My First Trip to China

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Anita Chan (陳佩華) is a research professor at the China Research Centre of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and has published nine books about China, several of which are about the era of Mao’s rule. She was author of “Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation,” which had a Chinese translation print-run of 120,000 copies, and is co-author of “Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization.” She was formerly editor of “The China Journal” for 13 years. A specialist in Chinese labor issues, she is the editor of two forthcoming books, “Wal-Mart in China” and “Labor in Vietnam,” that will be published this year.

The year I ventured into China for the first time was 1971, as a 25 year old. My experience there was entirely different from all the other first trips published thus far in this series. Theirs were official visits; mine was a private visit. They were China’s “guests”; I was an unwelcomed guest. They were young “China specialists”; I was a young China ignoramus. But perhaps the most fundamental difference was due to my formative years as a member of Hong Kong’s first generation born after World War Two.

Growing up in a lower middle class family of very modestly educated, apolitical parents; schooled at an anti-Communist Catholic school that made little girls attend church; spoon-fed by an exam-oriented educational system that regarded Hong Kong and Chinese history as having terminated in 1911; furiously taking notes in a course on Chinese geography at the University of Hong Kong on the exact whereabouts of Chinese mountains and rivers to make sure I could regurgitate this at the three-hour year-end examination; never hearing words like Marxism or communism in any of the classes I attended, I was a white sheet of paper on which anything could have been written.

Like most Hong Kong students at that time, I barely read anything that was not useful for passing exams. I did have a vague image of China, though—it had to be a horrible place. People were dirt poor and were ruled by a “gongchandang” that made almost nothing available to its people. I knew this as a child because when some relatives went to visit relatives across the border they brought with them bundles of old clothes and light bulbs. How can people not have light bulbs!?

My father’s twelve siblings were split into two groups—one group, like my father, returned to Hong Kong in 1945 after fleeing Hong Kong’s occupation by the Japanese army, and another group did not come back to Hong Kong after the war. Many years later, when I finally got to know them personally, I understood that they had socialist inclinations and had wanted to work for the motherland, and that most of them ended up suffering for their idealistic patriotic choice: because of their Hong Kong background, after the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966 they were considered politically unreliable.

One of my aunts who had remained in Hong Kong, Fourth Aunt, liked going back and forth to keep in touch with her brothers and sisters in China, and from the 1950s onward she came back telling everyone it was not so bad there. Her Hong Kong siblings did not believe her. I heard sly remarks about her liking the Communists. But except for when Fourth Aunt insisted on giving us news, our close relatives in China were not a subject of conversation in the extended family circle. My parents never communicated with any of them. I think my father’s attitude was: it serves them right to stay behind after the War.

The image I had of China worsened in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution when bashed and decomposed bodies, sometimes tied up in pairs by ropes, floated down into Hong Kong waters from the West River. Seeing disturbing photos of them in newspapers, I could not stop worrying when I went swimming in Repulse Bay that I might bump against one of the corpses, and I had to keep reminding myself this was impossible because the beach is on the southern side of Hong Kong Island.

In 1970 I returned to Hong Kong after studying for a Masters in Geography at York University in Canada. I soon became acquainted with some American postgraduate students who were in Hong Kong to study China. Several of them were members of an association called the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, which had been founded by opponents of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. As a result, my acquaintances received an invitation from the Chinese government in 1971 to visit China, where Zhou Enlai hosted them at a banquet. They were among the very first Americans allowed to go to China, and they considered themselves trailblazers. On their return to Hong Kong they sang the praises of the new China and excitedly related what they had experienced. One fact that stuck in my mind was that the Chinese were so honest that they would chase after them to return small items left at hotels and money dropped on the ground. Since I knew so little about China, I had no idea what to think, except that this was a very different China from my imagination.

It so happened that my new boyfriend, Jonathan Unger (to whom I am now married), was a stringer for the “Far Eastern Economic Review.” Shortly after our American acquaintances returned from their exciting trip, he managed to get himself invited to cover the Canton Trade Fair, the first American journalist ever to go. The day that he crossed the border into China, I thought: I don’t want him to come out and tell me all that stuff about how good China is. I have to go to see it for myself. So I went to my Fourth Aunt, the one who was pro-China and had China contacts. She gave me the name and the address of a distant relative in Guangzhou, an old lady who was once the concubine of one of my great uncles. I did not tell my parents for fear they would object. I’d go for a couple of days.

I took the train to Lowu. I handed in my Hong Kong I.D. card at immigration on the Chinese side of the border. They would not let me pass. One officer after another came over to interrogate me: why was I going to China? Why did you fill in “British subject”, not “Chinese” in your I.D. card? I was dumbfounded, not knowing what I had filled in. Who are you going to see? They went through my address book and pointed to names and addresses, demanding to know who they were: who is this person, who is that person. The same questions were asked over and over again by different people. I was petrified. Never in my life had I encountered anything like this. In the end they let me through. Even today I do not know why I was singled out for questioning.

On the other side of the border the panorama that greeted my eyes was a drab grayish hue of low-lying old houses interrupted by patches of red—flags and banners covered with slogans. The previous year I had journeyed overland back to Hong Kong from Canada (I was an adventurous young woman) and I had seen very poor places in Turkey and Iran, but the scenery from the window of the Chinese train seemed oddly drab. It was a vast contrast from the colorful billboards and lights of Hong Kong.

I arrived at Guangzhou by nightfall and was able to find the old relative. She was a wizened old lady in a rundown shared house. She seemed alarmed to see me and nervous about our being seen together at the front door. She urged me inside and brought me to her tiny room, with walls blackened with age, large water marks and a gaping hole in the ceiling. She soon found an excuse to leave me there, and shortly afterwards came back with someone in uniform. This person then took me somewhere in the neighbourhood, sat me down and began interrogating me. Much like at the border, several people fired the same questions at me again and again. I gradually realized I was at the “paichusuo,” the local police station.

The next scene I can recall was one of them bringing me to a dirty and unlit big room. I could make out there were beds with people sleeping in them. I was brought to a bed and was told this was where I had to spend the night.

The next morning it was decided that I was simply a young visitor from Hong Kong. I was escorted to a tricycle and a man pedaled me to a park, probably the Zhongshan (Sun Yatsen) Memorial Park. I walked around, not knowing much about Chinese history and not interested in being a “tourist” in this unwelcoming place, nor the prospect of spending another night in some grungy bed. I had seen enough. I headed back home.

My first trip to China lasted close to twenty-four hours. The China that I experienced was worse than what I had imagined for years. Now I could say to those American China experts and Jonathan Unger, the China I know is the real one.

An afterword: I happened to be in China at the height of the darkest days—the time of the One Hit and Three Antis Campaign (yi da san fan yundong 一打三翻運動). My distant relative the old lady must have been one of the four-bad-class elements (sileifenzi 四類份子), and for the past two decades an easy and frequent target at class struggle sessions. My sudden appearance from nowhere could have brought calamity to her, for l was living evidence of her bourgeois “overseas” connections. My Fourth Aunt wore blinkers on her eyes, and my father, who knew so little about China was, after all, right. Later, when I became a China specialist like my American acquaintances, the bleak impoverished landscapes, the haranguing barrages of questions, the frightened look in the eyes of the old lady and the awful tiny room she called home, all contributed to my understanding of the underside of the Maoist period.

