My First Trip to China

yangharrylg

Jan Wong (黃明珍), a journalist and author, divides her time between Toronto and Fredericton, New Brunswick, where she is a professor of journalism at St. Thomas University. She has worked as a reporter at the Montreal Gazette, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal and the Globe and Mail. From 1988 to 1994, she was the Globe and Mail’s much-acclaimed Beijing correspondent where she covered the massacre at Tiananmen Square. A graduate of McGill University, Peking University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, her first book, "Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now," was one of Time magazine’s top ten books of 1996. It remains banned in China. Her non-fiction books include: "Lunch With: Sweet and Sour Celebrity Interviews" and "Jan Wong’s China: Reports from a Not-So-Foreign Correspondent." Her latest book is "Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found." Website: www.janwong.ca

In my third year at McGill University in Montreal, a much older, married classmate suggested the two of us go to China during our summer vacation. I was 19; she was probably all of 25. When we applied for visas, she, a white Australian, was turned down and I was approved. It was my first lesson in Chinese apartheid.

As a third-generation Canadian, I didn’t speak Chinese and dreaded going alone. But the lure was too great. In 1972, China was radical-chic, at least to an idealistic university student in Montreal. Against a backdrop of protests against US involvement in the Vietnam War, Beijing was a beacon of hope.

In that era, Hong Kong was the gateway to China. My father, a Montreal restaurateur, had mysterious contacts in the British colony. To my surprise, an entire “patriotic” network enveloped me – I was met at Kaitak Airport, deposited at the Golden Gate Hotel in Kowloon and taken shopping at a fluorescent-lit emporium that, in an unwitting harbinger of global commerce, only sold things Made in China. I spent $15 on two pairs of black cloth shoes, two pairs of baggy gray trousers and three plaid blouses. I figured the best way to see China was undercover, as a Chinese. (I had no idea I had purchased “export-quality” clothing, the cut and fabric of which would instantly identify me as someone from the outside.)

It was June 1, 1972 – exactly 100 days after President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China. The 7 a.m. train from Hong Kong deposited me at the border. As I walked over the small footbridge to Shenzhen, wearing my new mainland outfit, I heard the strains of revolutionary opera blasting over the loudspeakers. Above my head the five-star red flag fluttered in the hot breeze. I stared in awe at the tall, handsome People’s Liberation Army sentry, thinking: my first Communist! Another equally tall and handsome PLA border guard checked my passport and politely waved me through. (I didn’t yet know these soldiers were chosen in part for their looks and height.)

Sipping a glass of jasmine tea in the railway waiting room, I watched women in straw hats, trimmed with black, curtain-like flounces, working in the fields. Then I boarded the train for Canton. Bai, the young woman who met me, was about my age, and had round pink cheeks and glossy braids she tossed briskly over her shoulders. She looked as though she had popped out of a propaganda poster.

More lessons in Chinese apartheid ensued. As I was racially Chinese, I was presumed to have an innate ability to read, write and speak the language of the motherland. So Bai didn’t know English, and the designated hotel where she deposited me, the Canton Overseas Chinese Hotel, was also unilingually Chinese, including the menus. I didn’t mind, at least not until the third time I mistakenly ordered pig esophagus for lunch.

Inside the Stalinist-style sandstone hotel, the class-struggle décor consisted of golden quotations from Chairman Mao. The lobby teemed with compatriots from Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, who lounged around in flowered polyester pantsuits and solid-gold jewelry, picking their teeth and shouting to one another in village dialects. Had I been classified a foreigner, I would have been charged twice as much for a room in an “international” hotel, which offered luxuries like interpreters, English menus and rooms with windows. The interior designer at the Overseas Chinese Hotel had chosen the prison-cell look for my tiny room: whitewashed walls, quite a few mice and no windows. He or she had solved the ventilation problem by cutting a big hole high in the wall separating me from the next room, which meant I could listen to every shout and snore from the adjacent family.

Bai rarely accompanied me. Each morning, she ensured I got into the right car. Then she would instruct the driver to take me to such tourist destinations as the Canton Trade Fair. (It looked like a clearance sale at an army and navy surplus store.)

At the Canton Zoo, I struck up a conversation of sorts with a 22-year-old worker with high cheekbones and finely shaped eyes. We talked mostly in sign language. When he fingered his worn denim jacket, it meant he was a worker. What kind? He went through the motion of driving a car, then fixing an imaginary engine. An auto mechanic!

For my part, I told him, yes, TOLD him, he must be happy in the workers’ paradise. I mimed happiness, pointing at my big grin, and then at him. He shook his head and turned down his mouth in a Chaplinesque expression of sadness. He thrust out his hands and made me feel the calluses. Then he rubbed the fingers of one hand together in that universal commercial gesture that means money. He shook his head, which meant the pay was crap.

I was stunned - how could a worker in China be unhappy? I thought this was the dictatorship of the proletariat. I couldn’t exactly say that in Chinese, so I tried to pantomime a happy worker, pretending to repair a piece of machinery, all the while smiling broadly.

The young mechanic thought I was crazy. He pulled a small pass from his pocket. It stated where he was from (Guangxi province) and where he was authorized to travel (Canton.) It specified he could stay two weeks and the purpose: visiting relatives from overseas. Slowly I understood – he could not travel freely in his own country.

When I told him I was from “Jia na da,” he wanted to go there. Again, I was shocked. Why would anyone here want to go to a CAPITALIST country? I had been in China exactly four days, so I was an expert. I told him, in my fractured Chinese, that China was way better than Canada. On cue, a line of singing schoolchildren marched past. He looked dubious. We agreed to go rowing the next day.

The next morning, Bai tracked me down in the hotel dining room and told me, beaming, that I was going to visit Chairman Mao’s school. My face fell. I tried to explain I was going rowing with a member of the proletariat. I pulled my arms back and forth. She couldn’t figure out what on earth I was talking about, so I pulled her outside where my friend from the zoo was waiting.

The change in Bai was startling. The sweetness was gone. She looked older and meaner. She shouted at him. His neck flushed as he pulled out his travel pass. She snatched it from him, examined it and frowned. Then she barked something at him, and he slunk away.

Later, I walked through Mao's school in a daze. Why couldn't I go rowing with a Chinese? What had I done wrong? What had he done wrong? I felt like crying at the ugliness I'd just witnessed, at the humiliation of my new friend. For the next few weeks, I continued to tour China alone, increasingly perplexed by and somewhat paranoid about the authorities, but still entranced and captivated by the strange, new society I was witnessing. After weeks of pestering Guide Bai to find me someone, anyone, who would teach me Chinese, I was suddenly told I could stay and study in China. Exactly where remained a mystery until one day I was dropped off at the gates of Peking University. I became the first Canadian to study there in the Cultural Revolution.

It was the first step in my Long March from Mao to now. I stayed a year at Peking University, learning fluent Mandarin, digging ditches, harvesting wheat and working in a machine-tool factory. It being the silly 70s, McGill University gave me full credit for that year of hard labour, and I graduated on time. I immediately returned to Peking University to study Chinese history, the next step in a journey that would ultimately take me back to Beijing as a foreign correspondent where I chronicled, among other events, China's rise as a global market economy, the struggle for human rights and the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square.

yangharrylg

Ezra F. Vogel (傅高義) is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University. He was professor at Harvard from 1967-2000. In 1973 he succeeded John K. Fairbank to be second director of Harvard’s East Asia Research Center. He was later director of Harvard’s US-Japan Program, the Fairbank Center, and the founding director of its Asia Center. In 1965 he began teaching a course on Communist Chinese Society, and later he taught courses on Japanese Society and Industrial East Asia. He wrote "Canton Under Communism" (1969), "Japan As Number One" (1979), "One Step Ahead in China" (1989) and has just published "Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China" (2011)

I first traveled to China as a member of the first delegation of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences from late May to mid-June 1973. We traveled for three weeks in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Beijing and were hosted everywhere by scientists.

I had been hoping to travel to China ever since I began studying China in 1961, three years after my Ph D. I was trained as a sociologist whose research was based on intensive interviewing. I believed interviewing was important to try to understand people’s thinking; I was trained to think of the big picture of societies by Talcott Parsons and I tried to link the bigger picture with a deeper understanding of people first hand. I had interviewed Italian-American, Irish-American, and old-American families in Boston for my Ph D thesis which I completed in 1958 and then I had interviewed Japanese families in Japan from 1958-1960. In 1961 I was selected by some of my former professors to begin a three year post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard to study the Chinese language and history; I was told that if it worked out, I might later have a chance to become the first faculty to offer courses on Chinese society at Harvard. Until 1960 some American universities offered courses on Chinese language, literature, and history, but almost none offered courses on contemporary politics, economics, or society. After the Korean War in the late 1950s, the “red scare” led by Joseph McCarthy caused universities to fear offering courses on Communist China. Some professors were afraid to show an interest in China; foundations offered no grants for studying contemporary China for fear of being criticized for being “soft on communism.” By 1961 the influence of McCarthy had begun to fade and foundations were prepared to support some of us from various disciplines to get the background needed to start university programs on contemporary China. I was excited by the opportunity to study such a large and important society that was so little understood. I believed, as did many other American intellectuals, that the United States must open relations with Communist China, that we and the Chinese people needed to understand each other to have a peaceful world, and that I could play a constructive role in furthering our understanding of China to help pave the way for Americans and Chinese to work together.

When the Committee for Concerned Asian Scholars was founded at Harvard, I became a member and supported the activities. Like other members, I believed that the United States was wrong to attack Vietnam, and I believed our country should pull out of the war. I was close to the graduate students who were a few years younger than I like Jim Peck, Victor Nee, Richard Bernstein, Tom Eberhardt, Perry Link, Andy Nathan. I remember once driving seven Harvard graduate students in my station wagon to Washington DC where we made the rounds of government offices to complain of the Vietnam War and urge a quick ending. But my father was a Jew who found opportunities in the United States while his sisters and their families perished in the holocaust in Europe, and I was more positive on America than some of my students. Also, I did not share the rosy view of life in Communist China held by many of the radical students. I had done interviewing of former residents of Communist China in Hong Kong from 1963-64 and for several summers after that. I had also read through a decade’s worth of Nanfang Ribao (《南方日報》) to understand the changes in China from 1949 to the mid-1960s. I was familiar with the ideals that Communist leaders had enunciated, but I had heard tales of the many good landlords who were killed along with the bad ones. I knew of the anti-rightist campaign of 1957. I had read of problems among the leadership –of Gao Gang (高崗), and the attacks in 1966-67 of Peng Zhen (彭真), Yang Shangkun (楊尚昆), Lu Dingyi (陸定一), Luo Ruiqing (羅瑞卿) and then of Liu Shaoqi (劉少奇) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平). I did not know many details of the failure of the Great Leap Forward, but I knew that there was widespread starvation and forced labor. And through interviewing in Hong Kong, I was aware of the tight control over citizen’s lives. And yet I wanted Chinese leaders to succeed, to make life better for their people, and wanted to help bridge the gap between China and America. I was envious of radical students who had visited China before I had an opportunity; in discussions with them, some said “How could you know about China if you have never been there?”

The National Academy of Sciences, a private organization of scientists, had promoted exchanges with scientific organizations around the world. Their Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China had been established in the late 1960s in the hopes of promoting exchanges between scholars of China and the United States. A number of the senior American scientists had former students who had returned to China and held key positions in China’s scientific institutions. The scientists were overwhelmingly natural scientists but there were a small number of social scientists among them. On this first delegation to go to China, over thirty natural scientists and their wives took part, as well as four of us in the social sciences and humanities: Eleanor Sheldon, president of the Social Science Research Council, Al Feuerwerker, a Chinese historian at the University of Michigan, his wife Yitze, a specialist in Chinese literature, and myself.

The meetings with Chinese scientific organizations were formal and polite. We visited universities and scientific institutes and received briefings. It was easy to sense that many Chinese scientists were eager to promote exchanges, that they were distressed at the poor state of facilities in China, and wanted to carry on ordinary scientific research, and yet they were very cautious in saying anything that might reveal their personal desires. We felt deep sympathy for the Chinese scientists, and we tried to take precautions so that they did not get into political troubles with their minders who had made their life so difficult.

When we visited Peking University, we were received by the Revolutionary Committee. Zhou Peiyuan (周培源), the distinguished scientist who had been in effect the president of the university, welcomed us, but when we were all seated, he said he did not understand the political situation and called upon his colleague, a PLA soldier who then recited the political line of the Cultural Revolution. His talk was full of political clichés, and we all felt sorry for Zhou Peiyuan who had to yield to people like this soldier who knew nothing about higher education and who knew nothing about science and who behaved haughtily toward scientists who did not share the correct revolutionary perspective. We visited the factory where students did part time work. They were doing some simple routine work, and when an American physics professor asked about one of the machines they were working with, the answer was so simple that a member of our delegation later confided to us that it was at the level of an American technical high school. When we visited the Nationalities Institute, we were given general presentations but it was painfully obvious that the researchers had not been given a chance to do field work for many years.

At one city, we were received only by natural scientists; none of our welcoming committee was a social scientist. When I asked our guide if this meant that natural science was considered more important, he replied that social science was also very highly regarded. At the next stop a social scientist was included in the welcoming committee, but the poor man was so petrified of making an error that every time I asked a question he quickly changed the subject to talk about the weather or the scenery.

Our visit was heavily programmed. We were well-fed and stayed at hotels built during the Soviet period. I tried to find opportunities to take walks in the early morning before our schedule began. When I stopped people on the street, even to ask directions, the people were so petrified that they quickly evaded and walked away. One of the best chances to talk with people was after the formal briefings as we walked around in smaller groups to observe the university or institute where we were taken. Once when we walked around, a professor who had given us a radical briefing as a member of the revolutionary group came up to walk besides me. He had clearly picked me out. He began by asking me if I were at Harvard and when I replied that I was, he confessed that he had studied at Harvard and asked if I knew what had happened to one of his American friends. When I told him I knew the person and told of his whereabouts, he was deeply moved. When I returned to the United States and called his friend to convey the news, the American friend was so deeply moved that I could tell he was choked up to hear that after decades of worry, his close Chinese friend was still in good health.

Some radical American students were disillusioned at the tight control and the poor conditions they saw on their first trip to China. I was not disillusioned for I had been prepared for what I saw first hand by my talks with former residents of China in Hong Kong. However, I was deeply happy to be able to visit first hand some of the communes, neighborhood associations, and buildings that I knew about. Yet a few things surprised me. I had been told of the success of the campaign to wipe out the four pests and was surprised at the use of mosquito nets that made it clear that mosquitoes had not been eliminated. I had not expected ordinary people to be so frightened of talking with foreigners. I had not expected to see campuses still in such disarray. I was surprised how dark the streets were at night. Bikes did not have bike lights. There were no regular street lights, only a single small light bulb ever 100 yards or so, even on busy streets in places like Guangzhou and Shanghai. The streets were filled with bikes but almost no motorized vehicles except the small number of car s owned by work units, tractors, and the open trucks. In the outskirts of some cities, I saw horse-drawn vehicles. Virtually everyone wore the same cotton dark blue pants and jacket so one could not tell status by clothing. There were virtually no little stores to buy daily goods. When we visited a Shanghai neighborhood association, the women represented the neighborhood were plainly dressed but it was easy to see they were bright and could under different circumstances been lively leaders. When we heard the Shanghai symphony play, they played simple marches and Cultural Revolutionary music, but they did it with a verve that one could imagine that the older members could play far more difficult classical music if given the chance.

