Transfusions of Hate

One night during his conducted tour through Communist China, Editor Frank Moraes of the Times of India was kept awake by mosquitoes. "You know, Chang," he said playfully to his interpreter, "the mosquitoes . . . sucked my blood. From today I shall call them landlords."

"No," retorted Chang somberly. "Call them American aggressors."

Everywhere Moraes went as one of India's cultural delegation to China, the story was the same, he wrote last week in the New York Times.

From the seemingly sagest adults to the small children, reported Editor Moraes, the bloodstream of China has been seriously infected with the propaganda germs spread daily from Peking: "America is Public Enemy No. 1. From billboards and posters, through the press, film and radio, in incessant speeches and slogans, the U.S. is reviled as an imperialist and an aggressor. Even the mild-mannered Madame Sun Yat-sen chuckled with glee when drawing our attention to a cartoon depicting Dean Acheson . . . as a 'bacterial bug.'" Moraes noted that Chinese who speak English with an American accent are nervous about where they got their education; he met one Columbia-educated Chinese interpreter who, while favoring American-style clothes and flaunting an American fountain pen, carefully made it clear that she had "hated every minute" of her stay in the U.S.

Moraes found the Chinese Communists' propaganda about American bacteriological warfare in Korea to be "clever and not ineffective." Since the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, he wrote, "Asian opinion has been particularly sensitive to the use of unorthodox weapons of war" and susceptible to the belief that the Americans are now using other Asians--the Communists in Korea --as guinea pigs for another horrible weapon. The Peking germ-warfare exhibition fills three large halls, with exhibits of parachuted cylinders allegedly full of germ-carrying insects, and maps showing where the Americans dropped pests 804 times at 70 points. An American-made phonograph plays over & over the "confessions" of two captured U.S. airmen.

"Loyalty to the state and hatred of those who differ with you," Editor Moraes decided, "are the twin props of Communism."

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