The Confidence Game

Passed from one to another by his expatriate fellow countrymen, Reporter Val Chu, in the U.S. after six years as a member of TIME'S Hong Kong news staff, conducted a month-long survey of the Communist pressures at work on Chinese students in the U.S. His report:

At whatever address they happen to be, dozens of Chinese refugee students will get letters from home this week, and each will bring a heaviness of heart and a torment of fear. Since last March, between 10% and 20% of the Chinese students and ex-students in the U.S. have received such letters, for they are a part of Peking's intensive campaign to woo the refugees back. Invariably they come from the students' families, who may not have written for years. They seldom dwell upon domestic trivialities, but upon the glories of the "New China" and the boundless opportunities to be found there. But the most frightening thing about them is not what they say; it is the fact that they are proof that Peking has discovered who and where the refugees are, and is pressuring relatives to bring about their return.

Promises & Problems. Red China first officially launched its offensive against the minds and morale of Chinese students in the U.S. during the summer of 1954. At the first Geneva Conference Chou En-lai accused the U.S. of "persecuting" and "detaining" Chinese students, especially 124 technicians held by the U.S. during the Korean war so that their skills would not be available to the enemy. When the U.S. lifted the ban, only half of the 124 chose to go home, but Red China decided to go after the entire Chinese student body in the U.S. Last March Peking began to register the students' families, then launched its letters-from-home campaign. Red China not only needs the skills of these refugees; it also wants to eliminate what could well become an effective group of well-educated counter-revolutionaries living in freedom abroad.

Over the months the letters have brought results. A subtle technique, as different from Russia's brutish kidnapings as China is different from Russia, they can have a deep effect on the minds of the students. They stir up traditional family loyalties, create doubts about each student's place in an alien land. They offer bright promises for the future -and an end to all the frustrations and problems that beset the students.

The Rootless Ones. These problems provide fertile ground for exploitation. As long as the students stay in the U.S., they live in a sort of no man's land. Many have no legal status, are permitted to remain only on an indefinite basis. Some find it impossible to make plans or a decent living. Some are lonely; there are about five male Chinese students to each female. "Many of them," explains a Chinese professor now teaching in New Jersey, "have discarded Confucianism and have not acquired the Christian spirit of the Americans. The technology they have learned is not enough to substitute for the Chinese philosophy of life they threw away."

Hou Yu-chun, assistant professor of chemical engineering at a Midwestern state university, went to Red China last month; the U.S. did not stop him, because all Chinese refugees are free to leave. Another Chinese student recently sent his wife to London, joined her there and traveled home by way of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, scores of other Chinese are racked by doubt.

Big Brother Was Asking. There are flaws in Red China's campaign. Sometimes the letter-writing parents themselves find ways to show how they really feel. After begging his son, at the insistence of the Communists, to come home, one father managed to get word to him through a relative in Hong Kong: "Ignore that letter. Don't come back." In a letter to her daughter, a mother kept referring to a "Brother Di," who, she said, had been asking a number of questions about the daughter. On reading that, the daughter knew exactly what was up: Brother Di was the mother's pre-arranged code name for "the Communists."

By word of mouth, by reliable letters, by diligent reading of the Red China press, the refugees can gather telling clues about what happens to the students who return. One New York student asked a friend to send a picture of himself when he got back to Red China, standing if life was fine, sitting if things were soso, lying down if they were bad. Back came a picture of his friend, lying on a park bench, his head below the level of his feet.

Word has seeped back that Ling Hsingyu, formerly a student at New York University, returned to Red China only to find himself in a labor camp. Huang Chiateh, once a professor at Shanghai's St. John's University, was put to work in a coal mine. One student was compelled to write a "thought compendium," and, for "lack of frankness," to slap himself publicly until blood ran out of his mouth. Often Red China's own propaganda betrays itself. "You people living in the other world don't understand our world," another returnee wrote to friends in the U.S. "Here every hair, every thread we have is for the Party."

Poisonous Education. Another student who went back to Red China detested what he saw there and escaped to Hong Kong, described the agony in store for any who succumb to Peking's blandishments. "The luxurious American President liner carried home our group of youths full of beautiful dreams and boundless enthusiasm," he wrote. "We sang lustily, 'Arise, those who don't want to be slaves.' " But the lusty group was soon told: "Don't consider yourselves returned students who have drunk foreign waters and therefore are special intellectuals . . . You must realize you underwent a longterm, poisonous education and have deeprooted, reactionary tendencies . . . You evaded the revolution by staying abroad. Today, you should atone for your sins."

Added the student: "The more I studied and the more brainwashing I had, the more I regretted my return. In the still of the night, I tossed and turned sleeplessly. Sometimes I thought of suicide. But I felt it was not entirely my fault. It was only my naive thinking that did me wrong. I was only one of the many thousands deceived in the greatest confidence game in history."

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