When I asked guides at places like Mao’s Peasant Institute questions that showed some familiarity with the period, the guide was unprepared to answer; he had no knowledge of the period. Sometimes the political line seemed so far from reality that I could not resist asking mischievous questions that reflected my improper political training. When I noticed some perfume in a department store, I asked the guide if some people regarded perfume as a sign of revisionism; he answered “No. It depends on the purpose to which the perfume is put.” “Do some people who hate imperialism,” I asked a particularly politically correct guide, “feel it difficult to accept foreigners riding in such luxurious cars?” “No,” he said, “they have been taught to believe in the friendship of peoples.”

Our delegation was welcomed in Beijing by Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua (喬冠華). The next day we were told to wait in our hotel rooms for we might be able to meet an important leader. We all waited impatiently in our rooms and then assembled in a waiting room where we waited some more. We were then driven from the Peking Hotel in our cars, all numbered in order by the rank of our members, to the Great Hall of the People where we were received for over two hours by Zhou Enlai (周恩來). We did not then know that Zhou already had cancer but he looked thin, and we did not then know he was under political pressure. But he seemed somewhat tense as he talked about the struggles between the two lines. Although we did not meet Deng Xiaoping, we heard that he had recently returned from the countryside to Peking and there was an air of anticipation that he would be returning to an important position and that he was someone who was capable of bringing greater order to China. In May 1973 there was hope in the air that scientists and universities might again resume their regular activities, but scientific institutes did not really carry on much research until 1975 and universities did not really reopen until late 1977.

I was enormously grateful to have had the opportunity to visit in 1973. I was able to take many photographs that I could show to my classes on China that gave a first-hand feel of the place I was lecturing about. In later years, I was even more grateful that I had been given a chance to see China when it was so poor, when people were so frightened to say anything, and when universities were still under the influence of the Cultural Revolution. It made it possible for me to have a vivid sense of the progress that China made in later years and to tell those Westerners who later complained about limitations on free discussion in China how much change had taken place in the years after 1978

yangharrylg

Andrew J. Nathan (黎安友) is the Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1971. His books include “Chinese Democracy” (1985), “Human Rights in Contemporary China” (coauthored, 1986), “The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security” (coauthored, 1997), “The Tiananmen Papers” (co-edited, 2001), “China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files” (coauthored, 2002), and “How East Asians View Democracy” (co-edited, 2008).

In 1972, a man named Jack Chen (陳依範) showed up in New York. He was the younger son of Eugene Chen (陳友仁), who had been an associate of Sun Yat-sen’s (孫中山) and intermittently foreign minister for various KMT governments. Jack’s mother was Trinidadian. He grew up there and did not speak much Chinese. At some point he had gone to China and made a career at the Beijing Foreign Languages Press. Then he came to New York, for reasons I think none of us in the U.S. fully understood. (He and his wife, Yuan-tsung Chen [陳元珍], subsequently wrote several books that explained parts of their story, including how they suffered during the Cultural Revolution.) He became associated in some way, if memory serves, with Columbia, and then later became an advisor or consultant with the Department of Education of the State of New York, helping to develop curricular resources about China. In that capacity, Jack arranged for a group of New York State college teachers to visit China in July, 1973.

The trip was called the New York State Educators’ Study Tour and involved about a dozen of us from Columbia, Cornell, Hunter, the University of Rochester, and other institutions. Like all foreign visitors at that time, we were overwhelmed with curiosity. We were seeing in person for the first time a vast and strange society we had known before only from the outside. We were accompanied everywhere by guides from the national and local offices of the China International Travel Service, who smothered us with a protocol that bore a faint edge of hostility. We responded with a respectful attitude of learning from the Chinese about their country’s wonderful advances and visionary experiments in human organization and economic development.

On the first day we crossed the short bridge between Lowu and what was then called Shumchun (now Shenzhen) by foot, seeming to leave the real world behind and enter, as I wrote in my notes, “a kind of poster art; the costumes, the signs, the murals, are all exactly as one has seen them in posters.” We went to the second floor of a damp, airy, fan-cooled concrete building and sat in white slip-covered chairs sipping tea while our luggage was inspected. We met our national-level guides, had lunch with plenty of watery beer, and boarded a train for a two-hour ride through the emerald countryside to Guangzhou. The following day began a three-week program of visits to production brigades, factories, industrial exhibitions, neighborhood committees, department stores, schools, universities, and the occasional classic tourist site, moving from Guangzhou to Beijing, then to Shanghai, Hangzhou, and back to Guangzhou. At each unit we sat in an arc of chairs or around a table, received a “jiandan jieshao” from a “leading cadre,” took detailed notes, asked earnest questions, and walked through the facility trying to peer behind the façade of Maoist correctness for signs of real life.

In Beijing, we were summoned one afternoon to a reception hall in the Nationalities Museum to meet with Chi Qun (遲群), the deputy head of the Science and Education Section (Kejiaozu) of the State Council. After the fall of the Gang of Four Chi Qun was revealed to have been one of their top followers. According to my notes, he was a slight young man in a full Mao suit, a silvery watch, and plastic sandals. The notes continue:

“There was much of the imperial in the manner in which we were received by Mr. Chi. The meeting had no date fixed in advance; it met in a place that one would not have expected it to meet in [a reception room at the Nationalities Museum]; all the trappings of power (the elegance of the setting, the waiters pouring soda, the large body of retainers, and even the Mercedes limousine) were present to awe the visitor. Mr. Chi affected imperial elegance as he languidly sat upon the couch and put in occasional questions (‘is it true that Columbia is the biggest university in New York?’) to set his visitors at ease. Our submissions [ideas about exchange programs] are accepted but no answers are given. We are not even certain with whom we are dealing. Questions will be passed on to the ‘proper authorities,’ but we are not to know who these authorities are, nor are we to confront them directly.”

Going around the circle of guests, Chi invited me to describe my research, which at the time focused on late Qing reform ideology. After hearing part of my presentation he interrupted me. “You may be aware,” he said, “ that there was an attempt to make reforms in 1892, but the Empress Dowager (慈禧太后) cut off the heads of Kang Youwei (康有為) and Liang Qichao (梁啟超).” Someone at his side whispered to him. Chi then resumed, saying that the reform took place in 1898 and that the Empress Dowager wanted to cut off the heads of Kang and Liang but since they fled, she cut off the heads of their followers instead.

In Shanghai we visited Fudan University. With elderly professors seated in a row in back, we were briefed by a young man identified as a “leading member” of the revolutionary committee. He told us,

“Before the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the struggle of two lines was acute, especially in universities. This school was basically going the revisionist road. Before 1962 especially, the authorities of the university intended to turn it into a Moscow University of Asia. Teaching methods, texts, and school organization followed the Soviet system. This made it impossible to train intelligent proletarians. So revolutionary teachers and students rose up in 1965-66 in opposition, and following the teaching of Chairman Mao, called for a shortened period of schooling and an end to the dominance of the educational field by the intellectuals.”

Upon leaving this meeting, I gave one of the senior professors a copy of the Columbia graduate school catalogue and a recent publication of mine, a small research guide entitled “Modern China, 1840-1972: An Introduction to Sources and Research Aids” (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1973). About an hour later I was surprised to be called out of my hotel room by one of our guides from the national guide team together with the guide who had conducted us around the university. According to my notes,

“They handed ‘Modern China’ back to me. ‘As soon as you left, Prof. Hu looked this over and he noticed this’ – pointing to an entry entitled ‘Gongfei qiejuxia de Zhongguo dalu fensheng ditu’共匪竊據下的中國大陸分省地圖(A province-by-province atlas of the communist bandit-occupied Chinese mainland) – a Taiwan-published item that I had listed in the geography section of the bibliography. ‘Seeing such language he felt very angry and cannot keep the book.’ I said, ‘I am sorry to have caused Prof. Hu any unpleasant feelings. This choice of words is not mine, but is simply the title of an item which I thought had value, and so included.’ ‘We understand that’ – here they nodded and assumed friendly expressions to imply that no fault was imputed to me personally. Next morning on the bus the guide from Fudan makes a point of sitting with me and making small talk.”

During a two-and-a-half hour train ride from Shanghai to Hangzhou I interrogated two of our guides.

“Is the man in blue riding the train a Public Security person? ‘Yes.’ Why? ‘Because we still have class struggle, and this is an important communications route, so they ride every train. There are two sections in public security, the “jiaotongjing” and the “minjing.” They are armed. They help kids and old ladies, help people locate relatives, register births, deaths, and changes of residence, and are the people’s friends not oppressors.’ … ‘When you Americans ask where are the Liu Shaoqi (劉少奇) elements in every unit, we must laugh, because there are no such things. Cadres are mostly good. We don’t throw them out for one or two errors but help them mend their ways.’ … What will happen when Mao dies? ‘He’s still in good health, for one thing. Secondly, we are now strengthening proletarian dictatorship and have driven out Liu Shaoqi. The danger of capitalist restoration still exists, but can be avoided by efforts now underway.’ But what if Mao had died in 1964, Liu would have been in charge. ‘Yes, but he didn’t die then.’ Who will issue directives to solve problems? ‘We have a Party Center, you know.’”

Arriving in Hangzhou, we are taken by bus to the center of town and allowed to walk around.

“Strolling, I stumble upon a series of about six freshly plastered ‘dazibao’ on a wall. I get photographs of two only. There are about five older ones, already torn and unreadable. The thrust of them, as I hastily read them, was that the ‘dangwei’ of the ‘Dianxinju’ [Post and telegraph bureau] contained a capitalist ‘jituan’ which was not giving equal work for equal pay and was not following the policy of ‘educated youth to the mountains and countryside.’”

That night:

“Mr. Huang phones [my hotel room] and asks to see me. He is acting as an intermediary for the Shanghai comrades [guides from the Shanghai office of CITS had accompanied us to Hangzhou]. Several of the broad masses have called the hotel to say that a foreigner with a beard and glasses and short pants took a picture of a big character poster this afternoon, and shortly thereafter two other foreigners came by and also took photos. [So far as I know, this latter had not actually happened.] Since the matter discussed in the wall poster is an internal affair, some of the masses are opposed to our having these pictures and for the sake of future friendship and to make future U.S. travel to China easier, the Shanghai CITS asks for my film, which they will develop and cut out the offending picture.

“I explain that wall posters are a sign of democracy. I bring out ‘Hongqi’ #6 [which contains an article] on unity and openness. (Huang laughs before I locate the spot on the page and says, ‘I know what you are going to say.’) I explain about preprocessing [when I purchased the film I had also paid for processing]. Huang says apologetically that it is not he but the broad masses of Hangzhou who want the film. I ask if I can just have a copy of the textual content of the picture. ‘Not very practical.’ My final question is only whether I can make the remaining 30 exposures on the film before handing it in. He’ll ask.”

I had brought only 30 rolls of film with me, and had taken many photographs. I hated to waste most of a good roll of film. After a short delay, permission to finish up the roll was granted. The next day, my Columbia colleague Jim Morley and I took a walk in the hills around Hangzhou. I filled the film with pictures of the scenery and handed it in to Mr. Huang that night.

Three days later the senior guide accompanying us from the national CITS office, Mr. Yu, who seldom dealt with us directly, asked for a private meeting with the head of our delegation, Ward Morehouse of the N.Y. State Department of Education. (Our group had been required at the start of the trip to designate a leadership structure so that we could fulfill the protocol requirements of our visit.) “Since it has to do with Nathan, he should leave,” Mr. Yu told Ward. Ward resisted but eventually agreed, stipulating however that he would share with me whatever was discussed. Coming out of the meeting he told me that only 30 shots had come out when my film was developed, all of them scenes of our walk in the hills. The six shots of the wall posters were missing.

Next I was called in to speak directly with the number two national guide, Mr. Huang.

“He accuses me of cheating them (pian). He says I must think the Chinese are not bright enough to know the difference between the beginning and the end of a roll of film. He rejects my offer that he can develop all of my film. He only wants the ‘right’ roll. He and Mr. Yu are very angry, especially Mr. Huang, who keeps waving the developed roll and pacing. He explicitly accuses me of trying to get away with handing over a wrong roll, of hiding the ‘correct’ roll, which they accuse me of knowing how to find among my films. Everyone [else in my group] comes up from waiting for the bus. Mr. Huang tells the whole story to them in agitation. Refusing the offer of all rolls, he stalks from the room.”

Ward, as group leader, had already protested the taking of my film during two of the many formal meetings we held with the guides to negotiate aspects of our program. His line had been that “the incident reflects unfairly on Nathan and the group as a whole since it seems to suggest that we have some less than honorable purposes in visiting your country.” To this, Mr. Yu had responded, “As the representatives accompanying you for the whole trip we regard this as a small issue which never extended to the whole of the group. But I must say that I receive many foreign tourist groups but most are only tourist sightseeing groups. Very few are like this group. Of course this is a new experience for us, so in our work there will inevitably be shortcomings.”

Now that a crisis had emerged, our group split. Several members urged me to stop playing games and hand over the right roll of film. Ward and my Columbia colleague Jim Morley, among others, accepted that I was telling the truth when I said that through some technical glitch – honestly one that was hard to explain – I didn’t have any pictures of the wall posters. I have never known for sure why this happened. My best guess is that I had loaded the film improperly, so that it didn’t advance when I moved the lever, but that some jostling had settled the film onto the sprocket by the next day, so that it started advancing normally. We all waited nervously to see what would happen now. My notes continue,

“Next day, we leave by air for Canton [Guangzhou]. Mr. Huang asks me to help hand out the boarding passes. The Shanghai CITS comrades seem neither to seek nor to avoid shaking my hand on departure.”

The rest of our trip went without incident and a week or so later we crossed back into Hong Kong with a feeling of giddiness at its brightness and buzz.

All of us learned a great deal on the trip, about how various kinds of institutions functioned and about ideological conformity. But a note made in Hangzhou crystallized my most lasting impression.

“This is the long-desired trip to China, but there is quite a sense of boredom and frustration in the group. Our rate of learning has plummeted as units and briefings begin to be repeats of basic types. Access to the populace is out because one simply cannot be inconspicuous. As we walk around, many compounds that we pass are out of bounds – PLA units, government offices, etc. Even the former Yueh Fei (岳飛) tomb, still called Yueh fen岳墳on the bus stop sign, is now an ‘exhibition on class struggle’ and is for ‘neibu canguan’ only – no foreigners allowed. The photo incident suggests how the society as a unit keeps its eyes on us. Nobody will talk freely. I, for one, am reduced to interviewing our more articulate guides for applications of the latest line to specific issues.”

Nandehutu(難得糊塗), says an ancient piece of Chinese wisdom. To make sense of this first trip to China became for me a project of many years.

yangharrylg

W.J.F. Jenner (詹納爾) taught Chinese studies for many years at the University of Leeds and the Australian National University. His books include "Memories of Luoyang: Yang Hsuan-chih and the lost capital" and "The tyranny of history: the roots of China's crisis" as well as many translations. He is now writing on the history of early China.


