Edgar Snow's wife denied access to dissident

BEIJING, APRIL. 1. Chinese authorities today halted an effort by the widow of the famed U.S journalist Edgar Snow to meet a leading activist for families of those slain in the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989.

Lois Wheeler Snow, whose husband's sympathetic reportage on Mao Zedong's revolution endeared him to communist authorities, was blocked from meeting Ms. Ding Zilin, an outspoken proponent of compensation for victims of the 1989 army killings. The 79-year- old widow had hoped to pass on a small donation and message of support to Ms. Ding, a retired professor whose son was slain in the crackdown. Ms. Ding has long lobbied for an official apology for the massacre and aid for bereaved families. At the entry gate to People's university, which was swarming with undercover police, security officials said Ms. Snow did not have proper permission to enter the campus where Ms. Ding lives.

On the campus in western Beijing, at least a dozen security agents blocked Ms. Ding from leaving her home, said a friend of Ms. Ding's whose son was also killed in the army crackdown. ``This isn't a surprise, it's a disappointment,'' said Ms. Snow, accompanied by her son. ``This a friendly visit from a mother who has a son to a mother who has lost a son - to many mothers who have lost their sons,'' she said.

Edgar Snow, whose best-known work was a portrait of Mao and his comrades titled ``Red star over China'', died in 1972 and part of his ashes are interred in Beijing. His widow had visited beijing frequently since his death and was honoured by communist authorities as a ``Friend of China''. But after a visit in 1987 she did not return in revulsion at the Chinese army's killing of hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy protesters. Snow's decision to use her first visit to Beijing since before the massacre put authorities in an awkward spot. China has ignored pleas that it revise its official verdict that the 1989 democracy movement was a counter-revolutionary rebellion.

``People always say Edgar Snow is a friend of China. This is not a friendly way to behave toward his widow,'' said Snow's 50-year- old son Chris. Ms. Snow passed a small sum of money and a book of Edgar Snow's 1930s photographs of communist revolutionaries inscribed with a supportive message to Ms. Ding's friend Su Bingxian. Ms. Su lost a 21-year-old son in the Tiananmen killings. ``It is shameful to see this treatment of a woman of advanced age who has come so far and whose husband helped China in its time of greatest trouble,'' Ms. Su said.

- Reuters

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Section  : International
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