Government,” said a Hong Kong student leader. People contacted in Chinese provinces by telephone from Hong Kong said they knew little of what was going on in their

homeland. A telephone operator in the city of Wuhan told Reuters, “I don’t know anything. I live close to work and walk to my job. You are so far away and you know more than me.” In Shanghai, China’s biggest city, people said they obtained news of the turmoil only from fax

messages from overseas plus the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corporation.

“No-one seemed to know what was the truth,” said a Briton who arrived in Hong Kong, one of thousands of foreigners who left Peking after the bloody June 4 Army assault on student-led demonstrators in Peking’s Tiananmen Square. Taiwan’s Broadcasting Corporation of China started beaming more radio news to China last week.

“The purpose is to spread all the news on the mainland we get from all media sources so that Chinese people can know more about the bloodshed, crackdown and political turmoil in China,” an

official from the State-run radio company said. A poster near a Hong Kong hotel carried a message for locals and foreingers owning companies in China.

“Support your staff. Fax the truth to China.”

A banner hanging from a walkway over a busy road said, “Write letters to the people of China so they will know what the hated Peking Government and military have done.” Alan Armsden, editor-in-chief of the “Hong Kong Standard” said his newspaper began publishing cut-out news summaries last Tuesday for leaders to send by fax.

He said he had heard the companies in Chinese provinces were posting the reports on factory

“It’s been an exciting thing from a journalistic point of view in terms of breaking a news ban of a totalitarian regime,” he said.

Some Hong Kong residents said they had heard of Chinese police standing by fax machines and confiscating news reports as they arrived.

“This is a futile exercise and could get a lot of people in trouble,” one Hong Kong student leader said.

“We have to find other ways now to get the news to the people.”

But Armsden said that itw as hard to assign a policeman to every fax machine in China.

“It was just a sheer logistical impossibility.”