Arrival

There was something unreal about first entering China one night in August 1963 in the middle of the Gobi after a week on trains since leaving Victoria station. We had crossed the frontier at Erenhot, and a Chinese dining car had just been added to the train instead of the Mongolian one that the Chinese passengers had been carefully avoiding. Now they were piling into it for a cheerful meal, and we joined them to celebrate being in China at last.

The next morning Delia Davin (蒂麗亞) and I—we were then married—set foot on the ground briefly at Datong. There was no time to see any more of the historic frontier city before the last, spectacular stage of the journey through the passes and the Wall into Peking. Through the train windows were peasants who might have come from illustrations to Zhao Shuli (趙樹理) stories, then crowds on bicycles waiting at level crossings as the city grew closer. The excitement of being in China and seeing what I had been reading about for years was dampened when the welcoming party on the platform of the recently built Peking station turned out to be from Peking Review. A month or two earlier I had signed a contract at the Chinese Chargé d’Affaires Office on Portland Place with the head of the Foreign Languages Bureau to work in Peking for two years. It stated that my “concrete working post” would be assigned on arrival. I had naively hoped to be translating literature. This, I realised, was to be it.

At least I had got to China, something not easily done from England in those days. Soon after I graduated in Chinese at Oxford in 1962 my teacher, the fine literary scholar Wu Shichang (吳世昌), returned to the country he had left as an endangered liberal in 1947. As a member of the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences—the Academy of Social Sciences had not yet been separated from it—he passed on the message that I would be glad to work in China. It was then all but impossible to go as a student from Britain, and I longed to get there.

1963 turned out to be just the right time to ask to go. Up till then only a few people with native or equivalent English had been needed to teach, edit or translate. Most of them had been taken on locally, but there were no more to be had. Previously they had been supplemented by Anglophone political trusties sent by foreign communist parties or their front organizations. Hardly any of these links had survived the Sino-Soviet schism, and the only foreign communists to stay on were converts to Maoism. So just when China’s rulers wanted their voice to be heard around the world they needed people with language skills. As a young graduate with some knowledge of Chinese and no Soviet connections I was doubtless seen as useful, as were a number of other new arrivals from around the world.

Going to China was a big decision. It meant giving up the British government studentship that had started the previous autumn and would have funded at least two more years of doctoral research at Oxford on Northern Wei Luoyang. But I wanted to experience a country I only knew from books and to be part of what was happening. The mediaeval studies would have to be fitted in when they could be.

First impressions of Peking were of a city that still had its moat and some of the city wall gate towers. There were hardly any cars, and some buses were still fuelled by huge bags of coal gas lying on the roof. Much was still moved around on pedicarts. People walked slowly. One day that first autumn I saw coal being delivered by camels.

Pretending to be a “Foreign Expert”

So began two years of the artificial life of a “foreign expert”. For the first eighteen months we had to live in the Youyi Binguan, the Friendship Hostel (or “the Druzhba” as it was still often known by its Russian name), north-west of the city. It then seemed a huge complex with grandiose accommodation that had been built to Moscow’s specifications in the 1950s for the Soviet and East European specialists who were advising on the creation of the new Chinese state on Stalinist lines. “Foreign experts” were a Soviet category that had been introduced for them. I suspect that the system needed substitutes to keep going after the Russians and their followers had gone. It may also have been a matter of pride to pretend that even after the split China could still bring in expert foreigners. This probably explains why a year after graduating I was given this unmerited status. Besides, there was this huge and now rather empty hostel in which to put us “experts”. Like many colleges and other new institutions created in the first years of the People’s Republic it had its own self-contained compound in a belt of what was then vegetable-growing land outside the city, which was then much smaller than it is today. It then seemed rather a long way out of town, though it is now an unremarkable set of buildings in inner suburbia, dwarfed by nearby shopping malls.

Some of the Youyi Binguan’s buildings were now used for Chinese conferences, and some for us new post-Soviet foreign employees. It was sealed off from the world outside by army sentries at the gates. Apart from the staff who worked there Chinese people were only allowed in with special permission. It was run by the Foreign Experts Bureau, which liked to keep short-term “experts” as far from ordinary life as possible. We could eat in its subsidised restaurants without having to bother with the ration coupons that everyone else needed. “Experts” were ferried to work by bus or car in the morning, brought back for lunch, then returned to the office for the afternoon before being shuttled back in the evening. On Sundays there was a bus into town for shopping. Sometimes the Foreign Experts Bureau or one’s own work unit would lay on a treat, such as visiting a prison, or going to see Peking ducks lining up to have a blob of glob thrust into their beaks through a metal spout. Sometimes we were fed globs of official culture.

The biggest occasions were on or around National Day. Hundreds of experts and their keepers would be taken in a motorcade to the Great Hall of the People for an impressively choreographed banquet at which Zhou Enlai (周恩來) might be distantly seen. On the day itself you could watch the parade from a stand by Tiananmen and watch the spectacular fireworks in the evening.

The Foreign Experts Bureau also organised the annual holiday trip outside Peking. At a time when travel was extremely restricted for foreigners, with only a handful of cities for which the Public Security might grant a travel permit, the chance to see Xi’an, Luoyang and Yan’an was too good to miss. When torrential rains washed away part of the Longhai railway we flew to Yan’an from Luoyang in an ancient DC3. Another trip was to the then utterly delightful Suzhou, which had not yet lost the beauty of its buildings and its Ming and Qing rentier urbanity, and to Shanghai, physically little changed since the 1940s. Shanghai felt like a slightly outdated version of the modern world where people walked briskly instead of ambling as in Peking. No doubt these trips only showed carefully chosen appearances, but I am very glad to have had those impressions of what places once looked like.

What we got to understand about life in Peking was limited but well worth having. The Foreign Languages Bureau and Delia’s employers, the Broadcasting Institute where she taught English, allowed us some contact with reality. We could buy bicycles (without having to wait years for a permit as our Chinese colleagues did) and make our own way to work and into town.

The Foreign Languages Bureau and Peking Review

The Foreign Languages Bureau was a large Soviet-style outfit set up in the 1950s and expanded after the split with Moscow. The Bureau was a typical 1950s Chinese office building in Baiwanzhuang with its own compound behind it that had crowded accommodation blocks for some of its staff. Office hours were long but leisurely, 8 a.m. to noon, then a break for lunch and siesta of two hours in summer and one and a half hours in winter before another four hours in the afternoon. The office worked six days a week, but foreigners were given Saturday afternoons off.

The Bureau’s staff all belonged to it. It was not just their employer: like other work units of the time it controlled their lives. Pay was low and living conditions were basic, but in exchange it provided security from cradle to crematorium: wages even after retirement, some medical cover, and accommodation, even if only a bed in a dormitory for the unmarried. Leaving was all but impossible. Back then, before the lethal madness of the Cultural Revolution, this forced coexistence meant that people had to get on together. Because they were not free to change jobs and promotion was glacially slow there was no pressure to work very hard, compete or get ahead. There was little privacy or freedom. Avoiding political mistakes or anything that might get you into trouble in the next ideological campaign seemed to be the main worries.

Given the nature of the Bureau’s work everyone was very well aware of the rules for dealing with foreigners. Conversations with us, except on safe subjects, were guarded. You knew that they had to be reported. While it did not matter to me what the authorities thought about my incorrect views I did not want to create awkward situations in which my colleagues had to trot out the party line. Most of them did not go out of their way to give political lectures.

Peking Review was in a newer building at the back of the compound. The magazine was hopeless as propaganda, though it did give foreign governments and other observers authoritative translations of the Communist Party’s line as given out for external consumption. The people on the magazine were pleasant to work with, but they had little say on what went into it and were not allowed to make it interesting. It contained no journalism and bore no resemblance to a news magazine. The content was largely set from above by the Central Committee’s Propaganda Bureau, and trusties fixed the English of key political texts before they were issued by the Xinhua News Agency. Peking Review had to print them without changing so much as a comma. Checking the English of other articles made few demands on me, and there was no scope for making them less boring.

Suggestions about improving the review met with wry smiles. I was sure that some of my highly educated and intelligent colleagues who knew the outside world were well aware of the review’s limitations. After the death of Mao one of them was to be a key player in setting up the China Daily, which with all its shortcomings at least pretended to be a newspaper. Something unexpected could provoke more spontaneous reactions. The assassination of President Kennedy brought out a sense of superiority at the incompetence of American security and a joke about “Kennidi ken ni” (肯尼迪啃泥), Kennedy biting the earth.

I was rescued from Peking Review by a misprint. One day I was given a cutting from the People’s Daily to translate, probably to find out if I could. The piece itself was of no interest, but a character in it seemed wrong. Asking about this must have given me some credibility, and things started to look up. While still having to polish Peking Review articles I was also given a wonderful assignment: editing Yang Xianyi (楊憲益) and Gladys Yang’s (戴乃迭) selected chapters from Sima Qian’s (司馬遷 ) “Shi ji” (《史記》). With the blind confidence of 23 I cheerfully thought I was improving their masterly work, and they were good enough not to take offence. (The book was to disappear, only to be published in Hong Kong in the 1970s before it finally came out in a Foreign Languages Press edition.)

The Foreign Languages Press

Towards the end of 1963 I was transferred from Peking Review to the Foreign Languages Press, the part of the Foreign Languages Bureau that produced books. My office was now a small room in the FLP English Section in the main building. I was given an unexpected assignment, to translate the proofs of what purported to be the memoirs of Pu Yi (溥儀). The plan was that the English version was to be brought out as soon as possible after the Chinese original was published in the spring of 1964 before there was time for any rival translation to appear. China was then outside international copyright agreements, which meant that the original was unprotected abroad.

For the sake of speed the book, “From Emperor to Citizen”, was brought out in two volumes. The first was by far the more interesting, going from Qing court politics in the decades before Pu Yi’s birth to the Japanese spiriting him out of Tianjin to the Northeast. It came out in 1964. This was the volume in which the Press’s editors unfortunately made some cuts. (Editors who dealt only with the Chinese text and were above the level of the English Section made the big editorial decisions. You had the impression that they had not been contaminated by contact with the outside world.) They left almost untouched the second volume, with its goody-goody, and probably too-good-to-be-true, account of Pu Yi’s “remoulding” in prison. Here more blue pencil would have been welcome.

The FLP’s English Section was a good place to work and observe the Chinese cultural bureaucracy in action. The care taken over every publication was extraordinary. Everything was checked over and over again. Proof-reading was done to a standard of accuracy that no Western publisher could match today. Zhou Jiacan (周家驂), an excellent colleague in my office, oversaw my version of the Pu Yi book. He referred some questions not to the supposed author but to his younger brother Pu Jie (溥傑). It was surprising to hear him refer to Pu Yi in phone conversations with Pu Jie as “huangshang”, His Majesty.

Pu Jie, it was hinted, was one of the book’s real authors. I was also told that historians had provided many of the stories and gossip about late Qing palace politics and the fate of the reduced court that lived on in the Forbidden City after the fall of the dynasty. Lao She (老舍), it was said, had given the whole manuscript a stylistic polish. It seemed plausible that as a Manchu himself Lao She would have wanted the story well told.

The whole Bureau was bound by one decision that had been made early in the history of the PRC: to use a degraded version of Wade-Giles romanization for proper names (except where Post Office spelling was followed for some place names) in all English-language publications. This continued even after Hanyu Pinyin had been introduced. This choice had apparently been made on the advice of Stalin-era Anglophone communists who thought that aspirations and umlauts would stand between the West’s toiling masses and the red sun rising in the East. So Chu had to stand for what in Wade-Giles would be Chu, Ch’u, Chü or Ch’ü, or in Pinyin Zhu, Chu, Ju and Qu. This sloppiness was followed by all foreign news media in their coverage of China until China switched to Hanyu Pinyin for international use.

I was of course excluded from meetings in the section’s large office and in the Bureau’s large hall, and my colleagues were careful not to pass things on. It would have been easy to trace the source of any hot news that got out through me. But sometimes I got a sense of what was happening. After the United States started bombing North Vietnam in the summer of 1964 there was no mistaking the tension. The canteen was plastered with posters of solidarity with Vietnam, and one colleague remarked, in a tone more of resignation than of enthusiasm, that it all reminded him of the atmosphere before China intervened in Korea. Later the sense of imminent war with America faded away. As we now know, Mao was not going to take on the USA when his main enemy was the USSR.

I nearly always avoided commenting on Chinese politics. One big exception was when there was delight in the office about China’s first atom bomb in 1964. You could understand it after all the years of living under the American nuclear threat, especially since the end of the Soviet alliance had removed one factor that might have inhibited Washington. But as a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament I could not help asking, “Who are you going to drop it on?”

The Press was helpful about slightly loosening some of the usual restrictions for foreigners. I was issued some grain coupons so we could buy food from ordinary stalls and restaurants around town. I could also eat lunch in the big canteen with my colleagues instead of going back to the Youyi or using the Bureau’s “small dining room” that prepared better meals for top management and for the long-term foreign staff who lived in the compound. (Its cooks were among the few fat people to be seen in the city.) When the English Section went to stay at a commune to help with the wheat harvest Delia and I joined them for one day. The short-bladed sickles looked almost the same as Han dynasty ones, and as there were not enough of them we pulled the wheat out by hand.

The Press also let us travel unescorted to bring my parents by train from Hong Kong with a stopover at Changsha. A side trip to Shaoshan, where the Mao pilgrimage industry had hardly started, included a walk up the hill of that name. As we climbed the path our local guide pointed out the spot where a villager had killed a tigress and her cub the previous winter.

Up till then I had avoided trying to contact Pu Yi, who seemed from the book published under his name to be a pathetic creature. He had evidently been a puppet all his life—of his mothers, of the eunuchs, of his tutors, including Sir Reginald Johnston, of the Qing loyalist elders, of the Japanese, of the Soviet Union, and finally of the Chinese Communists. My lack of admiration for him went with a wish to avoid a monarch, even a twice-deposed one. It all gave way when I was thinking of something special for my parents to be able to talk about when they got home. I asked if they could meet him, and the Press laid it on for me.

The meeting took place in a National People’s Political Consultative Conference establishment in the western part of the old city where veterans of fallen regimes were kept to be extensively debriefed and put their memories on paper. A tall, gangly figure in a black woollen standard Mao-era outfit ambled into the room. He seemed far from being the new man of his ghosted autobiography: he could not even smoke a cigarette without getting all the ash over his clothes. It soon became obvious that he was not able to answer any questions about the book. All I learned from the conversation was that he spoke with the thickest of slurred Peking accents.

Once the Pu Yi book was finished I was granted a very big favour. I asked to be allowed to do a full translation of “Journey to the West” and they agreed. I was to continue with the translation after returning to England, but in 1966, with a first draft of 33 chapters done, I was told to stop and return my copy of the typescript. I did stop, but I kept the typescript, which was just as well as their copy was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. I also polished translations of bad novels, sometimes having to unpick and redo the efforts of incompetent others. One very worthwhile translation I edited was to disappear in the Cultural Revolution: the Institute of Archaeology’s “Xin Zhongguo de kaogu shouhuo” (《新中國的考古收獲》), an invaluable survey of ten years of Chinese archaeology that was to have been published by Penguin in England.

