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Continued from Part 4
BECOMING A JOURNALIST
I had visited the News Ltd. Headquarters in Sydney's Surrey Hills slum district once
before, for my meetings with Menadue. But then I had been shown only the fairly plush
executive suites.
Now I was in the newsroom of The Australian - a confusion of nondescript desks, grubby
filing cabinets and unswept floors. I was supposed to spend a month or two there
learning how to be a newsperson before setting off for Tokyo.
It was a highly down-lifting experience. On one pillar of the room someone had tacked
up a wartime headline - 'three subs disappear mysteriously in mid-Pacific.'
'Subs' was jargon for sub-editors. The news-people clearly did not like the way
their copy was hacked around by the 'subs.'
Not that the news-people were much better. An semi-alcoholic old-timer who served
as foreign editor was assigned to look after me.
Day-time, he would discard uninteresting agency news items into a large basket.
Evening-time, and after a few stiffeners at the local pub just down the road and
favoured by News Ltd. people, he would reach into the basket, pull out a fist-full
of discarded items and throw them at the layout people to fill up any blank spaces
on pages going to the print shop.
Meanwhile I was trying to get my hand in as a journalist. My first move was to try
to interview the heads of Japanese firms with offices in Sydney.
Peter Robinson of the Financial Review, then the doyen of Japan-based reporters,
rebuked me for seeming to mix journalism with PR, especially after an interview I
did with Onoki, a leading executive of Nihon Keizai, Japan's main economic newspaper,
then in Sydney to publicize his newspaper.
But for an innocent like me at the time, it was all a voyage of discovery. I would
soon be off to Japan. I wanted to immerse myself in the people even before I got
there.
BACK IN JAPAN
Arriving in Tokyo in the middle of an especially vile summer, I had to set about
opening an office. First move was to visit the Asahi newspaper people.
The Asahi in those days matched The Australian in its national ambitions and progressive
slants. They seemed to be the obvious people to tie up with, and hopefully I would
get an office there in the process.
But they showed little interest in The Australian, or News Ltd. Thanks mainly to
a long connection with Peter Robinson, they hoped to tie up with the Fairfax group
in Australia.
(Robinson was something of an enigma for me at the time. He, and his Japanese wife
especially, had always been very courteous and friendly to me earlier in Canberra
when I was one of the very few people around with a genuine interest in and experience
of Japan.
But he did not speak Japanese. I always wondered how he got established in Japan,
and later how he got many of his close links to the Canberra establishment. )
After my knockback from Asahi, I went to Nihon Keizai, which in those days was also
fairly progressive and which had hosted my father's lecture tours to Japan in the
early sixties. Ohnoki, who had taken a liking to me because of the Sydney meeting,
took me directly to the Nikkei president, Enjoji.
There the parental connection was more than enough to guarantee my being quickly
approved for a large office, on the sixth floor - the newsroom floor - of the main
Nikkei Building in Otemachi.
In those days, Nikkei provided a home for only a handful of foreign correspondents,
and they were all shunted off to the eighth floor. I had been given a room in the
middle of the Nikkei action two floors further down. I don't think the News Ltd
people ever realised the deal I had got them.
(In the end, I was to transfer to a small office in the UPI news-agency, partly to
cut Tokyo costs and partly to be close to the UPI telex machines which I had to use
to move copy to Sydney.)
( The Fairfax people were to abandon Asahi in favor of Nikkei, which by that time
had moved to a Fairfax-style conservatism. Then, as Murdoch and News Ltd moved rightwing,
The Australian would eventually embrace tieups and offices with the rightwing and
nationalistic Yomiuri-Sankei groups. Newspaper musical chairs gone wild.)
Having got my prime office space, it was then up to me to try to get some prime news.
That was not easy. My first exclusive - a salt project in Western Australia -
took a month to find and ended up as two paragraphs on the finance pages.
But gradually the confidence grew. And as my Japanese improved, I discovered that
I could beat my competition simply by getting Australia-relevant news items from
the Nikkei galley proofs before the paper went to bed for the night.
The Australian competition - in those days mainly the ABC, the Melbourne Herald and
the redoubtable Max Suich representing Fairfax - had to wait till the next morning
to get the same news.
Another trick was to get hold of the many small trade magazines and newspapers with
information about resource purchases and other dealings with Australia. They also
gave me a few scoops over the years since the competition could not read Japanese
and had to rely on assistants.