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林和立博士，日本秋田國際大學和香港中文大學兼任教授/講師，多年從事中國政治、外交與文化研究。著有Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era（紐約M E Sharpe出版）等。 Dr Willy Lam is Adjunct Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Adjunct Professor of Chinese Studies, Akita International University, Japan. He has written six books on Chinese affairs, including Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era (M E Sharpe, 2006).

Willy Lam

It was July 1973. 30-odd students from several Hong Kong universities – including former Hong Kong legislator Choy So-yuk (蔡素玉), noted writer Hung Ching-tin (洪青田) and myself, then a final-year undergraduate at the University of Hong Kong – heeded the call of the motherland and took our very first trip to the PRC. The worst of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was over, and the United Front Department in both Beijing and Guangdong wanted to re-establish contact with college students in Hong Kong. The Chinese Communist Party authorities also seemed keen to tell the world that China was on track to normalcy.

Yet for most Hong Kong residents, horror stories of tightly bound corpses – apparently the victims of bloody clashes among rival Red Guard gangs – flowing down the Pearl River were still fresh on their minds. Many regarded the PRC with extreme suspicion and didn’t want others to know that they had toured China. Students feared that a visit to China meant they couldn’t pursue further studies in the United States. It was only toward the end of our three-week sojourn that I found out that some within our group were using false names to hide their identities.

We went by train and by air to cities including Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Wuhan and Zhengzhou. China was still in the throes of the Ten Years of Chaos. All colleges were closed; tens of thousands of factories and plants were idle or in disarray. Wherever we went, we were regarded as aliens from a distant shore. In Zhengzhou, capital of Henan Province, we walked up the February 7 Pagoda in the heart of the city to have a better look around; but what we were most amazed about was that in no time, several hundred people had gathered at the foot of the pagoda eyeballing us!

The people were desperately poor: both males and females were wearing white shirts and blue pants. A wristwatch was considered a luxury. No foreign goods were on sale. However, special products from comradely countries in Eastern Europe – as well as famous Chinese brands that were in short supply – were available in the Friendship Stores. In those days, scarce merchandises could only be bought with foreign exchange certificates, which were used by foreigners and tourists. I was glad that I could purchase a Phoenix bicycle in the Guangzhou Friendship Store for my cousin, who was a worker in the nearby county of Foshan. That was the only thing I could do for my relative, who told me wistfully that his high-school studies had been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution.

Beijing was eerily quiet. The vast East Chang’an Street was devoid of traffic. Cars and trucks, which were often outnumbered by horse-drawn carts, belonged to either the government or state-owned enterprises. There were hardly any taxis. We were put up in large rooms in the Friendship Hotel in northwestern Beijing – a huge complex that was constructed in the 1950s to house Soviet and other foreign experts. But in the early 1970s, most of these specialists had gone. We toured the Great Wall, the Western Palace built by the Empress Dowager Cixi, and the cavernous Great Hall of the People, where nothing seemed to be going on. What most impressed us was the rabbit warren of underground passageways. Responding to the slogan “Dig deep tunnels, store enough grain,” (深挖洞，廣積糧) the proletariats in Beijing had built labyrinthine underpasses in the capital, which could serve as bomb shelters in case China was attacked by either the American imperialists or the Soviet revisionists.

The Red Guards had disappeared; but internal power struggle, mainly between the pragmatic faction led by Deng Xiaoping and the Gang of Four ultra-radicals, was in full swing. Mao, knowing that his days were numbered, was, at least in the diplomatic arena, trying to undo some of the wrongs he had done. He sanctioned the Richard Nixon visit in 1971 and okayed moves to establish diplomatic relations with Japan in 1972. In domestic politics, however, the Great Helmsman was still in cahoots with the Gang of Four – and distrustful of Deng the “Capitalist Roader.” Yet the outside world had little inkling about these intrigues. Our tour guide, a young woman surnamed Lin who had attended a couple years of college before the Cultural Revolution, reassured us that “the future of the motherland is as bright as the sun.” Ms Lin said she wanted to become a diplomat; but we found out that she knew very little about foreign countries. Lin didn’t give us stern orders such as never wandering around on our own. Yet with no means of transport, it would have been difficult for us to go on unauthorized trips.

At Peking University, we were taken to see master philosopher Feng Youlan (馮友蘭), who, we later found out, had cooperated with the Gang of Four in the notorious “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius Campaign.” (批林批孔運動) Like renowned academic Hu Shih (胡適), Feng had studied under the revered John Dewey at Columbia University. He was the author of the world-famous “History of Chinese Philosophy.” Unfortunately, like most intellectuals at the time, Feng was under tremendous pressure to re-tailor his work to suit the requirements of Marxism-Leninism. When we met him, Feng was 78 and in obvious poor health. His hands were shaking. But he expressed approval of our “patriotic fervor” and even wrote some calligraphy for the group. Years later, I interviewed Feng’s daughter, the gifted poet and novelist Zong Pu (宗璞). Zong, who continued to live in their old house at Peking University after Feng’s death in 1990, told me sadly: “My father had a tough time.”

Everywhere we went, we were met by municipal officials of up to vice-ministerial rank. Even though we knew very little about China, we could guess that these senior cadres were following the same script. The rituals soon became familiar. In their briefings, our hosts always recited elaborate economic and production figures to demonstrate how the “New China” had made progress since 1949. There was nary a word about the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, news and rumors about which had been widely reported in the Hong Kong media. In Shanghai, we were taken to a new apartment building, where we chatted with a bunch of model workers. In what we later learned was a routine called “remembering past bitterness so as to better appreciate today’s sweetness,” (憶苦思甜) they attempted to convince us that after Chairman Mao Zedong had driven out the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek regime, it was pretty much paradise on earth.

Shanghai itself looked surreal. The great metropolis earned the sobriquet “Paris of the Orient” in the 1920s and 1930s. As late as the 1950s, Shanghai, China’s foremost industrial and commercial center, outshone Hong Kong in terms of vigor and glamour. Yet from 1949 to the mid-1980s, the city seemed frozen in time. While various ministries in Beijing put up a dozen-odd Soviet-style towers in the capital in the 1950s, the skyline of Shanghai remained practically unchanged. A numbing sense of historical stasis assailed us as we took a walk along the Bund. It was still the Shanghai that we learnt from the great naturalistic novels of Mao Dun and Ba Jin. I asked our guide to show us the French and British concessions, and was struck by the fact that pretty much all the European-style buildings had survived intact.

We had a strange encounter with the Nobel Prizewinning physicist Chen-ning Yang (楊振寧) at the Hubei Museum in Wuhan. He was accompanied by a senior local official. Our guide asked us not to disturb this eminent Chinese-American guest, one of the few big-name overseas Chinese who dared return to China in that murky era. The museum itself was devoted to the leitmotif of class struggle. Historical relics and objects of art from antiquity were displayed to illustrate just one theme: exploitation of the proletariats by the nobility and the filthy rich.

