FOREIGN RELATIONS: No More Blackmail

Chin Hong, a 40-year-old New York laundryman, had already mailed his $700 life savings to China, to buy his relatives out of a Communist jail. When a letter arrived last week demanding $1,000 more, Chin, depressed and penniless, tried to commit suicide. In a frenzy, he attacked three policemen who tried to stop him. They shot him in self-defense.

A few hours after Chin died, Treasury Counsel Emanuel Minskoff told a press conference in New York that the U.S. Government is calling a halt to the Chinese Reds' long-distance shakedown. During the past year the Communists have bled millions of dollars from Chinese-Americans with relatives imprisoned in China. The payments benefited the Communists, but not their victims. Some were executed while relatives in the U.S. were still signing ransom checks.

To cut off any more futile payments, the Treasury Department is now enforcing a 1950 regulation under the Trading with the Enemy Act, which makes remittances to Red China illegal. After this anyone who sends ransom money to the Communists is liable to a $10,000 fine and ten years in prison.