One of my better triumphs came during a serious slump in Japanese purchases of Australian
wool. Buried deep in the Nikkei's commodity price pages was an article about an
octogenarian Nagoya speculator, Nobuo Kondo, whose splurging on wool futures had
helped to create an earlier boom.
But now the time had come for his futures contracts to be unloaded. Potential buyers
knew this, and had backed away from the market, forcing prices down to basement levels.
Kondo faced enormous losses, and quite a few Australian farmers faced bankruptcy.
By any standard it was a great scoop. It combined human interest (Kondo also happened
to be blind, and lived in a closely guarded palace) with news of great importance
to the Australian economy, plus an insight to the very volatile and emotional state
of Japanese markets. Australian TV channels began flying people in to locate and
interview the reclusive Kondo.
But the Financial Review, which hated to be scooped on any story, let alone a major
Japan business story, then ran a belated front-page piece from its own Tokyo correspondent
trying to claim that Kondo and Japan's wool futures market was not very relevant
anyway . (In fact, Japan was buying 50 percent of Australian wool, much of it on
a futures basis).
GETTING ORGANISED IN JAPAN
Meanwhile I was also trying to organise my private life.
I had been able to rent cheaply a neat two-storey Japanese house in the garden of
a Kojimachi estate owned by the widow of a former top MITI bureaucrat. She lived
there with her divorced daughter, with whom I tried hard, but unsuccessfully, to
be more than just formally friendly.
The daughter later married Ogura Kazuo, an up-and-coming diplomat (who now heads
the Japan Foundation) whom I also knew, since his father was an agricultural economist
who had headed Ajiken and who had been a friend of my father.
Wheels within wheels in Japan's fairly incestuous high society.
The house was convenient to central Tokyo. But soon after both the house and the
estate had to give way to luxury condominiums.
Alone in my little Japanese house, I began to miss R. greatly. I had become very
close to her during the troubles of my last year in Canberra. Selfishly, I wanted
her to help me now. I rang her , begging her to come to Tokyo, even if it meant having
to give up her job in Canberra, which she did. I was very happy when she arrived.
But within a few weeks I began to realise my mistake. I had already sensed that
Japan would be my future for quite a while, and not just because of my commitment
to the new job. The Vietnam war was still raging; it would be a long time before
I could go back to Australia. And if I was to survive in Japan, I would need to
be with someone who shared my feeling and interest for the country.
R. did not have either, which was hardly her fault given her Canberra background
and upbringing - something I should have realised from the beginning. Soon the day
came when I had to turn round and beg her to go back to Australia. As she passed
through the airport barrier for the flight back to Australia she gave me a look that
haunted me for years.
I had behaved badly, and I knew it. Yet for the sakes of both of us, I had had
to do what I did. Back in Australia she married and had a family. That did something
to ease the guilt. Meanwhile I was renewing my friendship with Yasuko. She had
waited patiently while I made up my mind.
Meanwhile Japan was also in turmoil. The nation was caught up in what came to be
known as the kodo seicho jidai no makki - the last years of the high-growth period.
After a hot day at the beach I once wrote gushingly how the economy and society were
like being poised on the top of a wave pushing on for ever (little did we realise
it would soon hit the rock of the 1973 oil shock).
There was the excitement of the student revolts and the Red Army affair. Radical
violence was being condemned out of hand. But was it really wrong to resort to violence
to oppose a government determined to endorse and covertly assist the far greater
violence and inhumanity going on in Indochina at the time?
RADICALS AND VIOLENCE
Soon after I had arrived in Japan I had witnessed the so-called Kamata Senso (war)
- the riot police versus students and radicals who had gathered near Kamata Station
to protest Prime Minister Eisaku Sato's departure for the US for yet another deal
with Washington involving Indochina.
I was standing next to a student whose only crime was to look with hostility at
the police as they went about their violence (one trick was to tear open the blouses
of the female protesters in an alleged search for the incriminating smell from having
carried petrol bombs).
Just looking with hostility, it seems, was enough for the police to grab him and
throw him head first into a wagon, breaking his glasses.
I wondered how I would react to this treatment. I have an instinctive hatred of
violence. I know that if it was ever used against me I would want revenge.
A generation of young Japanese radicals suffered brutalization at the hands of the
Japanese police. Is it any wonder that some in revenge had wanted to join the Red
Army radicals camped in the hills around Tokyo?