A home from home

Where real human contact with China came was through Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi, the Bureau’s star translators, and their family. I had met Gladys when she gave a talk in Oxford in 1961 during her first visit to England in over twenty years. Right from our arrival she had opened their flat in the Bureau’s compound to us. I used to take my siesta on their battered sofa during the long office lunch break every day. Gladys had chosen to make her life in China at the worst possible time when she made the difficult journey there in 1940 to marry Yang Xianyi despite her English missionary parents’ heavy misgivings. She was admirably unlike other permanent foreign residents. Her commitment to China was to people, country and culture rather than to the twists and turns of party line. She cheerfully spoke her mind, an immensely refreshing relief from the preaching of true believers.

While Xianyi formally observed the rules on contact with foreigners by not saying many things he might have wanted to he could express a lot with a knowing smile and silence. When he had to produce some required formulation it would come with a warning such as “Of course, we say that…” Though he had to be discreet about the present he was a marvellous and quirky guide to enjoying the riches of China’s past.

Of their three children the oldest, their son Yang Ye (楊燁), was already away at university as a student. He came back occasionally at weekends, avoided contact with foreigners apart from his mother, and loaded his bag with books in Chinese and English before returning to university. You sensed a searching and independent mind, but not the terrible future that was to end with his suicide after the Cultural Revolution. His sisters Ying (楊熒) and Zhi (楊熾) were much better at coping with their Anglo-Chinese parentage. While being firmly Chinese they were more relaxed, friendly and comfortable with foreigners, but their main concerns seemed to be coping with the demands of the fiercely competitive school system. The Yangs’ flat was a home from home for us. When in 1964 more young graduates came from England to work in Peking they too made their way to the flat for an escape from official China.



Retrospect

Looking back, those two years turned out to have taught me a little about daily life in the offices of one of the capital’s work units and about the look of the few places I was allowed to see, but not much else. I allowed myself to remain in the dark about much of what had really happened in the rest of China. To be sure, I was told there had been three bad years with food shortages. Even in Peking the hepatitis rate was still high because of malnutrition, but there seemed to be pride that China had come through and that even government officials had shared the hardships. Hunger yes, but famine no—this was what people said and what, alas, I accepted. The only villages I saw were prosperous ones near big cities. What was visibly true from the availability of goods in shops was that in those two years the economy was recovering from the Great Leap.

As for the political picture, some changes were visible between 1963 and 1965, such as the growth of the Mao cult and the drafting of demobilized soldiers into the office to strengthen political control. The bitter struggles at the top that are now well known were then well concealed, making Mao’s regime seem unlike Stalin’s in that respect. Even the fallen Peng Dehuai (彭德懷) was said to be living in dignified seclusion somewhere in the western suburbs. It seemed like a very stable dictatorship. By the time I left in August 1965 it was evident that Yang Xianyi and the friends who visited him could feel that an unpleasant political campaign was in the wind, and they were resigned to being targets. What they expected was something like the Anti-Rightist movement, a campaign run from the top that might well hurt them but would be under some kind of control. Nothing pointed to the chaotic violence of the Cultural Revolution that was only a year away. It was inconceivable that my colleagues would soon be killing each other, Zhou Jiacan would be dead, and the Yangs would be in jail.

Two years of living alongside but not in China were enough. In August 1965 we took the long train ride back to England to start at the Department of Chinese Studies in the University of Leeds, Delia as a student and me as an assistant lecturer. It was to be over thirteen years before I saw China and the Foreign Languages Press again. When I went back in the spring of 1979 the place looked almost unchanged but belief in the system and its claimed values had gone.

yangharrylg

Delia Davin (蒂麗亞) taught English in Beijing 1963-5 and returned to work as a translator 1975-6. She taught at York University and at the University of Leeds where she is now Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies. She has published extensively on gender and population issues in China.


Delia Davin (蒂麗亞) taught English in Beijing 1963-5 and returned to work as a translator 1975-6. She taught at York University and at the University of Leeds where she is now Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies. She has published extensively on gender and population issues in China

I arrived in China in August 1963. I was 19 years old and had just finished high school in the UK. I was to teach English at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute while my then husband W.J.F. Jenner (詹納爾), a graduate in Chinese from Oxford, became a translator at the Foreign Languages Press. Our journey seemed hugely exciting. We travelled to Moscow on a trans Europe express via Berlin, Warsaw and thence on the trans-Siberian via Ulan Bator to Moscow.

Our first stop in China was the Inner Mongolian town of Erlian, then the site of the “break of gauge” where the broad track used in Russia and Mongolia gave way to the standard gauge. Each carriage had to be lifted up with a crane to have its bogies changed. This operation took a considerable time allowing the excited Chinese passengers, most of whom had been working or studying abroad for years, the time to enjoy a proper Chinese meal in the station restaurant. The next day the Chinese train attendants vacuumed the floors, cleaned every surface in the carriage and hunted down all the flies with swats to make the train fit to enter the capital. When we finally arrived in Beijing it was quite a wrench to leave the reassuringly familiar routine of train life and the attendants who had been proud of their exotic British passengers.

After a formal welcome at Beijing station from the “leaders” of the Press and the Institute, we were driven to the Friendship Hotel, or “Druzhba” as it was often still called, a large residential complex that had been built for the Russian experts who worked in China. Although they had departed in 1960, the buildings still bore many traces of their occupation. Its shops, dining rooms clinic, swimming pool, club and theatre were labelled in Russian although English, French, Spanish, and Japanese notices gradually appeared during the months we spent there. The scale of the architecture and even the furniture was large and clunky. We were lodged in two comfortable rooms with our own bathroom, much more luxury than we had expected in China and a considerable contrast with the furnished rooms with an outdoor lavatory that had been our home in Oxford.

Unfortunately we soon found that the comfort in which we lived was part of a systematic cosseting that tended to cut us off from the Chinese. In a petrol-short city where almost everyone rode bicycles to work and there were still very few cars we were expected to use the “Druzhba” taxis. It was only after many hours of argument that I was allowed to cycle to work and to take my lunch in the teachers’ canteen there instead of being driven back to eat in a “Druzhba” dining room. The complex was guarded by the army and visitors had to be met at the gate and produce identity. We spent over a year there until we were finally able to escape to a hostel that belonged to the Radio Station where our neighbours were mostly Japanese and Chinese. This building was in just outside the old city and overlooked the old city wall and the moat, a much pleasanter situation.

The college in which I taught had been established in the Great Leap Forward. This meant that its buildings and facilities were pretty basic; the students for example had no canteen. They collected food from the kitchen in bowls that they kept in their desks and ate in the playground or in their dormitories. To their annoyance they were required to use spoons (like children, they protested) rather than chopsticks that might have rolled off their bowls when stored and thus been unhygienic. As the Institute was preparing people to work in the Broadcasting Authority, over 20 languages were taught including Swahili, Urdu and so on. When I arrived, an Indian teacher who had formerly looked after the English class transferred to the Tamil class while his wife, who had formerly taught Tamil moved on to a newly enrolled group learning Malayalam. Both these colleagues generously shared their language teaching expertise with me. In one respect our Institute was privileged. We had inherited a collection of reel-to-reel tape recorders from the Radio Station to which we were attached. We used and reused precious imported West German tape. When a tape snapped we would mend it with sellotape. This was also imported and had to be collected from a technician who would carefully wind about an inch of it around my fountain pen -enough effect two mends. I often wished I had brought some with me from England.

In the first year we used duplicated texts many of which had originally been selected by Russian teachers of English. I found myself teaching extracts from “A Tale of Two Cities”, “Lady Windermere’s Fan”, “The Scarlet Letter” and a translation of Gorky’s “Mother”. A text on contemporary English life contained references to vacuum cleaners. My students could not begin to imagine what these would be like, so we went to the railway station to see them. The East German vacuum cleaners used on the Trans-Siberian trains were then, as far as I know, the only ones in Beijing. The station escalator was an added excitement. We also read Chairman Mao’s account of his life as recorded by Edgar Snow in “Red Star over China”. At that time the students knew nothing of the private lives of the communist leaders and were intrigued to learn that Mao had been married more than once. Later, as the Sino-Soviet dispute developed, our readings came under tighter political control. We were restricted to teaching texts from Chinese government publications including the polemics that the Chinese Communist Party was then blasting at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This was rather boring for the students who had to read and discuss the same documents in their politics class but it served me in good stead later when I taught this period of Chinese history.

My students had definitely been winners from the revolution. Many came from illiterate families and all felt that they would never have made it to university in “old China”. Their lives were basic but they got enormous pleasure from the simple purchases they could afford from their stipends such as tiny tins of moisturising cream, packs of pretty bookmarks or sugared dried peas that we ate at parties. Their food was simple - meals were predominantly steamed bread and cabbage - but for many of them an improvement on what they had eaten in early childhood. The students from the south longed for rice and were happy when it was available. Three students were of Hui nationality and ate only food supplied by the “halal” kitchen. Most of the people I taught were a year or so older than I was, but one was a mature student with 3 children. She had served in the Korean War and danced a “ladies excuse-me” with Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) – two claims to fame that impressed her fellow students equally. Of the thirteen in that first class all are still living except one whose health was compromised by poor nutrition and tuberculosis when he was a child labourer before 1949.

I often stayed on with my students after class helping them with their homework, chatting and doing physical training. This mostly consisted of running which I was good at. However we also practised throwing using dummy grenades and we were all hopeless at this. Indeed the trainer informed us that our throws were so short we would have blown ourselves up that had the grenades been real. In those days Chinese were strongly discouraged from associating with foreigners except as colleagues or students. I felt fortunate to be able to spend so much time with these idealistic, naïve young people and to learn so much about their childhood, their families and their ideas and hopes.

The Foreign Languages Press where my husband worked was a more complicated place. His colleagues were older; many had belonged to the highly educated elite and had foreign connections. Nearly all expressed great enthusiasm for the revolution and the People’s Government but their levels of sincerity no doubt varied. Some had already been in political trouble, many felt vulnerable. Nonetheless, this was a close community. Employees lived in Press accommodation and ate in the canteen. They did exercises or played badminton and table tennis together in the breaks. Spring and autumn expeditions to the Western Hills organised by the trade union were highlights of the year as was the annual distribution of grapes and honey from land belonging to the Press. For us, yearning for greater integration into Chinese life the Press provided a better compromise than the expatriate society of the Friendship Hotel. Our dearest friends were the literary translators Gladys Yang (戴乃迭)and Yang Xianyi (楊憲益) with whom we spent much of our free time. They were immensely knowledgeable about what was going on in China as well as about Chinese history and literature and we learnt a lot from them.

The Yangs’ hospitable household allowed us to meet Chinese friends and colleagues outside our foreign ghetto. Through them we also became friends with people who had one foot in each of the sharply divided worlds of the Chinese and foreigners in Beijing. Two New Zealand Chinese brothers who had come to back to China to help the new People’s Republic in the early 1950s worked as proof readers. They were often criticised for their “foreign” way of thinking, or even for walking like foreigners. Yet when they went to work in the countryside they were admired by the peasants for their Kiwi ability to fix broken-down machinery. A black American then working as a translator had been taken prisoner in the Korean War, and had opted to stay in China at the time of the ceasefire. He subsequently took a degree in Chinese at Wuhan University, married and had two children. By the time we knew him he was homesick for the United States. He could not take his family back to Tennessee however, because under his home state’s anti-miscegenation laws, his marriage to a Chinese woman would have been deemed illegal. He had to defer his return until the ban on interracial marriages was held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1967. By this time the Cultural Revolution was also making his life in China very uncomfortable.

Beijing in the early 1960s was heaven for cyclists. Although there was little motor traffic, all the major roads had broad cycle lanes shared by pedicabs, mule carts, and camels that carried coal into the capital. Traffic lights were worked manually and the roads were so quiet that they could be switched off altogether when the traffic cops went off duty at 7.30pm. We worked a six-day week but on Sundays we could spend happy hours in the Forbidden City, Beihai Park, the Summer Palace or temples in the western hills. There was little pollution and we enjoyed clear blue skies day after day. As there was minimal heating and no air conditioning but I found both the winter cold and the summer heat difficult. At least thickly padded clothing in the winter helped. Foreigners were such a rarity that even dressed in Chinese clothes we inspired interest wherever we went and often attracted crowds. Small children called out “Sulianren” (Soviet) after us. Later they got more up to date and substituted this with “Albanian” or even on one occasion after the Zanzibar revolution of 1964, “Zanzibari”.

Many other areas outside the capital were closed to foreigners but we were able to visit major historic cities such as Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Xian and Loyang before modern traffic and multi-storey buildings changed their appearance forever.

The timing of our stay in China was good – fortuitously of course. When we arrived food was becoming more plentiful, rations were increasing, the range of consumer goods was greater and prices were falling. We did not know then how severe the post Great Leap famine had been but we were aware that there had been serious shortages and hunger. Confidence in the Communist Party had certainly been rocked by the hard years but by 1963 it was returning, not least because people really wanted to believe that life would be getting better. To our distress the explosion of China’s first atom bomb was greeted with popular enthusiasm. We put on our British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badges and refused to celebrate.

There were events and campaigns that in retrospect one can understand as harbingers of what was to come although of course at the time we had no notion of it. The Four Clean Ups Movement (Siqing) meant that my students were sent off to the countryside for a month abruptly and to the detriment of their progress with English. The Socialist Education Campaign not only affected our teaching materials, it meant that western classical music disappeared from Radio Beijing and the hours our students and colleagues spent in political study doubled. We were all bussed off to watch an adulatory film on Stalin shown across two evenings. It lasted a painful eight hours if my memory does not deceive me. Liu Shaoqi’s (劉少奇) “How to be a Good Communist” was reprinted in Chinese and many other languages. Soon afterwards, the “Selected Works of Mao Zedong” which had been unavailable, reappeared in the bookshops and his name was mentioned on the radio ever more frequently.

When I left Beijing in August 1965 to study Chinese at the University of Leeds I could never have imagined that it would be more than a decade before I could return, that meanwhile China would undergo the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, and that many of my friends would be imprisoned or sent away from Beijing for long years. When I did return in 1975, Beijing seemed in many ways a duller and a grimmer place. Since then of course it has undergone still greater transformations. The ancient city and the young revolutionary society I knew have disappeared. But I do not forget those two years that gave me so many good friends and an interest in China that was to shape my whole life.

yangharrylg

Lois Wheeler Snow, California born and raised, has been an actress on Broadway for many years and is a member of New York City’s Actor’s Studio. She has worked with Martha Graham, Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, Herbert Bergdorf, Arthur Miller and Norman Rose. She has appeared in many television productions, in particular, the long-running soap opera, “The Guiding Light”. Her books include “China on Stage”, “A Death with Dignity: When the Chinese Came”, “Edgar Snow’s China: An Account of the Chinese Revolution Compiled from the Writings of Edgar Snow”. She lives in Switzerland with her daughter Sian, named after the Chinese city where her father set off to meet the Red Army and its leaders after the Long March. Her son Christopher died in 2008, leaving two children Chiara and Jonathan Snow.

