These are my comments to Chng's ardent response ('Strings attached to American aid', Oct 2) to my rhetoric.

One would be naive to assume that any country in this world provides aid without strings attached. Aid is a function of foreign policy, the incentive for a foreign country to maintain a positive relationship or alliance.

Occasionally, it is also dictated by humanitarian needs when the scope of suffering touches the human conscience as in Ethiopia. If one chaffs under Pax Americana, perhaps the alternatives are better like the former Soviet Union or China? You can always interview the citizens of the former Warsaw Pact or Albania (in the case of China) about their aid benevolence. Is it not interesting that Vietnam should pursue the lifting of trade sanctions with America more than she tries to trade with her former benefactors, Russia and China?

The writer has also maligned some of the Asian countries by equating them in the present tense to dictatorships. Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines certainly graduated into full-blown democracies with active political lives.

The fact that not all countries in Asia 'graduated' must take into account local demographics, society dynamics and historical factors beyond the control of foreign powers. The writer flatters the US by implying that our foreign policies can always dictate the final outcome of each country's destiny. We, like other nations, adjust and change our foreign policies to suit developments beyond our control in other regions.

If our civil liberties were "in tatters", I wonder why is it that the backlog in our Immigrations Naturalization Service (INS) for immigrant applicants stretches to five years long, with a majority of the applicants coming from the Third World? Is it because our "tattered" liberties are still heads and shoulders better than a large majority of nations in the world?

So it seems, people vote with their feet.