Bamboo curtain

Gen. Wego Chiang, commander-in-chief of the Combined Service Forces, called on leaders of the free world to design an effective global strategy to safeguard world peace and to rescue the enslaved people behind the Bamboo Curtain.

“A new bamboo curtain may be coming down on Southeast Asia,” he worried. This would not be a hard-and-fast wall like the Iron Curtain; nor would it be part of some newly imagined Asian domino theory.

As it had been for other Western reporters getting their first look behind the Bamboo Curtain, it was all a marvel for Payne. After all, here was a country that less than a quarter of a century ago had been destitute after three decades of revolutionary warfare.