China became part of my life when I met and married Edgar Snow (斯諾). I had read “Red Star Over China” (《西行漫記》) long before I knew the author but the years that followed were largely devoted to my acting career in New York. China was rather remote from Broadway. Through Ed, I developed close relationships with his friends and colleagues. Agnes Smedley showed me how to cook “oriental pilaf” (something she didn’t learn in Yenan); Ed and Jack Belden speculated about events in China, past and present, over frequent games of chess in our home. I became friends with Mariann and Edmund Clubb, and Caroline and John Stewart Service; Owen Lattimore fascinated me with his tales about Inner Mongolia. There were also letters from friends in China, but reception was complicated by the U.S. postal service’s requirement that mail from Communist China be acknowledged in writing before it was delivered (probably having been opened and recorded – no doubt the same occurred in China). At home in the 1950s we saw our American friends targeted by the McCarran Committee, Joseph McCarthy or more discreet members of the U. S. leadership. There were supporters, but people were afraid of losing their careers, their livelihoods. From years of reporting, the name Snow was closely associated with news about Communist China, those two words a “red flag” to editors and publishers in general. Gradually Ed found it harder to get published. Because of my marriage but also because of my support for civil rights and other causes, I became blacklisted on television, a main source of an actor’s income. With reduced savings, two children to raise, alimony to be paid, an offer to Ed for a position with a school traveling in Europe and Asia became a temporary lifesaver. We rented our house, and the children and I accepted the use of a friend’s summer home close to Geneva, Switzerland. After months abroad with the school, Ed received word from China that he would be welcome to visit. The State Department, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, reacted negatively but a persistent Gardner Cowles of Look Magazine overcame the “impediments.” In 1960 Ed flew, legally, to Beijing – a lone American journalist and a single one as well, the State Department having refused my request to accompany him. In 1964 Ed went back. Again my request was denied. In 1970 I didn’t ask; I went with my husband, carrying a contract to write a book on Chinese theater from Bennett Cerf at Random House. I also carried worry. Ed had not sufficiently recovered from a serious operation in the spring. He was weak and fatigued but he was adamant: we were going.

My first glimpse of the country, entering through Hong Kong, was from a modern, air-conditioned train operated entirely by women. Serving us mugs of hot tea, they were as eager to talk to us as we were to talk to them. From the train window I watched leathery buffalo, elongated heron and shimmering green rice fields dotted with farmers, birdlike in wide winged coats and peaked straw hats. Ed was impressed by evidence of farm mechanization new since his last visit. When we arrived at Beijing’s airport, I felt the awe of entering the Land of Oz. Having heard and read about people in China who had participated in events that shaped the country from the 1920s to the present, I knew they existed but like Ozma and the Tin Woodsman – could they be real? They were. During our five months in China, I met them in Beijing, Shanghai, Canton and other cities and rural areas as we traveled to many different parts of the country: old friends, Chinese and foreign, Long March veterans, once-upon-a-time “Little Red Devils” in the Red Army, women whose crippled feet had been bound, peasants in remote communes, factory workers, doctors (barefoot and shod), actors, ballerinas, musicians, women engineers, women film directors, Red Guards, coal miners in universities, intellectuals and university students doing unaccustomed manual labor far from city comfort. Ed, knowing conversational Chinese, could talk with many of them directly. In an account of his 1960 visit he said that he was not given any “clairvoyant power to enter into their private thoughts” and that “at formal interviews, there was generally an official or an interpreter present, and nobody bares his soul to either one, especially with a foreigner around.” Nevertheless, he noted: “I think I know more about all these people than I could possibly have understood had I never returned to China.” For myself, I felt that I was learning something each day. It wasn’t Oz. It was a huge country still trying to emerge from the effects of the Cultural Revolution.

Admittedly, my first visit to China was a special one. It began early on with an invitation from Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) for us to accompany him to a ping-pong match between North Korea and China at the enormous Beijing gymnasium where, some months later, the China-U.S. ping-pong matches created international excitement. At a pre-dinner gathering in the Great Hall of the People, prominent members of the political hierarchy included some whom Ed remembered from the early days in Yenan. We dined with Song Qingling (宋慶齡) in her lakeside Beijing home, where she greeted us warmly, Ed being an old friend. I saw her often on later visits. Zhou Enlai’s wife, Deng Yingchao (鄧穎超), concerned about Ed’s health, kept in close touch. One day I received a gift of sunflowers from her garden (I planted the seeds at home when I returned to Switzerland). An uncomfortable moment was my first meeting with Jiang Qing (江青) whom Ed hadn’t seen since 1939 when she had become the young wife of Mao Zedong (毛澤東) in Yenan, the Communists’ headquarters for 10 years before they entered Beijing in 1949. Introducing me, Ed remarked that she and I had much in common: “you are both actresses.” Jiang Qing’s face froze. She practically spit out, “I am NOT an actress!” (I retired behind Ed.) Nevertheless, she was indisputably head of the new “revolutionary model” theatre, therefore of great importance for the book I was to write.

Five revolutionary “model” operas and two ballets comprised the whole of the Chinese theatre at that time and she, Mme Mao, was in charge. The plots were pure political propaganda, simpler than fairytales; the actors trained in classic Beijing opera adapted to a modern, if stilted, stage technique replete with stunning acrobatics. Heroes were indefatigably heroic, villains were fabulously villainous – quite a different approach for me, a member of New York’s Actor’s Studio. There was also quite a bit of music, all Chinese; foreign composers like Beethoven and Mozart were politically taboo. Children’s dances and songs made up a different kind of entertainment, the little ones well trained and adorable.

On October 1st, 1970, National Day, I found myself on a balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square, Ed and I on either side of Mao Zedong. Nearby were Zhou Enlai, Cambodian Prince Sihanouk and a host of notables including Jiang Qing, Lin Biao (林彪) with his wife, to name a few of special interest considering what happened to them later. Turning to Sihanouk, I said that I wanted him to know that many Americans were against the war in Indochina. He replied, “When you go back, Madame, please tell the American people that every time a bomb is dropped, more Communists are created.”

Standing there I became aware of two particularly striking things (beside the fact that I was so close to Mao Zedong I could have touched the mole on his face). A vivid impression was the sense of worship rising from the mass of people below on the square, people screaming – just like with the Beatles, Sinatra, Michael Jackson – so it was with Mao Zedong. My attention then focused on a huge sign bearing the words, “People of the world unite to defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs.” Why were WE there, two Americans, side by side with the Chairman, before millions of Chinese citizens – and that sign? Afterwards Ed reminded me that the Chinese never do anything publicly without a reason. One December night we were awakened by Nancy Tang (唐聞生), Mao’s chief interpreter who, seeing a sleepy Ed, said “Please get dressed. The Chairman wants to see you.” It was during that midnight to near-dawn “conversation” – as Mao termed it – that the significance of our presence on the Tiananmen balcony became clear. We were the signal that Nixon could come to China. It took some time for that to sink in at the White House.

All along, Ed was unwell. Weakened by the operation in the spring, he had insisted on going to China by ignoring or putting up with pain and fatigue. Our Chinese companions urged us to take a week or two relaxing at the seaside resort of Beidaihe. Ed declined, saying that it would take too much time. Fixated on getting to basics, he wasn’t always patient with excessively long discussions of different versions of the Cultural Revolution. Once he slipped me a note on which he had written “Mao said Keep Meetings Short”! We spent a week at two of Beijing’s prestigious universities, Tsinghua and Beida, listening to students and professors recount tales of Red Guard fighting and upheaval on campus during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Ed was concerned by lack of forthcoming from people he had known who were justifying or covering up an unclear situation. Friends were evasive: when asked the whereabouts of a particular couple we had expected to see, the answer was, “They`re taking a trip, they`ll be back soon.” A revealing reply was “Better not bring that up.” An old Chinese acquaintance politely declined an invitation to come to our hotel for a visit, though others did come. But discretion, and caution, were obvious. Not until later did the hidden underside of the Cultural Revolution become fully revealed, and reticence – even among friends – become understandable.

Concerned as I was about Ed’s health and his determined efforts to get to the bottom of past and present events, I was excited by the China I was seeing: the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Ming Tombs, and the thrill of actually being on the Great Wall. I walked the wide, triple tree-lined streets of Beijing teaming with bicycles, watched the Little Red Soldiers – boys and girls too young to be Red Guards – standing at street corners and shouting through a microphone: “Don’t cross on red lights!”, “Use pedestrian crossings!” On a free hour it was fascinating to wander around narrow back lanes whose walls protected courtyards and low-roofed homes. A two-hour drive to Miyun dam north of Beijing on a tree-lined, paved road (trees were everywhere) took us past fertile countryside, orchards, tree nurseries and into villages with brick or mud houses, a primary school, fat pigs, and electricity supplied by the dam, which meant water and irrigation for the formerly arid area.

I was impressed, too, by working women “holding up half the sky” (or trying to); by small village hospitals, in need of paint, serviced by a dedicated barefoot doctor; by fruit-bearing orchards planted in earth-filled holes handmade out of solid rock. Ed described it as: “the physical transformation of the ancient Chinese earth by collective toil for the benefit of the group and not just for private gain – in a land which was second to none in the pursuit of personal aggrandizement and the devil take the hindmost.”

After visits to communes in Xian and Yenan, and a May 7th school where a Beijing professor was tending a strikingly clean pigsty, we were driven to Bao’an, the remote village in northern Shensi province where Ed had been in 1936 when it became the Red Army base after the Long March. It had been a desperately poor place, with a few ragged peasants scarcely able to feed themselves or their naked, unschooled children. The autumn we were there, Bao’an, a commune brigade, held some 3,000 citizens. A “model” opera was playing in the large theatre, the main street was lined with houses, cave homes dug out of the loess hills, a well-stocked general store, a handicraft shop, a power plant and a dentist’s office beside a small hospital. Goats and sheep grazed on the hills. We ate in the open with the people who had produced a special feast: corn on the cob, sweet potatoes, spicy chicken, melon and fresh fruit. Children ran about, people, young and old, gathered and stared. We and the village were on display. Bao’an’s general population looked amply fed and healthy. Still far from the amenities of modern life (I knew that by going to the “toilet”), they had pulled themselves up to achieve a decent, if frugal, standard of living.

We were the first foreigners to visit Bao’an in 34 years. It was I who had asked to go there, eager to see where Ed had first interviewed the outlawed Red “bandits.” It was no Potemkin village made up for an expected arrival. If I was inexperienced, I had a companion who, having spent years in China before “liberation” and months more in 1960 and 1964-65, could see changes that had often made immense differences. We were driven along a motor road that led us to Bao’an from Yenan. Ed described the roadless badlands he had walked over many years before as: “steep and interminable unkempt hills, divided by ravines, dry except in flood, with only here and there patches of grain and tumbledown caves.” He also wrote: “the countryside always had a better potential [...] part of that potential has now been realized, and the regenerated green-clad hills and narrow valleys are often breathtakingly beautiful.”

I had picked up a few Chinese sayings, among them “zi li geng sheng,” (自力更生) meaning “self-reliance.” The emphasis on self-reliance was born out of the struggle of a poor but proud nation to overcome the isolation imposed by Japanese invasion, the support America gave Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) during the Chinese civil war in the 1940s, and the U.S. economic blockade of many years following the Communist victory. It was how China sought to recover from such deprivation.

I concur with what Mark Seldon wrote in this series about “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.” On that first visit (there were quite a few more), whatever displeased me or made me uncomfortable was mainly due, I felt, to my totally different life experience. I hadn’t grown up hungry or illiterate, had never worked long hours in a factory, never labored in a rice paddy or gone without needed medical care. As an adult I had expressed opinions freely, voted for my choices, protested publicly, chosen my preferred career. Escorted through a rug factory where scores of women bent silently over work as we smilingly passed by, I was surprised to see one young woman deliberately staring at us with obvious hostility. I sympathized with her (I can still see that look). I had to remember what or where she might have been before the revolution: a child working 13 hours a day and sleeping under the workbench, a famished prostitute roaming city streets, an impoverished mother of undernourished children, a foot-bound slave to a domineering mother-in-law? China had overcome much, and there was much still to overcome. Bao’an was a good example.

There were other examples of overcoming, especially in the countryside. Differences were plentiful: medical care with barefoot doctors in remote areas, schools in communes, free education, free means of birth control, physical transformation of the ancient soil, and as Ed pointed out, for the communal group, not for private gain. That was 1970. Yes, there had been the Great Leap Forward with its tragic aftermath, when hunger had once again been a scourge, but since then almost-forgotten places like Bao’an and Shashihyu and others we saw had made noticeable progress.

If crop yields were sometimes exaggerated, women`s roles somewhat overstated or statistics unproven, sturdy stone and brick houses, reclaimed green fields and orchards gave evidence that hard work had made life better than ever before. When we were shown the best homes, those of families with a bicycle, perhaps a radio or a sewing machine, they pointed to what could be a similar future for others less advantaged. It was apparent that some units and some people could move ahead faster because of their own skills or possibly simply by hook or by crook. Communism didn’t guarantee equality or honesty any more than democracy does.

Early in the following year we were back together in Switzerland typing up months of notes, working on our books. Ed’s health slowly deteriorated. He died on February 14, 1972, two months after major surgery and just before Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit Communist China. No one could have saved Ed’s life. Desperate, I had sought help. Friends responded generously with messages of love, hope and offers of money if needed. Nixon, who for years had loudly proclaimed his hatred of China and who had played a prominent role in the McCarthy witch hunt, had his bags packed for the trip to Beijing. He sent a message referring to Ed’s “distinguished career” and expressing hope for his return to health. (We didn’t answer.)

Help came with a medical team – three doctors, four nurses, an interpreter – sent to our Swiss home by Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and their wives. They undertook the needed care, eased the pain, softened fear in the face of death. The difference was not better Chinese knowledge in treating cancer, it was in an attitude unlikely to be found in a busy hospital most anywhere. In our home, they had time and the ability to comfort, to care. Everyone in touch, friends nearby and abroad, our village neighbors, were affected by these men and women who had come to help. Our thanks poured out to them and to those who had made this gift possible, one I shall never forget.

Thus ended my first trip to China. Years have passed, people have died. In 1989 the Tiananmen massacre shocked the world. I broke with the Chinese leadership. I no longer visit, though my son and I made a special, and short, trip in 2000 to express sympathy and support for Ding Zilin (丁子霖) and the families of all those who, while participating in a peaceful demonstration, were murdered or severely injured by soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army following orders from the country’s leaders. In 1949 Mao had said: “China has stood up.” In 1989 Chinese citizens were shot down while trying once again to stand up.

Ding Zilin’s teenage son was killed the night of June 4th near Tiananmen while he was searching for a schoolmate; his mother has courageously and persistently called for an investigation of the massacre – so far to no avail. We were prevented from seeing her and the treatment my son and I received was, to put it mildly, far from cordial. Tiananmen was an outrage. Since then, learning nothing from that horrendous crime, the Chinese leaders have stepped up their persecution of peaceful dissidents and outspoken activists, intensified human rights abuses and multiplied unlawful arrests, imprisonments and forced disappearances. There is an increasing gap between the newly privileged, mostly urban rich and the still needy poor, a flagrant misuse of the judicial system and an absence of previous guarantees of livelihood.