We took the slow train from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, arriving on July 24, 1973. Soon after the train pulled into the old Tsimshatsui Railway Terminus, word somehow spread among the passengers that Bruce Lee (李小龍) had died four days earlier. It was the biggest piece of news in the global Chinese community that month. Yet the Bamboo Curtain was so air-tight that nothing, not even petty gossip about movie stars, could percolate into China. I was overwhelmed by a bittersweet feeling as I left behind a country still struggling to find its soul. Bitter because I empathized so much with the young men and women whose lives seemed wasted, sweet because I had the good fortune of getting to know them, if only from a distance and for so short a time.

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Simon Long (朗西蒙) is “Banyan”, The Economist’s Asia columnist. He took up this post, based in Singapore, in August 2010. Before that, he had worked in London for four years, as the magazine’s Asia Editor, and for four years prior to that as South Asia Bureau Chief based in Delhi.

Twice in my life I have been in China as its history was being made. Looking back with regret at how much more I could have made of the experiences, I find myself making excuses for myself. In Beijing, as a BBC reporter in early June 1989, the thing that is easy to forget is how little sleep we had all enjoyed in the previous weeks.

On my first trip to China, as a language student arriving just a month after the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 and ten days before Mao Zedong’s death, I was not tired; merely young. I had just graduated from university and spent the summer working on a campsite in the south of France with my girlfriend. My year’s study in China had been thrown into doubt by the earthquake. I was discombobulated—and heartbroken at leaving her behind.

It was my first trip outside Europe. I still remember the sensation of being mugged by heat and humidity as our plane stopped over in Calcutta in the early hours of the morning. I was both frightened and exhilarated by the exotic frenzy of Hong Kong, where we stayed at the YMCA in Kowloon, ate at “dai pai dongs” in Central and I was taken on a tour of Kowloon tenements by a British Trotskyist who wanted to display our imperialism at its worst. I had been much impressed at the time by Water Easey’s pamphlet “Hong Kong: A Case to Answer”.

After the heat, the crowds, the noise and the nervous tension of travel, China—or at least the train station at Lowu—was lovely: soft arm-chairs, anti-macassars, cold wet towels, tea, some Mao quotes and pictures and hardly anyone around. The soft-sleeper train ride to Beijing through what seemed to a young Westerner the picturesque poverty of rural China was an unfamiliar taste of luxury. It would be the last for nearly a year.

I was with 14 other British students. We were, I think, the fourth year to go to China on British Council scholarships. There were similar contingents from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and from European countries. Most of us were Chinese-studies graduates, though I think the idea of the scholarships was to take graduates in other subjects and teach them Chinese.

We all started at the Languages Institute in Beijing, to be farmed out according to academic discipline to a handful of other authorised universities—Beida, Fudan, or, if you had made the mistake of choosing the wrong course, Liaoda in Shenyang. I stayed at the institute until after Chinese New Year in 1977 when Nanda in Nanjing opened up as the location for history studies, or, as the modern-history course was more accurately known, “the history of the two-line struggle”.

The institute also housed Chinese students preparing to go and study abroad. Having skipped ten years of school during the Cultural Revolution, they tended to be older than their callow roomies. There were also large numbers of disgruntled Africans (whose luckier classmates were having a better time in Moscow) a few Pakistanis and other third-world (as they were still called) students. The North Koreans—just a dozen or so—kept themselves to themselves, looking rather smart in their suits and Kim Il Sung badges.

Life soon settled into a routine of morning exercises, language classes, canteen meals, evening showers and constant battles with the authorities, represented by a man we knew as “Frank”. He always said he wanted to “be frank with us”, and in that sense alone, he was. On Friday nights, the British embassy would send a bus to take us downtown and we would embarrass ourselves in “The Bell”, the curiously authentic pub in the embassy compound in Guanghua Lu.

My teacher was an inspiring young woman who gave every appearance of believing every word of the texts we used about Norman Bethune, the foolish old man who moved the mountain, the cruelties of pre-liberation Tibetan serfdom and the Chengdu-Kunming railway. My tonal deficiencies seemed to cause her genuine agonies.

My room-mate, a physicist from Huhehot, did his best. We alternated days of English and Chinese speaking. In both languages we struggled for things to talk about. My interests before coming to China had been those of a typical British student—ie, literature, cinema, human relationships, especially of the sexual kind, drugs and soccer. If he had views on any of these topics, he wasn’t prepared to share them.

Foreigners were still a novelty. Africans would find people rubbing their faces to see if the charred blackness came off; many would assume a Caucasian like me must be Albanian. I would attract a crowd just buying a stamp.

Off-stage, as it were, China was in ferment. The “first Tiananmen incident” at Qingming in 1976, following Zhou Enlai’s death that January, still seemed like an action awaiting its reaction. Then came the earthquake, which as well as obliterating Tangshan, had battered Beijing badly. All through the winter of 1976-77, large numbers of people lived in makeshift roadside shelters. And it was a bitterly cold winter. When the showers in our dormitory block broke, and we had to go to another building to wash, hair would freeze on the return journey.

There was one particularly fierce aftershock. An Ethiopian student broke a leg jumping from a fourth-floor dormitory window into a tree. We were evacuated to tents on the football pitch—or would have been, had the British contingent not taken refuge in a drunken stupor on the floor of the British Embassy’s archivist and the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent, Nigel Wade.

Not long after we arrived, a few of us cycled one afternoon into town—which, hard to believe these days, involved passing through farmland, retching at the stench of nightsoil. Unbeknownst to us, a pre-announcement had been made of a forthcoming important news bulletin. The streets cleared; shops emptied; sobbing and wailing could be heard behind grim grey walls; we listened to the broadcast. Mao was dead. I remember having to look up the formal phrase used for his passing ( 逝世了).

We went to see the body. I remember writing to friends how hairy his nostrils were. We attended the mammoth funeral rally in Tiananmen. My most intense memory of that is of the acute discomfort I suffered as my bladder filled. We made our way to the big rectangular open-air latrine dug in the south-west corner of the square. I found the scrutiny of several thousand observers rather off-putting.

At the time, the grief at Mao’s death seemed real enough. Yet a month later, we were back in Tiananmen to celebrate the “smashing” of the Gang of Four, and the beginning of the process that would lead to the dismantling of much of the edifice that Mao had built.

In January 1977, on the anniversary of Zhou Enlai’s death, apparently spontaneous demonstrations sprouted at the north end of Tiananmen, much of which was boarded off for the construction of Mao’s mausoleum. Little poems and bigger wall-posters were stuck to the boarding. One I remember enjoying for its simple accessibility: the character “Deng” or “waiting for” (等) and a crude drawing of a little bottle (“Xiaoping”). China would be waiting until the following summer. When the jaunty little man reappeared, I was confined for a week on the Trans-Siberian, reading, I am embarrassed to recall, “Lord of the Rings”.

