The Squeeze

Before Red China entered the Korean war, Chinese in the U.S. sent as much as $50 million a year to families across the water and, even since, great sums have been voluntarily sent to China through Hong Kong. Last winter, it began to be apparent that these gifts of dollars were becoming a curse rather than a blessing; Red China, hungry for foreign exchange, was putting the squeeze on those who received them.

In San Francisco, Boston, Wichita and dozens of other U.S. cities, Chinese began getting letters from relatives pleading for more money. Mothers, grandfathers or sons wrote that new taxes had been assessed on them, or that they had been fined for crimes against the Communist regime. A 57-year-old woman wrote her son in San Francisco that she had been charged with underpaying the workmen who had built her house 25 years before.

The U.S. Chinese who paid soon received new demands and new threats. To the small merchants who received them, some of the requests were huge. A group of Honolulu businessmen with relatives in the Kwangtung village of Bucktoi got a frantic request for $20,000. Another Honolulu Chinese, who sent his father $3,000, was immediately asked for $5,000. He sent it, and got a request for $20,000. By that time he was broke.

Requests in the form of cables from Hong Kong signed by intermediaries were frankly blackmail. One sent to San Francisco read: "Grandfather fined $2,000 U.S. Remit money immediately or lifeless." A Boston Chinese was informed that his family was in a concentration camp--unless he paid, each member would be lashed by ropes to five horses and pulled apart. The extortion letters and cables were even sent to such places as Wichita, Kans., which has only 100 Chinese.

Month after month, Chinese-Americans kept the extortion racket secret, not only for fear of reprisals in China but for fear that the U.S. might act against them for giving aid to an enemy. But last week Chinese-American editors and organizations such as San Francisco's Six Companies were bringing Red China's threats into the open. They guessed that $500,000 had been squeezed from New York Chinese, hundreds of thousands more from other colonies all over the U.S. Dozens of new threats were arriving in every big city every day.

Sadly the Chinese leaders asked the U.S. for help, and instructed their countrymen to send no more money. Said a Chinese leader in Chicago: "There is only worry and trouble in our district tonight. You don't know what you're going to hear tomorrow. The Chinese are praying in their homes. Their only hope [now] is in prayer."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.