DEFECTORS The Chinese Lawyer

In the twelve years since the end of the Korean War, eleven of the 21 captured G.I.s who defected to Red China have come forlornly home. Last week turncoat No. 12 returned.* By comparison with his predecessors, ex-Corporal William C. White, 35, a Negro from Plumerville, Ark., had fared well during his 11 1/2 years behind the Bamboo Curtain. A high school dropout in Kansas City, White got a law degree in Peking, studied Russian and Chinese literature and worked as a translator. White also married a Chinese girl, who accompanied him with their two children aged six and four.

Unheralded, they simply strolled across the Lowu border bridge between Red China and Hong Kong, announced that they wanted to enter the British Crown Colony as transients bound for the U.S. Later, at a press conference, White insisted: "I still have not betrayed my country. I have always been an American. I still am an American." As for the four remaining defectors, White said that they, too, will "eventually decide to leave."

Peoples U. The Chinese apparently decided to give White favored treatment in hopes of making him a Communist mouthpiece for the "oppressed Negro." After he was captured near Pyongyang, in North Korea, a Chinese commissar informed him: "You have been liberated. You have come over to the side of the people." Nonetheless, White spent the next three years in Chinese prison camps. Other prisoners of war who returned home testified that White became an informer on his fellow-G.I.s, was rewarded by being given special privileges and a soft job as prison camp mailman. When the armistice was signed in July 1953, White had made up his mind to stay in China. "I'd come to feel the Chinese weren't as bad as we'd been told," White said last week. "I had been thinking to myself, 'What is all this Communism business about?"I want to know.' '

Once in China, White was given two suits, an overcoat, four pairs of underwear, ties, and Russian-made shoes that didn't fit. He traveled first-class to Taiyuan, capital of Shansi Province, where he spent a year studying Chinese. Then he went to Peking, where he enrolled at the Chinese Peoples University, attended classes 18 hours a week and eventually was allowed to enter law school in September 1956. During his first year of law courses, White studied Hegel, Marx and Engels, later boned up on Leninist ideology, but was allowed to skip studies on Mao Tse-tung. It was at Peoples U. that White met and married Hsieh Ping, a classmate from Shanghai.

After graduating from law school (for his thesis he wrote a history of Chinese law), White helped to try a few cases before the Chinese decided he would be more useful as a translator. In the next two years, White translated a volume of Winston Churchill's History of World War II into Chinese and the writings of Chinese Author Lu Hsun into English. He was paid $115 a month and allowed the rare luxury of a three-room apartment with a refrigerator in what had once been an elegant residential district of Peking.

Confiscated Books. A year ago. White informed his superiors that he wanted to return to the U.S. "I'd finished my studies, which is one of the things I went to China for," he explained last week. "I wanted to come home, and I had always intended to return." Why had he waited so long? "I was married, and I thought about the difficulties of going home with a Chinese wife," he said. "I've been homesick, and I felt if I stayed any longer my parents would have died before I got back." Though White claimed that racial prejudice did not exist in Red China, he noted that one of his worries about returning to the U.S. was to find a place to live where his children would not be branded "mixed bloods" -him hsueh -as apparently they had been in Peking. Finally, three weeks ago, White got word that he could leave. At the border last week, Chinese officials confiscated White's diary, law books and all but $18.50 of his savings.

White feels certain that he will be able to enter the U.S. without difficulty, as the eleven other redefectors have. The only grounds for exclusion would be evidence that he served in a foreign army, voted in elections or expressed allegiance to another country, all of which White denies doing. All he wants now, he says, is "to get home, settle down and find a job," which may not prove too easy -even for a Chinese lawyer.

-Four others are still there; one died in 1954; one died in 1954: one reportedly went to Belgium three are unknown.

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