Robert Neville, TIME'S Bureau Chief in Hong Kong, runs a listening post--an ear trumpet on Red China's coast. His job is to pick up each rumble and whisper from the mainland. He hears plenty of both.

Hong Kong is the neutral way station, the communications center, for almost any traveler, whatever his mission, who skirts the edge of China or passes through Mao's bamboo curtain. Onto the British-held island and peninsula pour refugees from the Communist Utopia-in-reverse, agents and opportunists playing their own cautious angles; through its postage-stamp airfield and its busy railway station pass most of the diplomats who scuttle to & from Peking; from its shrewd businessmen go goods for Communist buyers; out of its newsstands and radio sets gush reams and hours of words from Mao's propagandists--intended not for Western newsmen but for the 463 million Chinese whose every thought the Communists hope to control. Truth and half-truth are there in abundance. The problem is to evaluate, piece together and check reports against material from other listening posts.

The Bureau's most exasperating job is digesting Communist newspapers, "literature" and broadcasts, with their wearisome load of Marxian cliches. Even the fine print must be studied, for it often tells the story which the headlines are designed to hide. For instance, Neville read a maze of Marxian dialectic about the Reds' wonderful social security system ("second only to Soviet Russia's") before he found the catch: the scheme applied only to an insignificant number of workers and even for them it would be delayed.

Some of the most shocking news about Red China is deliberately spread and documented by the Chinese Reds themselves. The Communist papers are at their gleeful best in reporting mass killings of "counter-revolutionaries." The present propaganda line attempts to scare peasants into submission, and so the Red journalist dwells on the gory details with all the morbid gusto of a tabloid reporter on a chorus girl murder.

Sickeningly similar stories are told by the hundreds of missionaries, businessmen and disenchanted Chinese who stream by thousands into Hong Kong. With Job-like patience, Neville and his assistants interview refugees by the hour, are able to follow much more than the march of the Red purge. They can watch trends such as the growing number of Russian "technicians" in China, the booming tax rate, the rocketing level of unemployment in specific industries. One student of transportation in Hong Kong was able to build up a timetable for trains throughout China.

Neville is a veteran of living on the edge of disaster. He was in Spain in 1936 when the Civil War broke out, in Warsaw in 1939 when the Nazis blitzed across the Polish border to start World War II. He has also followed gentler pursuits, e.g., bridge expert for the New York Herald Tribune. During his newspaper career, he got his first good look at the East. He set off on a westward jaunt around the world in 1940, reported the war's effects on Free China and Hong Kong, took a look behind the Japanese lines, and, incidentally, had several interviews with TIME coverman Chou Enlai.

After a trip through the South Asia rimland, Neville became a war correspondent with the British in North Africa. Then he joined the U.S. Army as a private, became top man on several editions of Stars & Stripes around the Mediterranean, rose to lieutenant colonel by 1946. Soon afterward he went to India for a two-year hitch as TIME Bureau Chief in Delhi, where he got to know Kavalam Madhava Panikpar, Nehru's Red-appeasing ambassador to Peking. Later he headed our Buenos Aires Bureau, where he learned more about the traits of dictators and propagandists.

Like Peron, the Chinese Reds keep attacking the American press, including TIME. A Chinese pamphleteer recently claimed that our overseas editions are subsidized by the "imperialistic American government." Again showing their characteristic lack of imagination, the Reds picked up this aging lie from other totalitarians.

Cordially yours,

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