I strongly feel the Chinese leaders misuse Edgar Snow when they praise the man who, at personal risk, broke through Chiang Kai-shek’s blockade and brought word of the outlawed revolutionaries to the Chinese people and the world. The government promotes Edgar Snow as a model. Any Chinese journalist knows full well not to write about whatever the government does not want investigated or revealed. In 1936 Ed made a trip to an area forbidden of access by the regime in power, that of Chiang Kai-shek. Doing the equivalent with the present government would mean years in prison. To protest peacefully is dangerous, as Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiao-bo (劉曉波) found out – eleven years in prison. Wei Jingsheng (魏京生) spent fifteen years behind bars and is now in exile. Wang Dan (王丹) and other student demonstrators at Tiananmen were jailed and exiled. The Tiananmen Mothers, headed by Ding Zilin, are under direct surveillance and are not allowed to publicly mourn their dead. At this writing, the noted Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei (艾未未), has disappeared. At present, if you were truly to emulate Edgar Snow in China you would be in deep trouble.

When giving consent for publication of “The Long Revolution,” which Ed had undertaken to write before he died, I wrote “This is an unfinished work – a beginning punctuated by the abrupt ending that death decreed for my husband. In it are the seeds of a new relationship between the people of China and America. If we nourish them they will grow.” That was written 40 years ago. Today both countries are engaged in capitalist competition. “Let the devil take the hindmost.”

yangharrylg

Roderick MacFarquhar (馬若德/麥克法夸爾) is the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science, and Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has been Chair of the Government Department (1998-2004) and Director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research (1986-1992; 2005-06). He was the founding editor of The China Quarterly. In previous personae, he has been a print journalist, a TV reporter, and a Member of Parliament in the U.K. He is working on a historical comparison of China and India.

I first applied for a visa to the People’s Republic of China* in 1955 as a fledgling journalist covering China for the London Daily Telegraph. On the few occasions I visited the PRC mission in London I was always told that they had not heard from Beijing; I had visions of an exhausted Chinese courier trekking across Siberia en route London with the reply held in his cleft stick. Seventeen years later, I finally got that visa.

The occasion was a goodwill visit by UK Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home to mark the elevation of relations to full ambassador status. Britain had recognized the PRC in 1950, but the Chinese government had not agreed to an exchange of ambassadors at that time. Finally in 1971, the two governments negotiated an end to this stalemate. The process had been marred by Prime Minister Heath’s fury at the lack of advance warning of the plans for the Nixon visit which he felt undercut the British negotiators, but agreement was reached, and Sir John Addis took up his post as the first UK ambassador in early 1972. A scholarly diplomat, Sir John had compiled the book “Communist China, 1955-59: Policy Documents and Analysis” while a fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs in 1962-3, but because of his diplomatic status, the credit for authorship was assigned to John Fairbank and Robert Bowie. Sir John is better remembered for his considerable expertise in Chinese porcelain, some of his collection now being housed in the British Museum.

The Home mission was designed to set the seal on the new relationship and it naturally attracted a large group of journalists, including my late wife Emily MacFarquhar, the China specialist on the Economist. I was a research fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs, no longer a journalist, no longer the editor of The China Quarterly, but the Institute’s director, Andrew Schonfield, paid my way to go as the “correspondent” of the Institute’s monthly magazine The World Today, which actually had no correspondents. The Chinese duly gave me a visa, but on arrival in Guangzhou in October 1972, one of our MFA minders, later an ambassador to a major western power, looked me sternly in the eye and told me that since this was a goodwill visit, the Chinese had decided to admit anyone whom the British said was a journalist. In other words, don’t try this trick again! Later we became friends after a mao tai “gan bei” contest which ended in a draw (seven all if I remember). Generally, the vibes of the trip, coming as it did after the Nixon visit and China’s entry into the UN, were very positive, but I don’t remember learning anything new from our discreet minders about current politics.

We flew first to Shanghai where the delegation, hacks included, was treated to a splendid banquet, with a large ice swan in the middle of the table. When I later remarked on this meal to a Chinese in Beijing, he patronisingly replied that it was true that the Shanghainese did make their food “look” good. We visited a suburban commune, clearly on the tourist route as the signs for the lavatories were in English, and Emily questioned the responsible cadre concerned about the wages and status of women. She was so excited at finally being able to speak the Chinese she had learned at Harvard and honed in Taiwan that she eventually became totally hoarse, and at subsequent sites, one or other of our colleagues would chime in with ‘Let me ask Mrs. MacFarquhar’s question’! Later, at the Capital Hospital, she was treated--at her request--with Chinese herbal remedies, but since the doctors also insisted on giving her western medication, she was unable to gauge their effectiveness.

Other experiences included witnessing an operation with acupuncture anesthesia and visiting the setting for the CCP’s 1st Congress, but our most interesting times occurred when we had some blessed free play and we wandered off with another journalist (whom we met next in 1979 transformed into an acolyte at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Pune). In back streets we found local citizens digging the crude air raid shelters which the party had ordered as a precaution against a Soviet surprise attack. It reminded me a bit of the shelters which inhabitants of Jinmen had in their houses to protect themselves against mainland shelling. Later we were taken to the far more professionally constructed shelters under Beijing.

In the capital, housed in the Beijing Hotel, the journalists were assigned to a fleet of cars, two to a vehicle, according to an order of precedence apparently based on the Chinese estimate of the prestige of each hack’s publication. As just a notional “correspondent,” I should probably been in the rear car, but the officials relented sufficiently to let me travel with Emily. If I remember correctly, David Aikman, as a British citizen but the employee of an American publication, Time, was regarded as an anomaly and therefore did bring up the rear.

In our hierarchical convoy, we went to another (Kim Ilsong) commune and were driven a long way out of Beijing to watch army manoeuvres, perhaps to rub in the point that the Chinese were determined to defend themselves against the Soviet “social imperialists.” From that drive, I remember: a construction team beside the road with the obligatory red flags fluttering; the way in which truck drivers coming our way chickened us into accepting their right to the center of the road; in this barely motorised economy, drivers tried to stay in top gear at all times even when their cars were juddering to a halt.

We hacks (as British journalists are often described, even by themselves) had a visit to the People’s Daily where we were told that sometimes the PD was a morning paper and sometimes an evening paper, a reflection of the need in those uncertain times to respond to sudden developments. And of course we were taken to the Great Wall, the Ming tombs, and the Palace Museum. During the latter visit, I told an official that I had just written a book entitled “The Forbidden City” (a coffee table book in a Newsweek series “Wonders of Man”) and had an advance copy which I would like to present to the museum director. A day or two later, I was whisked back to the museum and received by a deputy director. He told me we were meeting in a room which had been used by the Empress Dowager for theatricals, but which from the sounds emanating from the walls seemed now to be a home for large numbers of mice. Despite this interesting tidbit, it soon became clear to me that the deputy director had a very shaky grasp of Chinese imperial history and must be a reliable political appointee. He probably had no interest in my book, but he accepted the gift nevertheless, so mission accomplished.

Zhou Enlai (周恩來) gave the delegation a banquet, shook all our hands--a “zongli hao” from me elicited a sharp look but nothing more--and posed with us for a photo op. Years later I was told that the Chinese had expected Home to ask to see Mao and that they would have agreed, but the British never asked and so we were deprived of even a glimpse of the Chairman.

But politically the high point of the visit for me was the 50th birthday banquet for Prince (as he then was) Sihanouk of Cambodia. At the last minute, a few of us managed to get invitations and we lined up in the Great Hall of the People waiting for the VIPs to arrive. Zhou Enlai entered with Sihanouk, then Jiang Qing (江青) with Princess Monique, followed by Vice Premier Li Xiannian (李先念), Foreign Minister Ji Pengfei (姬鵬飛), and a handsome, rosy-cheeked young man in military uniform who looked as if he had just stepped off the stage of a model opera.

The two women stood to one side while the four men moved round the circle of assembled ambassadors, shaking hands. I asked a Beijing based (presumably East) German correspondent who was the young man shaking hands. He didn’t know but suggested it might be the interpreter. The idea that the Chinese would so dignify a mere interpreter seemed absurd so I turned for enlightenment to a Chinese cadre. He said that it was Wang Hongwen (王洪文). When I asked why the Shanghai chief PLA political commissar would be in Beijing, he said he didn’t know. In fact, that was Wang’s first public appearance in the capital and gave us China watchers a foretaste of what was to come.

After that, everything was pretty anti-climactic, though we hacks did give our minders a merry return banquet, the scene of that mao tai contest. But the day we left Guangzhou for Hong Kong, I got a further instance of the more relaxed atmosphere that had followed Mao’s discomfiture over the Lin Biao (林彪) affair. In Beijing, I had handed the stern minder a copy of my newly published edited volume, “Sino-American Relations, 1949-1971.” In Guangzhou, he told me that he had read Donald Klein’s chapter on the shredding of the Foreign Ministry during the Cultural Revolution, and that it was out of date: 50% of the personnel losses had been made up and within another year, the ministry would be back to full strength. On that note of bureaucratic optimism, we left China. I never did “correspond” with The World Today but I did contribute a brief article on the visit to the People’s Daily to The China Quarterly.

While preparing for my first visit to the PRC, I had remembered a short story (by Somerset Maugham?) about a criminal whose devoted wife had visited him in prison every day of his long sentence; but the day he was released, he walked out of the prison gate and straight past her. He had become sick of the sight of her. After years of studying the PRC, would I be totally turned off when I finally got there? Fortunately not!

* I say PRC because I visited China with my parents as a child.

yangharrylg

Thomas D. Gorman (高德思) has been a Hong Kong resident since 1974. His company, CCI Asia-Pacific Ltd., has published FORTUNE China under exclusive license from Time Inc. since 1996. He is the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of the magazine, which is published 18 times per year in print. The magazine’s website is www.FortuneChina.com.

Canton Trade Fair

With a sense of great excitement, on an early morning in April 1975, I embarked on the full day, 80-mile train journey from Hong Kong to Guangzhou , starting from the old Kowloon train station next to the Star Ferry, where the clock tower stands today.

After seven years of Chinese studies in the U.S., I was excited at long last to be going someplace where Putonghua was widely spoken. I had obtained an invitation to attend the Canton Trade Fair as a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong’s delegation, despite being the assistant editor of a Hong Kong-based trade magazine.

Invitations were not easy to come by, especially for journalists; and visas were only granted to those with invitations. In Hong Kong, invitations were issued by the local arm of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, China Resources, whose offices were then in the old Bank of China Building on Bank Street in Central District, where portraits of Marx, Lenin, Engels and Stalin welcomed visitors from above a pair of ping pong tables – premises currently occupied by the China Club.

Travelling from Hong Kong to Guangzhou required boarding the early morning train from the Kowloon station, which brought you into Luohu(Lowu) in time to connect with the afternoon train to Guangzhou. No other transport connection was available. This was before the era of airplane, ferry, and highway links. The fastest way to get from Hong Kong to Beijing involved taking the train to Guangzhou, and an overnight there in order to catch a flight the following day.

After clearing exit formalities on the Hong Kong side of the Shenzhen River at Luohu, passengers walked with their luggage across the quaint, covered wooden bridge – with the PRC flag waving ahead , and the Hong Kong flag flapping behind -- and began entry formalities on the China side.

There was a distinctly slower pace on the Chinese side. Emerging from the covered bridge, it felt as if a giant stereo turntable had been stepped down from 78 r.p.m. to 16 r.p.m. Not only was the pace different, but also the sights, smells and sounds. The Shenzhen River was not very wide, as rivers go, but crossing it at that point brought you into a very different world.

From the windows of the train station complex on the Chinese side one gazed out at a sleepy farming community, one corner of a People’s Commune, with wallowing water buffalo, ducks dotting mulberry tree-lined fish ponds, rice paddies, and low brick buildings. This hamlet was the forerunner of Shenzhen, although it wouldn’t be named Shenzhen for another five years or so. This was Bao An.

The advertising billboards near the Hong Kong side of the border were replaced by political billboards on the mainland side, with messages like “We have friends all over the world,” “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai,” “Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere,” “Long live Chairman Mao,” “ Serve the people,” etc.

There were many forms to be filled out. The tempo of inbound customs and immigration formalities was slow, but the reward was a sumptuous 12-course Chinese banquet served to all foreign guests within the cavernous low-rise train station complex. After lunch there was time to relax in a room filled with plush antimacassar-backed armchairs with spittoons at their base, beneath a huge Chinese landscape painting captioned “The welcoming guests’ pine tree.” Light blue enamel ceiling fans whooshed lazily overhead.

The spittoons, long since disappeared, were a unique feature of the design motif of meeting rooms. The standard spittoon had a white enamel finish with a stripe of bright red trim around its mouth and a cheery blue floral pattern circling its bulbous midriff. They were the bass note in the triumvirate of receptacles which awaited visitors in every conference room: spittoons, porcelain-lidded tea cups, and ashtrays. Local cigarettes featured copious quantities of red in their packaging, with brand names like Worker-Peasant (工農), Red Lantern(紅燈), Bumper Harvest(豐收), Unite(團結), Glorious (光榮), Great Production (大生產), Great Leap(飛躍), Hero(勇士), Red Flag(紅旗), and Labor(勞動).

After lunch and the rest break (everything ground to a halt during mid-day nap time), came the 2 ½ hour train trip to Guangzhou, which delivered passengers there between 3 and 4 pm. The view from the train windows was overwhelmingly agricultural: no paved roads or high-rise buildings, virtually no factories, and few mechanized vehicles.

At the train station in Guangzhou I was met by a representative of my host organization. Chinese people who had reason to talk to foreigners, and approval to do so, introduced themselves by surname only. Strictly speaking, the proper term of address was “Comrade,” as in Comrade Li , Comrade Wang , etc.

Name cards were not yet in use among the Chinese side, ostensibly because they would have divulged an excessive amount of potentially sensitive information, such as names, addresses, and phone numbers. For ordinary Chinese to be accused of having unauthorized contact with foreigners (li tong wai guo 裡通外國) was a very serious matter indeed; which meant that the emphasis was on institutional rather than individual communications. Spontaneous street-level conversations with foreigners carried serious risks for local Chinese.

The weather report was classified because it was deemed to be sensitive information of potential value to hostile foreign military forces.

All foreigners were mandated to stay in the Dong Fang Hotel. To find a friend or colleague in the hotel required checking the cork bulletin boards in the lobby, where new arrivals would post their business card with the room number scrawled on it. There were no telephones or air conditioners in the rooms. The best rooms, in the Old Wing of the Dong Fang, were more spacious and came equipped with a tent-like mosquito net which hung over the bed.

The telephone played virtually no role in doing business in China at the time. Instead, telex, telegrams and letters – all impersonally addressed to avoid getting the Chinese recipient in trouble -- were the available communications conduits for the conduct of commerce. A private telephone was such a rarified, elite device that the telephone book was also considered a state secret.

China’s total foreign trade volume was a pittance – her “total” imports and exports in 1973 were less than US$11 billion. That’s roughly equivalent to the volume of her luxury goods imports alone in 2010 –which represents a staggering degree of qualitative as well as quantitative change in less than 40 years.

In 1975, all foreign trade and economic decisions were concentrated among a handful of high-level bureaucrats in Beijing, and implemented through 12 highly centralized, monopoly state-owned import-export corporations under the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Foreign trade was largely an extension of foreign policy, and viewed as a kind of necessary evil.

Foreign investment was taboo. Words like “advertising,” “marketing,” and “competition” were regarded with obvious disdain, trumped only by the ultra-sinister word “profit.”

The Dong Fang Hotel during the trade fair housed a motley collection of people from every corner of the globe. Gaggles of folks wearing colorful native costumes shuttled between meals in the hotel restaurant and the sprawling trade fair complex situated across Xicun Road. The incredible diversity of the delegates was a bit reminiscent of the intergalactic bar scene in “Star Wars,” except that bars were not permitted in China at the time.

