Taiwan Readies ‘News Balloons’

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The Taipei government plans to use weather balloons to carry newspapers over the Taiwan Strait to the Chinese mainland, where a news blackout has left millions of people unaware of the Beijing government’s bloody crackdown on dissent, an official said Tuesday.

A Defense Ministry spokesman in Taipei said Taiwanese have donated tons of newspapers in the campaign to break the news blackout on the Communist mainland.

Organizers said the newspapers will be sent across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait attached to weather ballons sent aloft by a special military propaganda unit.

Officials said the unit is capable of sending 1,000 pounds of balloon-carried cargo and propaganda leaflets daily across the strait, a tactic that in the past was used to send everything from candy to cheap watches to mainlanders hungry for anything from the outside world. But the use of balloons as a propaganda tool has been curtailed in recent years as the Communist government in Beijing and the Nationalists on Taiwan began moving slowly toward easing more than 40 years of hostility.