Article Distorts Chinese Map

To the editors:

The Crimson had comprehensive, accurate reporting on Jiang Zemin's visit to Harvard, in many respects superior to the coverage of the same event in the Boston Globe and New York Times. Thus it is disappointing to see a front page story about President Rudenstine's upcoming China trip laced with five easily avoidable errors (News, March 10).

It tells how he will leave Beijing to visit "the Chinese cities of Fudang and Tsinghua" which one suspects is a reference to Fudan and Qinghua Universities, the former in Shanghai, the latter in Beijing. The "1948 communist revolution" is a typo, unless there's been some historical revisionism I'm not aware of. Shanghai is then referred to as a Northern Chinese city--sure, it's north of Guangzhou, but it lies in the middle of China and is generally considered an "eastern" city in Chinese place names. Finally, unless international air routes have changed, President Rudenstine will not be flying "east" to China, but west. PHILIP CUNNINGHAM   March 10, 1998

The writer is a 1998 Nieman Fellow.