Madam, - Hats off to the lady who heckled the Chinese leader on the White House lawn. She reminded me of the great Rosa Parks, who highlighted the racial segregation laws of Alabama back in the 1950s, and of the "White Rose" protesters who threw leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime from the windows of a Munich university at time when most Germans looked the other way.
Dr Wang Wenyi had every reason to be angry. The Communist regime of the so-called "People's Republic" of China has been responsible for numerous horrific crimes against humanity. The Falun Gong sect to which she referred, whatever one thinks of its beliefs, has millions of followers in China.
Like the adherents of any religious or spiritual belief system, they deserve the freedom to give peaceful expression to their beliefs. Instead, Falun Gong members are subjected to relentless persecution, torture and imprisonment.
The Chinese regime also retains its bloody grip on Tibet, which it invaded and annexed half a century ago. Since the occupation began, millions of innocent Tibetans have been murdered or imprisoned and repeated attempts have been made to exterminate the nation's unique Buddhist culture.
The paranoid control freaks who run China have imposed strict media censorship and restricted access to the internet to the point where, for example, it is impossible for any citizen to locate a website containing information or opinions critical of the regime's brutal policies. References to the 1989 massacre of dissidents in Tiananmen Square are forbidden, and Tibet no longer exists on globes made in China.
China's immense value and potential as a trading partner has blinded many people in the West to the cruelty and horror that its leaders have inflicted on their own citizens and the people of occupied Tibet.
Greed has over-ridden concern about the human rights catastrophe that is Communist China. - Yours, etc,
JOHN FITZGERALD, Callan, Co Kilkenny.