Radio: Words for China

For a few moments, the rented studio of San Francisco’s station KNBC was filled with the soaring strains of Mahler’s Song of the Earth. Then, after three strokes on a bronze gong, a Chinese woman in a richly brocaded gown began speaking Mandarin into a goosenecked microphone. Her message, delivered for the first time just after sunup one morning last week, sped 6,000 miles across the Pacific to pierce the bamboo curtain that surrounds Red China. Radio Free Asia was on the air.

Like its sister organization, Radio Free Europe (TIME, July 17, 1950), R.F.A. was founded by a group of private U.S. citizens* who feel that the Voice of America, though effective in its way, is sometimes hampered because of “good & sufficient reasons of national policy.” Explains Director John W. Elwood: “Because we nave no Government ties, we can say anything we damn please.” For the present, R.F.A.’s transoceanic voice will be limited to 75 minutes of news and interpretation, six days a week.

Elwood, who concedes that at the moment R.F.A. is little more than a “baby who has just got his rattle,” also realizes that very few people in Red-dominated China have receivers to pick up shortwave broadcasts from San Francisco. Eventually, R.F.A. hopes to speak loud and clear from a standard-band transmitter off the China coast—probably in Manila. But that time is at least 18 months and $2,000,000 away.

* Some of them: Importer Brayton Wilbur, Standard Oil of California’s T. S. Petersen, Banker Charles R. Blyth, Stanford U.’s Wallace Sterling, Pan American Airways’ Juan Trippe, San Francisco Chronicle Editor Paul Smith.