Censorship--Yes

From Chungking, too, there was exciting news of relaxed censorship. But the excitement proved to be all one man's --and he was all wrong.

The one man was ferret-eyed Henry J. Taylor, Scripps-Howard's hopabout journalist who rarely stays in any one country long enough for a second breath, or a second thought. Within 48 hours of reaching Chungking, he had seen Chiang Kai-shek and was breathlessly cabling home: "Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, in an exclusive interview today, promised to ease Chinese censorship regulations on news going to the United States. ... I told him that there was increasing uneasiness in America because of the tight censorship. . . . Chiang said he welcomed such a frank complaint. . . .

"I proposed that all news going to the U.S. be passed by Chinese censors if it was acceptable to two American officials --Lieut. General Albert C. Wedemeyer for military news, and Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley for political news. . . . The Generalissimo agreed. . . . He said he would request action . . . and this dispatch was the first filed under the new system."

Among other things, the interview was not exclusive : Cecil Dickson of the Gan nett newspapers was along; so was Vice Minister of Information Hollington Tong, who pointed out, with Chinese courtesy, that Taylor must have suffered from a "misunderstanding." U.S. Ambassador Pat Hurley was not so gentle. Said he:

"The American Ambassador ... did not desire and would not accept the right of censorship for the Chinese Government. ... I wasn't consulted in advance about Mr. Taylor's proposal. It would be absurd. . . ."

Even less courteous was the Chungking Foreign Correspondents' Club, which called Taylor's plan "preposterous and presumptuous." Correspondents' Club members, who had been working at the tortuous, tangled Chinese censorship problem long before Henry J. Taylor dropped in, planned to go right on working at it after he had gone.

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