Dear editor,

I thought Tom Plate's article, ``China vs CNN,'' in the April 19-20 edition of The Korea Times, was simply disgraceful and I could hardly believe what I was reading.

Perhaps you have fingers in many commercial pies in China and thus you sound like an apologist for a very nasty regime.

It is simply shameful for a Westerner who no doubt takes freedom of speech absolutely for granted to be so effusively supportive of a regime that has tortured, murdered and forced into exile hundreds of thousands of Tibetans.

The Chinese regime also viciously persecutes religious minorities such as Christians and Falungong practitioners, imprisons journalists and human rights activists, and counts among its friends such wondrous lands as Myanmar and North Korea (without China's support these states would collapse).

China's claims to rule Tibet have no more legitimacy than my country Britain has to rule the republic of Ireland (the majority of people there simply didn't want to be ruled by the British, so we left).

The vast majority of Tibetans likewise, by any unbiased account, simply do not want to be ruled by China, beginning and end of story.

Tibetans appealed to Britain and the U.S. for help just as they were about to be bombarded and mercilessly invaded by Mao Tse-tung's army but the West turned its back on a remote Himalayan kingdom of little strategic importance.

China's behavior today smacks disturbingly of the behavior of Japan in the 1920s-30s. There are still plenty of thugs and goons in the Chinese state.

Alan Rycroft
Seoul
arycroft@yahoo.com