Delegates were required to wear pink ribbons on their lapels, demonstrating they were authorized to enter the trade fair complex. The pink lapel ribbons added a festive, slightly comical touch, as if the wearer had won the competition at a county fair for growing the biggest pumpkin or baking the best apple pie.

After arriving in the Dong Fang that first afternoon, and filling out another small forest worth of forms, in a room dedicated to form-filling for foreigners, it was almost time for dinner. Meals were served at fixed times, with set menus. Good, cold Qingdao beer was available; Coca Cola and coffee were not. Foreign guests were fed like kings and queens compared to ordinary Chinese people, who could be seen queuing at food shops around the city with ration tickets in hand.

Then it was time for an early evening. There was no place to go after dinner other than sit and talk with colleagues, send telexes, play table tennis or billiards. An upstairs dining room in the new wing of the Dong Fang was converted into an ersatz bar serving local beverages, which regulars affectionately nicknamed “The Purple Cockatoo,” fantasizing about a far more enticing ambience than that which actually awaited them: hospital green walls, bright white lights, and plain cotton tablecloths.

So, that first evening I turned in early, excited about what the next day might bring. Finally, after all these years of study, my first full day in China lay just ahead of me.

What am I doing here?

My first trip to China had unlikely origins at an unlikely time: in the suburbs of Chicago, during the 1960s.

In the summer of 1966, the U.S. and China were ensconced in a hostile, non-conversational relationship. China was in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. American news media at the time referred to the mainland as Red China or Communist China.

Against that backdrop, that summer I received an IBM print-out from my high school suggesting that my second year courses would include Mandarin Chinese.
For a high schooler in the American Midwest in the mid-1960s to study the language of Red China was considered weird at best, and possibly suspect. The anti-Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era were very fresh in people’s memories.

One neighbor, commenting on my studying Chinese, asked me what I was going to do with that when I grew up: open a laundry, or a take-away joint? Another warned of possible communist brainwashing buried in the language texts. Some peers gave me nicknames which would be considered politically incorrect today.

I didn’t realize that my study of Chinese was part of a new but temporarily short-lived trend. During the mid-1960s, more than 300 American secondary schools (and a handful of primary schools) began offering Chinese language courses, mainly as a result of federal funds made available under the National Defense Education Act. NDEA provided funding for new programs in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Japanese studies, because these four groups were deemed most likely to be on the wrong side of future military conflicts with the U.S.

My high school was one of three in the Chicago area to get on the early Chinese language bandwagon. Within a few years, however, the NDEA funding for these programs had expired , and most of them were discontinued. My timing was thus fortunate. After three years of Chinese in high school, I became an East Asian Studies major at Princeton.

Shock and awe

Imagine, then, my shock and awe that humid April morning in Guangzhou, when I was rudely awakened at 6 a.m., by piercingly loud, searingly shrill broadcasts from loudspeakers in the streets outside the window of my room in the new wing of the Dong Fang Hotel. What a way to start the day, with the latest thoughts of Chairman Mao recited by a high-pitched female announcer with a staccato style reminiscent of a dentist’s drill. That particular morning, her focus was on denouncing Confucius, Lin Biao, and – much closer to home – American Imperialists and their running dogs.

I looked out the window to see a river of blue and gray Mao-jacketed bicyclists for whom this breakfast broadcast was a regular daily routine.

“Down with American Imperialists and Their Running Dogs!” (“Dadao meidiguo zhuyi jiqi zou gou!“「打倒美帝國主義及其走狗!」)

There was some solace in the fact that I could understand most of the message, which proved my Chinese language studies had not been in vain. On the other hand, it was not exactly a welcoming message, especially given the method, volume and tone of its delivery.

Still only half awake as the harsh denunciation sunk home, I thought to myself: “ I’m pretty sure I’m not an imperialist …but I’m not so sure what exactly constitutes a running dog.”

The irony hit hard. A few years ago at home, I’d been teased about studying the language of Red China, marginally at risk of being labelled a pinko or commie sympathizer. Now that my journey had finally brought me to China, it seemed I was now being labelled an imperialist running dog.

All meetings, with Americans at least, were scripted to begin with a critical political diatribe from the Chinese side. Especially given the lack of business cards or job title information from the Chinese side, it was always a guessing game as to who the senior person on their side was.

Interpreters on the Chinese side were generally young and understandably lacking in international experience. Given the politics of the day and its impact on language instruction, they were more familiar with British than American English. Language misadventures and snafus were commonplace.

In one long, tedious meeting between my Amcham delegation and a fairly senior Chinese foreign trade official, our delegation leader rattled off a long laundry list of practical trade issues. The young Chinese interpreter rendered these into Chinese with a fair degree of fluency, although he was clearly becoming fatigued as the detailed laundry list dragged on through the afternoon heat and humidity. At one point the Chinese official said something to the effect that perhaps in due course the “relevant departments” (「有關部門」) might consider looking into the matter.

At this stage the impatient American interlocutor, fond of using big business slang, responded “That sounds fine, Comrade, but I sure hope someone’s actually gonna put wheels under it.”

The weary interpreter took that to mean that the American now had a proposal regarding the automotive industry. This elicited a barely tolerant grunt from the Chinese official, and from that point on, the conversation veered off into a series of non-sequiturs in the remote reaches of outer space. Both groups left the meeting in a state of puzzlement.

My return to Hong Kong after this first visit to China elicited a wave of curious questions from friends and associates, no doubt similar to what astronaut Neil Armstrong must have faced after his return from the moon.

I consider myself very fortunate to have witnessed that extraordinary stage of China’s history first-hand. I’ve lived in Hong Kong and continued my travels in China ever since that trip. Those early experiences are very helpful to the process of appreciating the phenomenal changes in China since that era.

yangharrylg

Winston Lord (洛德) served as the US Ambassador to China from 1985-1989 and Assistant Secretary of State from 1993-1997.

The First American Official to Visit China since 1949
Certainly, the single most dramatic event that I've been involved in had to do with the opening to China in the early 1970s. In my entire career the question of relations with China has been the most important, including not only the work I did in the 1970s but also as Ambassador to China and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs. So China has been the single, most important aspect of my career as it has evolved.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger each came into office placing a high priority on making an opening to China. They had independently come to this conclusion. Nixon had indicated this in his article in "Foreign Affairs." We know, in retrospect, that he felt that this was a high priority. Kissinger felt the same way, primarily because of the Soviet dimension, but for a variety of other reasons.

Nixon sent Kissinger a memo on February 1, 1969, approximately one week after his inauguration as President. I can't reconstruct this memo verbatim, but basically he instructed Kissinger to find a way to get in touch with the Chinese. This was one of the earliest instructions that Kissinger got from Nixon. Of course, Kissinger was all in favor of doing this. We had the following challenge, among a lot of other challenges. You have to remember that we had had 20 years of mutual hostility and just about total isolation from China. We had no way of communicating directly with the Chinese.

The only way to get in touch with the Chinese was through third parties. There were various channels that Nixon and Kissinger tried to use to get word to the Chinese. I don't remember the precise chronology, but it became clear, certainly by 1971, that the Pakistani channel was the one to follow. We began to do it through Hilaly, the Pakistani Ambassador to Washington, who would come to us with hand-written messages from the Chinese, passed through Islamabad to him. He would bring these messages into Kissinger's office, and we would prepare hand-written messages back.

There was one exchange in Warsaw, in which the Chinese indicated, more or less on the record and through that channel, that they would be willing to see an American emissary come to China. We finally got to the point in these messages where the Chinese agreed that an American emissary would come and talk about a possible trip to China by President Nixon. The emissary would not only talk about Taiwan but about other matters as well. This was the breakthrough, in the spring of 1971.Once we had established that this was not just a single issue agenda, that they were willing to consider a Nixon trip, and that they were prepared to receive an American emissary first, then we could begin to get concrete.

Kissinger chose three people to go to China with him. Myself, as a sort of global sidekick, John Holdridge as the Asia and China expert, and Dick Smyser, as the Vietnam expert. The Vietnam issue would be a significant factor in the discussions in China. Those were the four, including Kissinger himself, whom he chose to go into China, as well as two Secret Service agents.

Now, as you recall, there was a publicly announced trip that Kissinger took. It included Vietnam, Thailand, India, and Pakistan. Then Kissinger was supposed to return to Washington through Paris. That was the public itinerary. However, the game plan was to go off secretly to Beijing from Pakistan and by pleading illness and the need to go to a Pakistani hill station to spend a couple of days allegedly recuperating while, in fact, Kissinger was secretly going into China. Ironically, Kissinger came down with a real stomach-ache in India, and so he actually was sick in advance of this secret trip. He covered this up as much as possible, because he wanted to save his real illness until he arrived in Pakistan.

A lot of material has already been published about how this secret trip to China worked out. However, this is how the secret trip worked.

We went publicly to Pakistan in July 1971. There was a public banquet the first night. We went back to the government guest house. We packed and, at about 3:00 AM we were driven to the Islamabad airport by the Pakistani Foreign Minister I believe - Sultan Khan. It seems that they're all named Khan. I've seen him since. We went to President Yahya Khan's plane. Apparently, there was one reporter from some news service who thought he saw us and reported this to his editor. The editor said that the reporter was crazy and spiked [rejected] the story. I wonder what happened to that guy's career.

The plan was to be gone on this secret trip to China for 48 hours. We got on Yahya Khan's airplane. Let me talk about the cover story. We took off for China and we left about 4:00 AM. On that morning the story was put out that Kissinger was not feeling well and, at the invitation of the Pakistanis, he was going up to a hill station [mountain resort] to recuperate for a day. There was a Secret Service agent in a car, slumped over. It wasn't supposed to be an impersonation but he played Kissinger up to the hill station and, I believe, Hal Saunders was with him. So there was a motorcade going up to the hill station. All of this was done fairly early in the morning so that there were no journalists around.

Arrangements were to be made for a Pakistani doctor to attend to Kissinger at the hill station. This doesn't make much sense to me but the way I heard this story, the Pakistanis asked one doctor: "Do you know what Henry Kissinger looks like?" He said: "Yes." They said: "We're sorry, but you're the wrong man." So they get another one. In addition, a couple of Pakistani cabinet ministers who were in on this charade went up to the hill station as if they were paying a call on Kissinger.

Meanwhile, of course, we were in China. At the end of that day the Pakistanis put out a communique saying that Kissinger still didn't feel very well and was going to stay another day at the hill station. This meant that our whole, public schedule in Islamabad had to be slipped because we were supposed to leave Pakistan for Paris on the following day. So the rest of the schedule had to be slipped a day. So that was the cover on that front. I don't how many people besides Hal Saunders knew about this, but he and Ambassador Farland were the key men in this respect.

Returning to our travel, Smyser, Holdridge, Kissinger, and I, plus two Secret Service agents, named Reedy and McLeod arrived at the airport in Islamabad. Reedy was the senior Secret Service agent, and he knew where we were going as we went to the airport. The other Secret Service agent had no idea. We boarded the plane and found four Chinese already seated there. I may be exaggerating this in retrospect but I believe that McLeod went to draw his pistol, because he was so surprised to see these Chinese on the airplane.

One of the four Chinese in the plane was Zhang Wen-jin (章文晋), an Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs in charge of American affairs and a key negotiator with us, just below the Foreign Minister level. He helped to draft the Shanghai Communique. He was a very cultured man. He was later Ambassador to the United States. He was the senior Chinese official in this group which was already on the plane. There were also a Chinese Protocol Officer, a grand-niece of Mao named Wang Hai-rung (王海容), and Nancy Tang (唐聞生), an interpreter. There were six of us in our party.

During some of the plane trip Kissinger was studying his briefing books. During some of the time he was talking to Zhang, and he switched back and forth between these two occupations. I've always made a lot of jokes about this, but Kissinger was genuinely upset by the fact that he had no extra shirts with him. He had a special, personal assistant named David Halperin, who had packed his suitcase but didn't put any shirts in. So I've always said that, instead of worrying about this historic trip and what he was going to say to Zhou En-lai about geopolitics he was fuming about his missing shirts. He really was upset about his shirts. He borrowed a couple of shirts from John Holdridge, who stands about 6' 3" in height. Kissinger is about 5' 9", so he looked like a penguin walking around in one of John's shirts. He really was upset. Here it was, an historic moment, and he felt that he was would look ridiculous. He was really mad at a time when you would think that this would not be a big deal. However, in human terms you could see that at this most important and dramatic time, when he was meeting Zhou En-lai, he would be upset to look ridiculous in this shirt. And, of course, the shirts he borrowed from John Holdridge had a label that said, "Made in Taiwan."

Anyway, we were sitting on the plane. I forget how long the flight was. Perhaps seven or eight hours or maybe less than that. Here is a well-known story from this trip. I've always tried to make it sound better than it was. I should tell it as it actually happened. Dick Smyser and I were sitting ahead of Kissinger in the back of the plane. The air crew, of course, was composed of Pakistani cabin attendants and Pakistani pilots, navigators, and flight engineers. No American official had been in China since 1949, so we would be the first American officials to visit China in 22 years. By my good fortune Smyser was called to the back of the plane by Kissinger for consultations just before we got to the border between China and Pakistan. All of the others, in addition to Smyser but not including me, were in the back of the plane with Kissinger. So, as we crossed the border, I was in the front of the plane. So I've said ever since then, in case the question should ever come up, that I was the first American official to visit China since 1949! I've said, on some occasions, that I deliberately raced to the front of the plane to do that, but that's slightly gilding the lilly.

Obviously, there was a great sense of drama. As the sun came up, we were passing K-2, the second highest mountain in the world. It was right outside our window, with the sun on it. Remember, we were in a Pakistani plane with the usual windows. We had left the nearly windowless KC-135 jet back at Islamabad. There was a sense of drama that we were going to the most populous country in the world, after 22 years and there were all of the geopolitical implications of that. There was the anticipation of meeting with Zhou En-lai, this great figure, and there was the excitement and anticipation of those talks. There were James Bond aspects of this trip, since it was totally secret. For me, personally, there was the realization that I was the first American official to visit China in 22 years and that I was married to a woman from Shanghai. I'll never top this experience in terms of drama.

Of course, we spent a good deal of time on the plane, discussing what the strategy would be in talking with Zhou En-lai and the Chinese. I had read very carefully the materials we had prepared over the previous several months. I don't have the precise time with me, but we landed at the military side of the airport outside of Beijing. We were met by Marshall Yeh Jien-ying (葉劍英), a well-known Chinese general from the Long March. I don't know whether he was on the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, but he was a very important figure. So that was a fairly high level reception. Also there to greet us was Huang Hua (黃華), who was later Chinese Foreign Minister. We entered limousines with curtains drawn, so people couldn't see into them. Then we drove into Beijing through Tiananmen Square and past the Great Hall of the People to a place called Diaoyutai, which is the guest house compound for very important visitors. We were then secretly ensconced there.

I don't recall how soon it was before Zhou En-lai came over to greet us, but I'm sure that it was right away. We had a banquet that night, sitting around with Zhou En-lai. We had discussions with him which, according to Kissinger's book, lasted for 17 hours. We were in China for a total of 49 hours.

