My First Trip to China

yangharrylg

源地址： http://www.hkej.com/template/features/html/first_trip/index.jsp


这是信报网站策划的洋大人第一次进入中国时的感受，粗看了一下，基本上是中美关系转折后去的，兹摘录数份文革期间进入中国的以飨读者。

Simon Leys


Simon Leys, the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans (李克曼), is a writer, sinologist, essayist, literary critic. He studied law at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Louvain), Chinese language, literature and art in Taiwan. He went to Hong Kong, before settling down in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University, where he supervised the honours thesis of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and later was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney, from 1987 to 1993. In 2004 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.

The Hall of Uselessness
Everyone knows the usefulness of what is useful,
but few know the usefulness of what is useless.

Zhuang Zi

人皆知有用之用，而莫知無用之用也。

莊子

I was born and grew up in Brussels. I had a happy childhood. To paraphrase Tolstoy: all happy childhoods are alike – warm affection and much laughter – the recipe seems simple enough. China was in no way – nothing at all (alas!) – an element of my childhood. There was no scope to study Chinese history or politics, or the Chinese language, at school.

I first visited the People’s Republic of China with a group of students in 1955. The Chinese Government had invited a delegation of Belgian Youth (10 delegates – I was the youngest, age 19) to visit China for one month in May that year. The voyage – smoothly organized – took us to the usual famous spots, climaxing in a one-hour private audience with Zhou Enlai (周恩來).

My overwhelming impression (a conclusion to which I remained faithful for the rest of my life) was that it would be inconceivable to live in this world, in our age, without a good knowledge of Chinese language and a direct access to Chinese culture.

After completing my undergraduate degree, I started learning Chinese. Since, at that time, no scholarship was available to go to China, I went to Taiwan. I had no “career” plan whatsoever. I simply wished to know Chinese and acquire a deeper appreciation of Chinese culture.

Loving Western painting, quite naturally I became enthralled with Chinese painting (and calligraphy) and I developed a special interest for what the Chinese wrote on the subject of painting: traditionally, the greatest painters were also scholars, poets, men of letters – hence the development of an extraordinarily rich, eloquent and articulate literature on painting, philosophical, critical, historical and technical.

We are often tempted to do research on topics that are somewhat marginal and lesser-known, since, on these, it is easier to produce original work. But one of my Chinese masters gave me a most valuable advice: “Always devote yourself to the study of great works – works of fundamental importance – and your effort will never be wasted.” Thus, for my PhD thesis, I chose to translate and comment what is generally considered as a masterpiece, the treatise on painting by Shitao (石濤), a creative genius of the early 18th century; he addresses the essential questions: Why does one paint? How should one paint? Among all my books, this one, first published forty years ago, has never gone out of print – and, to my delight, it is read by painters much more than by sinologists!

The virtue and power of the Chinese literary language culminates in its classical poetry. Chinese classical poetry seems to me the purest, the most perfect and complete form of poetry one could conceive of. Better than any other poetry, it fits Auden’s definition: “memorable speech”; and indeed, it carves itself effortlessly into your memory. Furthermore, like painting, it splendidly occupies a visual space in its calligraphic incarnations. It inhabits your mind, it accompanies your life, it sustains and illuminates your daily experiences.

Traditionally, Chinese scholars, men of letters, artists would give an inspiring name to their residences, hermitages, libraries and studios. Sometimes they did not actually possess residences, hermitages, libraries or studios – not even a roof over their heads – but the existence or non-existence of a material support for a Name never appeared to them a very relevant issue. And I wonder if one of the deepest seductions of Chinese culture is not related to this conjuring power with which it vests the Written Word. I am not dealing here with esoteric abstractions, but with a living reality. Let me give you just one modest example, which hit me long ago, when I was an ignorant young student.

In Singapore, I often patronized a small movie theatre which showed old films of Peking operas. The theatre itself was a flimsy open-air structure planted in a paddock by the side of the road (at that time, Singapore still had a countryside): a wooden fence enclosed two dozen rows of seats – long planks resting on trestles. In the rainy season, towards the end of the afternoon, there was always a short heavy downpour, and when the show started, just after dark, the planks often had not yet had time to dry; thus, at the box-office, with your ticket, you received a thick old newspaper to cushion your posterior against the humidity. Everything in the theatre was shoddy and ramshackle – everything except the signpost with the theatre’s name hanging above the entrance: two characters written in a huge and generous calligraphy, Wen Guang – which could be translated as “Light of Civilisation” or “Light of the Written-Word” (it is the same thing). However, later on in the show, sitting under the starry sky and watching on screen Ma Lianliang (馬連良) give his sublime interpretation of the part of the wisest minister of the Three Kingdoms (third century AD), you realized that – after all – this “Light of Civilisation” was no hollow boast.

The Hall of Uselessness pertains to the period when I was studying and teaching at the New Asia College in Hong Kong in the early 1960s. It was a hut located in the heart of a refugee shantytown on Kowloon side (Diamond Hill). To reach it at night, one needed an electric torch, for there were no lights and no roads – only a dark maze of meandering paths across a chaos of tin and plywood shacks; there were open drains by the side of the paths, and fat rats ran under the feet of passers-by. For two years I enjoyed there the fraternal hospitality of a former schoolmate, whom I knew from Taiwan – he was an artist (calligrapher and seal-carver) sharing a place with two postgraduate students, a philologist and a historian. We slept on bunks in a single common room. This room was naturally a complete mess – anywhere else it would have resembled a dismal slum, but here all was redeemed by the work of my friend: one superb calligraphy (in seal-script style) hanging on the wall – Wu Yong Tang (無用堂), “The Hall of Uselessness.” If taken at face value, it had a touch of tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation; in fact, it contained a very cheeky double-meaning. The words (chosen by our philologist companion, who was a fine scholar) alluded to a passage from “The Book of Changes,” the most ancient, most holy (and most obscure) of all the Chinese classics, which said that “in springtime the dragon is useless.” This, in turn, according to commentaries, meant that in their youth the talents of superior men (promised to a great future) must remain hidden.

I spent two years in The Hall of Uselessness; these were intense and joyful years – when learning and living were one and the same thing. The best description of this sort of experience was given by John Henry Newman. In his classic “The Idea of a University,” he made an amazingly bold statement: he said that if he had to choose between two types of universities, one in which eminent professors teach students who come to the university only to attend lectures and sit for examinations, and the other where there are no professors, no lectures, no examinations and no degrees, but where the students live together for two or three years, he would choose the second type. He concluded, “How is this to be explained? When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic and observant as young men are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to learn from one another, even if there be no one to teach them; the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas and views, fresh matter of thought and distinct principles for judging and acting day by day.”

I hope I have remained faithful to the memory of The Hall of Uselessness – not in the meaning intended by my friends (for I am afraid I am not exactly of the dragon breed!), but at least in the more obvious meaning of Zhuang Zi, quoted above. Yet is this second aspiration more humble, or more ambitious? After all, this sort of “uselessness” is the very ground on which rest all the essential values of our common humanity.

Looking back at those some twelve years, during which I lived and worked successively in Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong (plus six months in Japan), it was a happy period of intense activity – living and learning in an environment where all my friends became my teachers, and all my teachers, my friends. I am fond of a saying by Prince de Ligne (a writer I much admire): “Let each one examine what he has most desired. If he is happy, it is because his wishes have not been granted.” For some years, I had wished I could study in China; but now, in retrospect, I realize that, had I been given such a chance at that particular time (1958-1970), I would never have been allowed to enjoy in China such rich, diverse, easy and close human contacts.

I did return to the PRC twice – first, for six months in 1972, as cultural attaché at the Belgian Embassy in Peking; second, for one month in 1973, as a member of a delegation from the Australian National University – and the experience is described in “Chinese Shadows” first published in French in 1974.

My own interest, my own field of work is Chinese literature and Chinese painting. When commenting on Chinese contemporary politics, I was merely stating common sense evidence and common knowledge. But at that time, this may indeed have disturbed some fools here and there – which, in the end, did not matter very much.

Do I have any regrets? Mine include -- usually what we regret is what we did not do – sailing round Cape Horn and climbing Huangshan.


(These excerpts from Simon Leys’ recent writings and interviews were selected and edited by the editor.)

yangharrylg

Robert A. Scalapino (施樂伯) [1919-2011] was Robson Research Professor of Government Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley and the founder and first Chairman of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. He passed away on November 1 at the age of 92.

At the outset of the 1960s, the newly installed Kennedy administration attempted an opening to Beijing. In early 1961, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk in command, an offer was made to exchange journalists, as I had proposed. I had talked with Rusk in the course of drafting my report [the Conlon Report] and had sent him a personal copy upon its completion. Beijing responded by asserting that the Taiwan issue had to be “settled” first, thereby postponing any forward movement. It was not until after the Ussuri River clash with the Russians in 1969 that Mao [Zedong 毛澤東] set his political and ideological proclivities aside and opted for accommodation with the United States.

Meanwhile, I had continued to seek a more sophisticated policy toward the PRC than that being pursued. I organized a conference at UC Berkeley, held on December 9, 1964, to discuss various views and options regarding Communist China. Since the participants included Henry and Clare Booth Luce on one side and Felix Greene on the other, as well as certain prominent scholars, it is not surprising that heated arguments took place, but the subject of the PRC and its current course was thoroughly explored.

During this period, I had become acquainted with Cecil Thomas, American Friends Service Committee director in the Bay Area. After the widespread attention that the Berkeley conference received, we decided to organize a second symposium in Washington, D.C., Elaborate planning followed, and the conference was held at the end of April 1965. With an emphasis upon balance, speakers representing diverse views were chosen; the audience totaled more than eight hundred, and there was widespread media coverage. Once again, the effort was to explore developments in China from various perspectives and examine U.S.-China policies, past, present and future.

Several months after the Washington conference, Cecil called me, saying he wanted to talk to me about something that he had in mind. I told him that while I would be happy to talk, I could not take on additional assignments, given my heavy schedule. Nevertheless, Cecil came to the house, accompanied by his assistant, Robert Mang. The idea was to establish an organization devoted to a continuing exploration of U.S.-China relations, including all alternatives. After an hour of conversation, I said that I would call some of my colleagues to see whether they thought the idea had merit. Shortly thereafter, I talked with several close friends including Doak Barnett [鮑大可] and Lucian Pye [白魯恂]. The consensus was that the time might be ripe for such a project. I called Cecil and said that we could go forward, exploring the possibilities. Subsequently, on December 9, a small group met in New York, spending some four hours discussing the matter. While there was strong support for the idea of an organization, the decision was to examine the details more fully before any public action.

By April 1966, after many discussions, an organizing group had been formed, and a letter of invitation, which I signed, was sent to a hundred carefully selected people, asking them to join in creating a National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Those receiving the letter had been chosen to represent various fields and points of view; the business community, labor leaders, representatives of religious groups, and academics all were on the list. We sought, however, to avoid selecting anyone from the extreme Left or Right while still preserving ample opportunity for differences of opinion. Because we wanted the committee to be nonpartisan and outside officialdom, invitations were not sent to people in public office, national or otherwise. With some sixty of those invited agreeing to participate, the National Committee was officially launched on June 9, 1966, and I was appointed chairman, with Cecil as executive director. While most of the committee members were open to some shifts in U.S. policy toward China, we had determined that the committee would avoid taking specific policy positions, serving rather as a body exploring all available facts about China and U.S.-China relations. Our task was to move the dialogue away from the McCarthy era, reaching out both to the general public and to policy leaders.

Funding was a major challenge, but ultimately sizeable grants from the Christopher Reynolds Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund, and the Ford Foundation were forthcoming. We organized meetings in a variety of places, contacted diverse Asians through trips to Japan and elsewhere, and in February 1968, eight of us, including six scholars, met with President Lyndon Johnson at the White House to discuss our China policy. Despite his preoccupation with Vietnam, the president was receptive, and urged us to keep in contact. Meetings with other national and international leaders followed.

Thus was the foundation laid for the role of the National Committee in the visit of the Chinese Ping-Pong players to the United States in 1971. At this point, China had opened the window if not the door to interaction with the United States, and the Ping-Pong team was the first card played. The State Department asked the committee to host the team, and they were accompanied throughout the country by committee representatives. Consequently, the PRC government decided to invite the National Committee board of directors as guests in 1972, with the date set in December, some months after the Nixon visit.

The trip was truly memorable. I was no longer chairman, that position being held by Alex Eckstein, an economist teaching at the University of Michigan, with Jan Berris as a very able executive. Tragically, Cecil had been killed in an automobile accident in Africa. Our group was fifteen in number with three wives, including [my wife] Dee, accompanying board members. We were to take a train from Hong Kong through the New territories to the PRC border, thence to Canton (Guangzhou). This was the only route available to Americans at that time. Our group filled half of a railroad car; the other half was occupied by a group of New York radicals who sang revolutionary songs lustily as we moved toward the border. Finally, we stopped in the middle of a tunnel and were met by uniformed and armed Red soldiers. Disembarking, we were escorted to VIP quarters, while the revolutionaries were put in the regular entry line with Hong Kong amahs and others. We heard no more songs! After a rest, we were taken to a train en route to Canton. At an early point, officials asked Alex, “What is the order of your delegation?” Somewhat startled, Alex responded, “We don’t have an order. We are all equal.” The response, “Oh, but you must have an order since we have seven cars in Canton with which to transport you.” So our visit to a proletarian state began!

Our place on the train was clearly reserved for dignitaries, with big leather chairs and ample space for one’s feet. Delicious green tea was served while we viewed the countryside from the windows. The area from the border to Canton was intensely cultivated, with a wide range of crops. This was still a premechanized era for the region. Labor was human and buffalo, with men and women working bare-legged in the fields, pulling carts, carrying large bundles of straw, and tending to such animals as cows and ducks. Certain villages gave evidence of some new structures, but most seemed run-down, with houses mad of mud, brick, and plaster. People were dressed in the familiar blue tunics or, in some cases, gray or black pants and white undershirts; much of the clothing was patched. Footwear was scarce except for simple sandals. Yet for the most part, the people looked reasonably healthy and adequately fed. Political sloganeering in the villages seemed on the wane, with most posted slogans badly faded and few fresh ones to be seen. We saw very few vehicles on the road, only an occasional truck. We saw some soldiers in the larger villages. As we approached Canton, signs of industrialization came into view along with extensive pollution, including red-dyed streams.

We had our first discussions with local Party officials shortly after reaching Canton. When we inquired about education, they told us that the university had just reopened, and everything was on an experimental basis. “Everyone wants to go into the army,” they said when we asked about youthful desires. “You learn a skill there,” our informant quickly added. “You also go out of patriotic motives.” Young men were drafted at eighteen years of age and served two years. When we went to the recently opened revolutionary museum, Mao—flanked by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin—was eulogized; those ousted during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution were nowhere to be seen. Lin Biao [林彪], Liu Shaoqi [劉少奇], and others purged had been scrubbed out of the pictures; only Zhou Enlai [周恩來], Kang Sheng [康生], Dong Biwu [董必武], and several others were pictured with the Great Leader.

During the first evening’s dinner, I overstepped the bounds of permissible political discussion. I first commented that parading those accused of misconduct through the streets in dunce caps was likely to create permanent wounds, especially with reports that some of those accused were later exonerated. The host at our table said that cadres learned from the errors committed, and it was a cardinal principle of the Party to accept criticism from the people. I continued by saying that in the united States, “the people” were all citizens irrespective of their views, whereas in China, it appeared that the masses were divided into “the people” and “enemies of the people.” Who determined those who were expressing the voice of the people? My respondent answered quickly, “The Central Committee makes that determination.” I responded that the top could be wrong. Even Chairman Mao had evidently made mistakes such as in the selection of Lin Biao as his successor.

That overstepped the bounds of permissible discussion, and the Beijing Foreign Affairs Institute representative with whom I had been conversing abruptly rose to toast the guests at the next table. Later, I proposed my own toast, stating that the American and Chinese people had been separated from each other too long, that in our country, frank and open discussion was a mark of friendship, and while our opinions would differ with our Chinese friends on certain matters, I and others looked forward to the widening of our mutual dialogue. However, the evening gave me a fairly clear idea of what boundaries should not be overstepped if one wished to continue a political dialogue.

The next day, we toured the Canton Fair and various other sites in the city, and in the afternoon, we took a lengthy walk. Though seemingly adequately fed and provided for, the great majority of people wore drab blue or dark clothes. Tremendous curiosity greeted us as we walked, with crowds gathering around us on occasions. At this point, foreigners of any type were extremely rare. We were treated not in hostile or friendly fashion but with intense curiosity, as if we had come from Mars.

I had started to take down prices in stores and compare them with wages, concerning which I queried our escorts. My general conclusion after a few days was that the urban worker could manage insofar as the necessities were concerned, with two products—grain and cloth—rationed, and rents reasonably low. Affluence, however, was not to be seen. Moreover, the contrast between Canton and Hong Kong was dramatic. Hong Kong had hustle and bustle, neon lights, and extensive traffic. In contrast, Canton symbolized quietude, drabness, and aloofness from others, especially outsiders.

It was on to Beijing via air. As a Soviet-built plane arrived at the Canton airport, I asked Han, who was accompanying us, whether there was any difficulty in obtaining parts, and he responded, “Yes, and that is why we are determined upon the course of self-reliance.” When we arrived in Beijing, we were met by a sizeable group from the People’s Institute and People’s Friendship Association, headed by the vice president of Peking University, Zhou Peiyuan [周培源], and his wife. Zhou, a 1928 graduate of Cal Tech and a physicist by training, had thus far weathered the storm. Early the next morning, five of us took a walk along the wide main streets and one of Beijing’s numerous hutong, a traditional alley bounded on either side by ancient gates and walls. Again, I sought to compare prices and wages. This being winter, some items such as vegetables were not cheap. Later, after breakfast, we took a tour of Beijing’s monumental Tiananmen Square and the magnificent Temple of heaven. In contrast, the new Russian buildings were strikingly unattractive.

We were also taken to a show factory that specialized in making artifacts of doverse types. We were briefed on the nature of the plant’s Revolutionary Committee and the political meetings held three times a week for workers. Posters, loudspeakers, meetings—what do they mean for the individual worker: enthusiasm? Boredom? If we must, we must? I could not determine.

The following day, we climbed the Great Wall and ended with a dinner hosted by some of the Ping-Pong players who had visited the United States. After a delicious meal and mao tai unlimited, I returned to the hotel, took two Alka Seltzer, and went to bed. On our next day in Beijing, we began with a tour of Tsinghua University, which included discussions with faculty and a quick examination of facilities, including the library. It developed that the university had ceased enrolling students in the opening years of the Cultural Revolution (“the educational methods employed were antiquated”), and started to enroll students again only in 1970.

At the library, I asked “What happens to the writings of someone like Liu Shaoqi when he is declared a revisionist and ousted from the Party?” The answer: “His works are not taken out of the library, but his card file is removed.” In the library, I saw a small stand containing a display of Western works, possibly set up for our visit. It included “The Tale of Marco Polo” as well as works by Jack Belden, Edgar Snow, Owen Lattimore, and Anna Louise Strong—a collection scarely representative of American writing on modern China!

Shortly thereafter, we were taken to Shenyang and Anshan in Manchuria. It was intensely cold, but the inhabitants seemed amply dressed for the weather. Again, the curiosity regarding foreigners was intense. On the morning after our arrival in Anshan, I left the guest house alone to go into a nearby store to take down prices. When I entered, there were no customers. Suddenly, people began to pour in—to look at me. After scores had entered, I fled, moving rapidly up a hill until I had lost everyone except one young man. Finally, I stopped, and in my rudimentary Chinese, asked, “Do you know who I am?” Silence, then “Albanian?” Never before nor since have I been confused with an Albanian, but Albania was China’s only friend at the time.

Visiting an Anshan factory, we were told that the Kuomintang had destroyed many plants in the region, with no mention of the oft-repeated assertion that the Russians had taken away much industrial equipment. When confronted with this matter, our informant insisted that the Kuomintang had destroyed this factory, but he acknowledged that the Russians had removed equipment from the area. Moreover, when I called his attention to a toy aircraft hoisted above the roof, I laughingly asked, “Who is the enemy—the United States, the USSR, or Japan?” I then said that because the plane was headed northeast, it must be Japan. He quickly stated, “The Japanese are not our immediate problem.” I then said, “The Russians?” He replied, “It is a fact that the Russians have large numbers of troops on our borders. That fact cannot be denied.” This was but one indication among many that the Chinese were deeply concerned about the post-Stalin USSR, especially after the Ussuri River clash.

We bantered about the slogans hung high over the main factory floor: Continue the Revolutionary Struggle; Liberate Taiwan; and People of the World Unite! I told him that I could at least support the latter slogan providing I was allowed to interpret it. In touring the factories, I was impressed with the diligence of the workers but distressed over the lack of safety equipment and the grim conditions. Throughout our visit to Manchuria, we continued a dialogue with various guides and mentors, covering a wide range of subjects—from economic conditions in the region to domestic politics and foreign relations. Knowledge and ignorance abetted by ideological considerations were intertwined. For example, it was asserted that Moscow hoped to see a pro-Soviet faction emerge after Mao’s death. With respect to Taiwan, one of our hosts insisted that China could help Taiwan develop and that the Taiwanese were yearning for liberation.

On December 19, we returned to Beijing. The following day, after another morning visiting historic sites, we had a detailed briefing on the current status of Chinese commerce and agriculture—informative and misinformative, especially with respect to the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the PRC economy. The following day, we met with Wu Yushen, vice president of the Academy of Sciences. A day later, we had a lengthy meeting with the Central Institute of National Minorities. Yet the most revealing meeting was one at Peking University on December 23. A number of professors were seated around the table, but the person who gave the briefing was a young man with Party rather than academic credentials. We received an unequivocal message of support for the Cultural Revolution and its impact o the university. Our informant asserted that the purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to unite, educate, and remold the teaching staff. Previously, the faculty had been separated from the workers, the peasant masses, and working conditions. To change this, they were sent down to the countryside and into factories to take part in productive labor.

