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The book, In Fear of China, finally appeared in 1968.

I had assumed
naively that the detailed research I had done with so much effort on the
Sino-Indian dispute would be widely read and would awaken world
opinion to the facts.

But publication had not been easy. At the time I was supposed to be
studying the Japanese economy full-time at the Australian National
University. I had reluctantly been given a mere six months to go off and
write the book. The ANU Press, which earlier had promised to publish
the book, rejected it on the advice of the then heavily pro-government
foreign policy International Relations Department (it was also heavily
infiltrated by intelligence people determined to keep dangerous anti-
government policy academics like myself at bay).

Melbourne University Press also withdrew a promise to publish ( its


head was later shown also to be closely involved with Australias
intelligence establishment).

Eventually I found a commercial Australian publisher the Lansdowne


Press. But its weak overseas connection meant the book, and the all-
important Sino-Indian chapter, could easily be ignored by the then ultra-
hawkish US and UK foreign policy establishments. The China Quarterly,
then the main journal on Chinese affairs and at the time edited by later
UK governor in Hong Kong David Wilson, and which earlier had
published much supporting the Indian case over the border dispute,
managed dismissively to review my book in a single paragraph.

It was not until publicaton of Neville Maxwells very important book,


Indias China War, in 1972 that the facts could no longer be ignored.
But by that time it was too late. As Henry Kissinger is reported to have
said at the time, if he had known the facts of the dispute earlier, his
image of Beijing as inherently aggressive would have weakened,
together with his support for US intervention in Indochina.

Former US secretary for defence Robert McNamara has also confirmed


that the Washington view of China as aggressive was the key factor
behind that intervention, with its three million deaths in Vietnam plus
another million or so deaths elsewhere in Indochina.

And to think that it all began at that remote Dho La Strip, and that the
inability of people like myself to get the facts out was at least partly
responsible for the subsequent tragedy

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