China talk
Sir: In disposing of writers of books about China as charlatans and 'travellers,' Professor Joan Robinson FBA (August 26) has made use of information known only to the instigators of the Lin Piao affair, a plot to restore Imperial rule, scrap the characters and close down the factories and steel-works.
Professor Joan Robinson's Freudian slip is similar to those already made by Lord Hill, a newspaper, and various economists who have been predicting a boom in exports on the flimsiest of evidence. Some time ago Miss Colina McDougall and Mr Stewart Dalby of the Financial Times wrote of a political crisis in China on the basis of such evidence as 'History has its twists and turns, and quotations of Chairman Mao written as far back as 1949.
Mentioned on ITN was a document containing the number '5881' which was explained as a code for ' armed uprising.' Since this code is immediately broken as soon as it is written down, it follows that this document is the master-plan. The whole idea of using such a code is ludicrous and would never occur to a genuine Chinese, but it is just the sort of thing that would appear perfectly natural to scholars whose knowledge of Chinese is limited to the spoken language.
Professor Joan Robinson is a close colleague of Mr Derek Bryan OBE who wrote me: "Despite what Peking Review says, I am holding to my view that demand for steel is growing." A. J. H. Brown 46 Merryton Avenue, Giffnock, Glasgow
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