At one point, I had been sufficiently disturbed by this account to raise a question. “You closed the university for four years at a time when China needed people trained in such fields as science and technology, and for the most part, research was stopped. Did not this action cause grave damage to China’s forward economic development and also cause the people who were left out of the educational process for those years to feel cheated?” The answer was stern: “The word ‘cheat’ is a bad word. The university in the New China does not cheat people. Those faculty and students involved in that period received a political education. If it had not been for the Cultural Revolution, we would have become revisionists like those in the USSR.” Then, for the first time, he turned to one of the professors and said, “Don’t you agree, Professor Zhou?” Zhou said, “Yes, of course.” Some years later, I was told that my remarks had circulated on campus, much to different people’s amusement—and support.

In the afternoon, we met with Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua [喬冠華]. We had been scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, but the U.S. bombing of the Hanoi vicinity caused that meeting to be cancelled, although a different excuse was given. Qiao expressed hope for an expansion of unofficial contacts, but ruled out official relations or Chinese studying in the United States as long as Washington recognized the ROC. He also expressed opposition to the partial test ban treaty with the Soviet Union and asked why only the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons? Then, he expressed the hope that PRC-Japan relations would improve, given the recent establishment of diplomatic relations, but he was less hopeful regarding relations with the Soviet Union, indicating that no progress had been achieved in recent talks. Indeed, throughout his remarks, he recurrently voiced a distrust of Russia, including the statement that China owed Khrushchev a debt “because he forced us to seek self-reliance.” With regard to Party politics, he insisted that a person would not be expelled from the Party for differing on a single issue, as in the case of Liu Shaoqi. In general, Qiao set forth in clear fashion the PRC’s current position with respect to both domestic and international politics.

That evening, Qiao attended the dinner hosted by Peking University Vice President Zhou, and we continued our conversation. I remember one memorable remark. Qiao was strong in his praise for President Nixon and his efforts to improve Sino-American relations. I commented that although Nixon should be given full credit for his policies, earlier, at the beginning of President Kennedy’s administration, the United States had made overtures to China such as suggesting the exchange of journalists. Qiao’s response astonished us. “I don’t like any of the Kennedys,” he asserted. “They didn’t understand Asia. They have just tried to use it for their own political purposes.” At the time, I was puzzled. Later, I decided that Qiao’s wrath was directed at Ted Kennedy, who had supported India in the China-India conflict that had erupted a few years earlier.

On Christmas day, we flew to Nanking. Our stay there involved a one-hour trip from the city to the October People’s Commune. We had an interesting discussion with the chairman of the Commune Revolutionary Committee and some associates. He told us that the commune had some 3,500 households with more than 16,000 people. The chairman had numerous statistics, the gist of which was that crop production had greatly improved, with living standards rising; mechanization had increased; and work points were based on the quality as well as the volume of work, with one-half of the allotment as compensation for labor in grain and other products, one-half in money. Private plots now accounted for only 5-7 percent of the total cultivated area. This was clearly a Commune selected for visitors. In several private conversations, however, we were told that even in this showplace, the average yearly income was only 130 yuan per capita, although the official figure that had been given us was three times that amount. In Nanking as elsewhere, concern about the Russians was clear. Repeatedly, we were asked, “Do you think that they will attack us?”

Soon, it was off to Shanghai. Here, we were introduced to China’s ongoing efforts to advance industrial production, visiting several large factories. Later, we went to Fudan University where once again the briefing was given by a young man whose title was vice chairman of the University Revolutionary Committee but who was oblivious to meaningful higher education and who had all the grace of a boar. The key theme was one that we had heard a number of times before: in former times, students learned only from books; now they and the faculty were sent to factories, to the countryside, to commercial shops so that they could come back to the university with enlarged practical knowledge.

In the English class, while a dialogue was taking place, I borrowed the English-language book that had been prepared for practice from one of the students. The contents were shocking. Two themes were prominent: total sacrifice for the “fatherland” and hatred for “the enemy.” As I read on, the chief enemy was the Soviet Union, but there were negative sections about Great Britain, Japan, and the United States, the latter being blamed for the Vietnam War (this might not have been the complaint a few years later, when China invaded that nation!).

I left Fudan University in a state of deep depression. That evening, after dinner, we were taken to an opera, Song of the Dragon River. In it, the “good guys” and the “bad guys” were presented in totally white and black dimensions. On the way back to our quarters, I pondered a central question. What we had seen and heard centered on pure ideology; on the other hand, much that was going on in China was infinitely more complex, containing diverse motivations—personal, economic, and political. How would the contrasts be reconciled?

On December 29, we were taken to another model commune, about twenty-five miles from the city. In the detailed briefing, we were told that twelve successive years of bumper harvests had greatly increased grain production. Further, a hospital had been set up and new schools built, with eighteen middle and primary schools now in operation. Only about 5 percent of the cultivated land was private property. Moreover, yearly income was only 170 yuan per capita. The following day, we were given a detailed briefing on Shanghai’s role in the Cultural Revolution from its beginnings to the current scene. Included were supportive remarks about the role of Jiang Qing ([江青] Mao’s wife) and her compatriots, who were later to be known as the Gang of Four. Their primary effort had been to oust the moderates, starting with Deng Xiaoping, with considerable initial success.

One January 1, we were taken by air to Hangzhou, where we had a chance to see some beautiful scenery. Our stay here was mainly sightseeing; a few days later, we left for Canton. Once again, on the day following our arrival, we were taken to a rural commune, and in the days that followed, we visited factories and Zhongshan University. Little new was revealed in the various conversations that took place. At the university, the theme was praise for the Cultural Revolution, which had out teaching “on the right track” and repudiated the “counter-revolutionary line” of Liu Shaoqi. It was acknowledged that at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a few students were killed or injured and much property had been damaged, but after the students “received education from Chairman Mao’s line,” violence ceased. The university had closed down in June 1966, and although a workers’ team came in mid-1968, the first graduates, few in number, did not emerge until 1970. At that time, the Philosophy Department had added politics to its discipline. As the chair of the department said, “During the past two years, we have persisted in implementing the principle of putting politics in command of knowledge, and also of uniting theory and practice.” Hence, a student had to spend one-third of the time in work off campus.

On January 6, we departed by train for Hong Kong. When we arrived, we knew we were back in an open society—the noise, confusion, and color were almost frightening. We scrambled with others to get a taxi, and finally climbed into one. The driver immediately asked, “What did you think of China?” We merely said that it was very interesting, whereupon he said, “I was born in Shanghai, but I will never go back. It is all right for tourists, yet they want everyone to think like them and support Chairman Mao, but we don’t. Everyone in Hong Kong feels that way.” Probably “everyone” was an exaggeration, but it was easy to see why a majority would prefer leaving the PRC at this point to foreign tourists.

[Editor’s note: Prof. Scalapino accepted the invitation to join our series “My First Trip to China” in early October this year. Unfortunately, he passed away on November 1 at age 92. This is adapted from his memoirs “From Leavenworth to Lhasa – Living in a Revolutionary Era” (Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, 2008).]

yangharrylg

Gregory Clark joined the Australian diplomatic service in 1956 and was stationed in Hong Kong from 1959-62 and Moscow 1963-65. He left the diplomatic service and after ANU post-graduate studies on the Japanese economy became Tokyo correspondent for The Australian in 1969. From 1974-76 he was consultant, assistant-secretary level, in the policy coordination unit of Canberra's Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Then after almost two decades at Tokyo's Jochi (Sophia) University as professor of Economics and Comparative Culture he was made president of Tama University before being made vice-president of Akita International University where he remains as trustee. He is the author of “In Fear of China” (1967) and “The Japanese Tribe - Origins of a Nation's Uniqueness” ( in Japanese 1978). His website is www.gregoryclark.net

It is 1971. The moderates in China led by Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) have been able to stage something of a comeback against the Cultural Revolution fanatics. Zhou was searching for a way to open ties to the outside world without inviting reprisals from the still active Gang of Four radicals. Inviting ping-pong players from around the world to visit China was his solution, and it succeeded. One result was to put an end to the decades of harmful isolation policies imposed on China by the US, Japan, Australia and a host of other Cold War worthies. Another was that after a decade of futile China-watching from a very long distance, I would suddenly be propelled into China - a China that was still struggling to overcome the harm caused by bouts of insane domestic policies.

And yet another would be to open the path for Australian diplomatic relations with China. Emboldened by our ping-pong visit the leader of the Labor opposition party in Australia, Gough Whitlam, would lead a party delegation to Beijing later that year. The ruling and anti-China Liberal-Country Party coalition would be defeated in the 1972 elections soon after. One of Whitlam's first moves in power would be to offer diplomatic recognition to Beijing.

How to get to China, in six easy steps.

My story begins with me in Tokyo in the cold, wet spring of that fateful year. We have already had wind that something involving China will happen at the world table tennis championships being held in Nagoya in April. The championships get underway and we are told that all participating teams will be invited to visit China after the championships have ended. Even the Americans have been invited. But for some reason there is no word of an Australian team being invited.

I contact the Australian team leader, a Dr. (medical) Jackson by phone in Nagoya. No, for some reason we were off the invitation list, he insists. Besides, the team plans a visit to Taiwan after some travel in Japan. I suggest that he contact me if he comes to Tokyo, which he does and he ends up staying in my apartment (he does not like Japanese inns). There I am able to show him the glowing newspaper reports of how the US team is being feted in China. What a pity he was not invited, I persist. Finally he admits that he was invited but Canberra, which in those days was bitterly anti-China, had insisted that he refuse and take his team on a pre-arranged ping-pong tour of Taiwan instead.

I tell him I can arrange a China tour instead, if he wants, and he agrees. I send a cable to Beijing saying he is now ready to accept the invitation offered him in Nagaoya. I add that he wants one, Gregory Clark, to accompany the team. Just twelve hours later I get a reply inviting the team to come, and to bring one Gregory Clark also.

I was euphoric. As a young diplomatic recruit in Canberra during the late 1950's I had responded to a call for volunteers to take a two year course in Chinese, first in Australia and then at the University of Hong Kong. It was Canberra's first move to train Chinese speakers following the 1949 break in relations, and since I was the only respondee I got to spend two highly educative years in Hong Kong in the early sixties, partly working in the Australian consulate there, followed by a year on the China desk back in Canberra. But because Canberra was still refusing diplomatic relations with China I was then sent to Moscow instead (I had been one of the post-Sputnik dabblers in Russian). Meanwhile and to my great envy all my UK Foreign Office colleagues on the Hong Kong language course were being posted to Beijing, eventually ending up as heads of mission, governors of Hong Kong etc.

In 1965, with Canberra insisting that the war in Vietnam was 'Chinese aggression relying in the first instance on their north Vietnamese puppets', and that I should pass this astounding revelation on to the Soviet foreign ministry together with our regret that the Soviets had not realised this sinister danger, I decided there were better things to do in life. So after a four year post-graduate spell at the Australian National University I had ended up as Tokyo correspondent for an Australian newspaper. Which is why, after ten years circling China and trying vainly to visit the place, I suddenly had my chance to get there on the coat-tails of a ping-pong team.

For the record I contact the Australian Embassy in Tokyo to see whether Canberra, which had tried to head off a China visit by arranging that visit to Taiwan, would oppose our visit. The Embassy remains studiously neutral. After all, by this time half the world's ping-pong teams already seem headed in the China direction.

The only other problem was that we did not have a team. They were scattered around various training sites in Japan, they did not have the funds to get to Hong Kong, and some did not even want to go to China. Eventually we managed to get just enough volunteers - two men and a 16 year old girl - to call ourselves a team. My newspaper offered to pay the fares to Hong Kong in exchange for the scoop I was going to give them. And so, just 24 hours later, I found myself standing with Dr. Jackson, three bleary eyed Australian table tennis players, their manager and one other Australian journalist at the Lo Wu crossing, waiting to get into China.

At the Lo Wu crossing

We have handed over our passports. But for some reason we are all left standing in the hot sun. Why? Eventually a stern-faced guard emerges to tell us that we cannot go to China. The players all have unused Taiwan visas in their passports. Worse, I have a used visa. Taiwan is the enemy of the Chinese people. People with visas to visit the territory of that enemy regime cannot be allowed into China. Only Vince Matthews, the other journalist (from the Melbourne Herald - Melbourne is the home of Australia's only pro-Beijing communist party), can be allowed in. He does not have the offending Taiwan visa. I invent some excuse for the visas, and emphasise the importance of our mission. Eventually after calls to and from the Beijing office back in Hong Kong, we are allowed in. As we board the train for Canton (as it used to be called in English in those politically non-correct days; today it has its proper name of Guangzhou) I do not even try to contain the excitement.

True, as we are waiting to board the train we meet some dazed Latin Americans coming out of China. Their impression of China? ‘Six weeks, one song’ one of them says unhappily. But even this does not worry me. After a decade of flitting around the periphery of China - the nation whose language I have studied with such difficulty, and whose foreign policies I have researched and defended in a book (In Fear of China, 1967) - I am finally being allowed to board a slow train headed for the Middle Kingdom.

Into Canton

At Canton we are met by a small delegation of boiler-plate communist officials. Fortunately, it includes a Mr. Yu (the ‘Yu’ means ‘fish’) - a youngish, sophisticated official sent down from Beijing by the Chinese Foreign Ministry to look after us. We are taken to the Dongfang Hotel - the main hotel in Canton for welcoming foreign guests (the hotel lodges most of the thousands of foreigners who pour into the town each year for the Canton Fair, China’s one point of commercial contact with the outside world). Being put in such a prestigious hotel means the Chinese realise the political importance of our visit, I tell myself.

But the self-satisfaction will not last long. At the hotel post office we find that Beijing has not yet organized press accreditation for myself and Vince. So if I want to cable the story my newspaper wants so badly — “First Australian Journalist into China since 1949” - it will cost one US dollar a word, and I will have to pay before midnight.

It is too late to go to the bank. So I can do no more than file a brief story saying that we are all in China, that we are part of the historic ping-pong diplomacy, and that the first breach in the wall of traditional Australian hostility to China has been made. But Vince is much more aggressive. His first story out of China is a 3,000 word opus on the welcome we have been receiving, and saying that the girls look nice beneath their Mao costumes, that the food is splendid, and that the beer tastes good. Unfortunately, he does not have the 3,000 dollars needed to send this opus back to Melbourne. He tells the cable office he will pay later, and heads for the bedroom I have to share with him. We are both exhausted. I have hardly slept for the past three days.

Red Guards

As we lie prostrate in the sticky south China heat, I hear a frantic knocking on the door. It is exactly midnight. A group of angry Red Guards pour in through the unlocked door. Vince still has not paid his bill, and they want to know why. Needless to say, the Red Guards are speaking in Chinese, and very rapid Chinese at that. It all passes over Vince's Chinese-illiterate head. The Red Guards get even angrier, and try to pull him out of bed. I have to intervene.

I say that it is not Vince's fault he cannot pay his bills since Beijing has still not arranged the Press cards that guarantee our newspapers will pay bills. Besides, Chairman Mao (毛澤東) has instructed the Red Guards to serve the people, and they clearly are not doing anything to serve Vince. The Red Guards are not impressed, especially by my attempt to drag Chairman Mao into the argument. But they realize there is nothing they can do about the semi-comatose, Vince. They leave, swearing vengeance.

Expulsion from Canton?

The next morning when I go down to breakfast I can sense that the meet-and-greet friendliness of the night before has evaporated. Indeed, the officials of the night before are now viewing me with intense loathing and silence. With them is Mr. Fish, and he is looking very worried. Yu takes me aside. In a low and serious voice he says that he and the officials have been up all night dealing with those Red Guards. The Guards have been demanding my immediate expulsion from China for unacceptable behavior – the defamation of Chairman Mao especially (no mention of the true culprit, Vince). Only after six hours of intense all-night debate was Yu, the diplomat as ever, able finally to persuade the Red Guard fanatics to allow me to stay. But only if I make an apology.

I try to take stock. I have spent much of my adult life learning Chinese, writing a book explaining Chinese foreign policies, defending China from insults, and in particular trying point out that China was not responsible for the Vietnam War. What’s more I have defied my own government and single-handedly organized the ping-pong team China wants so badly to have visit. And then when I finally get to China, I discover there are some people there who want me expelled on my first evening. Just brilliant. But I stomach my pride and do what Mr. Yu says. I am allowed to stay in China.

After an exhibition table tennis match in Canton we set out for Shanghai. On the plane is a delegation of American women led by Shirley MacLaine. They have come to learn about the liberation of Chinese women. The first Chinese woman they meet is a timid stewardess on the plane. They beg her to tell them about her liberation. She does not have much to say. In fact, she does not want to say anything. She is clearly terrified by these large, dominating, liberated American females

Dateline Beijing

Arriving in Beijing, we are given the welcome usually reserved for African potentates. There is a large official banquet, with Dr. Jackson as the chief guest. The next day we are taken to the Great Hall of the People to meet none other than Premier Zhou Enlai. I still have a photo of the little-known doctor from South Australia being welcomed by the prime minister of the world’s largest nation. I also have a photo of myself meeting Zhou. He is looking straight at me. I am bowing slightly, Japanese style.

I come away from the meeting with two lasting impressions. One is the cracks in the wall of the hastily built Great Hall. The other is something others have written about - Zhou's extraordinarily magnetic presence. You have the feeling that this is a man of depth and intelligence, who has known power, and suffering, and has had to come to terms with both.

More Problems

Meeting Zhou is one thing. Dealing with his citizens in those frantic Cultural Revolution days is another. I move quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous. It begins the next day, when our little band of news-people (by now some Australian TV people have also arrived) head for the main Peking table tennis stadium to see a match with the Chinese national team. It is an important match, and we assume we do not need tickets to see it – that our journalist credentials are enough. But a very determined guard says no tickets, no entry. Once again it is left to me as the sole Chinese speaker to sort things out.

I ask the guard his name - it is Zhang. I tell him that we have come all the way from Australia to see this match, and now we will have to go all the way back, empty handed. And when we get back we will all write stories about how a Mr. Zhang stopped us from reporting on this great and historic match. Does he realise the terrible damage that will be done to good relations between the great Chinese people and the great Australian people? Does he realize he will be directly responsible for that damage? Mr. Zhang lets us in, reluctantly. But there will soon be repercussions.

The match over (I forget who won, but the Chinese are usually doing all they can to make sure the Australians win sometimes), I am in a taxi with Max Suich, an Australian journalist from the Fairfax media group, who had joined us subsequently (he had been badly scooped by my arranging the visit), heading for the Chinese Foreign Ministry for a formal visit to present our credentials. Suich stops the car to photograph some Chinese slum children (the Fairfax papers love that kind of photo). In those days photographing slum scenes was tantamount to slandering the great Chinese people. An angry policeman emerges to demand that Suich hand over the camera and that he go to a nearby police station for questioning. Once again it is left to me to do the explaining. I rehash much of the same indignation I had given Mr. Zhang earlier. Eventually we are allowed to go, but again there will be repercussions, and soon.

At the Chinese Foreign Ministry

Arriving at the Ministry we are ushered into an impressive room and told to wait. The official handling Australian affairs will greet us. Meanwhile I am imagining how the official will soon enter the room, and single me out for a special greeting as the one Australian in the group who has learned the Chinese language, who has tried to explain Chinese foreign policies in the past, who has done so much to get the team to China, and who has defied a virulently anti-Beijing Canberra in the process. The Chinese authorities must know about all that, and be grateful. How wrong can you be.

Eventually a very stern-faced official does enter the room and he does single me out. But it is not to offer praise or thanks. He says the Ministry has just received reports from a Mr. Zhang and an unnamed policeman stating that a Chinese-speaking Australian journalist has been behaving in ways insulting to the great Chinese people. Is that person you, Mr. Clark? I mumble something about being misunderstood, and watch on as the official turns to welcome all the other journalists, warmly. He congratulates them on having opened the door between China and Australia. I am left standing in a corner. It was my first lesson in how narrow and self-centered Chinese attitudes to the outside world can be.

But the outside world can be equally narrow, as I discover on four subsequent visits to China in the CR seventies - first in early 1973 to mark the opening of Australian diplomatic relations with China, then with a trade delegation headed by Australia's trade minister and later deputy prime minister, Jim Cairns, then in November 1973 with prime minister Gough Whitlam, and finally for a 1974 trade exhibition headed by Cairns again. Wandering around China with groups of Australian businessmen, journalists and officials still deeply suspicious of China, and of anyone who can speak Chinese, is not an edifying experience. I got a minor scoop when I discover that the Chinese are so unimpressed with Cairns' and the Embassy's efforts to cement trade relations that they demand all exhibits be returned to Australia, though maybe China will accept some of them for free. Neither Cairns nor the Embassy was impressed by the scoop, even if it did show the fragility and superficiality of some Chinese efforts to open up to the world.

Deng Xiaoping and other Non-Scoops

During the 1971 visit I was able to use a Tokyo contact to get to interview Sihanouk, then in semi-exile in Beijing. My main impression was the lavish attention he was receiving from his Beijing handlers, and a documentary on the young dedicated Khmer Rouge fighters, male and female, he said would recover his nation for him (as he sat in pomp in Beijing). But back in Sydney few were interested in that mini-scoop. And no doubt most of those I had seen in the documentary would be either wiped out or radicalised into killing madness by those secret B52 bombers (which I also got to see later in Guam. "Just bombing pretty green fields and trying to finish the 12 hour mission in time to get back for the steak dinner and the Filipino band" is how one Anderson Base crew member put it to me).

But on the 1973 visit with Cairns I was able to arrange a meeting with Penn Nouth, the then Cambodian prime minister in exile. I even managed to get a polaroid photo on the front pages. But Canberra was still following the US pro-Lon Nol line. Cairns was officially reprimanded.

Then there was day during the Whitlam 1973 visit when we all went off to see the famous Coal Hill gardens on the northern outskirts of Beijing. A small man wearing a cloth cap and a happy smile was showing us round. Everyone thought he was the head gardener. I looked a bit harder and realised it was none other than Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), on yet another of his attempted comebacks from Cultural Revolution exile.