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Michael Yahuda (葉胡達) is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, where he served from 1973 to 2003. Since then he has been a visiting scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, the Elliott School, George Washington University, except for 2005-2006 when he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has acted as an adviser to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. His main fields of interest are China's politics, foreign policy and the international relations of the Asia Pacific. He has published six books and more than 200 articles and chapters in books. He is joint editor of International Relations of Asia (2008) and is currently preparing a revision of his single authored The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific.


My first visit to China took place in April 1976 and it coincided with a major political upheaval. I was with a group of British younger academics who arrived in Hong Kong on April 4th, who were due to enter China the following day for a two-three week visit at the invitation of the Ministry of Education. Although we held different political views, none of us was as committed as our American more radical equivalents.

On the morning of the 5th we worried as to whether the visit would take place at all. Overnight the wreathes in memory of Zhou Enlai (周恩來) and his mourners were forcibly removed from Tiananmen Square, giving rise to what was then called “The Tiananmen Incident.”

Nevertheless our group proceeded as normal on the train journey to Canton (Guangzhou), having to cross the famous bridge on foot with our luggage to the station of the Shen Zhen fishing village, where we received by representative of the Education Ministry, as if nothing had happened. We were then taken to a small museum on the outskirts of the city and we stayed there for five very long hours without explanation.

Suddenly we were summoned to the bus and taken to the airport, where the plane (a Trident jet) was already moving towards takeoff. Before we had properly sat down the plane started to roar down the runway. Our fellow passengers were mainly military people who were laughing and smoking without wearing any seat belts. We then heard an announcement asking those with guns and explosives to hand them over to the stewardess.

We arrived late at night at the Beijing Hotel and a few us then walked to Tiananmen Square where fire-trucks were still hosing it down. Soldiers with fixed bayonets stood every ten yards surrounding the Square. It was a grim sight. The following day we were taken to see the sights, as if all was normal. But tension was evident as we vainly sought explanations from our minders.

On the third day we woke to the sound of drums and cymbals. The decision to remove Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) from all his posts had been announced. That day we saw processions of tens of thousands of people from the various government and academic work units on the way to the Square to “celebrate” the event. Many looked as if they were just going through the motions.

The following day we visited a primary school and heard the children sing anti Deng-Xiaoping songs. I was amazed how quickly the propaganda people had done their work. Earlier in the visit we had been taken to Peking University to see worker, peasant, soldier students and some teachers, but the only ones who spoke to us were older academics, who had been at universities in the West in the 1930s and 1940s. It seemed as if they alone were deemed to be of the appropriate academic quality to engage with us. They told us how much they had benefitted from the Cultural Revolution, but I don’t think any of us took that at face value.

We then went to Nanking (Nanjing),which had been a scene of anti-leftist incidents a week earlier and where anti Jiang Qing (江青) slogans could still be seen on walls. Perhaps that was why we were housed in a government guest house a few miles away. When our bus arrived in the city center we went our different ways and each one of us was surrounded by throngs of people, who had evidently not seen Westerners since the 1950s. They were pleasantly inquisitive and eager to touch our clothes. It was a vivid demonstration how isolated China had become.

We visited several communes and had the usual “brief introduction” from a local peasant leader. They all recounted with seemingly great vigor and intensity the history of their unit replete with various production statistics as it went from rags to relative riches. The one I enjoyed most was a silk producing village near Canton, where the process of production seemed to me to be exactly what I had seen in pictures from the Song Dynasty. It summed up what I took to be one of the contradictions of China at that time: revolutionary politics amid traditional farming practices.

Although we knew that these were “show” places, I saw them as examples of the best that could be done. A year later I found out that it was all make believe from beginning to end. I spent the summer of 1977 in Beijing, with an indirect attachment to the Foreign Languages Press and one day I was asked to see if I could improve the draft translation of a Chinese travel book. I was astonished to find that it covered all the places then open to foreign visitors, including the places my group had visited. These recounted word for word what calloused handed peasants had told us so convincingly about their communes.

I was very excited on my first visit to a China that I had studied from afar for more than 15 years and while I was skeptical in many ways, I was also impressed. I had visited India briefly five years earlier and from what I could see from the train journeys and from closer at hand, China was very much a developing country, but in better condition than India.

It was my first visit to a country under a dictatorship and I did not take things at face value, but I did not appreciate until much later the lengths to which the authorities went to deceive us and, more importantly, the Chinese people.

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Perry Link (林培瑞) is Professor emeritus of East Asian Studies at Princeton University and Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California, Riverside

My father was a radical leftist professor. He led study tours to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and later admired Mao Zedong (毛澤東). For me, that influence, in addition to the passion in the late 1960s and early 1970s within the American student movement against our country’s war in Vietnam, a movement in which I was not only a participant but an activist, led me to look at socialist China with very high hopes.

The first time I tried to go to China was in 1967, the year after I graduated from college. I was living in Hong Kong and wrote a letter to Beijing. A few months later I received a charming reply: two sheets of paper that appeared as if a Red Guard with little English and a faulty typewriter had spent days laboring over, a letter in which it was explained that the Chinese people had nothing against me, but that I was from a predatory imperialist country and could not visit the People’s Republic. Before I left Hong Kong I bought four volumes of “The Selected Works of Mao Zedong,” and, rather grandiloquently, ripped the covers off of them so that I might carry them safely back to the imperialist U.S.

Meanwhile, I found a corner of Hong Kong that was still legally part of China, and I settled for going there. The Walled City of Kowloon (九龍城寨), formerly an outpost of the Qing empire, had been abandoned for decades by both Nationalists and Communists, and had been disowned by the British as well. It had become a fetid labyrinth of alleys and tunnels, the lawless bailiwick, I was told, of drug dealers, prostitutes, and gangsters. A group of Baptists ran a primary school there—and yes, there were children. I volunteered to teach English at the school. I knew this wasn’t socialist China, but it was “China.”

The first time I set foot in socialist China was May of 1973. A year earlier, in April 1972, the Chinese ping-pong team had visited the U.S. to break the diplomatic ice of 23 years, and I had served as an interpreter traveling with the Chinese and American teams. Chinese officials on that tour got a good political impression of me, in part because I led four of the six American interpreters in a boycott of the teams’ meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House. (Nixon had ordered a bombing of Haiphong just the day before; to me, small talk in the Rose Garden just didn’t seem right that day.)

Anyway, a year later we U.S. interpreters asked if we could visit China, and the answer was yes. During four weeks we visited Guangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, Xi’an, Yan’an, Beijing, and Tangshan. The bill for the trip—room, board, airfare, rail, sightseeing, everything—was $550 U.S. It was a friendship rate.

But it was during that trip that cracks began to form in my ideal image of the People’s Republic. I carried a small camera and took walks on my own, in search of “real life.” I had learned in graduate school that there were no flies in China after the “Four Pests” campaign of 1958. When I saw a fly on a white stone table in Suzhou, I photographed it. I thought I had something.

