Out of the Zoo

The Chinese Communists keep Peking's tiny complement of foreign correspondents (about 25) penned up like zoo animals, spoon-feed them a diet of propaganda seldom adulterated by truth. But now and then the tamest specimens, i.e., those with the staunchest Communist records, are led forth for a blinkered stroll around the compound. Last week 19 such journalists returned to Peking after a three-week tour of ravaged Tibet.

The arrangements were pure Mao dynasty. All 19 excursionists were carefully chosen on the basis of docility: reporters from Pravda, Tass, Poland's Trybuna Ludu, North Korean news agencies, Britain's Red Sheep Alan Winnington (the London Daily Worker), along with Author Anna Louise Strong, doyenne of U.S. Red-liners, who was accused by the Kremlin in 1949 of working against Communism--an error for which Moscow later abjectly apologized. (For the Tibetan junket an oxygen tent was taken along for 74-year-old Journalist Strong, but the heady political climate of captive Tibet made it unnecessary.)

By limousine, Jeep and horse, guides steered the domesticated newsmen along a beaten path that carefully skirted Communist Chinese troops fighting on India's border, a do-or-die stand by Khamba tribesmen in western Tibet. Even when the opportunity for independent sightseeing presented itself, the newsmen turned away; no one interviewed India's Consul General Shiv Lai Chhiber, spotted in a Lhasa rug shop, because, as one correspondent explained: "Our main interest was in social reforms."

Back in Peking with full notebooks, the tunnel-visioned correspondents ticked off what they saw. Lhasa--where 15,000 died in the bloody fighting--was "quite normal." Everywhere, the people smiled on their oppressors--a piece of information the reporters picked up during lunch in Shigatse with Mao's puppet Panchen Lama. Then, suntanned and refreshed by their exercise, the correspondents trotted back to their cages.

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