I asked him just that: "Are you Deng Xiaoping?" He giggled agreement. I felt certain I had quite a nice story to report for my paper, and maybe a worldwide scoop as well. China-watchers around the globe were using Deng’s return to grace as a measure of China’s return to sanity after the Cultural Revolution madness. Sadly my story was cut to pieces by sub-editors in Sydney who, like that large group of Australian media people on Coal Hill, did not have the slightest idea who Deng was.

I had long been aware of Deng when he made that sudden but little-noted visit to Moscow in the early sixties in a bid to patch up the dispute with the USSR. He had also been prominent in the mid-sixties when, together with Zhou Enlai, he had tried to move China to more moderate policies. But if none of this was of great interest to my Coal Hill colleagues, it was of even less interest to editors back in Sydney.

Cultural Revolution Realities

My 1971 visit and two 1973 visits coincided with the beginning of the CR run-down (one 1973 hint was the way the ubiquitous pro-CR slogans were gradually being toned down, under pressure from the military we were told). But the legacy of that madness was on every side to see: Factories more interested in producing Maoist slogans than goods; demoralised, poorly fed, badly dressed crowds gaping suspiciously at any foreigner in sight; constant stories of Red Guard idiocies and brawls; the persecution of technicians who had studied abroad and had wanted to bring their skills back to China; gory reports of the civil war between rival factions at the Tsinghua university I visited.... As someone who had long respected the intelligence with which the Chinese ran their foreign policies (including the dispute with Moscow which few seemed to realise was over the all-important question of Taiwan) I could not understand why they could be so crazy in their domestic policies.

At the annual trade fair in Canton I was shown a rather primitive machine for making zippers. It had been developed by the workers at XX factory, I was told proudly by two cheery young ladies trying vainly to sell it to the world outside. I asked where it was being sold in China, only to be told that Chairman Mao had decreed self-reliance, that the machine had been developed solely for use in XX factory, and that other factories would be inventing and producing their own zipper machines. (To anyone who knows anything about production scale economies, the insanity of this approach should have been obvious. Yet back in Australia some were very willing to praise this sturdy emphasis on independent local initiative. Fortunately the China of today has got rid of that nonsense.)

In the countryside I had seen even worse - decrepit factory-shacks that were supposed to be producing independently the chemical fertilizers needed for each commune; the debris of the Great Leap Forward backyard steel furnaces which had to be fed by valuable pots, pans and needed farm implements. China in those days was also determined to impress us with its medical skills. The highlight was being taken to see a badly-burned Shanghai worker receiving acupuncture while shouting long live Chairman Mao.

Sometimes the nonsense could turn sinister. On a walk through the Shanghai slums a large crowd gathered behind me. Someone started shouting that I was a capitalist intruder. Fortunately, and just as the mood was turning ugly I turned a corner bringing me onto the main Nanjing Road thoroughfare. The relief was considerable. Elsewhere I was to see similar Cultural Revolution degradation of Chinese society, though not as dangerously as in Shanghai. I assume the journalistic China-glorifiers at the time had little of that experience, staying as they did in their comfortable cars and hotels.

Western China-watching

Collective idiocy in those days was not confined to China. For years the Western media had portrayed China as an evil dragon breathing fire and fear over Asia. Now thanks to ping-pong diplomacy and the frantic rush by Western journalists to get visas, China had overnight become a model of peace and contentment.

One writer - a Tokyo-based colleague unable to speak a word of Chinese but who had been able to persuade the world that a brief meeting with Mao in 1943 made him an expert on all things Chinese - spoke gushingly about the amazing honesty of the Chinese under Communism. Little did he realise that the hotel employees trying to return discarded razor blades whom he and others had praised so highly were under strict instructions to do so. If they wanted to know something about Chinese honesty, all they had to do was look at the bicycles parked outside their hotel, all carefully locked by owners. In several weeks traveling China in 1973 I did not see a single construction crane. At a factory making transformers outside Shanghai the workers had been too busy even to glance at us as we strolled through. When I went back half an hour later the place was deseerted. It was pure Potenkim. And I wrote that.

Meanwhile my colleagues from the US and elsewhere were writing happy reports about China's great economic progress. Few seemed to realize that the steel mills we were shown in Beijing and Anshan were parodies of steel mills, certainly compared with the steel mills I had been visiting in Japan just a few weeks earlier. (Some of them seemed never to have seen steel mills before.) Trying to report for my newspaper on the still very backward state of China’s economy without seeming to want to encourage the anti-China crowd back in Australia was not easy. But it had to be done.

I suspect that to this day I am still on some kind of Beijing warning list as a result. Certainly the Chinese authorities have never gone out of their way to be as welcoming to me as they have been to a quite a few journalists happy to write glad stories at the time. Ironically, the same media were later to turn anti-China again, as we were to see with the Tiananmen Square massacre myth.

The Causes of Chaos

After the first 1973 visit myself and two ABC correspondents had six weeks to wait before the trade delegation visit got underway and we were allowed to travel around China to fill in the gap. We got to see much – across to Xian in the west, by train then to Loyang and then down to Shanghai before returning to Beijing. Once again it was the same pattern of poverty, squalor and inefficiency smothered with Cultural Revolution propaganda.

I tried to find the logic behind it all. Helping me were our two minders - she, an intense CR devotee from Shanghai which had always been in the forefront of revolution in China; he, an easy-going fellow from Beijing willing to admit there had been mistakes. As our train wandered over the Chinese countryside I could eavesdrop on their constant debates. Clearly both took their politics very seriously. And so too did the rest of China. Almost at every visit we would be told how this CR faction had attacked yet another CR faction. In short, there clearly was some kind of ideological dispute in progress. But over what? No one seemed to know for sure. But ‘being struggled against’ had been the order of the day for anyone who seemed in any way to deviate from the official line.

Returning to Tokyo, I tried to regain perspective. The Chinese were not a stupid people. Many of the officials I had met in Beijing were intellectually more supple than most of their Japanese or Australian equivalents. Our minders were unusually smart, intelligent, caring people. Yet even they had been overcome to some extent by the fanaticism and obscurantism imposed on them. It was my first real lesson in the power of ideology to warp a nation and a people.

yangharrylg

Richard Baum (包嘉瑞) is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at UCLA. A long-time director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, his books include "Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping" (Princeton, 1996) and, most recently, the personal memoir, "China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom." His 48-part lecture series,“The Fall and Rise of China,”was produced in 2010 by The Teaching Company as part of its award-winning Great Courses™ audio/video collection. He is the founder and list manager of Chinapol, an online discussion forum serving the global China-watching community

My maiden journey to the PRC was a direct outgrowth of ping-pong diplomacy and Richard Nixon’s subsequent visit to China in February 1972. In the aftermath of those game-changing initiatives, unofficial Sino-American diplomatic, cultural, and scientific exchanges commenced in the latter half of 1972.

Within China, the opening to the United States proved highly contentious. Lin Biao (林彪) and Jiang Qing (江青) strongly opposed “sleeping with the enemy.” Although Lin’s sudden death in September 1971 cleared a path for Zhou Enlai’s (周恩來) diplomatic breakthrough with Nixon, Jiang Qing did her best to derail the new détente.

On the eve of Nixon’s historic trip, Jiang Qing and her fellow leftists attempted to sabotage the visit of an advance team of U.S. Government officials led by Deputy National Security Advisor Alexander Haig, sending them out on Hangzhou’s freezing cold West Lake on a bare-bones tour boat with no heating and no refreshments. Only a last-minute intervention by Premier Zhou -- who personally ordered up a new boat, suitably heated and provisioned -- prevented an embarrassing diplomatic dust-up.

Signs of left-wing defiance became even stronger as the political infighting in China heated up in 1974-75. By that time, with Mao’s blessing, cultural exchanges between China and the United States were a regular occurrence. In addition to ping-pong and basketball teams, the U.S. had sent to China a variety of delegations, including a symphony orchestra, university presidents, secondary educators, world affairs specialists and swimming and diving teams; China had reciprocated with acrobats, martial arts specialists, ping-pong and basketball teams. Two Chinese pandas -- Lingling (玲玲) and Xingxing (興興) -– now resided in the Washington D.C. Zoo. In exchange, the U.S. side sent two rare white musk oxen to Beijing. Unfortunately, these latter ambassadors of good will failed to flourish in the confines of the Beijing Zoo. Suffering from a debilitating skin disease, the two oxen – Matilda and Milton—soon lost their hair.

Since there were as yet no official government-to-government relations between the two countries, all bilateral exchanges between 1972 and 1978 had to be arranged informally by non-governmental (“people to people”) organizations. On the American side, there were two facilitating bodies: the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC (CSCPRC), an offshoot of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, set up to coordinate scientific and technical exchanges, and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, which handled cultural exchanges. The National Committee was a non-profit NGO established in 1966 to educate American opinion leaders about the PRC. My U.C. Berkeley mentor, Bob Scalapino (施樂伯), was its first president; and he invited me to join the organization’s board of directors in the early 1970s. By mutual agreement, all bilateral exchanges were to be strictly apolitical-- without ideological or political content.

As a recent appointee to the National Committee’s board of directors, I was eligible to serve as a scholar-escort for an outgoing U.S. exchange delegation; but being a relative newcomer to the board I was nowhere near the top of the pecking order.

My number came up unexpectedly in the spring of 1975, when I received a phone call from Jan Berris at the National Committee headquarters inviting me to accompany a delegation of American municipal mayors who were scheduled to visit China in September of that year. I was ecstatic. I renewed my passport, read John Lewis’s book, “The City in Communist China,” and hired a tutor to help polish my spoken Chinese, badly neglected since my graduate student days in Hong Kong in the late 1960s.

All too soon my ecstasy turned to agony. In late March 1975 Jiang Qing struck again. Violating the ban on political content, the Chinese side at the last-minute informed the National Committee of its intention to change the scheduled repertory of a Chinese performing arts troupe on its upcoming U.S. tour. In place of an innocuous pastoral folk song, a new choral piece was being inserted into the program. Entitled “Taiwan tongbao, wo gurou xiongdi” (“Taiwan compatriots: our own brothers”), the new song contained the inflammatory lyric: “Women yiding yao jiefangTaiwan!” – “We shall certainly liberate Taiwan!” After hastily conferring with the State Department, the National Committee informed the Chinese side that the proposed program change violated the “no politics” rule, and was hence unacceptable. The Chinese responded by canceling the tour. I panicked. September was close at hand. Would there be further repercussions? Retaliation in kind? I picked up the phone and called Jan Berris. “When does the next exchange delegation leave for China?” I asked urgently. “In two months,” came the reply, “the AAU national track and field team.” Without a moment’s hesitation, I offered to swap my September mayors’ delegation for the upcoming athletic team. The National Committee approved my request.

As it turned out, my fears were well-founded. In mid-September the Chinese side, in an ostensible display of solidarity with a small but vocal Puerto Rican independence movement (who knew?), refused permission for the “colonialist” mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, to be included in the U.S. mayors’ delegation. The National Committee retaliated by canceling the mayors’ visit. Encouraged by this disruption, Jiang Qing redoubled her efforts to sabotage the U.S.-China relationship.

Her efforts peaked in February 1976, when Richard Nixon--by now in deep disgrace in his own country--paid a second visit to China on the fourth anniversary of his 1972 triumph. He and his wife Pat were invited by the irrepressible Mme. Mao to an evening of musical entertainment in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. At one point during the performance Jiang Qing suddenly jumped to her feet, loudly applauding a young tenor’s bravura solo number. Emulating their hostess, the Nixons rose up from their seats to clap, only to be sharply but tactfully restrained by an alert U.S. Government official, who had recognized the title of the tenor’s song: “Taiwan tongbao: wo gurou xiongsi,” with its inflammatory lyric, “We shall certainly liberate Taiwan!” The Nixons quickly sat back down in their seats, refraining from joining in the ovation. Thus did Jiang Qing narrowly fail in her attempt to sandbag the former U.S. president into openly cheering for Taiwan’s liberation.

And so it came about that, alarmed by Jiang Qing’s proven capacity for disruptive mischief, in May of 1975 I approached the “Friendship Bridge” at Hong Kong’s Lowu border crossing along with 98 of the very best athletes America had to offer. I could barely contain my excitement: After a decade of watching China from afar, I was on the through train to Canton. Well, not quite the through train. In those days, the Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR) had its terminus at the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula in Tsim Sha Tsui, across from the Peninsula Hotel, near the clock tower where the Hong Kong Cultural Center now stands. Belying its name, the KCR did not actually cross into China. It stopped at Lowu, where passengers were offloaded and required to cross the railroad bridge on foot.

At the far side of the bridge, PLA border guards carefully inspected our travel documents. After a brief delay we boarded a Chinese train for the trip to Guangzhou (Canton), sixty miles to the northwest. Passing by Shumchun (the Cantonese name for Shenzhen), the train slowed. The day was warm and humid. I leaned out the window to take a photo of a barefoot toddler of two or three, standing in the shade of a protective parasol on a path leading to an austere, tile-roofed farmhouse. No one else was in sight; time seemed to be standing still. There was no hint whatever of Shenzhen’s staggering metamorphosis to come.

Stepping off the train onto the station platform in Guangzhou, I was exhilarated -- a kid in a candy store. For more than a decade I had been watching China through the wrong end of a very cloudy telescope, from Taiwan and Hong Kong, in print and on film, unable directly to experience the elusive Middle Kingdom. Viewed at a distance China seemed enigmatic and inscrutable, a fantasyland of surreal political stereotypes and extreme ideological clichés, but lacking in living, breathing human beings. Until that day, my most vivid image of contemporary China was the all-too-familiar celluloid scene of frenzied Red Guards waving Mao’s “Little Red Book.” As I walked through the railroad station, I found myself scrutinizing the people around me. The mass insanity of the Cultural Revolution seemed light years removed from this very unremarkable, quotidian scene. Observing a group of middle-school students on an outing, I wondered idly if their older brothers and sisters had participated in beating up teachers or informing on parents.

Up close, the Chinese people seemed so . . . normal. With some surprise, I noted the ordinariness of their appearance, their clothes and their mannerisms. What do they talk about at dinner? I wondered. How do they react when they see an American? Feeling conspicuous and self-conscious, I was oblique and indirect in my gaze, reluctant to initiate eye contact. The objects of my attention were not nearly so discreet, however. They stared right at me, boldly, without the slightest hint of shame or embarrassment. On one occasion a passing bicyclist stared at me so intently he crashed into a lightpost. I found this combination of curiosity and brazenness off-putting at first, but endearing later on, as my Chinese friends and acquaintances exhibited no qualms whatever about grilling me as to the cost of my clothes, or the amount of my monthly income, or whether I had a Chinese girlfriend. I recalled from my Berkeley language training that the concept of “privacy” was not translatable into Chinese. One Chinese dictionary had defined it as “a Westerner’s liking for loneliness.”

The Guangzhou train station was crowded. Hundreds of people were in motion, though few seemed to be hurrying. Many others were simply waiting – for what? I wondered. Several squatted on their haunches– a posture few Westerners are able comfortably to sustain. Others clustered in small groups, smoking and chatting among themselves. Most of them– men and women alike – wore plain, unisex cotton pants and shirts in three basic colors: gray, blue and olive drab. There was a smattering of white shirts in the crowd. Women wore their hair either in short pigtails or simple pageboy cuts; there was no jewelry and no makeup – depressing evidence of Jiang Qing’s lingering influence as chief arbiter of cultural taste and fashion.

On our first evening in Guangzhou I went out for dinner with two National Committee staff members who had also accompanied the AAU track team, Arne de Keijzer and Peggy Blumenthal, along with our unofficial State Department escort, Neal Donnelly. We went to what was, by reputation, one of Guangzhou’s finest restaurants, the Beiyuan. Later that night I wrote in my trip notes:

"Restaurant lavish and decadent. Built as large rectangular courtyard house ('siheyuan'). A dozen banquet rooms on four sides, surrounding traditional Chinese garden. Stained glass panels in each room, richly hued in deep blues and reds. Exquisite wooden furniture, hand carved. Excellent food; incredible service."

The meal cost ¥54 for the five of us (approximately US$6 apiece-- an amount equivalent to roughly ten days’ wages for the average Chinese industrial worker). Small wonder most of the restaurant’s patrons were Westerners, in town for the recently-concluded annual Canton Trade Fair. This was most definitely a haut bourgeois dining experience, far removed from the egalitarian hype of Maoist publicity.

What happened after dinner left an even deeper impression. I had often heard that Chinese went to extraordinary lengths to return personal items that had been misplaced, or deliberately discarded, by foreign guests. To test this, at the end of our meal at the Beiyuan I attached a small AAU lapel pin to a pack of Chinese cigarettes and left it in a darkened corner of our banquet room. We then took a cab back to the hotel, where I began writing up my notes on the day’s activities. An hour or so later the hotel’s floor attendant walked in without knocking, completely oblivious to my obvious annoyance. (One quickly learns to give up one’s expectations of personal privacy in Mao’s China.) His eyes bright with triumph, the attendant proudly displayed my cigarette pack in his hand, the lapel pin still attached. It was an impressive piece of detective work. We had not made an advance booking at the restaurant; we had not given anyone our names; and after dinner we had hailed our own taxi, some distance away from the restaurant. How did they find us so quickly? Somewhere in this experience lay a cautionary tale: Big Brother is watching!

Guangzhou’s taxi fleet was something to behold. The majority of taxis were exact copies of 1946 De Soto-Plymouth four-door sedans. When I asked how this curious situation came about, I was told that at some point in the past China had purchased the entire tool and die works from an obsolescent Chrysler Corporation assembly line in Detroit. Whatever their source, these thirty-year-old behemoths were amazing to behold. Considering their age, their bodies were in reasonably good shape; but the engines were something else again.

A mechanical breakdown en route to our hotel gave me the opportunity to peek under the hood of one of these beasts. As our driver labored with his tool kit to nurse the wheezing, sputtering engine back to life, I looked over his shoulder. What I saw was startling. Lacking spare engine parts, the cab had been kept in running order through ad-hoc patches and engineering improvisations. A bulky, jerry-built replacement carburetor, distributor, and starter motor had long ago replaced the original factory equipment on our taxi, and a profusion of home-made belts, bolts and cables now protruded at odd angles from the engine block, fastened together with a considerable amount of baling wire and electrical tape. The overall effect was that of a homemade Rube Goldberg device. I had to admire the considerable ingenuity that went into keeping the aging Guangzhou taxi fleet in service.

The U.S. Track and Field Delegation spent three days in Guangzhou, three in Shanghai, and four in Beijing. In each city a two-day track meet was held, matching the American athletes – who included several past and present world champions – against seriously outmanned Chinese provincial teams. Considering that track and field was in its infancy in China, the crowds were impressive, ranging from 15,000 in Guangzhou to over 70,000 in Beijing. Though most in attendance had clearly never seen a track meet before, the spectators were generally polite and attentive, dutifully applauding winning performances.

Fortunately for all concerned, our delegation’s visit had been organized under the slogan, “Friendship first, competition second” (“Youyi diyi, bisai di’er”). It was fortunate because the track meets themselves were anything but competitive; and the results were anything but pretty, at least from a Chinese perspective. With thirty individual events held in each city, including both men’s and women’s competition, a total of ninety first-place medals were awarded. The US athletes captured 89 of them. Then, in one of the final events of the final meet in Beijing, a Chinese middle-distance runner caught -- and passed -- the lead American runner with less than 400 meters to go. Suddenly the previously inert crowd came alive. “Jia you! Jia you!” they began to chant in unison – “Pour it on! Pour it on!” When the Chinese runner built an insurmountable lead with less than 200 meters remaining, the chanting turned to screaming: “JIA YOU ! JIA YOU!” More pure adrenalin was pumped out during that brief outburst than had been displayed in five full days of prior athletic competition. Notwithstanding the debilitating traumas of the Cultural Revolution and other Maoist excesses, Chinese national pride and patriotism were evidently still alive and well, lying dormant, awaiting only a superb performance by a gutsy Chinese athlete to be re-awakened.

Several years later I discovered that the ubiquitous “friendship first” motif, displayed so prominently throughout our three-city track and field tour, did not long outlive the death of Mao and the advent of Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) market reform and “opening up” policies. Attending a Chinese intra-league basketball game in Shanghai in the early 1980s, I was both startled and slightly amused to discover that local fans, apparently emulating their NBA counterparts in the United States, delighted in heaping abuse upon visiting players, chanting “yang-wei” (“can’t get it up”) whenever an opponent missed a shot, and “xiong-qi” (“erection”) whenever the home team scored. I took such trash-talk as tangible evidence of the two-edged nature of China’s “opening up.”

Toward the end of our trip, on a sightseeing visit to the Great Wall north of Beijing, I got into a rather heated discussion about photography with one of our local guides, a Ms. Li. I was an avid amateur photographer, and had been taking quite a few pictures from the window of our bus – mostly focusing on peasants working in the fields, or balancing heavy loads on shoulder poles, or sleeping by the side of the road, or riding on horse-drawn wooden carts. After a while Ms. Li tapped me on the shoulder. “You must like old carts,” she said. “Why don’t you take pictures of our modern buildings?” I responded that in America we have lots of modern buildings, but not so many horse carts or shoulder poles. Obviously annoyed, she proceeded to deliver an impromptu lecture on the dangers of “lying with your camera.” I asked her what she meant. She told me that the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni had made a film in China two years earlier that lied about China. “He filmed only poor rural villages, old houses, and shabbily dressed peasants,” she scolded. “He lied with his camera, just as you are doing now.” I protested that Antonioni merely filmed what he saw, and that what he saw was real. Dissatisfied, but not wishing to offend a foreign guest, she abruptly terminated the conversation. “We have a different viewpoint than you do,” she said dismissively. A few years later, after Jiang Qing was toppled, the Chinese government apologized to Antonioni and invited him back.

There were other surprising encounters as well. One of the more memorable of these occurred during an evening stroll along the famous Bund in Shanghai. Situated on a quay alongside the Huangpu River, near the mouth of the Yangzi, the Bund (the word is Urdu for “embankment”) was built by Europeans shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. With its monumental mix of Romanesque, Gothic, and Baroque architecture, the thirty or so massive concrete buildings along the Bund formed the financial and diplomatic hub of Shanghai’s pre-WWII international settlement, its famous skyline a trope signifying the city’s modern history of Western domination.

