John Hodgson's assessment of the US spy plane affair (Opinion, April 19) is just a little one-sided.

When considering Sino-American relations, readers will doubtless recall it is only ten years ago the Communist Party sent the tanks in against the students in Tiananmen Square, with predictable and tragic results.

Nowadays, the objects of state repression are the followers of a religious sect, the Falun Gong, who are, of course, "enemies of the people". Not much new there.

China has clearly expressed territorial claims over the waters of the South China Sea, thus threatening the security and territorial integrity of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. The last North Asiatic power to have such blatant imperialist ambitions in this area was Japan (the so-called East Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere of 1942) and look what that led to - a full-scale Far Eastern war, culminating in Hiroshima.

In the circumstances, some people might feel the US is doing us all a favour by keeping an electronic eye on what is going on in China.

Incidentally, it is not just the American Republicans who have never forgiven the Chinese Communists for taking part in the Korean War.

There are several thousand British and Commonwealth ex-servicemen who fought on the United Nations side in that war who doubtless feel the same.

-J L Riches, Grebe Crescent, Horsham