In Yan’an, when four of us foreign guests boarded a crowded bus the driver shouted “waibin!” (外賓!) Immediately four seated passengers stood up, offering us their seats. The old man who stood up next to me did not, in my impression, seem to want to. I said, “Please, you sit,” but he said nothing and remained standing. Embarrassed, I remained standing, too, and for the rest of the ride the people on the bus endured the ludicrous spectacle of an empty seat on a crowded bus.

We foreigners always rode “soft sleeper” class on the railroad, while most people on the same trains were riding “hard seat” class. I asked our guide about it.

“Why is there a soft-sleeper class?” I said, my socialist principles in mind. “Who rides in it, besides us?”

“The leaders,” the guide replied.

“Why?”,I asked, unaware that it was a stupid question.

“They are busy. They have many burdens. They need soft-sleeper.”

My image of a classless society had suffered a blow, and it suffered a few more blows before the tour was over. The example that sticks most in my mind happened in Tangshan, where we visited the huge Tangshan coal mine. We descended in an elevator far below the earth’s surface. (This was three years before a Richter 7.8 earthquake buried countless workers in that same mine.) Riding small railroad cars through a maze of tunnels deep underground, I noticed various signs: “slow!”, “sound horn!”, etc. The signs were in traditional Chinese characters, not simplified ones, and I also couldn’t help noticing that there were no political slogans among them. All the signs were strictly business. This contrasted sharply with the surface of the earth, where slogans and quotations from Chairman Mao, on splendid red-and-white banners, or giant red billboards with gold writing and trim, were everywhere.

After emerging, I asked our guide: “Why are there no quotations from Chairman Mao down there with the miners?”

Her immediate reply: “Oh, it’s too dirty!” She seemed a bit irritated at me for suggesting such an inappropriate location for the Chairman’s thoughts. To me, though, it was a hard fact to swallow: the dirt of the mines was OK for the working class but not for the thoughts of its leader.

The inner insecurity of the guides became apparent to me in something that happened in Shanghai, when I bought a souvenir of my trip for my mother. My mother was born on a farm in Nebraska and was a salt-of-the-earth type. Her name was Beulah, she ate wheat germ, and brown was her favorite color. In a small shop I found hand-brooms that I knew she would like. They were crafted of sorghum stalks, light brown with dark flecks. Lovely. And symbols of the dignity of labor—which I knew she also would like. I imagined that she might hang it on a wall in her home, so I bought one.

Afterwards one of our guides, very nervous, accosted me. He seemed torn between handling an emergency and trying to maintain politeness.

“Why did you buy this?!” he asked.

I explained about my mother.

“Let me get you a better one!” He took the broom back to the shop and returned with another—not much better or worse, to my eye, but in his view more nearly perfect. Then, sitting next to me on the mini-bus ride back to the hotel, he began a deeper interrogation of me.

“Doesn’t your mother like silk? …China has silk. China has jade carvings, China has cloisonné. Why do you buy a farmer’s broom to represent China to your mother?” I began to realize that the guide saw what I had done as “unfriendly.” My mother and I were looking down on China.

And this started me wondering: did this guide, deep inside, respect China’s working people, the wielders of brooms—and want my mother to have the impression that “China is silk” only because he guessed that she, from a bourgeois society, would respect silk but not brooms? Or was it maybe worse than that? Was he participating in a societal hypocrisy that pretended to value brooms over silk but in reality did not?

From time to time during the trip I tried to strike up conversations with ordinary citizens, people with whom meetings had not been arranged. This was not easy. People constantly formed crowds to look at us, but kept their distance and stayed quiet. I have a vivid memory of one man—I would guess he was about thirty—who was part of a crowd but made eye contact with me. When I tried to address him personally—“What’s your name?”, “How are you?”, etc.—his lips and eyebrows contorted wildly, from what seemed to me like severe pain, so I stopped.

Children were a bit less inhibited, and plainly curious about us. Any walk of ten minutes or more on a city street attracted a long train of them, as if we were pied pipers. I was amused to note, one day as we were walking past the gates of the Beijing Zoo, that some children who already held tickets to go see hippos and giraffes chose instead to come out of the zoo and follow us.

During one meeting with children—this was in Xi’an—a number of them gathered around us and seemed willing to talk. I asked a boy what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“I want to go to the toughest place and serve the people!” (我要到最艱苦的地方為人民服務!). He pronounced the words in a sharp, confident, high-pitched voice.

“And you?” I asked another.

“I want to go to the toughest place and serve the people!” A sharp, confident, high-pitched voice—and exactly the same words.

I asked three or four more, of slightly different ages and of both sexes. All the answers were identical. I do not believe our handlers had prepared this scene for us; it had come about in too casual a manner. And I don’t know how much of the conformity resulted from training in how to answer this question and how much may have come just from others seeing that the first boy had produced a good answer and wanting to play things safe by doing the same. In any case, it left me with a deep impression.

In the years since 1973 I have learned much, much more about how wrong I was in the late 1960s to take Mao Zedong’s “socialism” at face value. I could not have been more mistaken. I am a bit puzzled that others among my leftist-student friends from the 1960s sometimes seem reluctant to face this obvious fact. Is it embarrassing? Why should it be? We were naïve, yes. We believed lies. But we were not the ones who spun the lies. Aren’t the lie-spinners the ones who should be embarrassed? Besides, I feel no need to explain any reversal in my underlying values, because I don’t find one.

In the late 1960s, I admired Mao because I felt strongly about things like peace, freedom, justice, truth, and a fair chance for the little guy. Today I detest Mao and his legacy. Why? Because I am drawn to things like peace, freedom, justice, truth, and a fair chance for the little guy.

yangharrylg

Mark Selden (薛爾頓) is a Coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, a Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University, and Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at Binghamton University. A specialist on the modern and contemporary geopolitics, political economy and history of China, Japan and the Asia Pacific, his work has addressed themes of war and revolution, inequality, development, regional and world social change, and historical memory. He was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars in the 1960s and for more than thirty years edited The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (later Critical Asian Studies).


I was a fellow traveler in the 1972 Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars trip to China with Richard Bernstein and Jonathan Mirsky . . . and in other ways with Richard Kagan and Edward Friedman who followed in 1975 and 1978 (Friedman and I visited rural Hebei in 1978 and then spent the next quarter century trying to fathom and write collaboratively about China’s rural transformations). All five of us were or had been active members of CCAS, two of whose primary goals were ending the US War in Indochina and opening diplomatic relations with The People’s Republic of China.

My experience in this first China visit was framed by my recent experience with CCAS and the anti-war movement, and my understanding of America’s Asian wars, military base structures, and the US-China relationship, as well as my research on the Chinese revolution.

Reading these accounts more than thirty years later, I am struck by the powerful influence that first experience in China had on all of our thinking and, indeed, our subsequent lives. For Bernstein and Mirsky, within days of their arrival in China, any illusions that they might have cherished about China and the Chinese revolution were shredded. (Can those illusions have been larger than life given the sense of betrayal that resonates in their accounts decades later?)

What replaced them were images of a manipulative totalitarianism that would drive their subsequent careers as leading China journalists. A theme that unites all four reports is the determination not to be duped by Chinese Potemkin villages or official lies.