I was walking along the northern bank of the Bund with Neal Donnelly when we heard the sound of whispered voices coming from a nearby, darkened bridge. It was a moonless night, and there was no illumination on this particular stretch of riverbank, where the Huangpu joins the Suzhou Creek. Strolling onto the darkened bridge we could make out shadowy forms lining the railings on either side. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we saw dozens of young couples, crowded together along the bridge railings, in various stages of sexual intimacy. All were more-or-less fully clothed; and all were vertically upright. But there was clearly a good deal of body heat being generated.

At one point two young men approached us, speaking to each other, weighing the costs and benefits of confrontation. One said, “Let’s hassle the foreigners a bit.” The other replied, “Are you crazy? We’ll be shot on sight.” Self-preservation prevailed over bravado, and the youths retreated without incident. In point of fact, the penalty for crimes committed against foreigners in those days was extremely harsh; for physical assault, the penalty was death. We felt very safe on China’s streets. On the other hand, we now had clear evidence that despite decades of puritanical moral education and a constant stream of Communist Party propaganda claiming that China’s young people routinely sublimated their sexual urges to higher ideological principles, hanky-panky was very much alive and well in Shanghai--albeit only in a few designated sanctuaries. (Public parks were another favored venue for youthful heavy breathing.)

Earlier that same evening, Neal and I had visited the Foreign Seamen’s Club on the Shanghai Bund. I had been told by one of our Chinese guides that duty-free goods were available there for merchant sailors at rock bottom prices. We decided to check it out for ourselves. Inside the front entrance, a clerk in the anteroom asked for the name of our ship and pushed a register in front of us. I signed the book in English, nervously scrawling, “Dick Deadeye, HMS Lollipop.” The clerk looked at the signature, shrugged, and motioned us inside. There we saw three or four large display cases filled with foreign cigarettes, perfume and liquor of every description– including half a dozen top-quality brands of single malt Scotch, various exotic brandies, and nine or ten Russian and East European vodkas. I pointed to a one-liter bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and asked the clerk, “Duoshaoqian?” (“How much?”). “Shisankuai,” came the response – about US$7, roughly half the usual U.S.retail price. From then on, until the Foreign Seaman’s Club moved to new headquarters under a tightened security regime in the early 1980s, each time the Good Ship Lollipop dropped anchor in Shanghai, Able Seaman Dick Deadeye showed up to claim two bottles of Black Label.

One of the U.S. male track athletes had a rather chilling encounter with the local public security police in Shanghai. On the first day of our two-day track meet there, after winning his event he got caught up in the spirit of “friendship first” and ran up into the grandstand waving a small Chinese flag and shaking hands with a number of enthusiastic spectators. It was a spontaneous display of inter-cultural good will. Later that evening, as I was dressing for dinner, he knocked on my door. He told me that during his jaunt into the stands that afternoon a Chinese spectator had discreetly shoved a note into his hand. After glancing uncomprehendingly at the Chinese characters, he shoved the note in the pocket of his warm-up jacket, where he soon forgot about it. Some time later, two plainclothes Chinese security police visited him in his hotel room, inquiring about the note and its author. Did he still have the note? Did he recall who handed it to him? His suspicions aroused, he told them he had thrown the note away and couldn’t remember who gave it to him. After his visitors left he waited a half an hour or so, then knocked on my door. He handed me the note and asked me to translate it. “Long live the friendship of the Chinese and American people,” it said, in hastily scrawled characters. He asked me what he should do if the police came back again. I told him that if he wanted to keep the note as a souvenir he should stuff it in the toe of one of his shoes inside his duffle bag, and then make a mental note of where things were positioned in his room and in his bag before he went out for the evening. Later that night, after dinner, he knocked on my door once again. His room had been searched, and a few personal items were now out of place. But they hadn’t found the note. It was another small but sobering reminder that China remained firmly in the grip of xenophobic autocrats.

On our last full day in Shanghai we were taken on a tour of a Chinese factory, the Shanghai Turbine Plant, one of the largest and most modern in China. The plant produced giant turbine engines, used to generate hydroelectric power. In the reception room, the plant’s public relations director gave us the standard, obligatory “Brief Introduction” (BI) to the factory and its history. Before the Cultural Revolution, he told us, the plant’s managers and engineers had oppressed the workers, forcing them to comply with hundreds of detailed rules, and docking their pay if they violated any regulations. Managers had also shown favoritism to better-educated workers, looking down on the uneducated and the unskilled. Consequently, plant morale had suffered and productivity had lagged badly. After the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he said, things changed. The workers became “masters of the house” as the plant introduced participatory management. The old managers, along with administrative staff, engineers and technicians, were criticized for their arrogant bourgeois attitudes and work styles and were forced to scrub toilets and do menial work on the factory floor. Morale improved greatly, and the plant registered outstanding improvements in both the quantity and quality of turbine production. It was a typical Cultural Revolution morality tale–stereotyped, melodramatic, and almost certainly untrue.

This particular vignette bears repeating only because some three years later, in the summer of 1978, after the overthrow of the “gang of four” and at the onset of Deng Xiaoping’s second political comeback, as chance would have it I returned to the same Shanghai Turbine Plant. By this time the worm had turned and many of the “revolutionary virtues” celebrated during the Cultural Revolution were being decried as “ultra-leftist poison” spread by the “gang of four.” Not surprisingly, this new morality was incorporated into a revised BI at the turbine plant. Curiously, the narrative on this occasion was given by the very same public relations flack who had addressed the U.S. track and field athletes three years earlier. But this time his story line was quite different. During the Cultural Revolution, he said, agents of the “gang of four” had sabotaged production in the plant. Overthrowing the management, they spread anarchy on the factory floor. Workers played cards during working hours, while managers were ruthlessly “struggled.” Engineers and technicians stayed home, unwilling to risk criticism as “bourgeois authorities” if they dared to display initiative in solving technical problems. Consequently both the quantity and quality of output suffered badly. Over 70 percent of all the turbine engines produced at the plant between 1967 and 1976 were rejected as substandard. However, in the past two years, he continued, things had begun to turn around. The workers came to understand that their thoughts had been poisoned by the “gang”; and managers, engineers and technicians were rehabilitated and permitted to do their jobs. Piece rates were introduced, along with monthly bonuses for over-fulfillment of quotas, and production consequently rebounded. They were now well on their way to breaking previous records for productivity, innovation, and quality. It was an inspiring story. At the end of his spiel he looked around the room and asked for questions. I raised my hand.

“Three years ago,” I reminded him, “you stood in this same room and gave a very different Brief Introduction to another group of foreign guests.” I then highlighted the contrasting elements in his past and present narratives, asking him how he could reconcile such strikingly different stories. He stammered and sputtered for a moment before blurting out the only possible explanation under the circumstances: “My thinking was poisoned by the gang of four.” This anodyne phrase became China’s unique and ubiquitous national mantra in the late 1970s, as 800 million people struggled to reconcile their recent “revolutionary” words and deeds with the new, more pragmatic requirements of political correctness in the age of Deng Xiaoping. The ability to turn on an ideological dime, rationalizing one’s previous attitudes and behavior in order to minimize personal culpability, shame and opprobrium had become an essential survival skill.

On our final evening in China, after the track and field team had finished its last day of competition in Beijing, a lavish farewell banquet was laid on for us at Beijing’s International Club. The event was organized by the U.S. Liaison Office, whose Chef de Mission, Ambassador George H. W. Bush, and his wife Barbara, served as hosts for the evening. Approximately 200 people were there, including, in addition to our delegation, a number of Chinese government officials, leading members of the All-China Sports Federation, and various other VIPs. The American athletes had been in training for two full weeks, on a strict dietary and recreational regimen that excluded alcohol, drugs and late night revelry. They were young, they were energetic; and they had been tightly wound. Now, with the rigors of competition at an end, they were ready to break loose.

At each table, small glasses of “Maotai,” a potent Chinese barley liquor closely related to “Gaoliang,” were refilled at frequent intervals during the banquet, as were larger glasses of sweet red “Shaoxing” rice wine. Glasses of luke-warm beer were also constantly refreshed throughout the evening. Three or four courses into the meal the decibel level in the banquet hall rose noticeably, as the athletes’ inhibitions began to melt away. By the fifth or sixth course, raucous laughter echoed through the room. By the time soup was served after the eighth course, my well-trained olfactory sense detected a familiar, sticky-sweet scent wafting through the room.

As waiters cleared the dishes prior to serving dessert, Ambassador Bush stood up to speak, and the ambient noise level in the room dropped a bit. After making a few introductory remarks, Bush raised his wine glass in the direction of the Chinese officials sitting at the head table, intending to propose a toast. Before he could say “ganbei,” however, a commotion broke out at the back of the banquet hall. I looked up in time to see a tall, lanky pole-vaulter from Texas rushing drunkenly up the center aisle, heading toward Ambassador Bush, calling out, “I’m gonna kill that sonofabitch.” Just before he reached Bush, a heavily muscled American discuss thrower jumped up and tackled him. It was no contest. The pole-vaulter was quickly subdued and carried bodily out of the banquet hall, whereupon Mr. Bush, seemingly unfazed, resumed his toast. Later, I was told that the offending athlete had been drinking and smoking pot since late that afternoon. Evidently, “Maotai” was the coup de grace that sent him over the edge. After being carried from the hall, he was taken to the team bus where a couple of his teammates sobered him up.

On the afternoon preceding that final bacchanalian banquet, I sat next to a dour, unsmiling Chinese government official in the VIP section of Beijing’s 70,000-seat Workers’ Stadium. He had arrived late. The track meet was already underway, and we introduced ourselves hastily. I didn’t quite catch his name, but it didn’t sound familiar. (Full disclosure: I have always had a poor memory for Chinese names.) I recall feeling vaguely disappointed, as I had been hoping to meet someone really important. In the course of the day’s competition I made several attempts to draw the fellow into conversation, but he didn’t seem interested in chatting. Nor did he appear to be enjoying the track meet. After a while I stopped making any effort to engage him.

Fast-forward eight months to January 1976. The international China-watching community was abuzz with rumors about the succession to Premier Zhou Enlai, who had succumbed to bladder cancer on January 8. Although First Deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping was next in line to succeed Zhou, there had been no formal announcement of the succession. Rumor had it that the Party Politburo was deadlocked between Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Qing’s preferred candidate, Zhang Chunqiao (張春橋). Then, on January 28, the Chinese press agency Xinhua issued an otherwise routine report about the arrival in Beijing of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Accompanying the report was a photo of the airport reception for the visiting German leader, with the following caption: “Acting Premier Hua Guofeng greets Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.” Immediately, China watchers everywhere picked up their telephones and started calling each other: “Hua GuoWHO?” we asked. A frantic search of “Who’s Who in Communist China” yielded the information that Hua Guofeng (華國鋒) was a provincial party secretary from Hunan (Mao’s native province) who had been brought to Beijing late in 1971 to serve on the commission of inquiry investigating Lin Biao’s conspiracy and death. Hua had evidently impressed Mao with his performance on the commission, for in 1974 he was promoted to the important post of Minister of Public Security—China’s top cop. Looking at the Xinhua photo, I thought that Hua Guofeng looked vaguely familiar. Though I didn’t recognize the name, I felt sure I had seen the face before.

On a hunch, I began sifting through the hundreds of photographs and other memorabilia from my visit to China the previous May. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. There, in grainy black-and-white, was China’s mystery man, Hua Guofeng, sitting next to me at Beijing’s Workers’ Stadium. I could have kicked myself. Why hadn’t I recognized his name? Why hadn’t I persisted in trying to chat him up at the track meet? For years afterward I kept that photo, now badly faded, pinned to a bulletin board in my UCLA office as a memento of my close encounter, and a reminder to work harder on my retention of Chinese names. With the exception of two brief viewings of Mao’s embalmed corpse, a National Committee-sponsored encounter with Deng Xiaoping, and a five-minute photo-op with Jiang Zemin (江澤民), that was as close as I ever got to a Chinese Communist Supremo.


[Adapted from "China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom" (University of Washington Press, 2010).]

yangharrylg

Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (傅立民),USFS, Ret., was the principal American interpreter during the late President Nixon’s pathbreaking 1972 visit to China. Two of his children have continued the family tradition of sinology. His daughter, Carla （傅瑞真）is the Associate Director of the China Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. His oldest son, Charles III （傅瑞偉）holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

On a chill, gray Monday morning -- on February 21, 1972 -- I stood on the steps of the old Hongqiao Airport terminal. I had arrived in Shanghai twenty minutes in advance of President Nixon. I was on the backup plane, which arrived first, so I actually saw the arrival of Air Force One in Shanghai. I had studied Chinese in Taiwan, but this was, of course, my first encounter with the Chinese mainland. My eye was drawn to a billboard that defiantly proclaimed, much as those at the airport in Taipei did at the time (with seven of the same eight ideograms), "we have friends all over the world." As Air Force One pulled up and cut its engines to refuel and take on a Chinese navigator before flying onward to Beijing, I heard a bird sing. Judging from the presence of birds but the absence of aircraft at Hongqiao, I deduced, all those foreign friends of China couldn't be conducting their comradely visits by air.

As our president and his wife deplaned for an off-camera cup of tea, I was reminded that I had written some advice for Mrs. Nixon, which was not to wear red, a color associated in China with weddings or prostitutes. Of course, she got off in a brilliant red overcoat. So much for that advice. But it was photogenic, which was obviously the main concern.

I struck up a conversation with a Chinese foreign ministry official, the first I had ever met. I was, it turned out, also the first American official with whom he had ever spoken. That day culminated in President Nixon's meeting with Chairman Mao (毛澤東) and dinner with much of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee in Beijing. It was a day of mutual discovery for many Chinese and Americans. Not just for me and others who took part in some or all of its events, but for all whose stereotypes were blown away by the images on television.

We went from the airport arrival ceremony to the Diaoyutai guesthouse. There were three interpreters: myself, as the senior interpreter; Cal Maehlert, who had excellent Chinese, who had been pulled out of Saigon for this purpose; and Paul Kovenach, who had been recruited by somebody or other for the purpose. We were an odd group, because Cal Maehlert was rabidly pro-Kuomintang and in fact a great personal friend of Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). And right after the trip, he went off on a hunting trip in Taiwan with Chiang Ching-kuo and probably told him everything. He also lost his entire, I believe, at least he couldn't account for, his copy of all the briefing papers. Paul Kovenach was as close as you could get then to a Taiwan-independence advocate. Paul and I rode in together from the airport. I still didn't know what I was to do. There was a brief preliminary meeting with the Chinese at the guesthouse, where essentially they did the interpreting.

It wasn't until later that I was suddenly called over to the president's villa in the Diaoyutai guesthouse, with the assurance I would be told what I was to do. Cal and Paul came along, and we were all put into a side room. The president came out, and I noticed he was wearing pancake makeup, and there was a large glob of Max Factor hanging from a hair in the middle of the groove at the end of his nose. But all he did was shake hands, say he was pleased to meet us, and not tell us anything about what we were to do. So we went back to our villa, on hold.

There was to have been a banquet early in the evening, but Nixon went off unexpectedly to see Mao, excluding Secretary of State William (“Bill”) Rogers and everyone from the State Department.

Suddenly, a little after eight o'clock in the evening, the banquet having been moved down to about nine-thirty, I was called over to the president's villa again. There was a bunch of people milling around, a couple of Chinese interpreters, Ji Chaozhu (冀朝鑄) and Tang Wensheng ("Nancy" Tang 唐聞生), and a number of other protocol people, including some I've since gotten to know very well on the Chinese side.

Dwight Chapin, the appointments secretary for the president, came out and said, "The president would like you to interpret the banquet toast tonight."

And I said, "Fine. Could I have the text, please, so that I can work it over?"

He said, "Well, I don't know. There may not be a text."

I said, "Well, I know there's a text. And Chinese is not French or Spanish. One has to consider carefully how this is done, if it's to be done well. I'm sure there's a text, and I'd appreciate your getting it for me."

He went into the president's office, and came out and said, "There is no text, and the president would like you to interpret."

I said, "Well, I happen to know that there is a text. And really I must insist on having that text. I have something approaching a photographic memory; I just need to read it once."

At any rate, he went back in again, and he came out, and he said, "There is no text, and the president orders you to interpret."

And I said, "Well, it might interest you to know that I did the first draft of the toast tonight, and while I don't know what was done to it, in detail, at the NSC and by the speech writers, I do know that some of Chairman Mao's poetry was inserted into it. And if you think I'm going to get up in front of the entire Chinese politburo and ad lib Chairman Mao's poetry back into Chinese, you're nuts. So, either..."

He said, "All right." And he took the text out of his pocket and gave it to the Chinese. And so they had it. Later, Ji Chaozhu, who did the interpreting, consulted with me on a number of points before he did it. Indeed it did contain some of Chairman Mao's poetry, and it would have been catastrophic for me to try to interpret it back into Chinese.

So my first act as interpreter of Chinese (this was my debut as interpreter; I had never interpreted except in a classroom) was to refuse to interpret.

As we sat through the banquet, I was at the head table with Nixon and Zhou En-lai (周恩來) and Kissinger and Ji Pengfei (姬鵬飛) and Li Xiannian (李先念), later president of China, and, I think, Qiao Guanhua (喬冠華), who was, in fact, the brains in the Foreign Ministry, and Bill Rogers, of course, and Mrs. Nixon. Interpreting for them, I could see the president glaring at me across the table, with his jowls wobbling and a grim expression on his face, obviously mighty annoyed that I had pulled this stunt.

I have thought a lot about why he might have wished to conceal the fact that there was a text. The fact is that he had a habit of memorizing speeches, and he liked to appear to be ad-libbing them, giving them extemporaneously, which is what Dwight Chapin had told me he planned to do. And I think he was afraid I would stand up there with the text, which I wouldn't have done, of course. In any event, he also had a predilection for using the other side's interpreters, because they wouldn't leak to the U.S. press and Congress. So all these things came together.

Two days later, after some other things had happened, he apologized to me. He called me over and said, "I'm sorry. I made a mistake. That was wrong. I shouldn't have done that." And there were tears in his eyes. Then he did some other things that were by way of making amends. It was odd.

I did not smoke at that time. I had given it up nine years previously, when I was in law school. But right after I had refused to interpret the president’s toast, I remember, Li Xiannian, then sort of the chief economic planner of China, later the president, offering me a cigarette. I took it, and I smoked for the next thirty years. I was terribly nervous. I was both proud of what I'd done and vindicated by the nature of the toast, and also numb with shock at what I'd done, figuring that my career was over and that that was it.

The president and Zhou En-lai hardly talked at all. Nancy Tang was covering them, and I was covering the others. As the evening went on, since there was no discussion going on, I started talking with Qiao Guanhua and several of the Chinese, in Chinese. We were just chatting about various things; I asked some questions about the schedule and this kind of thing. It wasn't a very substantive conversation.

As it turned out, I did all of the interpreting for the meetings between the foreign ministers, which very much fit the mode. I think Ambassador Averell Harriman remarked once that the diatribe is left to the foreign ministers, while the chiefs of state have a pleasant conversation. We had several such lengthy sessions with the acting foreign minister while the president communed with Zhou Enlai.

Of course, I was fatigued out of my mind. It was such an intense experience that, for probably a year after, I could have replayed all of those conversations verbatim. I could also read the Chinese briefing book upside down across the table, since I had taught myself to read Chinese upside down, thinking it might be useful someday. And that helped a bit.

Those discussions were essentially on the level of detail and exchanging complaints and interpretations of history and the like, some of which I think astonished Bill Rogers, as it turned out that he wasn't terribly familiar with the details of history, such as the precise origins and course of the Korean War and various U.S. statements on foreign policy matters. The Chinese pulled out a whole series of news articles, to try to show that the United States was hegemonic. And we got into great arguments, their interpreter and I, over the translation of a few key concepts, like deterrence, which they had translated as intimidation, a rendering to which I took exception. Of course, they had their own highly prejudicial vocabulary. They had not been subjected to the influence of positivism. They saw nothing wrong with making statements that were value laden, and they did so. In fact, they used language prescriptively, rather than descriptively, much unlike us. So it was a lively, but rather inconsequential, venting of views.

My impression about Mao Zedong was very little. He was so heavily screened from his own people that he was quite a mysterious figure. Zhou En-lai was always the urbane, loyal implementer of Mao's policies - implementer in the best sense: he would take broad concepts and translate them into something that could work. I had, of course, read much about him. I remembered a remark that former UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold had made, to the effect that, when he first met Zhou En-lai, as he did, I believe, during the effort to compose a truce in Korea, for the first time in his life he felt uncivilized in the presence of a civilized man. There was this enormous grace and charm about him. Indeed, at one of the dinner conversations on the second night, Zhou En-lai engaged me in conversation across the table, asking about my background, where I had learned Chinese, what I thought about this trip, and so forth, with the Chinese interpreter interpreting our conversation for the president.

I can't remember the exact day, but I snuck out (snuck out is the wrong word, because one couldn't sneak anywhere in China) but, with Chinese connivance, I got out to the New China Bookstore on Wang Fujing Street in Beijing. I was looking for a copy of the “Twenty-four Dynastic Histories” (《二十四史》). Each dynasty in China writes the history of its predecessor. And there is a tradition of considerable objectivity and really great professionalism in the writing of these things. They go back well over two thousand years, and they are the most complete record of any human civilization that exists. They contain information on everything from the amount of rainfall in a given year to the court dress to events in foreign relations to domestic political and economic policy changes to the life of the court and so forth. I wanted to see if I could buy these, and I had brought a pile of money with me. I had read, actually, in an intelligence report, that they had been published. The book store told me that scholars were still busily preparing these. I was told that they were not published yet.

Zhou En-lai, obviously well briefed by his staff, on our last day in Beijing, at lunch, spoke to me across the table and said, "I understand you're interested in the “Twenty-Five Histories.” I didn't know that they had written the history of the Republic of China, the twenty-fifth dynasty on the Mainland. We talked a bit about those, and he explained to me, for the benefit of Nixon, what these things were. And he said the work in publication had not yet been completed, but that, as a response to my interest in them, he was going to give two sets of an original edition of these things to the United States, one to the White House and one to the State Department. And indeed, in the State Department Library, there is the boxed set of the “Bo Na Ben,” (《百衲本》) which he presented to the Department through me. And he also gave me, separately, three books of literary criticism on a favorite poet and writer, by someone that Mao was very fond of, an intellectual that Mao admired, who was the father of one of the Chinese interpreters, someone who was then having an affair with the foreign minister and who later married him.

