Technology: Fax It To 'Em

The political revolution has discovered the fax revolution. Overseas sympathizers of China's student movement last spring quickly learned that the official news blackout could be effectively penetrated through the use of facsimile machines. They used faxes to get foreign press reports into China.

With a little help from Western publications, exiled dissidents are again employing fax technology to send their pro-democracy views into China. But last week authorities got the message and ordered all work units equipped with the machines to intercept the transmission of objectionable material.

China's exiled dissidents are not the only ones to have entered the fax age. In South Africa the imprisoned black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela has been allowed, as one of several new privileges, to send and receive messages over a government fax.