PURGING INTELLECTUALS
SIR,—Mr. J. E. M. Arden's letter refers your readers to the back tiles of Encounter and suggests I have misreported a controversy there, but says he himself was only concerned with my 'assertion that Fei [Hsaio-tung] was an enthusiast for the [Peking] regime's treatment of its intellectuals' 1 did not say this, but that Fei would be genuinely keen on the work he was doing; which Wittvogel in his lengthy insinuations had known nothing about. Just pos- sibly, Mr. Arden thinks that 'minorities' in China means intellectuals; it means non-Chinese tribes- people such as the Miao, for whom alphabets were being invented and so forth, and presumably still are, through Fci's new university for them. (I think the term also includes the Chinese Moslems.) Unless Mr. Arden made this quaint mistake, his accusation against me is just another of those malignant fan- tasies which continually hop out of the mouth of a propagandist, like the toads in the fairy story.—Yours faithfully,
WILLIAM EMPSON
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