In any event, that conversation then led, in Hangzhou, to Nixon calling me over, as I mentioned, to apologize. And he said several things. I did some interpreting between him and Zhou. Then he said something to Zhou En-lai that I found grossly embarrassing. He said, "Mr. Premier, I want you to take note of this young man." I interpreted that. Then he said, "Because very likely he will be the first American ambassador to China." I was 27 or 28, and I thought to myself, "My God, he's either saying that they're going to have to wait thirty years for an embassy, until this fellow grows up, or he's saying they're going to send the least consequential, youngest ambassador ever to China." I was just terribly embarrassed. I didn't interpret it; Nancy Tang did. Zhou En-lai muttered something like, "That'll be the day," and that was the end of that.

But Zhou then asked me to stay on, and we talked some more. He asked more about our diplomatic service and various things. After that, I was feeling fairly good, having been apologized to by the president and praised by Zhou En-lai.

There were two military officers from the military region in Eastern China where we were. This was the first visit by Zhou En-lai to the region since the Lin Biao (林彪) incident, and the military were all on tiptoes. Anyway, I started talking to these two guys about the Korean War, in which both of them had participated. We got to drinking, and, as you know, in China, you never drink without toasting someone. Well, I sort of concentrated on these two fellows, and pretty soon they were very happy and glowing with pleasure. They got up and went around the table, and in a terrible faut pas, said to Zhou En-lai, and I could hear this, "Since that unfortunate incident, we've not seen you down here. We want you to know that we're personally loyal to you, Mr. Premier." There was great embarrassment on the Chinese side at this maneuver, which they attributed, probably in part correctly, to my having gotten these two guys drunk.

So Qiao Guanhua, who was a famous drinker, turned on me and started getting me drunk. We had, I think, twenty-three glasses of Maotai. By the end of the evening, I was feeling no pain whatsoever. But, fortunately, Maotai passes through the system quickly, so it did no permanent damage.

In Hangzhou, Kissinger and company were sequestered, with Nixon closely looking on from a distance, dealing with the final elements of the Shanghai Communique. The State Department was excluded from that. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Marshall Green played a crucial role there in rejecting and insisting on a revision of some of the language on Taiwan, which would have given away a point that we didn't need to give away.

Both Taipei and Beijing, the two regimes which have been in a civil war since the 1920s, regarded Taiwan as part of China and believed there was only one China. At that time, they simply disputed which one of them was entitled to represent China as the legitimate government of China.

So the United States, by the artful language of the Shanghai Communique, took note of this agreement between them and said we didn't challenge it. That was the basis for the framework by which we were able to manage, and have been, to this day, able to manage, relationships between Taipei, Beijing, and Washington.

As I recall, Kissinger began to accede to language that went beyond stating that we didn't challenge this view, and appeared to endorse it more directly. And it was that to which Marshall Green objected and on which he got Bill Rogers to weigh in. At any rate, he played a very important role at that moment.

The Shanghai Communique, so called, which was issued February 28, 1972, on our departure from Shanghai, which was our last stop, was actually agreed in Hangzhou.

I didn't see the text until we were in Shanghai, when I was asked to review the Chinese text, which I did with Ji Chaozhu. As is always the case between two languages there is no complete coincidence of meaning, there is an overlap, and there are several possible renditions of words, some of them key words. I found, to my very pleasant surprise that the Chinese translation had bent over backwards faithfully to render the reservations of the United States and really required no polishing at all. I did make a couple of suggestions, some of which were accepted and some of which weren't. But it was a very artful piece of very professional translation that they did.

I mention my review of the communique because it's become an article of faith that no one did review the text. I suspect that Kissinger isn't aware that it was actually reviewed by an American interpreter. But it was, and after that, it was put in final form and released.

The original language on Taiwan, as well as the language that I had crafted, establishing various mechanisms for interaction -- economic, cultural, and continuing diplomatic dialogue -- was essentially accepted in the text.

It was an unusual communique, in the sense that it began with a lengthy recitation of differences, and then, in effect, said that notwithstanding the foregoing, we have a common interest in opposing the hegemonic ambitions of other powers. Neither of us seeks hegemony, we do not wish anyone else to have it, and therefore we will engage in this relationship.

The Cultural Revolution was still in progress in 1972 and Beijing was a cultural desert. One of the first things that I always do when I go to a new place is to look at what people are reading, or, indeed, whether they're reading anything at all. And here was a city, a large city, probably at that point six million or so people, in which nobody was reading anything, and in which, in the bookstores, aside from the dogma, there was virtually nothing for sale. I found that the former edition of the Little Red Book of Mao's quotations, which was the Bible of the Cultural Revolution and had been blessed with a foreword by Lin Biao, had been removed from circulation. I managed to get a copy in Shanghai by browbeating a shopkeeper to take one out from under the table. It may have been the last such copy left in China.

Everybody was wearing Mao badges. Very much in my mind was the image of this cultural desert, like deserts elsewhere, occasionally bursting suddenly into bloom, with vast demonstrations in Tiananmen. But Beijing was under very tight security control. There were veterans of the Korean War in China, who had no cause to love Americans; there was the residue of the Lin Biao incident, and the place was buttoned down tight.

In Hangzhou, I went out on the street to go shopping and had one of the eeriest experiences of my life. When I went into a department store, there were thousands of Chinese in there, none of them speaking. You could only hear the swish of clothing contacting and cotton-soled shoes rubbing on the terrazzo.

Of course, we were shadowed by security people, several layers of them. The basic theory of security in China, as I knew, is very similar to ours; that is, there should be three layers of security. And I was able to spot the three layers, to the point where, in Hangzhou, when I wanted to buy some records of the Chinese Revolutionary operas, which I had read in the libretto but had never heard, I didn't have enough renminbi, Chinese currency, so I went to one of the fellows who was in the inner perimeter, a plainclothes fellow shadowing me, and I said, "I think you're with me. I don't know if you have any money, but I need to borrow some money. I'll pay you back when we get back to the guesthouse." He was shocked, but he gave me the money, and I bought the records, as well as some other things, some chopsticks and things like that. On the way back, walking on the street, I saw the tension revealed when a couple of these security people, who now had come out of their effort to conceal themselves and were preceding me on the sidewalk, literally knocked people off the sidewalk to make way. They were terribly nervous, and probably for good reason. And I'm sure that their paranoia was increased by our Secret Service, which, of course, is pathological on the subject of security.

In any event, it was not the period of the Cultural Revolution when starvation was at its peak; rather, that was after the Great Leap Forward. And time marches on. I was astonished on the Great Wall, when I dropped back and started talking to a couple of the local Chinese guides. Since the president was interested in being photographed and didn't want me in the photo, I turned the job of interpreting over to the Chinese and went back to talk to some of the ordinary little girls who were serving as guides, and I asked one of them, "What did you do during the Cultural Revolution?"

And she said, "Well, I was too young."

I meant at the height of it, which was only a few years before. But, of course, she was right, and it suddenly dawned on me that time does march on. This event, which was one of the great events in history, had come while she was still a child.

I also remember asking her whether she was aware that men had landed on the moon. And she said she didn't know that. So we talked a bit about that.

But later I discovered that in fact the Chinese were terribly well informed, in many ways, about the outside world, that there was something called Reference News, which any Chinese could subscribe to, not then but later, which rather faithfully selected and reprinted articles from the Die Zeit and the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Times of London and so forth. So, someone a bit older than she certainly would have been aware of the whole Apollo series. She was not.

When I left Shanghai, I was still on the backup plane. The mood was euphoric. We had accomplished our purpose, which was a strategic one. We had not given away very much on Taiwan. We had held our ground on other international issues. We had established the framework for a relationship. The one item that was unclear was the precise mechanism for future diplomatic contact. We had agreed on the channel, through the embassies in Paris. I didn't know it at the time, but Paris had in fact been a point of contact, through General, later Ambassador Vernon Walters, with the Chinese, primarily on the Vietnam War. And Kissinger had found it convenient during his contacts with the Vietnamese there to also maintain contact with the Chinese. So there was a certain logic to that.

In the past four decades, China has changed so much and become so much part of the world and Sino-American relations have become so tangled in multiple intimacies that the international solitude China then enjoyed can no longer be imagined. There is no birdsong now at the Hongqiao or Pudong airports. Instead, there are hundreds of jet aircraft arriving and departing for every corner of China and the globe. China has become the world's third-largest destination for foreign visitors. And the human ties between almost every sector of our two formerly estranged societies are now rich, ubiquitous, intricate, and warm.

Yet China and the United States began our contemporary relationship not with affection but with cold strategic calculation. The American intention was to alter the world's strategic geometry, not to change China by opening it to outside influence. Ours was a marriage between hostile parties arranged by geopolitics. It took place despite bitter disagreement on many matters and highly negative images of each other.

Today, when people think of the Shanghai Communiqué, they remember the way in which it finessed differences over the question of Taiwan's relationship to the rest of China and pointed to the need for Chinese on the two sides of the Strait to craft their own peaceful resolution of it. That language was, of course, a major achievement for both sides. But, in diplomatic history, the most innovative element of the Shanghai Communiqué was not the creative ambiguity of its language about Taiwan. It was the unprecedented candor with which the text recorded sharp differences between the United States and China on many regional and global issues.

And, in terms of the broad national security and foreign policies of our two countries, the essential paragraph was not that about Taiwan. It was our mutual acknowledgment that, while "there are essential differences between China and the United States in their social systems and foreign policies," we could and should set aside these differences in the interest of sustaining a mutually advantageous international security order and pursuing common purposes in accordance with international law and comity. I do not paraphrase by much.

Such realism and mutual respect, tempered by deference to the rules of international conduct, was a wise basis on which to open a relationship between two great nations with the capacity greatly to help or hurt each other. It also delivered the strategic results both sides intended. The essence of this approach was 求同存異 — preventing differences on relatively minor matters from obstructing the search for agreement on others of greater importance. Today, despite the political and economic bonds between Chinese and Americans, the two countries appear to be drifting back into military antagonism. We would do well to rediscover the strategic vision and willingness to adjust policies to advance our national interests that were so much in evidence in February of 1972.

yangharrylg

Ross Terrill (譚若思), a China specialist and Research Associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, is the author of ten books. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the George Polk Memorial Award. In 2011 his memoir, 《我與中國》 ("Myself and China") was published in Chinese in Beijing.

In the early 1960s, few Westerners set foot in the People’s Republic of China. Australians needed permission from their own government to go there. Some got a green light, but Beijing guarded visas for people from non-Communist countries like precious jewels. Australia, in step with the U.S.A., still had not recognized Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) government, which made getting a Beijing visa tougher.

During the summer of 1964, while hitchhiking through Europe after graduating from Melbourne University, I knocked hopefully on the tall carved wooden doors of Beijing's embassies in East Europe (few existed in West Europe), saying I would like to see New China. I had previously obtained permission from the Australian government to travel to China. In Prague, Budapest, and Belgrade, I was told to wait a couple of weeks for an answer. Alas, I had to take the train on to the next capital, to protect my dwindling funds, before a reply came at the Chinese embassy of the previous one. I felt I was in a revolving door, with a Chinese visa always just out of my grasp. Warsaw was my last stop in East Europe. At the PRC embassy on Bonifraterska Street, feeling I now had nothing to lose, I boldly asked to see the ambassador to debate whether or not it was a good thing for the world to understand China. A senior diplomat emerged from an inner room, smiling slightly. Two cups of tea appeared before us; I made my case. Next day I was phoned at the Bristol Hotel and told my Chinese visa could be picked up that morning at Bonifraterska Street.

Visiting Moscow on my way to China, I wrote a wide-eyed letter to my parents: “You can imagine how excited I am to be having my first sight of the USSR. It is a long-standing dream come true.” I took a tour of the Lenin State Library with its 21 million volumes, conducted by a blond female librarian who said, when told I was heading for China: "Remember, the present government of China is just a dictatorship of one man, the chauvinist Mao Zedong. It is not a government of the people - and it is bent upon war." The Soviet librarian’s words were a blunt introduction to the burgeoning Russia-China split. I tried to suggest the USSR and China were at different stages of development and it was inevitable that outlooks would vary. The librarian cut me off. How could a kid from a capitalist country understand the finer points of Marxism! Whether in connection with our conversation or not, a “Statement of the Soviet Government” was delivered to my room at the Ostankino Hotel next day. It was a 20,000-word refutation of the Chinese government’s statement opposing the treaty of 1963 banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere.

From Moscow I took a worn Aeroflot turboprop plane to Omsk. About half the passengers were Chinese. Two Hungarians struggled aboard with melons in string bags. A Finnish woman, on her sixth trip to China, was off to buy textiles at a trade fair in Shanghai. Albanian commerce officials were on their way to North Korea for a vacation. Omsk looked like a town in Alaska or the far north of Japan. In a terminal that was full of sleeping Russians and resembled a railroad station, we sipped sweet-scented Siberian lemonade. Another stop at Tomsk, and then after a night flight we reached Irkutsk. A Siberian tourist guide led me to a breakfast of buns, apricots and mineral water. As we ate, the Chinese (CCAC) airliner that was to take me to Beijing rolled up outside the window. I began to sense the enormousness of the co habitation of the Soviet Union and China, the two leaning upon each other for 4300 miles, their bodies together like reclining dinosaurs, their minds far apart, one in Europe and the other in Asia.

Changing to CCAC, we began a four-hour flight to Beijing. During many months in Europe, this was the first flight I took with no Americans on board. The cultural transition to China was agreeable. The cabin smelled of bamboo fans and fragrant tea. Hostesses brought chewing-gum, cigarettes, and little plastic envelopes for the protection of fountain pens. We flew over Lake Baikal and the barren ginger waste of the Gobi Desert, and later over North China’s yellow streams and green velvety hills.

At Beijing airport, a customs officer sealed up my rolls of film exposed in East Europe, so that I would be able to take them out of China, and made me undertake to have any film used during my stay developed within China. A guide from the China International Travel Service awaited me. Even a wandering Australian student could not arrive in Mao’s China unmet; he had to have an escort to ensure an appropriate experience of New China.

A stubborn idealist, I wanted to see for myself the new China that had turned off the lights of Treaty Port China and excluded the West, throwing out the last American diplomats in 1950 and treating each succeeding American president as the world's devil of the moment. The revolution that Mao clinched in 1949 was still a shimmering abstraction for most people around the world, the way the Russian Revolution was for Europeans through the 1920s and 1930s. I was too young to buy an abstraction, and energetic enough to hunt down a few realities.

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My first vista of Beijing was of a huge mass of people in white shirts and blue pants assembled in Tiananmen Square. It was a rally of 800,000 Chinese protesting U.S. President Johnson's attack on North Vietnamese vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, just a few score miles from Chinese territory. Nearby, Chang An Avenue, the spine of Beijing, swarmed with bicycles. Amidst them, occasional busses, like carp among minnows, made a sedate progress. Hooked together in pairs with a folding canvas connection, giving a caterpillar effect, the busses ploughed forward packed to capacity. My taxi dashed at fifty miles an hour for half a mile, then coasted at fifteen miles an hour for a few hundred yards a maddening way to drive, which I thought at the time meant engine trouble, but learned later was to save gasoline.

The only major new buildings in Beijing were Soviet-style government monoliths: The history museum, the Great Hall of the People, the central train station, all put up in the fevered years of the Great Leap Forward. They didn’t look very Chinese. A waiter at the Beijing Hotel said the train station went up from the moment of its design to the last coat of paint in ten months. I wrote in my diary: “The Chinese acknowledge no limitations, whether on the speed of putting up a building, set about with trees that arrive fully grown in boxes, or on controlling the historically uncontrollable waters of their great rivers.” No high rise or international chain hotels existed, nor did any foreign airline other than Aeroflot fly to China.

Some buildings were being spruced up for the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the PRC a couple of months ahead. Little of the famous city walls of Beijing remained. I wondered in what way the destruction of city walls was intrinsic to the Communist revolution. Did aesthetics not count at all? I concluded that the rush to pull down city walls was in keeping with the Communist aspiration to make a new environment and a “new man.”

Drivers of the few cars, imports from Russia and Poland, with an occasional battered Morris or Chevrolet from "imperialist" days, made constant use of the horn, sending little boys scurrying and old men hauling wagons lurching to one side at the last moment. I wrote in my diary: “My guide said in the future there will be many more cars in China. If there are one tenth the cars in Beijing that there are in Melbourne, people will be deaf within a day from the noise of the tooting.”

As Chinese as many things were, from the curved tiles of the Forbidden City's palaces in the hue of a goldfish's skin, to the nasal cries of the hawkers and stone-grinders, and the smell of Chinese noodles and sauces and vegetables, Beijing nevertheless had the air of the Communist bloc. I stayed in the Russian style Xin Qiao Hotel, a rectangular cement block which nestled against a remnant of the city wall in the old Legation Quarter. My room had no shades and sun streamed in upon the bed at 4.30 AM, as outside my window cicadas sang as if in millions. In the hotel courtyard, the bushes, although lush, exuded heat. Beside them, old Chinese men and women did rhythmic snakelike “tai ji quan” exercises.

The Xin Qiao Hotel had large parties of Laotian dancers and Cambodian table tennis players. Many Africans were on visits of “Goodwill,” for in 1964 one-third of China’s forty-eight embassies were located in Africa. Except for three Western resident journalists, the main foreigners in the city were French visitors. They strode out into the terrible August heat in Parisian clothes, feeling proud that France, under de Gaulle, had led the way among Western powers in establishing full diplomatic ties with the PRC. Some East European technical residents of Beijing were becoming disgruntled as the Sino-Soviet quarrel made the atmosphere chilly. An engineer from Budapest carried in his wallet a piece of paper on which he crossed off one by one the days until his departure from China.

I had never seen a pedicab before. Patched up all over, perhaps they were being phased out as the government saw them as an imperialist relic? I liked them because of the open-air ride, the absence of a tooting horn, and the leisured pace that permitted real sight-seeing. The only drawback was the rather precarious seat and the feeling that it might be “unsocialist” to be pedaled by a Chinese worker.

To my room at the Xin Qiao each afternoon an attendant brought an English edition of a bulletin from the New China News Agency. The main theme of reports on world events was anti-colonialism. One morning during breakfast, four Africans with whom I had flown from Siberia to Beijing came into the restaurant. They approached my table and we shook hands and chatted. From the hotel staff there came a murmur of oohs and ahs. I did not understand why, but after further experiences at the opera and in museums of greeting Asians or Africans and evoking a buzz from Chinese by standers, I saw the point. To the Chinese, schooled in Marxist orthodoxy about imperialism and national liberation forces, human warmth across the chasm between a white person and Third World brothers seemed to come as a shock.

The end of colonialism was supposed almost automatically to solve the problems of the Afro Asian World. My bulletin from the Chinese news agency spoke of "old forces" of the West being swept aside by a tide of "new forces" of Afro Asian socialism. Many people, including to a degree myself, believed in this upward evolution of the oppressed. Of course it would be a long process.

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No longer an abstraction, here was China as steel plants, crying babies, 3000 year old tombs, soldiers with fixed bayonets at the gates of unlabeled buildings, bookstores selling Albanian political pamphlets and the social realist works of Jack London, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens. Also a populace with a genius, often born of necessity, for deriving pleasure from simple things.

The hotel dining room staff used bread as a magic tool to keep Westerners content. These cheerful young men and women were convinced no European could eat a meal that did not include a pile of slices of dense, dry bread. A culture needs pigeon holes for dealing with other cultures, and for these Chinese bread was the key to our civilization (as, for many Westerners, rice was the essence of Eastern civilization). If I ordered a meal that did not include bread, the waitress would look at me as if to say, "Haven't you forgotten something?" flash a knowing smile, and write the Chinese characters for bread on her docket book.

When I took a taxi to the Summer Palace, the driver, dropping me at the gate, said I would need sun glasses against the glare and lent me his own pair. After lingering longer than planned in the hillside pavilions, I could not find the taxi or the driver. I took another taxi back to the Xin Qiao Hotel and tried to ensure that the sun glasses were returned and full payment was made. I was not able to press upon the taxi co operative the 60 yuan agreed upon originally for the round trip to the Summer Palace. They would accept only 40 yuan plus the return of the glasses. No tip, even if disguised as a rental fee for the sun glasses. "Let us shake hands instead!" said the staff man when I tried to tip. Tipping had been abolished as a relic of colonialism, and only twenty years later would it come back as a prized badge of competitiveness.

I knew little of China, nothing of its language, and my eyes were my only investigative tool. But I could see the CCP was keeping a tight rein on Buddhists and Christians. Religion seemed a test of China’s new society. I asked to see a Protestant pastor, Zhao Fusan (趙復三), head of the Beijing Research Institute of Theology, and he received me at Beijing’s Rice Market Church. I knew of Zhao from church contacts in Europe, since he had represented China at international Christian gatherings in the years before the Cold War put an end to Chinese participation in world Christian activities.

Zhao wanted to talk about socialist China, not about theology. He put everything in a framework of imperialism, which my education made me inclined to accept. “There is little light for us in Western theology,” he complained. But I got little light from Zhao Fusan about Chinese theology. I asked him: “Which parts of the Bible do you turn to most often?” Looking impassive, he replied, “All parts of the Bible have appeared in a new light to us since 1949.”

I had a great time at the Beijing Library, which then had six million books and subscriptions to nine thousand periodicals. The head librarian, who had learned English and German in his spare time, led me through airy reading rooms and a rare book room. I asked him what sections of the library were the most popular. “The one on Marxism-Leninism,” he replied. “Next would come the fiction sections, both Chinese and literature from all over the world.” I looked up the English name C. Wright Mills, whose sociology books we read at Melbourne University, and found four of his works in English. Learning I had been in Moscow, the librarian inquired: “Is it also your impression that the Soviets are plain revisionists, and that a bourgeois strain has appeared in Soviet society?” I was startled when he answered my question about rules for borrowing: "Generally speaking, only organizations may borrow books not individuals."

