PEK/8)
CONFIDENTIAL
•
19
SEH
MADA.
Office of the British
Chargé d'Affaires,
PEKING.
3 June, 1968.
4599
ހ
My dear Jibos,
I enclose Digest No. 8 or items taken from the Chinese·· confidential bulletin of foreign press reports, Reference News,
This which is circulated to cadres on a restricted basis. time the period under review is from 26 April to 8 May.
2, I said in my last letter accompanying Digest No. 7 that the Chinese authorities had kept their officials reasonably well-informed about the moves to find a site for the Vietnam peace talks. They contimed to do this in the present period under review and the bulletin of 5 May carried the news that the Americans and North Vietnamese had agreed upon Paris,
3. Meanwhile the official press has kept silence on the talks. The People's Daily still describes the idea of peace talks as an out-and-out fraud concocted by the United States Government
At the same time with the connivance of the Soviet Union. Chinese newspapers continue to carry routine reports of Vietcong battle successes and North Vietnamese claims about the shooting down of American aircraft. So as far as the average Chinese is concerned the Vietnamese are still fighting on as before without any thought of negotiating. The pretence is maintained even in the speeches by Chinese officials at Government receptions, If any of the guests mention the talks, as the Guinean and Malian Foreign Ministers did, this section of their speeches is omitted from the official account in the People's Daily.
Their hosts unfailingly ignore the reference.
4. There were a couple of items this time which are of interest in the context of Sino/British relations. The first was the reference to Sir David Trench's arrival in London for his visit to the United Kingdom, The editors of the Reference News suggested in the headlines to the article that the main purpose of the trip was to discuss Sino/British relations. By contrast in the article itself Sino/British relations was the last of the subjects mentioned as possible themes for discussion. The intention behind this deliberate distortion may have been to show cadres that the Hong Kong and British
Or perhaps the Governments give high priority to this topic. Chinese genuinely believed that the visit would result in a move to defuse the present tension. The bulletin also picked up Mr. Rodgers' statement on the Watt case and the Vickers- Zimmer summons, Un occasions like this, when the Reference News quotes from Ministers criticising the Chinese Government, it sounds almost like an opposition newspaper. Perhaps the editors argue that Mr. Rodgers' statement in which he described Chinese conduct as inhuman, would appear so preposterous to readers of the bulletin as to be rejected out of hand, other hand the theory may be that the louder the imperialists
But one wonders squeal the better regardless of what they say.
../whether
J.D.I. Boyd, Esq.,
Far Eastern Department.
On the
CONFIDENTIAL