That first visit left an indelible stamp on each of us in the course of lives substantially devoted to writing about China. Indelible . . . but in multiple and diverse ways, including not only our perceptions of China, but also of America. Richard Bernstein spells this out most clearly: for him, it was not only that “China was so backward,” but, “we’re better than they are.” This was doubtless in part a response to the over enthusiasm of some of our fellow travelers. Still, I wonder, can this provide a clue to the American passion for world travel: it allows us to return home with renewed conviction that we’re number one?

What strikes me in three of these accounts is the absence of another theme that was central to the intellectual movements of the sixties, including the currents that gave rise to CCAS and to my own thinking then and since: that is the imperative to understand other countries in light not only of their own history and culture, but also of the workings of global power, particularly American power.

Mirsky, Bernstein and Kagan were among the coauthors of “The Indochina Story,” the work primarily of Harvard Asian Studies graduate students and perhaps the finest achievement of CCAS in providing a comprehensive, informed and accessible critique of the US Indochina Wars, one that reached a significant readership as a 1970 Bantam paperback. Not only that, Mirsky and Kagan had contributed critical chapters on American blinders on China, and on US war making in Laos, respectively for a volume that Friedman and I edited. That was “America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations,” which appeared in Vintage the following year. Both were among early works that sought to rethink the reigning parameters of Asian Studies, above all in light of America’s global role and the history of empire.

Reading these accounts, which rightly remind us of the need to exercise independent judgment when visiting another country, I discern little of the kind of critical thinking that animated some of our work at that time that was preoccupied with the American exercise of global power that impinged on China and others and that led to ways of thinking not only about China but equally about ourselves, that is, about the US-China relationship.

Mirsky and Bernstein appear to have been astonished to discover that China was a poor country, and Jonathan was outraged that the Chinese would go to great lengths to conceal that poverty and put forward the best possible face for one of the earliest groups to visit China at a time when the two nations were groping toward establishment of diplomatic and economic relations.

As a student of Chinese history and the Chinese revolution, having earlier spent a year studying in Taiwan and another in Japan, I was reflecting at that time on China’s decline from its position as a major world power as recently as the eighteenth century as a result of the disintegration of the Qing dynasty, the impact of an invasive imperialism setting off a century of war, above all the decimation of the country and the loss of 10-30 million Chinese in the China-Japan War of 1937-45 and many more in subsequent revolutions.

In particular, I was recalling both a US-China World War II alliance and the quarter century that followed during which the US and China were perpetually at war, including US intervention in the 1947 civil war followed by the US-Korean and US-Indochina Wars, as well as American attempts to isolate the PRC internationally in geopolitical and economic terms.

During that trip, I certainly anticipated neither the speed nor the character of China’s subsequent hyper growth and social transformation. But viewing this poor, proud and determined country, it seemed to me that its poverty was hardly either unusual or surprising in light of conditions in much of the post-colonial world at the time, and in light of China’s modern history of war and revolution. Indeed, there was much that struck me positively about China’s achievements at the time.

I felt hopeful that the re-establishment of diplomatic, trade and cultural relations that seemed imminent could support positive trends in both our countries, the Asia region and the world. This was a sense reinforced by the nocturnal discussion magisterially presided over by Zhou Enlai (周恩來) in the presence of other Chinese leaders. Knowing of my interest in Japan and my recent book, “Open Secret: The Kissinger-Nixon Doctrine in Asia,” our hosts arranged several opportunities to speak with Chinese specialists on Japan and on US-China-Japan relations, at a time when these relations all seemed to be in flux. Chinese international relations specialists were deeply concerned about the revival of Japanese militarism at the time, even more, apparently, than they were about American militarism.

My own thinking centered rather on Japan’s postwar subordination to US power under the AMPO framework, and the uses and abuses of US base expansion and multiple Asian wars. But we shared a sense that Japan then (as now) had yet to fully come to terms with the crimes committed during the invasion and occupation of China and much of Asia. The discussions helped me to understand the deep legacy of the China-Japan War in framing China’s international perspective and to think in fresh ways about the prospects for US-China relations.

On the other hand, I shared with Mirsky and others in our group the disappointment that our Chinese hosts blocked our attempts to arrange a visit to the North Vietnamese Embassy to discuss the ongoing US-Indochina War. This underscored what we knew prior to the trip: that China-DRV relations were deeply troubled, the conflict rooted not only in the longue durée of China-Vietnam relations but also in the China-Soviet rift.

It is a bit difficult to recall nowadays, at a time when China is among the nations most plugged-in to the international economy—far more than the US, Japan or Europe when measured by the extent of foreign trade or foreign investment as a share of GDP, or in terms of its grip on the US economy with the purchase of approximately $1 trillion in US treasuries—just how isolated China was in 1972 from world trade and contacts with the West. And how proudly it wore its self-reliance. That self-reliance, I understood to be the product in large part of protracted guerrilla warfare, and above all, a fifteen-year resistance to Japanese invasion in what became the national mythos.

But it was also, of course, the response to the US ability to isolate China from world markets . . . a pattern that was just beginning to reverse as the US opened the way for China’s entry into world markets and world councils (above all the United Nations) as part of a strategy of isolating the Soviet Union and encouraging the opening of China’s economy, with US trade and investment to the fore.

What could we learn about China during an officially sponsored and organized trip? Not surprisingly, we learned a good deal about the issues that preoccupied the Chinese party-state, our hosts, both directly and indirectly. Meaning, also, of course, that there was much that we did not learn about: it was difficult for us to discern the nature of ongoing tensions in society in the late years of the Cultural Revolution decade when the party had regained power without resolving underlying tensions; we learned nothing about the way in which the “hukou” system divided society, about the devastating toll of the Great Leap Forward or about the structural foundations of Chinese poverty; and little about the early stages of reform that were just getting underway without fanfare, particularly in the countryside. And much more.

We were perhaps better able, by reading between the lines, to gain a rudimentary sense of the ravaging of the universities during the Cultural Revolution, just beginning to resume teaching and with worker-peasant-soldier students chosen primarily for their activism in place of the previous examination system.

For me, most memorable was our three day rural visit to the Red Flag Canal in Henan province, inevitably a national model of self-reliance which proudly featured an “Iron Girls Brigade” comprised of young women who had distinguished themselves in physical labor and the embodiment of Mao Zedong (毛澤東) thought. Living in villager’s homes for a few days gave us our first limited opportunity to talk with farmers and gain a first glimpse of rural life.

But what were we seeing? Was it perhaps a caricature of rural reality, precisely because we had been taken inevitably to a model village and because the families who hosted us were party loyalists? Most of us recognized, I believe, that we were seeing the state’s display of its model agricultural community and its self-reliant policy, indeed, I would later realize that the presentation of the model to us shared much in common with the Party’s use of models to define its policies for the Chinese people.

That experience in Dacaiyuan village set off the desire to seriously investigate Chinese rural society, which I had been studying at a distance in the US. Over the next six years, a series of applications to conduct research in rural China languished until 1978 when the United States and China established diplomatic relations and, as Friedman has described, we began (with Paul Pickowicz) the research in rural North China which would continue over a quarter century and produce two volumes on the theme of village and state in the epochs of war and revolution and of reformist transformation.