The Chinese ultra-leftists, soon to jump to center stage, were quite right to say that a lot of "the old crap" still remained in the China of the early 1960s. The traditional Tian Qiao folk entertainment area, south of Qian Men gate, attracted happy crowds with its painted magicians, expressive story tellers, huge wrestlers, and double jointed acrobats. It wasn't forbidden to consult the writings of Confucius (孔子) and the Taoist philosopher Lao Zi (老子), to enjoy the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven, or to go dressed in a colorful skirt to a dance on Saturday night and prepare with a session at a hair salon. Not everyone yet realized or could say that the new crap (much of it Soviet socialist realism) was not necessarily better than the old.

Rightly or wrongly, I sensed a slightly old fashioned world. My room at the Xin Qiao was equipped with a chamber pot and a steel nibbed pen beside a bottle of ink, and in a nearby park older Chinese men played tennis in long white flannels, gravely inching their way through a baseline game. Leading restaurants, hotels, and embassies were staffed by silver haired veterans with elegant manners owed to imperialist tutelage, and the boutiques of Wang Fu Jing and the art shops of Liu Li Chang offered lovely antiques from mansions recently turned into schools or offices or dormitories. When I bought an ice cream, the seller took the time to carefully unwrap it and put the paper in a trash can before handing me the ice with a smile. And there were the dilapidated Morrises and Chevrolets, like remnants from a junk yard.

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Packed up to leave Beijing, I reported to the CCAC air terminal office that was then near the Beijing Hotel at the corner of Wang Fu Jing. The little old colonial building was deserted. “There is a storm over south China,” an official said. “No flight to Guangzhou until it’s over. Try again in two hours.”

In Guangzhou, a sign in Chinese, English, and French rose opposite my hotel: “Welcome to the Businessmen for the Chinese Export Commodities Fair.” Even Australians came to the Canton Trade Fair, as foreigners called the event. Business folk were almost the only link with New China for many Western countries. Again in the south, the issue of the Soviet Union came up. My guide said crisply: "In Russia a new bourgeoisie has appeared, of which Khrushchev is the political spokesman. They are playing a 'great power' game. The sort of game that made them put missiles into Cuba. It's national egoism, nothing to do with class struggle." She told me: “Albania is the only socialist country left in Europe.”

The view of the Pearl River from the top of the Aiqun Hotel was wonderful. The yellow water was alive with boats of every shape and size. Some were sampans, with boxes of chickens affixed to the back that provided home for families who refused to live ashore, despite the government’s efforts to remove them as a pre-Liberation relic. The only cat I saw in China was on the deck of one of these sampans. On the roofs of buildings lower than the Aiqun Hotel, I looked down on small restaurants, people asleep, and little boys playing football.

The clip clop of wooden sandals on the crowded pavements had just about given way, with modest economic development, to the rustle of plastic shoes. “It makes Canton quieter than before Liberation,” a shop-keeper told me.

At the bus station the photos in a display sixty feet long were fiercely political. One showed a large crowd in Japan demonstrating against the United States. A grasping hand was superimposed over the crowd to represent Uncle Sam, and the chairman of the Japanese Communist Party was addressing the throng. I was shaken by a photo exhibition called “Four Wicked Men.” I saw Truman with a clenched fist, Eisenhower looking moronic, Kennedy as old and bewildered, and Johnson leering into microphones that resembled guns. I objected to an official. “These men are enemies of China,” he declared with a shrug. “Consider their deeds. Their deeds are a caption to the pictures.”

Flying home from Hong Kong to Melbourne, I wrote in my diary that China seemed to the left of the Soviet Union, just as Yugoslavia was to the right of the Soviet Union. China seemed more ideological than the Soviet Union, its citizens more swept up in public purposes. Fifteen years after Liberation, I found the snap and bustle of a confident new order. But in Moscow I had discerned more prudence about nuclear weapons than in Beijing.

I was left with the impression that the quarrel with the Soviet Union was not basically an ideological dispute, but one arising from the different stages of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions. Beijing’s focus, only fifteen years from beginning to unite and organize the country, had to be on feeding people, industrializing, and modernizing. Moscow’s talk of “goulash communism” was dangerous for the Chinese. So the battle with the Soviet Union was not an abstract dispute, but a matter of life and death.

I was wrong in thinking the Russia China split would likely have a negative impact on China's cultural evolution. "Communism in Rome and Paris and London, as well as in East Europe," I worried in my diary, "is a bridge between the Chinese Marxists and Western culture. By 'going it alone' the Chinese are cutting themselves off from all manifestations of European culture." It did not turn out that way.

I saw China poised among Chinese tradition, Western culture, and the new Communist culture. These were similar to the three forces that had jostled together in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a prelude to China's later twentieth-century convulsions.

In Guangzhou I mentioned in my diary an appealing side of Chinese society: "The alleyways are crowded and they are poor, yet no one is in rags, no one is sitting or lying around in that state of hopeless looking poverty familiar in some Asian cities. The clothing is standardized to an extreme degree, but it is neat and adequate. Everyone seems to have a task, and consequently no one comes running after you, ingratiatingly, to beg something, or even to sell something. In the midst of poverty there is order and a certain dignity."

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Most of my teachers in Australia at the time saw the PRC as nationalistic, fairly successful in economic development, and bound for a large role in Asia. They did not yet see the full scope of the social engineering mistakes of the Great Leap Forward of 1958-59. The international comparison they made was always with the Soviet Union.

Disagreements between Moscow and Beijing were plain to Australian China Hands, but most thought they stopped well short of enmity. The older school of China Hands from the 1940s, including Professor Charles Patrick Fitzgerald (費子智) in Canberra, who had seen the Communists in Yanan as “agrarian democrats,” felt any split between Beijing and Moscow just proved the CCP had never really been Communist in the first place. In general, Mao’s communism was considered intriguing and probably more flexible than Moscow’s.

My teachers of China never mentioned India, just as India experts knew little of China. But I was interested in this comparison. India displayed pervasive religion, an accompanying fatalism, and British-flavored intellectuals. All were a contrast with China. The Chinese in their secularity seemed more rational, more modern than the Indians, and imbued with a Promethean spirit. China was less influenced by any part of the West (or East ) than India was by Britain. China was more insular yet more intellectually challenging. I was fueled in my desire to seriously study China by an impression that, virtually unknown as the condition of the PRC was, China was Asia’s center.

Such bald thoughts went into a six-part series I wrote in Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian a few months after my China trip. Murdoch had just founded this newspaper (four decades later it is one of the world’s best) and he was its editor. He pruned my articles with a blue pencil and wrote out the payment check with a fountain pen.

In one of my articles I criticized the American policy of non-recognition of the PRC. “One can only be astonished at the continued American policy of isolating China – to the extent of refusing citizens, including the late Eleanor Roosevelt and Averell Harriman, permission to go to China and cut through the cobwebs of myth with a bit of ordinary human communication. Can ignorance benefit anyone? Can it benefit us in the West whose cause is bound up with the irreducible nature of freedom?”

A tendency exists in some quarters, perhaps especially in Europe and the USA, to think international problems get steadily worse, but 1964 was a more troubled time than most later years. All of East Asia was immensely poorer than it is four decades later. Tumult beset the politics of the truculent Soviet Union, as Khrushchev was kicked out as Stalin’s successor. China exploded its first atomic weapon in 1964, rejecting the Test Ban Treaty signed by the three nuclear powers in 1963. In Beijing and Guangzhou, photos of Chinese children cheering at the news of President Kennedy’s assassination nine months before made me pessimistic about U.S.-China relations.

But I knew not all Chinese believed every word the party-state said. In Beijing, David Wilson (魏德巍), then a young British diplomat, later British Governor of Hong Kong, told me of a recent rally against the Vietnam War. "I happened to be minding a friend's Dalmatian dog," said Wilson, "and I arrived at the [British] office in my red sports car with the dog sitting beside me. The people assembled for the demonstration against us burst into fits of laughter. It opened the whole atmosphere up - they let me pass through the door." Wilson said "a fascination with the West and its goods existed" even in the China of 1964, "but it was suppressed.” I suppose a red Alvis, a mountainous pet dog, and a Briton in a Scottish kilt were striking spectacles for the people of Beijing to behold.

A novice at age twenty-five, I did not realize in 1964 that “Liberation” was a facade behind which lay a mixture of social change, political control, and cultural continuity. Mao, it turned out, had more doubts about the results of the Liberation than we Westerners who saw China in the early 1960s detected. Nikita Khrushchev was more prescient about the excesses of the Great Leap Forward communes than China specialists in the West. He told Senator Hubert Humphrey, later U.S. vice-president, as early as December 1958 that they would certainly not succeed.

At the end of my last article for The Australian I wrote: “All around the world, from Singapore to San Francisco, you can see pockets of Chinese society. But only in China can you behold the vast and formidable civilization in its power and its old and beautiful setting. Only in China do you realize what the Chinese as a race and a nation must increasingly mean in the pattern of future decades. Just as once in the past, long before the present barren era of clashing ideologies and wrenching divisions, China was the greatest power on earth, so in the future she may become so again.”

I felt that observing this huge slice of humankind had launched me on a path that might hold my feet for many years.

yangharrylg

Jerome A. Cohen (孔傑榮) is professor and co-director of the US-Asia Law Institute at NYU School of Law and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

I started studying the Chinese language August 15, 1960 at 9 am. Confucius said "Establish yourself at thirty," and, having just celebrated my thirtieth birthday, I decided he was right. I would not be allowed to visit China, however, until May 20, 1972. For almost twelve years my study of China's legal system and related political, economic, social and historical aspects, had necessarily been second-hand, dated and from afar. It was a bit like researching imperial Roman law or deciphering developments on the moon.

Like many other American specialists on China, as a new era of Sino-American relations dawned in the early 1970s, I tried many ways to finally reach the Promised Land. The one in which I had invested the least effort was the one that panned out first. A phone call from the Federation of American Scientists, a group of liberal scientists seeking to initiate cooperation with China, suddenly brought an invitation to accompany its chairman, the distinguished physicist and policy advisor Marvin Goldberger, and its executive secretary, the dynamic political activist Jeremy Stone, on a several week-trip to promote the first scientific exchanges between our countries. The three of us were allowed to take our wives, but not our children.

So Joan Lebold Cohen (柯珠恩), who had become a specialist in Chinese art on the faculty of the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, and I shared this first trip to China just three months after President Richard Nixon's famous China visit. We had been spending the academic year in Japan on my Guggenheim Fellowship, and we reluctantly left our three school-age sons in Kyoto under the supervision of our kind and competent housekeeper, Hatenaka-san.

INITIATING CULTURAL EXCHANGE

We were guests of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. One of its able staff, Mr. Li Mingde (李明德), met us at the Hong Kong border and escorted us to Beijing's Minzu (Nationalities) Hotel. Excited to finally be there, I awoke early the next morning and decided to explore the neighborhood before joining my wife and colleagues for breakfast. The area was bustling with people rushing to work, leaving no chance to strike up a casual conversation. I tried to talk with people in the nearby market, which would have been difficult at any time, but especially at 6 am. I heard one vegetable-seller say to another: "He's a Frenchman," perhaps because Americans were few at that point and I had a mustache. After a while, since I was hungry and getting nowhere in my marketplace effort at cultural exchange, I decided to try my luck at a nearby "little eating place." As I stood in line, the man behind the counter seemed friendly and asked what I wanted to eat. I asked him to give me what those ahead of me were having - hot soymilk soup called "doujiang" and a long cruller called "youtiao." Armed with these props, I took the fourth seat at a table for four occupied by three middle-aged workers. Everyone else in the room was watching but my new companions barely looked up. I was determined to get them to talk, but how to start? I remembered that foreign journalists who preceded me in China had told me that, every time they asked anyone about the mysterious fate of disappeared leader Lin Biao (林彪), the answer was always: "Have some more soup." So, instead of explaining who I was and how I got there or reminding my companions about Chairman Mao's (毛澤東) emphasis on being at one with the masses, I stayed with what seemed a safe topic and said to the fellow on my left: "What's the name of this soup?" He didn't answer.

The room hushed, and tension began to mount, but I pushed on, saying hopefully to the man across from me: "Do you know the name of this soup?" He wouldn't answer either. At that point, as the sympathetic man behind the counter looked unhappy at the cool reception I was receiving, I noted a sign on the wall that said: "Heighten revolutionary vigilance. Defend the Motherland against spies." And standing in a corner staring at me with bulging eyes was a man who resembled a security officer about to make an arrest in a Jiang Qing (江青) opera. Meanwhile, the anxious man seated on my right was slurping his soup furiously in an effort to clear out and avoid the inevitable. He probably didn't want to be impolite like the others, but may have feared that, if he told me the name of the soup, the next question would be "What happened to Lin Biao?" In some desperation I persisted and said to him: "You must know the name of this soup." He looked at me and then at the soup and said what Chinese often say when they don't want to answer: "I'm not too clear about that!" At that point, hoping that the official route to cultural exchange might be more successful, I decided it was time to return to the hotel!

On that first full day in Beijing, I underwent an unexpected name change. For twelve years my Chinese name had been "Kong Jierong" (孔傑榮). My first Chinese language tutor in Berkeley, California, a learned former Beijing scholar, had given me this name. "Kong," he had said, was the perfect family name for me since it sounded like Cohen and was the name of China's most famous sage, Confucius (孔子), who took a great interest in law. But in the China of mid-1972 Kong had become the enemy, the hated symbol of China's feudal past, and anathema to every upstanding revolutionary. I had inadvertently arrived in the midst of a nationwide campaign to wipe out the remnants of Lin Biao and Confucius. So my hosts declared that I should have a new, more proletarian name. They decided that "Ke En" (柯恩) would do nicely since "Ke" was an ordinary name of the masses and, together with "En" (they knew I admired Zhou Enlai [周恩來]), would sound even more like Cohen than "Kong" did and have a favorable meaning. I gave the matter little thought, but later, in 1977, when I escorted Senator Edward M. Kennedy and ten members of his family to China to meet Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and other luminaries, Taiwan's "Lianhe Bao" (United Daily News 《聯合報》) used my new Mainland name against me, claiming that I had abandoned the name of China's foremost figure. Of course, outside the Mainland, I have continued to be known by my original name, and recently, since the resurrection of Confucius in China, some Mainland organizations and friends have adopted it in referring to me.

We spent our first ten days in Beijing, preoccupied with the usual introductory tourist sites and meetings devoted to persuading our hosts to send their first science delegation to the United States, which they did six months later. For me, two personal academic/professional meetings stand out. One was a four-hour chat with three members of the Legal Department of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT). It was my only contact during the entire visit with people concerned with law. The domestic legal system had been a shambles and arbitrary even before the Cultural Revolution, and the revolution still had four more years to run when we appeared. Legal education had virtually ceased. Although the worst days of violence had long passed by 1972, struggles reportedly still occasionally took place in cities that were closed to foreigners. Yet China's international trade was expanding, raising legal problems that had to be handled, and business with the United States was gradually opening. So when I asked to meet legal experts, my hosts naturally turned to the CCPIT's Legal Department. The three people introduced, although they lacked formal legal education, seemed to be experienced, competent people, and I was destined to see much more of them when, beginning 1978, China launched a serious effort to establish a credible legal system. The director of the department, Mr. Ren Jianxin (任建新), in the late 1980s became not only President of the Supreme People's Court but also, concurrently, head of the Communist Party's Central Political-Legal Commission, which controls the activities of all the country's government institutions for implementing the law. Mr. Tang Houzhi (唐厚志) became China's best-known expert on international commercial arbitration, and Mr. Liu Gushu the leading specialist on patent and trademark matters and founder of an important law firm dealing with these problems.

The other meeting I well recall was with a large group of "America watchers" convened by the Foreign Affairs Association (waijiao xiehui), an offshoot of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They were familiar with my July 1971 article in the American journal "Foreign Affairs" calling for U.S. recognition of the People's Republic and disengagement from the Republic of China on Taiwan. At least a few knew that I had chaired a Harvard-MIT committee that in November 1968 gave President-elect Nixon a confidential memorandum recommending that he send a close aide for secret talks in Beijing with China's leaders. That was the origin of Henry Kissinger's famous 1971 visit. Of course, my hosts, the "America watchers," wanted to discuss the problem of Taiwan and prospects for normalization of diplomatic relations between our countries, but they seemed most anxious about Senator George McGovern's chances of unseating Nixon in the fall presidential election. I was known to be an advisor on Asia to McGovern, although, since I had spent most of the year abroad, I did little for his campaign. At a time when China was looking to the U.S. to be a shield against the Soviet Union, McGovern's pledge to cut the defense budget by one-third seemed very worrisome to my hosts. Also, it was obvious that the PRC had high hopes for cooperation with the Nixon administration, much of it based on the admiration that Kissinger and Zhou Enlai professed for each other.

I had agreed to talk with the group about these subjects if they would agree to also discuss problems of cultural exchange. I wanted an opportunity to let them know how this initial effort looked to their guests. Since they hoped to establish diplomatic relations with the U.S., I thought it useful for them to make their reception of Americans as smooth as possible. I especially wanted to ask about the most puzzling of our experiences - the subway, an experience that reminded me of the old jokes about the then new Moscow subway of the 1930s. When our escort inquired whether we would like to ride on the Beijing subway that had been under construction, I said that the newspapers had reported that it was not yet in service. Our escort said that it was already in service and that we could ride on it. At the appointed hour, while standing next to the track, we were given a long lecture about the history of the subway's development. During that time, only two trains came by, and neither had a single passenger. The next train, which we took through eight stations, also had no other passengers, nor did we see any people waiting at any of the stations. We were told they were all in waiting rooms, where conditions were more comfortable. When we got to the last stop, the Beijing railroad station, our escort still insisted that the system was in use. I embarrassed my wife by saying that we would like to wait a while for evidence that people really were using the subway. I had had doubts about some of the information we had been given on other matters and was disturbed that we could not successfully communicate about something as basic as whether the subway was in service. A bit exasperated with my determination to clarify an evident misunderstanding, my wife and a couple of others in our group went up the escalator to the main hall to wait. Down at the track, no trains came in for a time but finally one did appear with about twenty assorted workers, peasants and soldiers who seemed flustered when they encountered the escalator. With some satisfaction, our escort said: "You see, the system is in service." When I later asked the Foreign Affairs Association group about this mystery, our escort's leader, with the escort seated next to him, smiled and said: "It's very simple. Our subway is not yet in service."

Our escort had given me a more reliable insight into contemporary China earlier in the trip, as we viewed the beautiful valley of the Ming Dynasty tombs outside Beijing from a hilltop. By that time I felt we had become friendly enough to talk politics and even international law. Just a few weeks earlier, at a lecture in Tokyo to the Harvard Club of Japan, I had discussed the increasingly tense dispute between China and Japan over the eight piles of rock in the East China Sea known as Diaoyutai in Chinese. When on May 15, 1972, the United States surrendered administrative jurisdiction over these islets to Japan, Sino-Japanese relations deteriorated further, and even today the dispute continues to fester. When I mentioned Diaoyutai, my escort became uncharacteristically emotional. "China," he said, "will never allow the Japanese aggressors to occupy one inch of its sacred soil. We will fight them to the death." But when I gently informed him that Japan had assumed jurisdiction over the islets only the previous week, he suddenly resumed his usual relaxed manner and said: "Oh, well. There is a right time and place for everything. We are in no hurry. We can settle this matter any time in the next 500 years!" I had witnessed the two sides of contemporary China's politics - nationalism and pragmatism - in short compass.

One question that overhung our first ten days was where we would go next. My wife wanted very much for us to visit the ancient capitals of Xi'an and Luoyang and their nearby artistic treasures. For days we waited for confirmation of this excursion. Finally, after dinner on our last night in Beijing, our escort came to our room and told us that it would not be possible. After he left, Joan expressed her anger at their rejection of her only request. I agreed with her view, while motioning to her to raise the volume of our continuing conversation about our disappointment. I assumed that our hosts might be monitoring our conversation and may well have been right. The next morning, just twelve hours later, our escort returned to tell us the exciting news that we could go to Xi'an and Luoyang. Moreover, at the farewell lunch that the famous poet-official Guo Moruo (郭沫若), then head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, gave us that day, Guo, unprompted by us, said to me: "I understand that your wife is interested in ancient Chinese culture. So we will arrange for you to go to Xi'an and Luoyang!" That incident taught me a lot about the importance of using imaginative negotiating techniques in China.

MEETING PREMIER ZHOU ENLAI

One other question concerned us in Beijing - whether we would meet Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. We were told that we might, but there was no word by the time we left the capital. Nor was there any information as we pursued the rest of our itinerary. Our travels proved pleasant and stimulating but plagued by the continuing "cat and mouse" games played by our local hosts to parry my efforts to learn basic facts about public life. An exchange in Shanghai conveys the flavor. I asked: "What are the names of your Shanghai newspapers?" "We have the People's Daily," I was told. I responded: "But that's your national newspaper. What are the names of your local papers?" Our host replied: "You wouldn't be interested." I answered: "Then why do you think I asked the question?"

We ended our travels by returning to Beijing in order to fly to Guangzhou on our way out of China. Our hosts seemed slightly embarrassed that there had been no confirmation of a meeting with Premier Zhou. Then, while en route, bad weather in Guangzhou required our flight to be diverted to the closed city of Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province. Because Nanchang was closed, we were kept at its airport until dark and then taken to the People's Hotel, which we were forbidden to leave. At four a.m., we were awakened to return to the airport before daylight to resume our flight to Guangzhou. In the interim, however, big news came from Beijing.

At one a.m., as we were fitfully sleeping amid blistering heat on our woven bamboo mats, there was a knock on our door. It was a telephone call from Professor Lin Daguang (Paul Lin [林達光]), a Canadian friend who had previously been an assistant to Premier Zhou. Would Joan and I be willing to return to Beijing to meet Zhou? I said I would gladly return and would let him know about Joan. I also suggested inviting our companions on the trip, which he arranged. Joan, understandably, felt she had to return to Kyoto to look after our sons. The Goldbergers also had to go home, but the Stones were able to return to Beijing.

