For a few moments, the rented studio of San Francisco's station KNBC was filled with the soaring strains of Mahler's Song of the Earth. Then, after three strokes on a bronze gong, a Chinese woman in a richly brocaded gown began speaking Mandarin into a goosenecked microphone. Her message, delivered for the first time just after sunup one morning last week, sped 6,000 miles across the Pacific to pierce the bamboo curtain that surrounds Red China. Radio Free Asia was on the air.
Like its sister organization, Radio Free Europe (TIME, July 17, 1950),...
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