Aware as I am today of just how difficult it is to fathom the social dynamics of a village, let alone Chinese (or any other) rural society, what stands out is the value of that first visit in whetting my appetite to learn more, and the value of that experience as a first step in thinking about the issues, including the limits of “viewing flowers from horseback.” Perhaps above all the visit deepened awareness that our understanding of China and other countries is closely bound up with our place in and grasp of the global role of the United States.

yangharrylg

Richard Kagan (柯義耕) is a retired Professor Emeritus from Hamline University. He was a founder, chairman, and editorial board member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. He has written books on North Korea, and Taiwan and many articles and lectures on the Vietnam War, and East Asia. He was the Taiwan history consultant for the movie, "Formosa Betrayed."


I made my first trip to China in January, 1975. My itinerary included Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, Beijing, Yenan, Xian, Lungmen, and Changsha. I was a co-leader with Professor Lu chung-tai. We had 12 students on the three week trip.

My attitudes toward China were quite different from the usual groups that traveled there.

In the late fifties and early 1960s I had been deeply involved in the civil rights movement in Berkeley and in the South. In the early sixties I also became involved in the teach-ins on the Vietnam War. From 1965-67 I studied in Taiwan, and did research in Hong Kong and Japan. In Taiwan, I became deeply involved in anti-war activities. Information was gathered and published on the movements of the U.S. Army and demonstrations were prepared against America’s policies in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan.

These two commitments to civil rights and anti-American imperialism led naturally to a sympathy for the Taiwanese—especially those in southern Taiwan—who had been abused by the Kuomintang troops and secret police. America’s support of Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) martial law in Taiwan, and the use of the Republic of China as an ally in Vietnam fueled my protests against Chiang and the War.

During my studies in Taiwan, a group of scholars and I, formed an organization which called upon the association of Asian Studies to allow for some political dissent and more academic freedom. We organized around two issues: anti-Chiang and anti -Vietnam War. After I returned to the U.S., this group became the nucleus for the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars.

Recognition of China was a major policy of the Committee. For them, the issue was one of American imperialism. Some did idealize China. For them, China was creating the new “man,” and a new pattern for foreign policy. A few did feel betrayed by the false promises of the Chinese revolution.

In order to understand these reactions and the consequent reflections on China, the political context of the 1970s must be taken into account. The anti-communism and pro-America campaigns were still aggressively applied to students and intellectuals alike. The key fuel to the protests of this period was the Vietnam War. China seemed to be the only major Asian power that stood up to American imperialism.

In addition, there was a great deal of powerful testimonies describing China’s positive revolutionary success. For me, Jack Belden’s “China Shakes the World,” and his writings on the war in Asia and Europe were a fascinating counterview to the popular American views on war in the Pacific and in general. And of course there were the foreigners like William Hinton and Rewi Alley among many others. None of us really knew what the social, economic, and political situation was in China. We were feted with great meals, happy people, kind tour guides. It was a well-designed theater of deception.

While I was deeply committed to teaching about China, and supported America’s recognition of China, I was not without severe doubts. I was put off particularly both by those groups who continued to condemn it and those who looked to it as a model of a better world.

To compound my own reservations, I had to suffer with my co-leader, a Professor of Economics at Hamline University. I only learned later that he was invited to travel to China because Beijing was trying to win him back to the motherland. He and his wife came from two large and powerful warlord/landlord families in Manchuria. He was related to Chang Tso-lin (張作霖), the warlord in Manchuria. Where ever we went he was treated like royalty. He acted super patriotic to our hosts. He would tell them in advance to be careful talking around me because I knew Chinese. The students felt abandoned by his behavior and his insistence that nobody criticize the hosts or ask embarrassing questions and many felt very threatened and frightened.

One consequence of this was that I wanted to distance myself from him as much as possible. This led to many adventures and to many disagreements.

Visit to the May 7th Cadre School. (Changsha?) . We sat in the typical conference room—a large table, tea cups, and book shelves against the wall. The lecture covered the usual topics: the role of Mao, the mass, line, the need to work like the farmers, and the role of the cadres. They boasted of their library, and stated that at night they read and had study groups.

At this meeting, I developed a ruse that I have used in various modes at many times in China, and during the martial law period in Taiwan. I asked to go to the bathroom. I was taken there. At which time, I made it clear that it would a while and I could return on my own. Then, without much ado, I hurried through the rooms. In the case of the May 7th Cadre School, I made my way to the library. (Like chicken feed for the academic in me). I took the books off the shelf. They were published in the old fashioned way—the pages still needed to be cut. And they were not. Furthermore, these cadres who had been working in the fields, with the pigs, and the wells, had not left any dirt on the pages. The books were squeaky clean—in both the brightness of the pages, and the sounds of opening them. This was a Potemkin library.

I returned just in time for questions. I pointed to the book case in the room and asked which books they had read. They said they had read them. But I could not get them to comment on which ones. I did not offer to take them off the shelves.

We were in Yenan in mid-January. It was cold. There was ice and snow. Luckily I was dressed like a Siberian Minnesotan. This is where I broke down any friendly views about China’s leaders.

I bought some cans of fruit and made my way into the night up into the hills. I came to a cave with a quilt-like covering over the entrance. Inside there was an old, very poor family. The grandmother had no teeth. But a great smile. I only understood a few of her words, but her body language was warm and inviting. We sat and ate and talked. They warned me not to tell my guides that I had visited them. When I returned to the hotel, I was interrogated. Where did I go? What did I do? I was threatened to be sent back to Beijing.

There was a famous hill top pagoda in Yenan. I was able to leave my group and climb the hill and then enter the pagoda. At the top I took a picture of the area. On the inner walls, there were inscriptions. Tourists would write their names and their units. My favorite was an intriguing message in French, which read, “Je etait un mauvais etudiant” (I was a bad student). I often have thought of him or her, and why this would be written. When I returned from the pagoda, I asked our guides if we could go there and climb up. They told me that it was closed. And people could not go inside.

I had many other similar episodes. There was one that inadvertently exposed my pro-Taiwan attitudes. My guides asked what countries I had visited. I told them: Israel, France, Japan, and Taiwan. The next morning they descended on me with anger. How could I call Taiwan a “country”? They ranted for quite a while.

I left China for a day or two in Hong Kong. I gave a report to some pro-China people in Hong Kong. I was not well-received. Upon returning to St. Paul, I gave talks to the U.S.-China Friendship Committees. My criticism of China drew hisses from the audience. I soon gave up talking to these groups.

In my teaching career I have tried to balance the many views of China: from human rights abuse to economic success; from being a Party state to promoting educational achievement. I find the problems in teaching about China similar to the problems of teaching American history. How does one balance the very negative with the positive? How does one prioritize the different levels of experience?
Going to China was a trip that has deeply affected many lives. The trip was a reaction to American values. For some it made them further alienated and critical. Some were blacklisted and left the country for careers and lives abroad. For others, it made them feel betrayed by the realities they saw. They became bitter and hostile to China.