As Harrison Salisbury later commented in his book "To Peking and Beyond," invitations to meet Premier Zhou were often issued at the last minute, and it was not unusual to bring guests back from all over the country. There was also sometimes an air of mystery surrounding these meetings. For example, I was told to wait in my hotel room from 5 p.m. after which I would be picked up and taken to a preliminary meeting with an unidentified person, to be followed by dinner with an unidentified group, but with a strong hint that Premier Zhou would be the host. The preliminary meeting turned out to be a private one-hour session with Deputy Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua (喬冠華), a stimulating and self-confident interlocutor whom I enjoyed. I then went to dinner and met with Premier Zhou, Qiao and some of their principal aides, at least two of whom eventually became ambassadors to the U.S. and heads of the North American section of the Foreign Ministry. Our interpreter was Tang Wensheng (唐聞生), known to many Americans as Nancy Tang, who had grown up in the United States while her father served at the UN. Although I had several short chats in Chinese with Premier Zhou, Nancy did the heavy interpreting for the evening. The main guests were Professor John K. Fairbank (費正清), America's senior China scholar, and his charming wife Wilma (費慰梅). Fairbank was my senior colleague at Harvard University, where I was then teaching in the Law School. The Fairbanks had been friendly with Premier Zhou in Chongqing during the mid-1940s before the Communist Party's 1949 victory in the Chinese civil war. Foreign correspondents Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times and Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and their wives also attended, as did Jeremy Stone and his wife.

Salisbury's book gives a long account of most of the conversation at our almost four-hour evening with Zhou and this group. I need not repeat it, although it was surely the high point of my first visit. Here I will mention only my most outstanding impressions. The deepest impression was left by Premier Zhou. He gave us an hour of discussion sipping tea before dinner while seated in a circle. He was genial, informal, relaxed, humorous, yet serious and always guiding the conversation by asking questions. His first remark to me was: "Why didn't your wife come with you? We invited her." When I explained that Joan had wanted to join but was concerned about our sons, he quipped: "Oh, I forgot. In America, parents still have to look after children." Later, as we went into dinner, he said to me with a smile and a bemused twinkle in his eyes: "I understand that you have done many books on our legal system." This showed the respect he gave his guests by learning their backgrounds in advance. Yet he said it in a slightly quizzical way that gently implied that perhaps I had made more of China's legal system than China had. After all, the country was then still in its Cultural Revolution!

What I remember most vividly from the pre-dinner conversation was the Premier's preoccupation with cancer. Zhou knew, of course, that the purpose of Mr. Stone's and my visit was to initiate cultural exchanges in the sciences. He seemed especially interested in inviting to China America's leading cancer specialists, in theory and practice. Since the Premier appeared so lively and healthy, it didn't dawn on me that he might be inquiring on his own behalf. I did think that he might be asking on behalf of Chairman Mao Zedong, whose health had reportedly been deteriorating and was the subject of much speculation at home and abroad, and soon after our meeting I wrote about this in an op-ed in the Washington Post. We later discovered that Premier Zhou had learned in 1972, the year of our visit, that he himself was suffering from several kinds of cancer, which ultimately caused his death in January 1976, eight months before the demise of the Chairman.

Broader cultural exchange was one of our dinner talk's main themes. Since Professor Fairbank sat on Zhou's right and I on his left, we were in a particularly good position to urge him to allow Chinese to visit and study at Harvard. Zhou deflected our efforts as well-meaning but premature. He seemed to think that brief visits could soon be arranged but that study might better await the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between our countries. He appeared especially worried that Chinese students might have unpleasant encounters with students sent to America by the Guomindang government in Taiwan. He even asked me, as an international lawyer: "If our students debated on the same Harvard platform with students from Taiwan, wouldn't that be implicit recognition of a 'two China' policy and signal Beijing's acceptance of the legitimacy of the Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) regime?" I assured him that academic debate among students had no necessary international law implications. At that point, about an hour into dinner, perhaps to ease the pressure from Harvard, the Premier suggested that we take a five-minute break. In the men's room, as we stood at our respective urinals, Professor Fairbank, indicating that perhaps we had put too much pressure on the Premier, looked me in the eye somewhat sheepishly and said: "The missionary spirit dies hard!"

I had wanted to make one serious suggestion about international law to the Premier and his colleagues and waited most of the evening till an opportunity presented itself. I said that, having already entered the United Nations the previous October, China should move quickly to take part in all UN institutions, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ). That gave the Chinese officials their biggest laugh of the evening. They thought I must have been joking. Why, after all, would a revolutionary communist government want to participate in a bourgeois legal institution where its views of international law would not be accepted and it was sure to be outvoted? I explained that the world was entering a new era and China, having recently been acknowledged as a great power by being awarded a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, should obviously want to play a role in the application of international law by the ICJ. The People's Republic did not nominate its first judge to sit on the ICJ until 1984. Although Chinese judges have played a constructive role in the Court's work ever since, their government has only gradually expanded its confidence in the ICJ's deliberations.

CONCLUDING THE VISIT

After the memorable evening with Zhou Enlai, anything else that occurred in my first trip was inevitably anti-climactic. Yet the exchange of ideas at the dinner with Zhou encouraged me to offer one more suggestion on a very sensitive topic before leaving Beijing. We were meeting the next morning with Professor Zhou Peiyuan (周培源), then Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Peking University, or, as he preferred to put it to us, president of that illustrious university. Zhou Peiyuan, a University of Chicago Ph.D. in physics and a former Cal Tech professor, had already spent a great deal of time accompanying us as the senior person responsible for our visit. His mission was presumably to get acquainted with and hear the views of his fellow physicist and sometime U.S. government advisor, Professor Marvin Goldberger, the leader of our small delegation.

I wanted to express my concern for my friend and college classmate, John T. Downey, Jr., who had been detained in Chinese prison since November 1952 after his plane had been shot down over China on a CIA mission to foster armed resistance against the then still new Communist government. I had been trying for many years to obtain his release and had previously suggested to both the Chinese Ambassador to Canada (later Foreign Minister) Huang Hua (黃華) and Henry Kissinger that this could be accomplished, to the satisfaction of both countries, if the U.S. would finally acknowledge the truth of China's accusations that this had been a CIA incursion. I had also revealed the truth of the Downey matter in nationally-televised testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 1971 and in a New York Times op-ed. I did not want to leave Beijing without again urging consideration of this idea, and I took the meeting with Professor Zhou as the best opportunity. Early the following year, six weeks after President Nixon discreetly conceded the truth of the charges against Downey in a press conference, Downey was finally released.

It turned out that Professor Zhou had an even more sensitive topic to raise with us, even in Professor Goldberger's absence. He surprised Jeremy Stone, a knowledgeable Washington defense expert, and me by asking what we could tell him about the so-called "smart bomb" that the U.S. had reportedly begun to use in the Vietnam war. I, of course, knew nothing about this subject and didn't know whether Stone was informed. In any event, we told Zhou that if anyone in our group could answer the question it would be Professor Goldberger, who had already returned to the U.S. I'll admit that I was a bit naive in feeling shocked at what seemed a blatant effort to turn cultural exchange into an intelligence operation.

Overall, Joan and I found our first trip to China enormously stimulating despite the evident limitations on cultural exchanges in both law and art. I felt that my research, and especially the year 1963-4 that I had spent in Hong Kong interviewing Chinese refugees many of whom were former officials, had well-prepared me for the visit. Every experience left me with vivid images. Joan, a professional photographer as well as art historian, was more struck by the drabness and austerity of contemporary life and the absence of amenities. After returning to Japan, we took our boys to see Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner in "55 Days at Peking," a colorful film depicting the imperialist heyday of the Boxer Rebellion, which by coincidence was playing in Kyoto. As we left the theater, Joan said: "That's the China of my dreams."

Nevertheless, we both agreed with the humorist Art Buchwald that, after a stomach-full of China watching, an hour later you're hungry for more!


(All photographs by Joan Lebold Cohen [柯珠恩]© except the first two.)

yangharrylg

Leo F. Goodstadt (顧汝德) arrived at Hong Kong University in 1962 on a Commonwealth Scholarship and then became an economics lecturer. He progressed to deputy editor at the late-lamented Far Eastern Economic Review and thence to private consultancy. He spent 1989-97 at the Hong Kong Government’s Central Policy Unit. He has since combined commercial projects with academic research. He has published five books: from “China’s Search for Plenty. The Economics of Mao Tse-tung” in 1972-73 to the latest, “Reluctant Regulators: How the West Created and China Survived the Global Financial Crisis”, this year. 顧汝德為中央政策組前首席顧問，香港大學名譽院士。現為經濟顧問，曾撰寫多本中港經濟及政治發展研究的重要著作，包括2011年出版的《官商同謀––香港公義私利的矛盾》及《金融海嘯論衡》兩部新著等。

In April 1973, I got a phone call from Xinhua News Agency instructing me to apply for a visa to join a group tour of Guangdong. Xinhua was then a very different organisation. The “gang of four” were in power, and news was more an export commodity to be managed and packaged rather than professionally reported. And my “packaging” was to come undone, leading to formal protests to Derek Davies, the Far Eastern Economic Review’s talented but volatile editor, who had returned the previous month from such a trip without provoking complaints.

Why I had been granted a visa so soon after Davies’s tour, I could not understand. I did not regard it as a sign that I was being taken seriously as a student of Chinese affairs. In 1972, I had published a book about economics and Mao Zedong (毛澤東), and the American edition was just out. But this had not raised my status perceptibly, even at the Review. Here, I wrote about China only in the absence of icons like Harald Munthe-Kaas and John Gittings (詹丁思) who had serious China-watching credentials, and while expecting the return to Hong Kong of the redoubtable David Bonavia.

Unlike Davies, I would not be allowed to visit Beijing and the more strategic areas of China. I would be confined to Guangdong province, a restriction that I did not resent since it was well within my comfort zone. There would be no culture shock. I knew that Cantonese and Cantonese etiquette prevailed throughout the province despite the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards’ drive to purge the nation of the “four olds” –– old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. And just as in Hong Kong, it would be almost impossible for people not to react kindly to any foreigner who, in Cantonese, tried hard to “follow the customs of the village”, as the saying goes.

The big surprise once inside Guangdong was a strange feeling of familiarity and affinity. Everywhere we went, poverty was compounded by austerity. In the countryside, life was harsh and close to subsistence. In Guangzhou, food and clothing were subject to controls, and consumer goods seemed barely fit for use. At night, the streets were empty and virtually without lighting. But none of this seemed extraordinary to me. The parallels were striking with the Wales of my childhood and teens where austerity had reigned. British rationing of food and clothing was severe throughout World War II; intensified after the Allied victory in 1945; and was not lifted finally until 1953. Furthermore, the wartime blackout and an absence of civilian road traffic were what I had grown up with.

As for “modern” amenities, Guangdong’s present was my not-so-distant past. The unavailability of indoor sanitation, bathrooms and even a domestic water supply on the Chinese Mainland was a state of affairs to be found in much of Wales when I left home, and many houses had no electricity or even gas. Telephones were few in Welsh towns and villages, and private cars almost unknown.

All the same, Guangdong’s poverty had a dimension that I had never encountered before. This was a pre-industrial society. Mechanical equipment of all kinds, vehicles and even tools were often ill-designed, clumsy to use and the products, it seemed, of cottage industry rather than factories. Back in 1973, Guangdong was still very much a pre-industrial society. Mao Zedong had decided for strategic reasons that this coastal province should not be industrialised. The policy proved a great advantage when economic modernisation began after 1978 because unlike China’s northeast, for example, the provincial economy was not lumbered with obsolescent heavy industry modelled on the Soviet Union. But the immediate consequences for Guangdong were a dismal growth rate compared with the national average, and real poverty.

Now, almost forty years on, I have reread for the first time my 1973 articles on trading conditions at the Canton Trade Fair and life in a rural commune. They are professional enough but not especially memorable. I decided to compare them with the feature by the Review’s editor, recounting his own voyage round China the month before, which I find much better written. On display was Derek Davies’s remarkable capacity to turn a week’ visit into a compelling, far-sighted analysis of an Asian nation’s current travails and its future prospects, identifying in particular the looming discontent within China’s workforce.

Nevertheless, my coverage of Guangdong led to reverberations that lasted until 1998. The fallout began the day after my feature story was published. I came back to the office after lunch to find Davies puce with rage. I had, he said, destroyed the Review’s chances of ever opening a Beijing bureau. Chinese officials who had accompanied the tour, he went on, had just called to see him and protest at my reporting. They had alleged that I had tried to bring China into disrepute. They had warned him that my article bore no relation to what had been seen on the tour. Davies insisted that their charges could not be totally without foundation. After all, they had assured him that the photographs illustrating my article could not have been taken anywhere in Guangdong. They had probably been shot, they had suggested, in the newly-established Bangladesh (which I had never been to).

At this point, the complainants’ case crumbled. The Review’s production editor, Hiro Pumwani, was able to retrieve from his filing cabinet the negatives of the rolls of 120 film, taken by me but developed at the company’s expense. They were in continuous strips, which started with the British flag on one side of the Lowu crossing and the Chinese flag and PLA guards on the other. They recorded the train journey to Guangzhou, followed by pictures taken in sequence at each school, workshop, village and scenic spot we went to subsequently. And then the return journey to Hong Kong via Lowu. My article had been illustrated with genuine photos of Guangdong life.

What had caused such official ire? Although President Richard Nixon had dismantled the economic embargo in 1971 and transformed the Sino-US relationship with his personal visit to Beijing in 1972, the Cold War was not over yet. Chinese officials made considerable efforts to get the maximum advantage from foreign contacts. This process used to involve tests of moral fibre. From time to time, even in Hong Kong, I had been asked to meet this official or that who would upbraid me for a recent article. The dialogue rarely varied. I would be told that my account of official policy or economic performance was distorted. I would express my gratitude for this opportunity to learn what official speeches or statistics I had misconstrued. I would be told that my offence arose from my habit of quoting published material whose circulation overseas was not authorised.

This showed a hostile attitude and lack of respect for China. Anything that it was proper for me to know about China I should seek solely in the Renmin Ribao or Guangming Ribao, Hongqi or Xinhua and the English-language publications intended for overseas distribution. It was hard for either side to take such an exchange of views seriously when Louis Cha’s (查良鏞) Ming Pao and its Hong Kong rivals were filled with incisive, “inside” coverage of Mainland developments.

On our tour of Guangdong, the interrogations had become more personal. How, I was asked one afternoon, could I live with the shameful legacy of a father who had served for seven years as a professional soldier in India under British rule? How, I wondered, had this official obtained such an item of information. (It was, as I recounted earlier, an Indian colleague and his meticulous photo files who was to provide the proof that I had been describing Guangdong.)

Round 2 took place on the Sunday of our visit after I expressed a wish to go to Mass. I was told that China’s Catholics had given up Mass in churches: each family celebrated its own Mass at home. An unlikely theological discussion ensued in which I opined that if Catholics were not permitted access to Mass celebrated by a priest, freedom of religion was not a flourishing feature of Guangdong life. For this, I was rebuked with the prompt reply: “You are trying to make trouble just like your mother-in-law when she came to Guangzhou with Hong Kong’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce in 1954”.

That verdict was something to be proud of. She had indeed refused during that visit to accept the propaganda line that the nuns who took in baby girls abandoned by desperate parents at a convent’s doors later committed infanticide. Or that priests working with lepers and other outcasts were tools of an imperialist conspiracy. She was a woman I admired enormously: an accomplished businesswoman yet kind and caring to the distressed and deprived; irresistibly charming and possessed of strong principles. To be compared with her was an enormous compliment.

And yet, none of these exchanges as we travelled around Guangdong involved real rancour or mistrust. They were interspersed by serious discussions about Hong Kong-related matters. For example, a senior member of the official team took considerable pains to stress the special value which China’s leaders attached to maintaining the effectiveness of the colonial administration. He recounted how he himself had conveyed reassurances from Beijing to the Hong Kong authorities at the height of the anti-colonial violence in 1967 that there was no intention of taking over Hong Kong. And an important channel of communication, he said, had been “Editor Davies”. In the 1970s, he continued, cooperation between the two sides would be even more important and he knew that I met senior Hong Kong government officials. I was not being invited to carry a specific message, it seemed, but I was being asked to convey friendly sentiments. Which I later did when I met the Governor, Lord MacLehose (麥理浩), during one of his charm offensives for the local media. He did not seem especially impressed, so there was no story for me there!

Yet, plainly my reporting had given offence. Otherwise why the mischievous allegations about the use of “Bangladesh” photos in a feature about a Guangdong commune? My article had been almost as predictable and routine as much of the reporting by visiting journalists. There was one difference, however. On rereading it today, I realise that 12 per cent of the text was devoted explicitly to recounting the serious poverty suffered by a model commune’s families. In these passages, I was reporting the uncensored insights and experiences of a local cadre who could not bring himself to parrot propaganda.

He had begun his presentation to our group by declaring: “I won’t speak Putonghua. I don’t want to speak Putonghua”. For me, it was like being at a meeting at home in rural Wales where a farmers’ union representative insisted on speaking Welsh instead of English. Afterwards, I apologised to our host for taking up his time, which was a conventional Cantonese courtesy that anyone in Hong Kong would have expressed. In addition, I felt genuinely embarrassed. I knew how precious time is for farmers when work is heaviest. We had taken him and other commune leaders away from the fields for almost an entire day, and I felt obliged to state my regret for imposing this burden on them.

The cadre said that he had indeed sacrificed precious time. But what bothered him most was the likelihood that none of us would take what he had said seriously. He had been told that the stories written by foreign journalists who had come to the commune in the past failed to acknowledge the persistent poverty with which it had to contend and the wretched conditions under which many of its members still lived. These visitors preferred to paint a pretty picture of life in New China, he complained.

I promised to prove the exception. My published account began with his admission: “I ask myself how we survive on the earnings which the ordinary peasant gets on this commune.” I went on to record how he “nudged me and pointed towards a small group … Dressed in tatters, the handful of men, women and children were Hakkas from the hills”. “These people are very poor indeed”, he continued. “We try to help by selling goods to them at subsidised prices. But there is not a lot we can do”.

This commune leader was scathing about one of the main features of life under Maoism: the “down to the country” movement which transferred 17 million middle-school graduates from the cities to the villages during the Cultural Revolution. “Their efforts in the fields”, my article said, “were described as ‘a ballet dance’ by a senior cadre, who said he would prefer not to see any more of them in his parish”. “They send far too much food back to their families in the urban areas. (Food in the rural areas, an official commented, is much cheaper than in the cities.) They reduce the rice ration available for ordinary commune members”. Such accusations were not new, of course. In a contribution to a 1965 book, “Youth in China”, I had quoted similar rural sentiments reported by the official press during 1962-63.

While insisting on the paramount principle “obey Chairman Mao”, this rural leader went on to brush aside the rhetoric of the “Gang of Four” and the “ultra-leftists”. His own political strategy was: “First look after people’s stomachs and their health, and then you will be able to touch their hearts and persuade them that cadres and the state care for them. Afterwards, you will be able to change their minds so that the people will recognise that their prosperity can only last and grow if the entire nation flourishes”. He was expressing the sort of sentiments that were to get Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) dismissed from office in 1976 but gave him the credibility with the public at large to be restored to power and launch the 1978 reforms.

This man had serious moral courage. What happened to him subsequently I had no way of knowing. But I was sure that he had discounted in advance the price to be paid for insisting on stating his views. But he did not strike me as an exceptional case. Similar encounters over the years with individual Mainland officials and Party members whose pragmatism was inspired by ideals gave me confidence that Chinese people will always rise above the failings of their rulers and find their way to a better life despite the most unfavourable obstacles.

My attitude was neither naïve nor unduly sentimental. Anyone closely involved in Hong Kong’s Chinese world could hardly avoid knowing the personal costs inflicted by the political upheavals of the Maoist era. In my extended family, there was a revolutionary guerrilla hero who had fallen into disgrace during an ideological purge –– fortunately to be restored to an honourable career after the demise of the “gang of four”. There were the Catholic relatives from Shanghai who spent over 20 years in labour camps for refusing to repudiate their religious convictions.

There were the “New China” manufacturers and professionals –- especially my “mentors” among senior executives in the Bank of China group –– whose children had gone back to the Mainland for their education only to fall victim to the Anti-rightist and to every subsequent campaign because of their family links with Hong Kong. Ironically, it was this group which provided the antidote to total cynicism on my part. They had accepted their family sacrifices in the belief that revolutions cannot be “temperate, kind, courteous” and that a revolution is “not a dinner party, or writing an essay” so that innocent individuals must suffer for the greater good. It was not until corruption became rampant on the Mainland once more after 1978 that these by now elderly men went from disillusionment to despair. Such an outcome was still unthinkable in 1973. And I was reassured that these friends, so dedicated to “New China”, took no exception to my article regardless of official complaints.

As was to be expected, the officials did not make their complaints entirely in vain, even though their allegations were patently absurd. Derek Davies decided that Beijing’s goodwill ought not to be jeopardised by allowing me to write up the rest of my adventures in Guangdong. In the process, he deprived me of a potential scoop that would have had some historical interest. Our party had been taken to Foshan where we were briefed on a pilot scheme to attract direct foreign investment that had recently begun. The previous year, Tianjin had been allowed to borrow foreign funds to modernise key manufacturing plants whose export potential would enable them to repay the foreign loan and still make a respectable profit. But Foshan had gone a step further, according to a senior city official.

In the winter months, we were told, a national leader –– identification refused –– had come south to Foshan to escape the cold. While enjoying its scenic and cultural attractions, the distinguished visitor had been told that its Song dynasty temple was a huge attraction for Japanese tourists some of whom had expressed an interest in setting up production lines in the city. The visitor had thought this suggestion an attractive initiative as China was starting to rebuild its financial links with the outside world. Sometime later, the city’s spokesman said, Beijing had approved an inflow of Japanese funding.

