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Winchester, Va. -- One of my newspapers (the New York Post) has asked me if I would be
willing to go to Communist China and try to interview some of the people in the
government there. I had long wanted to go to China, just as my husband always
wanted to go there.
Hoping that the State Department was ready to relax its rules and allow for communication
between our countries through the press, I made application for a visa and was
told that, as yet, no newsman was permitted by our government to visit
Communist China.
I still hope that the State Department may find it possible to allow all correspondents who
wish to gather news from this area of the world to go there if the Chinese will
allow them to enter.
I believe it might be easier to learn some things in China than in the Soviet Union. But I
am anxious to go to the Soviet Union, too, and since I cannot now go to China,
I hope that I will be able to visit the Soviet Union in the near future.
My husband acquired his earliest interest in China and his great respect for its people
through his grandfather, Warren Delano, who had lived there for a number of
years. Warren Delano had been a partner in one of the British trading firms
dealing primarily in tea.
Westbrook Pegler once reported the horrifying fact that the firm also had probably dealt
in opium. I never knew, nor did my husband, if there was any truth in this.
But when I went to Hong Kong a few years ago I found an old book which told much of the
story of the tea and opium trade. I also talked with a representative of an
equally ancient British trading firm whose family had been there for
generations. He said that opium was a minor part of the tea business and that
many of the British firms traded in it.
All of my life, it seems to me, I have been interested in China -- even before I knew of
my husband's interest in it. My Grandmother Hall had cherished some beautiful
old blue and white china that came from her ancestors who either had bought it
from Chinese traders or themselves had gone to China.
Neither my husband nor I ever traveled to China, however,
and the possibility became more remote as the situation there grew more and
more serious.
I have been saddened by the final results brought about by
what undoubtedly was a bad government. Reforms which should have been made
never seemed possible, and finally Communism became the answer.
The establishment of this new regime seems to have cost
800,000 lives, according to the admission of the present government. This does
not seem to be a happy way to inaugurate reform.
Nevertheless, I would be interested to go to Communist China
to talk with the people in power. I especially would like to see Madame Sun Yat Sen, for whom I always have had a great respect.
I believe that we need all the information we can get about
every part of the world, regardless of the type of government that may be in
power there.
We now are officially recognizing the fascist government of
Spain, which actually came into existence through cooperation with our German
and Italian enemies in World War II. During that war, because of the danger
facing all of us, we fought as allies with the Soviet Union and only when the
war was at an end did our difficulties seem insurmountable.
The difficulties we face with any Communist country are
still considerable, but I believe that trade and communication are essential if
we are ever to come to some solution of how to live in the same world, in spite
of our differences, without war.
Above all else, the peoples of the world desire to
live without war. We must feel secure from attack, but in the long run just
building up military strength is not the way to find out how to live together
in the new world we face.