When I read Richard Bernstein’s New York Times article, I was incensed. His nationalistic narcissism creates America as the only or best standard of the world. He and I have lived in a different Americas and different Chinas. Paraphrasing Judy Collins: I have seen China and America from both sides now—from the KKK to Martin Luther King Jr., from the Communist Party to the Chinese people who have stood for human rights and who have created artworks that reveal the human spirit. Our war in Vietnam is not superior in purpose or in practice than Beijing’s actions in Tibet. Our treatment of the Native Americans is not a standard to apply to the world. And neither is China’s threat to Taiwan’s freedom.

Bernstein is not alone in his Occidentalism. As teachers, we daily face the problem of inappropriate comparisons, stereotyped descriptions, hyperbolic fears, and selective sculpting of facts and generalizations. The paradigm of the “discovery” of China in the 1970s still controls our perceptions. The division is between those who still see China as a positive personal experience in terms of visiting it and helping it develop, and those who see it as a threat. As teachers and citizens, it is necessary to pull back from the extremes of blind loathing or admiration.

yangharrylg

Jonathan Mirsky (梅兆贊) was East Asia editor of The Times (London) based in Hong Kong from 1993 to 1998. In 1989 Dr Mirsky was named British newspapers' International Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the Tiananmen uprising. He has accompanied Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries to Peking, has interviewed the Dalai Lama, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Lee Teng-hui, and during long residence and travel in Asia visited Tibet six times.

[Editor's note: Veteran journalist Richard Bernstein recalled his first trip to China, through Hong Kong, in his farewell column titled "A Bridge to a Love for Democracy" in The New York Times recently (see below). Jonathan Mirsky, who went on the same trip, recounts his experience here.]


I went to China in 1972 on the same trip as Richard Bernstein, and my painful memories of that journey remain the same as his.

The details are slightly different: I wasn’t a graduate student. I was teaching Chinese and Chinese History at Dartmouth, an Ivy League college, and at 40 I was older than most of the group. Beijing had issued an invitation to the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a radical coalition devoted to stopping the war in Vietnam and persuading Washington to recognize Beijing. The Chinese would pay for our six weeks in China.

All of us had studied Chinese and related subjects, and while some, like me, had studied in Taiwan, none of us had ever set foot in China. We were excited at the prospect of going there during the Cultural Revolution, now in its sixth year. As we reached the middle of the Lowu Bridge and crossed the dividing line into China we hugged each other and were greeted by our hosts, or minders, as they turned out to be, for our entire trip.

That night in Canton we had the first of many welcome banquets and were asked if the next day we would like to meet “a typical Chinese worker family.” Absolutely! We were driven the next morning to a high-rise block of flats and ushered into the brightly painted three rooms plus kitchen, bathroom and toilet where the family enthusiastically welcomed us. They were father, mother, granny, and two children, one of them an infant. They had a radio, television, colorful satin covers on their quilts, and several shiny bicycles. We knew already to have notebooks and ballpoint pens handy and the father briefed us on his factory work: the number of workers, their pay, and how many owned wristwatches and bicycles.

We were encouraged to ask questions so we enquired why, if there was no crime in China, as our hosts had assured us, the windows were barred? We were told that the flats had been built in 1949, before Liberation, when there was crime, and the same explanation was given for why the bicycles had built-in locks: they were pre-Liberation models from when there was bike-stealing, and the model hadn’t been changed. We loved this family, their warm welcome, and we loved that they seemed so prosperous.

The next morning I woke up very early, happy to be in China, and eager to go outside and join the throngs I saw walking to work. By an amazing coincidence I soon found myself outside the same block of flats we had visited the day before and in front of the door stood our typical Chinese industrial worker feeding his baby from a bottle. He gestured to me to come in and have some “white tea” - boiling water. But it was a different flat, shabby, poorly painted, only two rooms, no private kitchen or bathroom; such amenities were shared with the neighbors. There was no television, the quilts were gray and well worn, and the man owned only one well-used bicycle, which was locked.

I have thought for years that I had been in the presence of the bravest man in China, never equaled by anyone – and I met many brave Chinese - I was to meet over the years until my expulsion in 1991. He told me we had been in the show flat, arranged by “shangmian,” (上面) the authorities, for “foreign friends,” and that while the building looked old it had been built only ten years before, in 1962, and the reason there were bars on the windows – and on all bicycles – is that there were plenty of thieves about. He disclosed all this to me matter-of-factly, rather as he had briefed us the day before, and didn’t ask me not to tell anyone what he had said.

I returned to the hotel, stunned by what I had seen and heard. In the foyer I met two of our minders who asked me where I had been. I said I had been for a walk. They pressed me hard, wanting to know exactly where and expressing alarm that I might have fallen down ill in the street. I observed that I could speak Chinese and could have dealt with any emergency. When I declined to tell them precisely where I had been they picked me up under the arms, carried me into the lift and to my room, which they locked from the outside telling me I would be let out when I apologized.

After some time my fellow trippers liberated me from my detention but I told them nothing about what had happened until lunch, when the minders were away. Several of my friends wondered if the man was a Taiwan spy who had somehow inveigled himself into a position of trust in China in order to betray it. Others insisted that there was nothing too bad about the day before; after all wasn’t it just a case of a host putting his best foot forward to make a good impression on a guest? Only Richard Bernstein shared my distress and alarm.

For the rest of the trip, surrounded by Maoist enthusiasm from the Chinese around us and from our companions, Richard Bernstein and I were treated, as he says, like political deviants. Both of us were now suspicious of every venue, every briefing, and every account of how everything should be understood. Every school, every hospital visit, every commune, every discussion with intellectuals seemed suspect to Mr. Bernstein and me and I confess we seemed to our companions at best a pair of sourpusses, at worst turncoats.

After three weeks I announced my intention to return to the US but I was subjected to what might be called a “douzheng,” (鬥争) struggle session, by several of my companions who were all to become well-known academics. Their central point was that if I returned it would give comfort to reactionary people like Lucian Pye (白鲁恂), a distinguished professor of Chinese politics at MIT, a well-known disparager of positive claims about Mao and the Cultural Revolution in particular and the People’s Republic in general. I am ashamed to admit they convinced me to stay.

When we arrived in Beijing we wanted to visit the embassy of the People’s Republic of Vietnam and were told, for the first time in our trip, that a wish could not be granted. We went anyway and were told, discreetly but plainly, by the Hanoi ambassador that the US and China seemed to be making a deal to end the war. This turned out to be true.

When we saw Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) as a special treat at the end of our trip, as usual with him after midnight, he departed briefly from his celebrated courtesy and banged on the table, demanding we tell him what the North Vietnamese had said. We were too frightened or discreet to tell him and he dropped the subject.

Several years later, after Mao’s death in 1976 and the end of the Cultural Revolution, I chanced on one of our minders in the street in Shanghai. Over a cup of tea he disclosed to me in detail how our trip had been managed. Almost his last words were “we wanted to put rings in your noses, and you helped us put them there.”