I picked up some low-level gossip that the mystery leader was in fact Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing (江青), on her way to her favourite holiday resort in Hainan (then still part of Guangdong province). A more likely candidate I personally felt was an obscure soldier, Bai Xiangguo (白相國). This career PLA political commissar had made “helicopter rides” from head of Shantou’s Revolutionary Committee in 1968 to the leadership of Guangdong the following year and to the post of Foreign Trade Minister in 1970. Here, he had become the globetrotting frontman for a massive surge in China’s imports. His shopping list included US Boeings and British Tridents, Japanese and German steel plants, record imports of grain and chemical fertilisers. In 1973, he handed over to Li Qiang (李強), a career trade expert, and returned to the PLA. One of the unsung architects of China’s future strategy of growth through foreign trade, he ended his military career in 1984 as a deputy director of logistics. But I was denied the chance at the Review to write up Bai and the pioneering “open door” experiment at Foshan years ahead of the Shen Zhen Special Economic Zone.

Another story that did not make it into print was the apparent disappearance of Guangzhou’s children with disabilities. We had visited one of the city’s secondary schools which we had been told was attended by all children in the district without any form of selection or discrimination. This sounded a very enlightened policy of inclusive education. What facilities and resources did the school have to care for special needs children, I wanted to know. The reply was that there were no children in the district whose vision, hearing, mobility or mental capacity was impaired. My wife was a professional social worker who specialised in rehabilitation. After listening to her complaints about Hong Kong’s service shortfalls over the years, I had a fair recall of the statistics for the main disabilities per thousand of the population. So, I asked what had happened to the cohorts who must have born been with disabilities. The reply was an insistent denial that any special needs children could be found in the district.

That was a story that deserved to be followed up. Its explanation probably matched Hong Kong’s historical experience. The colonial administration was insisting even in the 1950s that there was no need to provide for such children because those with disabilities were sent back to their parents’ native villages in Guangdong. The border was steadily sealed off in that decade, which brought this practice to a halt. But Guangzhou perhaps was able to have such children transferred to the care of an extended family in the countryside. I was never to find out.

My 1973 trip resurfaced as a target for public criticism a quarter of a century later. In 1998, the late Choi Wai-hang (蔡渭衡), Chairman of the Chinese Reform Association, published an unflattering article about me. He had been detained without trial under colonial legislation in 1967. The Review objected vigorously to these detentions as a breach of civil liberties, with little success however. I came to know Mr. Choi personally through a family connection after his release. He was a very talented corporate executive and impressively adventurous as well as shrewd in his business projects as the Mainland opened up to Hong Kong firms.

In 1998, he expressed regret about our acquaintance in a Hong Kong newspaper, explaining that he had always mistrusted me. What legitimate reason could there have been for the four volumes of the “Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung” on my office bookshelf, he inquired? This was a painful reminder to me of how limited had been the impact of my book about Mao’s economics, whose starting point for me had been a laborious perusal of each of these volumes. Not by accident, I felt certain, among his other criticisms was an assertion that for nefarious reasons, I had urged him to get me a journalist’s visa to report on the Canton Trade Fair. This newspaper piece took me back to 1973 and the fallout from my Guangdong tour.

There had been one more, small reminder of Wales in the meantime. A good friend in the Bank of China group told me when our families met for “tea” one weekend in 1973 that he knew that while in Guangdong, I had done my note-taking in Welsh not English. “Please remember Mr. Goodstadt that if we truly wanted to see what you had written”, he said quite matter of fact, “You can be sure in China, we could find someone who can translate very accurately”. That sounded like a promise of truly VIP attention!

yangharrylg

Liu Heung Shing (劉香成), a Hong Kong-born former foreign correspondent and photojournalist for the Associated Press, shared a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News and an Overseas Press Club Award for his coverage of Soviet Union’s collapse. In 1989, His image of a defining moment during the Tiananmen Turmoil was awarded Picture of the Year by the School of Journalism at University of Missouri. In the same year, he was named Best Photographer by the Associated Press Managing Editors. He is the author and editor of many books including "China After Mao" （Penguin, 1983）, "China, Portrait of a Country" (Taschen, 2008), and "Shanghai, A History in Photographs 1842 to Today" (Penguin Viking / World Publishing Group, 2010). His latest book "China in Revolution: Nineteen-Eleven and Beyond" was just published.

As a Hong-Kong born Chinese who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, it’s hard to pinpoint my first trip to China; at least, one that I remember clearly, for my real first trip was as a toddler, in 1953 in the arms of my mother who carried me to her hometown of Fuzhou. Most likely I slept through most of that the trip, or was just too young to take it all in. So I guess, the real instance of a “first trip” in the sense of this series, would be my first trip to China as a professional photojournalist in 1976.

Yet, I would like to think that the first few years of childhood left their mark on me for the good. That experience, however fragmented or vague in my memory, definitely prepared me for my eventual first trip back to the mainland as a photojournalist in a way that was more profound than I first realized. It allowed the perspective of an outsider looking in, whilst still being privy to the many experiences of an insider myself in those trying years.

As a child in Fuzhou, I was enrolled in the Guyizhong Primary School (near Fuzhou PLA Garrison Command). My years there—six in total—helped define the way I came to portray China later in my professional life. I recall going to the school everyday by walking out of the courtyard house, which my grandmother had gifted to my mother as part of her wedding dowry. By early 1955, it had already been appropriated by the State as part of the landmark land reform policy. The head of the neighborhood committee, a Mme Zhou, moved into house where she occupied two rooms; the others taken by local families. Our family was left with the main house and a courtyard garden in the back, which featured a beautiful Dragon Eye (Longyan) fruit tree. I learnt later that we were fortunate to have escaped the fate of many landlords who had simply been shot or disappeared. We were spared because the State classified my family as a “peaceful landlord”. My mother’s uncle, Chen Bi (陳壁), was a Minister of Communication under Emperor Guangxu (光緒) (in 1894) The Chen family’s land had been granted by the emperor, not gained through business dealing or renting it to the peasants, hence the title “peaceful landlord”.

This family background may explain why the PLA children in my class treated me with condescension. According to the prevalent political jargon, they were “red” and I was “black”. I remembered the red slogans on the schoolyard “We must catch up with Britain and surpass America”. Under the highly charged political atmosphere following China’s incursion in Korea, where troops fought the U.S. military to a temporary truce, students were required to perform manual labor every Wednesday to help build a stronger Socialist state. Every week I collected stones for building the railroad. Under the spell for the Anti Four Pests campaign, I was energetically motivated to catching flies at home, which I collected in a matchbox for my teacher. But no matter how many flies filled my matchboxes, semester after semester under the column labeled “Political Behavior”, she would only grant me a “C” in my report card. I felt the effect of apartheid in a classroom full of kids from the families of the nearby army officers. Those kids instinctually felt superior to the sons and daughters of any other social class. I didn’t officially “fit” into any of the social classes.

Many years later, in Beijing, I met the famed PLA writer Bai Hua (白樺), who in early 1980 wrote for the film “Sun and the Man” (《太陽和人》), based on his script originally named “Ku lian” (《苦戀》). Through the film’s main character, he expressed the common feeling of many mainland Chinese and those who were expatriated: “I love my country, but does my country love me?” This open questioning of unrequited love was severely criticized by Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and the film was banned. In 1980, Deng launched the Anti-Bourgeois Campaign; Deng had then recently shut down Democracy Wall in Xidan bus depot where petitioners from all over the country put up big character posters to protest the injustices of the Cultural Revolution.

Come 1960, my neighbors who “shared” our house in Fuzhou, were all stricken by malnutrition, their arms and legs swollen. The Great Famine which was the harsh result of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. One day in 1959 a pig was killed in our neighborhood leading hundreds of people to queue to buy a portion. I waited half a day to buy two ounces of pork fat. I was told I was lucky that the butcher gave me the fat as it was deemed more valuable than the meat. One day after school, I saw a man on the street selling tiger meat, a striped tiger pelt dangled from a tree above the vendor. My father ,who was the editor of the international news page for Zheng Wu Bao (《正午報》)， who was in Hong Kong knew it was time for me to depart Fuzhou. My father one day came home looking very upset, he said his pro-Beijing newspaper editor had refused to print the news that the Americans had landed on the moon.

Some years later, in the summer of 1968, my mother took me to Guangzhou to visit relatives; I vividly remember being yelled at by a barber in the Overseas Chinese Hotel who forced me to stand and recite one of Mao’s quotation on the wall before he would give me a haircut. At six pm Guangzhou was already dark. We queued for almost an hour to get a table in a restaurant, of which the city had but a few. The waitress threw the chopsticks on the table and walked away. Everybody behaved in a manner that officials like to call “vigilant”. Why vigilant? The Chinese in that era literally seemed to see enemies everywhere. I was glad to return to Hong Kong, feeling utterly exhausted by the hysteria which I absorbed from the people’s body language and facial expressions.

Perhaps it was these bitter, sour memories of childhood that led me to develop an avid interest in newspaper reports about China during my studies in New York. I followed the Toronto Globe and Mail’s dispatches in the New York Times—the Canadian newspaper was the only North American newspaper to have an accredited journalist in Beijing at that time. At the university library, I read the little weekly pamphlet China News Analysis published by Jesuits who monitored radio broadcast from the mainland. Among the Jesuits were the few westerners specialized in Chinese dialects; including those who could understand Mao’s strong Hunan accent. As I later discovered on my travels through China, Hunan, the birthplace of my father, was the only place I required the services of an interpreter.

By 1976, after nine months of apprenticeship with Gjon Mili at Life Magazine who had earlier taught me at Hunter College [under New York’s City University], I went to Europe and photographed post-Franco Spain; to Portugal where Communist presidential candidates were campaigning in the countryside with peasants driving tractors, but who stopped to listen and enjoyed a picnic as they did so. In Paris, I went to Hotel Matignon to photograph newly appointed French Prime Minister Raymond Barre. As I came out of the metro near St Germaine des Pres, I saw Mao’s photograph on the front page of every Parisian newspaper on the newsstand. It was September1976: Mao had died. I was on the first plane to Hong Kong thence to the mainland on assignment for Time Magazine. Before I left for the border at Lowu, my uncle introduced me to Lo Fu (羅孚), editor-in-chief of Hong Kong’s New Evening Post (《新晚報》). Lo, a respected Communist newspaper editor, well liked by senior Chinese leader Liao Chenzhi (廖承志), provided me with a letter of introduction to the border authorities. In those days, one needs an introduction letter from an organization just to check into a hotel.

I walked across Lowu bridge past the PLA guards, before boarding the train bound for Guangzhou I was stopped at customs. The guard inspected my camera bag; three cameras and assorted lens, forty rolls of Kodakchrome film. I didn’t have a journalist visa; he asked me what I planned to do. I said I was a traveler and presented him with the letter of introduction from Lo Fu. He disappeared for a while and came back with another more senior custom official. I gave him the same answer. They asked me to sit and wait. Just minutes before the train departed, the junior man returned and told me to hurry up if I didn’t want to miss the train.

The army-green train was staffed by young attendants who were friendly by the standards of the Cultural Revolution: at least they smiled at me as they poured hot water over a bag of green tea that cost five fen (cents). The seats were covered with white cotton covers. The train roared through the rural areas towards Guangzhou. The scenes outside the window were familiar, but what was missing were the announcements from the omnipresent loudspeakers mounted on every telegraph pole. I was not sure if this was in order to mourn the death of Mao, or for other reasons. Few missed the streaming exhortations to keep up the revolutionary vanguard or the recital of the day’s editorial from the People’s Daily.

In Guangzhou I checked into the Overseas Chinese Hotel, where the portrait of Mao in the lobby was now adorned with the appropriate black trimmings. It was still warm in September, but outside I was struck by how quiet it was on the streets as I rushed from the hotel to stroll the embankment of the Pearl River. People wore black armbands of mourning. Some silently read the newspapers posted on the road side propaganda boards. Elderly people were doing taiqi. It dawned on me; something had changed in the people’s body language. They lost that “vigilant look.” Even though overseas Chinese and foreigners usually attracted inquisitive stares they seemed to have no interest in me. I sensed China was going through a profound but as yet undefined transition. The death of Mao did not seem to sadden the residents in the streets of Guangzhou, unlike those seen in the official propaganda photographs which showed youths crying with crocodile tears while holding a small printed portrait of Mao. On the contrary, I felt people, clearly more relaxed now, were behaving as if they had been relieved of a huge mental burden that had been hanging over them. Perhaps it was my childhood experience that prepped me to observe these unusually calm faces. As I continued to photograph daily life on the streets, I decided that if given an opportunity, I would photograph China after Mao.

But immediately I became caught up with my attempts to get a flight to Beijing to photograph Mao’s funeral. My repeated requests to the China Travel Service were denied. I learnt later that few people were allowed to travel to Beijing as the authorities were poised to arrest the Gang of Four (Jiang Qing [江青], Zhang Chunqiao [張春橋], Wang Hongwen [王洪文] and Yao Wenyuan [姚文元]). The death of Mao was world news and I missed it: I would not let that happen again.

The opportunity would eventually come again two years later in 1978 when Time Magazine decide to send Richard Bernstein to open the Time-Life News Service bureau in Beijing, ahead of the resumption of Sino-U.S. Diplomatic Normalization in 1979. I would be Time’s first contract photographer in China after 1949, and fulfill my wish to document "China After Mao."(1)

In Beijing I joined Richard Bernstein (白禮博), Fox Butterfield (包德甫), Melinda Liu (劉美源), John Roderick, Victoria Graham, Irene Mosby, Jay and Linda Mathew, Michael Parks and Frank Ching (秦家驄); the first wave of American foreign correspondents to be stationed in new China, six years after President Richard Nixon opened the door. The rest, as they say, is history.


(1) "China After Mao"《毛以後的中國》was published by Penguin in 1983. Twenty-eight years later the Chinese edition was published in the mainland by Shitu (世界圖書出版社). Release in September, 2010, it is currently in its third printing.


(All photos taken by the author except the first two.)

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Frank Ching (秦家驄) is the author of "Ancestors: 900 Years in the Life of a Chinese Family," "The Li Dynasty: Hong Kong Aristocrats" and "China: The Truth About Its Human Rights Record." He opened The Wall Street Journal's Bureau in Beijing in 1979. Twitter: @FrankChing1

When the East was Red
Unlike many others, my first visit to the People’s Republic of China was not as a member of a delegation of academics or students invited by Beijing. Nor was I among the tiny handful of journalists fortunate enough to have been allowed individual visits.

Indeed, the Chinese government was unwilling to give me a visa because I was a journalist with The New York Times. After China and Canada established diplomatic missions in each other’s capital in 1971, I flew to Ottawa from New York to explain that all I wanted was a private visit but I was told that the Chinese embassy could not issue me a visa. The decision had to be made by the Foreign Ministry in Beijing.

Eventually, I entered China as a “Hong Kong compatriot” since I was born in the British colony and, while I had become a permanent resident in the United States, was not yet an American citizen.

I flew to Hong Kong from New York in 1973 and, as a first step, obtained from the British colonial government confirmation of my status as a “Hong Kong belonger,” or a British subject who was born in Hong Kong. Then I approached the China Travel Service, a mainland governmental agency, and argued for my right to visit Hong Kong as a “compatriot.”

After repeated visits, my request was granted. I was issued an “Introduction for Return to Native Village,” which enabled me to visit the mainland.

This was a time, in the wake of the Kissinger and Nixon visits, that Chinese-Americans and overseas Chinese were resuming contacts with their relatives in China. And, fortunately for me, a good friend of mine from New York, Danny Yung (榮念曾), was also traveling to China with his parents to visit their relatives in Shanghai. We traveled together to Canton (now Guangzhou), Shanghai and Beijing.

On August 1, 1973, I boarded an old diesel train that took China-bound passengers to Lowu, a town on the Hong Kong side of the border. For some reason, China Travel Service had arranged for me to travel third class. There, men and women clawed their way onto the train, passing goods and children through windows and often climbing in after them because the narrow entranceways were jammed. Many people carried shoulder poles from which dangled live chickens, baskets of food and other gifts for relatives in China. Even standing room was scarce. I gained a foothold on the bottom rung of a carriage and hung on to the handrail to prevent myself from falling off onto the tracks. In this fashion, I was slowly borne by the chugging train toward China.

At the border, we walked across a rickety wooden bridge that separated British-ruled Hong Kong from the Communist mainland. Once across the bridge, we were in Shenzhen, now a major city but at that time only a small village. All the passengers were led into a vast shed to be interviewed by immigration and customs officials.

I was interrogated by a man who questioned me at length on my background, my job, my relatives and my friends. He made me empty all my pockets. In one pocket, I was carrying the business cards of several people I had met in Hong Kong. My interrogator was extremely interested in all of them. He asked me about each of them and what relationship, if any, that person had with any of the others. He asked me about my parents and my brothers and sisters. He wrote down all the answers. Then he asked me the same questions all over again, in different ways. The interrogation lasted for over an hour.

Finally, he allowed me to go through to customs. There, Hong Kong newspapers I had with me were confiscated.

The train ride from Shenzhen to Canton was a distinct improvement over the ride to the China border. The train was the only air-conditioned one in China, and it traveled back and forth between Shenzhen and Canton, I suppose to give foreigners a good initial impression of China. I sat back in my soft seat and watched the green fields of Guangdong province roll by. The loudspeaker played “The East Is Red,” a paean in praise of Chairman Mao Zedong that had virtually become China’s national anthem during the Cultural Revolution.

When we finally pulled into the Canton station, the loudspeakers thanked the passengers for helping the crew to complete their mission successfully.

The China Travel Service in Hong Kong had advised me to stay at the Overseas Chinese Hotel in Canton, but the young woman behind the counter there told me the hotel was full and refused to refer me to another hotel. “Hong Kong compatriots usually stay with relatives,” she said. “We only serve guests from overseas.”

I then was forced to produce American identification and explained that, though a Hong Kong compatriot, I lived in New York. The change in the clerk’s attitude was remarkable. A selection was rooms was available, she said. The best room, for ten dollars a night, had a bathroom, a telephone and an electric fan. I took it.

The next day, together with Danny and his parents, I boarded a plane for Shanghai.

The atmosphere in Shanghai was noticeably different from that in Canton, where service bordered on being surly. In Shanghai, as soon as we checked into the Park Hotel across from the People’s Park, or what used to be the Shanghai Race Course, a waiter arrived with glasses of ice water to provide relief from the stifling heat.

I had the address of my uncle Qin Kaihua, my mother’s brother, whom I had never met. He and my mother were never close. But this uncle was my only point of contact with my entire family in China.

When I arrived at his home, I tapped gently on the door, trying not to arouse the suspicions of the neighbors since having “overseas connections” was often a crime in China. A skinny, elderly man dressed only in shorts and an undershirt appeared. He turned out to be my uncle. I introduced myself as Qin Jiacong, the son of Zhaohua, and he waved me in.

I walked into a dingy room with a wooden bed, then through a doorway into a small sitting room. Shanghai summers can be very hot and my uncle switched on the electric fan and directed it at me full blast while cooling himself with an old-fashioned straw fan. He introduced me to his wife, Lin Yanzhu, and their 16-year-old daughter, Zhifen.

In the presence of these strangers I felt curiously at home. I told them about the various members of the family outside China and what they were doing. And before leaving, I invited them to my hotel for dinner the following evening.

The next day, the hotel’s reception desk called to tell me I had visitors. I went down to the lobby and found an argument going on between my relatives and the hotel personnel, who insisted that each of them produce identification. They were told to fill in forms in triplicate, giving their name, address and place of employment, plus their relationship to the person they were visiting. Only after that were they allowed to enter the elevator and go to the dining room. After dinner, when I invited them to my room, the elevator operator refused to take them. In the lobby, we were informed that only parents or children of hotel guests were allowed in rooms; other visitors had to be entertained in the lobby. Eventually, after filling in another set of forms, my relatives were allowed up as a special dispensation. Not surprisingly, they never visited me again.

I also spent time with Danny’s relatives, which included not only his grandfather but numerous uncles and aunts. Among the presents Danny’s parents had brought with them was a bicycle, but there was a problem: how could the bicycle be transported from the train station to their home? I volunteered my services and rode the bicycle through Shanghai’s streets to the grandfather’s home. It was an exciting experience and made me feel like a local, especially when someone stopped me and asked for directions.

As for my own relatives, they made me welcome in their home and I learned things about China and my family that I had never dreamed of.

Before leaving Shanghai, I bought a birthday present for my aunt. I went to the Friendship Store and purchased a Chinese-made watch, one of the more expensive brands. I also gave my uncle some knickknacks that I had with me. In return, he gave me a small jade rabbit that had belonged to his grandfather, one of the few things of value that he possessed.

From Shanghai, we went north to Beijing, which was still called Peking at the time. The city was awe-inspiring, with the Great Wall winding north of the city and the vast Tiananmen Square in the city center, where Chairman Mao Zedong had reviewed millions of Red Guards at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Changan Avenue, or the Boulevard of Eternal Peace, was the city’s main street, built in the 15th century and wide enough for more than 10 lanes of traffic. The whole city conveyed a sense of history, of being the center of an ancient and still vibrant civilization.

I visited Tiananmen Square and marveled at its vast emptiness aside from the Monument to the People’s Heroes, as well as the Great Hall of the People next to it, where all major meetings were held.

Danny and I also ate in a duck restaurant, where we enjoyed our first meal of Peking Duck in Peking.

I had relatives in Beijing too, but did not know how to get in touch with them. During subsequent visits to China, I discovered relatives in Shanghai and Beijing on both my mother’s and my father’s side of the family, gradually building up a mental picture of the family I never knew in China.

Despite its brevity, the trip to China was exhilarating. After my return to New York, I wrote several articles about my trip for The New York Times, not about politics but about such things as how Chinese families cope with shortages and how increasing numbers of Chinese-Americans were returning to their ancestral homeland. After my articles appeared, I was contacted by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Yang Chen-ning (楊振寧), who taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and who had himself been to China, and paid him a visit.

The trip to China confirmed me in my journalistic career of China watching. The following year, I moved to Hong Kong and, after China and the United States established diplomatic relations in 1979, I became the first correspondent in China of The Wall Street Journal.

That first trip in 1973 launched me on a quest for my roots. It culminated years later with my writing a book on my family history: “Ancestors: 900 Year in the Life of a Chinese Family.”


Twitter: @FrankChing1