BRUTAL MEASURES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26479, 5 June 1947, Page 7

BRUTAL MEASURES

OPPRESSION IN CHINA

MALTREATMENT OF STUDENTS FOREIGN OBSERVERS SHOCKED Rec. 10 p.m. NEW YORK, June 3. . The scope of the violence of the Chinese Government’s repressive measures against students and other opponents during the past fortnight mark the employment of methods of rule characteristic of the worst periods of the Kuomintang dictatorship, says the Nanking correspondent of the New York Times. AH the instrumentalities , and practices of the modern Police State oppression—secret police, informers, hired thugs, pre-dawn bedroom arrests, large-scale gaolings, martial law and censorship—have been brought into use. Government actions have shocked many foreign observers in Nanking, and they promise to alienate and antagonise large sections of the more politically conscious Chinese people. The arrests, shootings, and beating of students are widely regarded as particularly unjustified and unnecessary. . Students, who in modern China are the most sensitive barometer of. popular sentiment, have been the instruments for expressing a widespread desire for peace and relief from the near-starvation level of existence at which most Chinese these days are living. There is probably some Communist and other Left-wing manipulation of student movements, but professors and others close to the students feel that it is spontaneous and nonP °Observers agree that the way , th ® Government has handled the student movement has turned many students heretofore neutral into Communist sympathisers and many of the democratic gains of the Central Government in the last year or two have been wiped out. During the last few weeks the Chinese people have learned to their dismay that they live almost everywhere under martial law which can be invoked apparently at any time, with the resultant cancellation of many of the tenuous civil liberties won in recent times. Journalists all over Kuomintang China fear that direct censorship will soon become nation-wide, and intimidation of personnel and rationing of newsprint are already used as a means of controlling the press. ■ ... ... Recent events have shown that the real pattern of power and control has not been changed in the Central Government in spite of new faces brought into the regime. Observers see the recent heavyhanded Government actions as largely actuated by fear. The anticommunist offensive is making little progress, the economic situation is getting worse, and the .Government is becoming increasingly “ jittery ” and uncertain about the future.