The major challenge, of course, was to work out an agreement that President Nixon would visit China and to develop some rough sense of what the agenda would be. We agreed in principle that there would be just a brief announcement, which both sides would issue simultaneously, after we got back to Washington.

However, the real negotiating, and this went on for hours, was about the following. We wanted to make it look essentially that the Chinese wanted President Nixon to come to China. The Chinese essentially wanted to make it look as if Nixon wanted to come to China and that the Chinese were gracious enough to invite him. So we went through our first, agonizing process of negotiation on that issue. At one point we broke off the negotiation, not in a huff, but just recognizing that we were at an impasse. We thought that the Chinese were coming back to the negotiations within a couple of hours. Kissinger and I and the others walked around outside, because we knew that we were being bugged, and we couldn't discuss strategy and tactics unless we walked outside. Probably the trees were bugged, too. Who knows? I remember that we waited for hours and hours. The Chinese were probably trying to keep us off balance and were probably working out their own position. Most likely, Zhou En-lai had to check with Mao Zedong.

Finally, the Chinese came back, and we resumed the discussion and worked this issue out. I forget the exact language used in the brief communique which was made public. The formulation used went something like this: "Knowing of President Nixon's interest in visiting China..." And in fact he had expressed an interest in visiting China in general. The formulation went on that the Chinese had invited him. So it wasn't as if the Chinese wanted Nixon to come to China and were going out of their way. They used the formulation that they invited him because they had heard about his interest in visiting China. On the other hand, Nixon wasn't begging to go to China. So it was a fair compromise. This matter was covered in a few sentences, essentially, but it was tough to work out.

In the midst of this negotiation we also did some sightseeing. The Chinese closed off the Forbidden City of Beijing to tourists so that we could visit it privately and on our own. We had the head of the Chinese Archeological Museum and an expert on the area take us around personally as our guide. I'll never forget it. It was a very hot, mid-July day. I was carrying either one or two of these very heavy briefcases. We had to take them everywhere with us. We didn't dare leave them anywhere for security reasons. Of course, it was dramatic to see the Forbidden City all by ourselves. It was also very hot, carrying those damned briefcases around.

After that we had a Peking Duck luncheon-banquet hosted by Zhou in the Great Hall, I think.. The main topic of conversation was, in fact, the Cultural Revolution. Here we saw just how clever Zhou En-lai was. We know that he, himself, was aghast at the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, which had been unleashed by Mao. At one point he himself had been imprisoned in his office by Red Guards. However, he hadn't survived this long by suddenly being disloyal to Mao and on an issue of that importance.

The way Zhou recounted this experience was basically as follows. He went through how he had been locked up in his own office. He talked about some of the exchanges he had had with the Red Guards, in a very clinical way. He then used some phrasing like the following. He said: "Chairman Mao is, of course, much more far-seeing and prescient than I am. He saw the need for the 'Cultural Revolution' and all this upheaval and destruction to 'cleanse' the revolution." I don't recall exactly how he phrased it. Zhou continued: "I wasn't so prescient. I saw the excesses, the problems, and the down side." He said something like that.

If Mao read the transcript of what Zhou said, he couldn't have complained, because Zhou En-lai was saying that Mao had a better vision than Zhou did and saw the need for the Cultural Revolution. At the same time Zhou was signaling to us that the Cultural Revolution had gotten out of hand, had become rather brutal, and there were excesses. So it was a typical example of cleverness by Zhou En-lai. He was keeping his flank protected with Mao but was also making sure that the people he was talking to knew that he was a much more reasonable and pragmatic person. It was a fascinating performance. I'm sorry that Smyser missed it because he was sick.

When we finished drafting the communique, we got back on the plane and returned to Pakistan. We successfully re-inserted ourselves in the charade which had been worked out in Islamabad. We then went on to Paris the next day. It so happens, and we'll get back to this, that while we were publicly in Paris, we secretly snuck off and met with the Vietnamese Communists. Indeed, this was one of the more forthcoming meetings with them. Afterwards Kissinger and I thought, somewhat naively, that we had pulled off two, historic encounters in one trip: the opening toward China and moving toward settling the Vietnam War. That latter idea was a wildly premature judgment. I remember that we debated which was the more historic and important, getting the war over with or arranging for the opening to China. We said, wasn't it a great achievement to do both in one trip?

Meanwhile, I had brought back with me for my Chinese wife a small sampling of Chinese soil.


Postscript:

This trip, four decades ago, set up President Nixon's historic visit in February 1972. The opening of relations between our two nations caused tectonic shifts in the global geopolitical landscape. It has proved to be one of the seminal events since World War II.

There were immediate repercussions, including a dramatic improvement in relations between Moscow and Washington. In the 1970s and 1980s Sino-American ties were driven importantly by the shared goal of balancing the Soviet Union. Since the end of the Cold War our foundations have broadened greatly, with increasing areas of cooperation, competition, and conflict.

Today and for coming decades our bilateral relationship is arguably the most consequential and complex in the world.


[Photo caption: "Banquet at guest house the first night of the secret trip to Peking, July 1971." Clockwise from the author(at the lower left-hand corner): John Holdridge, Henry Kissinger, Dick Smyser, an unknown Chinese official, Wang Hai-rung(王海容), Yeh Jien-ying(葉劍英), Ji Chao-zhu(冀朝鑄), Zhou En-lai(周恩來), Nancy Tang(唐聞生), Huang Hua(黃華), an unknow Chinese official, and Zhang Wen-jin(章文晋).]

yangharrylg

John Kamm (康原) is an American businessman and human rights campaigner active in China since 1972. He is the founder and chairman of The Dui Hua Foundation, based in San Francisco California with an office in Hong Kong. Kamm was awarded the Department of Commerce’s Best Global Practices Award by President Bill Clinton in 1997 and the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights by President George W. Bush in 2001. In September 2004, Kamm received a MacArthur Fellowship for “designing and implementing an original approach to freeing prisoners of conscience in China.” Kamm is the first businessman to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, which recognizes “individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary originality and dedication to their creative pursuits and who have contributed importantly to society through their work.” (Photo: Karen L. Ding -- The Harvard Crimson)

I left America for Macau in August 1972, and by the end of 1975 I had lived most of the time in Hong Kong, and hadn’t had an opportunity to travel to the mainland. My chance came in January 1976 when, as a freshly minted representative of the National Council for US-China Trade, I was asked to go to Shanghai to attend the China Feather and Down Garments Minifair (中國羽絨服飾小交易會) put on by the China National Native Produce and Animal By-Products Import and Export Corporation (CHINATUHSHU, 中國土產畜產進出口公司). My visa only came through at the last possible moment, enabling me to make the flight to Shanghai from Guangzhou on January 6.

After crossing the border at Lowu, and waiting for several hours in the train station’s dining area from which one could view a drab farming village (the future Shenzhen) in the distance, I and fellow trade fair attendees took the train up to Guangzhou. I was accompanied by a young American entrepreneur who had become a leader in manufacturing down garments, then quite the rage in America, and an Australian businessman and scholar and his wife. Upon arrival at the Guangzhou train station we hopped into grey Shanghai sedans for the run to the airport. We arrived at Hong Qiao Airport in Shanghai after nightfall, but there was no one to receive me.

Eventually Mr. Ma from the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Bureau materialized and I was taken to the Shanghai Mansions, the old Broadway Mansions, where the trade fair was taking place. I was given an immense apartment with balconies overlooking the Whampoo, Suzhou Creek and the Bund. There was a big radio circa early 1940s in the living room.

The next day, January 7, I visited the trade fair itself, and registered with the liaison office. One of my jobs was to write an article on the minifair for the National Council’s magazine, so I put in a request for an interview with the trade fair’s leadership. My request received a cool reception. I was told to go to my room and wait for an answer. This was a sensitive time for people doing business in China, and minifairs, an innovation introduced as a modest reform in 1975, were under fire as examples of the “roots of capitalism” being introduced by Deng Xiaoping. I wondered if I would get an interview in Shanghai, or have to wait until I got to Beijing, where a Fur Products Minifair was about to open.

Rather than heeding the liaison office’s instructions, I decided to take a walk along the Bund and up Nanjing Road. I have always visited bookstores on trips to China, and my first trip was no exception. I walked into the large Xinhua Bookstore on Nanjing Road, passing through thick canvas curtains meant to shield the building from the bitter cold outside. Upstairs I walked into the room that held internal publications sold only to cadres with the right documents. I was quickly and unceremoniously told to leave.

I wandered back to the hotel, stopping first at the office of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, located in a small building on a side street not far from the compound housing the Friendship Store and the Seamen’s Club. The compound had previously served as the sprawling British Consulate in Shanghai. I was greeted by the bank’s British manager with more than the usual British reserve. He and his colleague from the Standard Charter Bank were at the time the only resident foreign businessmen in Shanghai. Unfortunately they could not conduct business. They were in effect hostages of the Chinese government to insure that China’s holdings with the banks wouldn’t be expropriated. Their colleagues had in fact been detained during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. They couldn’t leave Shanghai until colleagues arrived to replace them. The fellow I met expressed relief that he would be ending his assignment later that year.

I decided to stop by the Friendship Store, a dreary place selling shoddy goods far below the quality found in Hong Kong’s Chinese products stores. I then walked over to the Seamen’s Club. In those days these establishments were the hubs of entertainment for foreigners in China. They served cold beer and one could almost always find a sailor willing to tell tall tales of his visits to China. I struck up a conversation with a young Hong Kong sailor who was working on a tramp steamer registered in Hong Kong and operated under the Chinese flag. Together we went back to the Shanghai Mansions where we had a simple dinner and played pool for several hours, drinking beer and eating peanuts. The young sailor told me of his life on a PRC-owned vessel. He complained about the incessant political study sessions he and his fellow seamen had to endure. I listened attentively. Apparently, others were also listening attentively.

The next day, January 8, I was advised that my request for an interview would be granted. I was told to come to a room on the top floor of the Shanghai Mansions at 10 PM. I spent some time putting together my questions, and then prepared to join a tour of a Shanghai Commune. When I tried to sign up for the tour however I was told that I was not welcome to join it. I protested to the liaison office to no avail. I headed out on another walk, this time witnessing the arrest of a Shanghai citizen by a police officer. The officer frog marched the young man down a narrow alley, attracting a throng of curious onlookers.

I went back to the Shanghai Mansions, had dinner, and waited in my room for the interview. At the appointed hour I went to the assigned room and found about two dozen cadres waiting for me. The interview was a formal affair, no smiles or words of greeting. I was told the ground rules. I would first ask all my questions. Thereafter I would be given a brief introduction to the trade fair. No further questions would be entertained. I must have asked thirty or so questions, after which I was given the brief introduction. Few if any of my questions would be answered. The “brief introduction” started out with words of praise for the wise leader Chairman Mao Zedong and the correct policies of the Chinese Communist Party. I was then given the bare bones facts of the trade fair: how large the exhibition space was, how many provincial animal by-products branches were in attendance, how many traders from which foreign countries were in attendance. That was it.

I tried to slip in one more question. In 1975 China agreed for the first time to sew into garments intended for export the labels of the western company that had ordered them according to their specifications. This was a welcome reform as Chinese labels like Peony, Snowflake and the like didn’t appeal much to American and European consumers. Suddenly, at this minifair, traders had been advised that this policy had been cancelled. No more foreign labels would be sewn into Chinese made garments. There was much unhappiness about this sudden change, and I wanted to ask a question about why this step had been taken. I never got a chance to do so. I was cut off and reminded that there would be no more questions and told that the interview was over.

Shortly after returning to my room the phone, an old black apparatus with a solid feel, started ringing. It was the young sailor I had befriended the night before. His voice was shaking, and I guessed he had company sitting nearby. Obviously distressed, he told me that he was leaving Shanghai early, and that I was not to try to contact him. He told me he would always remember our friendship. He rang off. A cold shiver ran up my spine.

I went to bed, but had trouble falling asleep. In the early hours of January 9 I heard a great commotion taking place on the barges on Suzhou Creek below me. Loud voices and the sounds of fighting. I dozed off and when I awoke I saw the streets lined with military vehicles, and all the barges gone. In the distance I could hear the somber music of a funeral dirge. I left my room and encountered an elderly floor attendant. What has happened I asked? He told me that Zhou Enlai had died. He was weeping.

I and other trade fair attendees went to the liaison office to find out more. The officer solemnly announced the premier’s passing, and then told us that “the Chinese people will turn grief into strength” and that they would carry on the great traditions of the revolutionary leader. There would not be interruption to the trade fair. Business as usual.

I went down to the lobby and ran into my Australian friend and his wife. They had just had a harrowing experience. They had gone for a walk and saw crowds of people reading the newspapers which had been posted on wooden bulletin boards. They were reading official news of Zhou’s death, and the couple decided to photograph the scene. Bad move. In those days it was against the law for foreigners to purchase or even read local newspapers like the Wen Wei Bao and Liberation Daily. The couple were swiftly taken into custody by the local neighborhood revolutionary committee and held in a small room until the police showed up. They were interrogated and lectured at length. Their actions were unlawful and violated the terms of their visit to China. They were eventually escorted back to the Shanghai Mansions.

A small group of us decided to try another restaurant for lunch, having sampled just about everything on the Shanghai Mansions’ menu. We walked to the Peace Hotel and took the elevator up to the dining floor. Sitting down, we noticed that the waiters were wearing black arm bands. One of the young men came to our table and explained: “We have been told not to commemorate Zhou Enlai’s death, but we are doing so anyway. We are not afraid. Let them come and try to make trouble.”

The next day I flew to Beijing where I attended the fur minifair, and visited one of the model communes on the city’s outskirts as well, of course, the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. I also took part in the funeral of Zhou Enlai as part of the American delegation. Diplomats were all dressed in black, thin clothing for the bitter cold. China would be visited with much more sorrow that year, the campaign against the right deviationist wind, the Ching Ming protests and the deadly response, the July earthquake in Tangshan, and much joy when the Gang of Four was overthrown in October. I witnessed all of those events, making six visits to the country that year.

Upon my return to Hong Kong after attending Zhou’s funeral I was asked by a friend at Ta Kung Pao to write a eulogy for the recently departed premier. I did so, and the piece ran under my Chinese name given to me by a teacher in the United States: Kang Youhan (康又瀚). The eulogy was full of praise of Zhou. A few days after it appeared my friend told me that the article had been removed from the Reference News edition published in Shanghai. My friend suggested that I adopt a new name for any future Chinese language articles I might write. I adopted the name Kang Yuan (康原), and have kept it to the present day.

Postscript: More than 30 years later, I took members of the board of The Dui Hua Foundation to Shanghai. We went to the restaurant at the top of the Peace Hotel, and there I recounted the story of the defiant young waiter. Across the room I spied a man of roughly my age who was now the manager of the restaurant. He looked familiar, and I asked him to come to our table. He complied, and we quickly figured out that he was that young waiter I had encountered in January 1976. In excited voices we relived what had happened. Misty eyed, he asked me a favor. Would I be willing to come back and talk to his young charges? “Young people have no idea how we lived then. And they aren’t interested. You can help. Please come back.” I agreed to do so, but when I returned a few months later the restaurant was closed for renovation. I subsequently found out that Mr. Zhang the manager had retired.

(All photos were taken by the author.)