Eventually most of them were rounded up and thrown into jail for long periods. But
not before some of them had hijacked some planes, to the great embarrassment of
the Japanese government.
To this day they have not been forgiven for this crime of embarrassing the nation,
even though there were no casualties.
Hundreds in the various security organs have worked fulltime for years tracking down
the Red Army remnants. Sometimes I wondered if one of the people on the run included
that young student I had seen thrown head first into that police wagon.
Violence begets counter-violence, which then gives governments even more license
to unleash even more violence. The public condemns the violence of the radicals,
with little interest in looking at what started it all.
The same is true in international affairs. Our conservative leaders have been quick
to condemn the violence of leftwing insurgencies, and now Islamic militants. Rarely
do they even look at, let alone try to stop, the violence that led to those insurgencies
and militancies.
During Australia's long period of anti-Communist China hysteria we were reminded
constantly of Mao Tsetung's saying that 'all power comes from the barrel of a gun.'
Nobody had ever bothered to look at the background to this famous saying, namely
the brutal Kuomingtang massacres of the 1920's against pro-communists and other left-wingers
who had been cooperating with the Kuomintang.
Mao was simply saying that the time had come to cease cooperating. Or rather, if
you want to continue to use peaceful means to achieve your political ends the track
record proves that you will be massacred. Hard to dispute that piece of logic.
Similarly with Vietnam, and a host of other nations - Latin America especially -
where the brutality of rightwing governments has given the leftwing opposition little
choice but to resort to arms. Our conservatives condemn that resort to arms. But
they have nothing to say about the rightwing brutality that caused it.
One reason, of course, is that they never get to meet and talk to the victims of
that rightwing brutality. Many are massacred. The others are in hiding.
Elsewhere I have written about how on a train from Odessa I had met a man whose young
wife - a nurse with the Red Army on the Murmansk front in the 1917 Russian civil
war - had been murdered by the Whites as a result of the British intervention.
Yet the same British no doubt would then go on to insist that that man's subsequent
devotion to the Stalinist cause was abnormal.
Apparently there is nothing abnormal about having British troops being sent to intervene
in a civil war in a foreign country, and handing over innocent captives for execution.
But it is abnormal to act in revenge.
In his book "About Face: The Odyessy of an American Warrior," David
Hackworth, a decorated veteran of the Korean war, explains why he had decided he
could not stomach the senseless brutality of the US intervention in Vietnam and had
resigned his commission.
One incident involved four North Vietnamese nurses captured in a field hospital during
a raid into guerrilla-controlled territory. They were handed over to the South Vietnamese
forces who had the charming habit of exploding US-supplied flares in the vaginas
of captured women prisoners.
The heads of victims would be blown off by the force of the explosion.
Does any of this worry our conservatives, right-wingers and other Vietnam War supporters?
Of course not. But they can still tell you in excruciating detail the sufferings
being imposed of Soviet bloc dissidents at the time - exile, incarceration in mental
hospitals and so on.
True, all barbarity is reprehensible. But having your head blown off by a flare in
your vagina sounds a lot worse than being put in a mental hospital.
As well I would have thought that one's first responsibility is to stop the barbarity
being abetted by your own government and funded by your own tax monies. Only when
that is done can you begin to worry about the barbarities created by other people.
In the acres of print about the so-called killing fields created by the Khmer Rouge
regime in Cambodia in the 1980's, there is hardly any mention of the vicious US
B52 bombing raids against the Khmer Rouge armies that went before.
Very few in the West seem interested even in knowing the results of such a raid -
people reduced to pulped flesh in a matter of seconds, with many of the survivors
in shock for years after.
Among our conservatives and right-wingers the reasoning seems to be quite simple:
if people are being bombed that is because they deserve to be bombed. They are
non-persons. They do not exist.
On this basis the West has been able for over a generation now to ignore the vicious
bombing of North Vietnam - the large town of Vinh, for example, with only one building
left standing after five years of constant bombing. Or the fact that Laos had more
bombs dropped on it than the whole of Germany during World War Two. And so on.
To this day there has been no apology for the bombings and defoiliations. As for
the US joining European groups trying to remove unexploded ordinance from the Plain
of Jars in Laos? Forget it.
In 1971, at the height of the secret Cambodian bombing, I visited Guam from Japan.
A journalist friend there with strong links to the US military, Doug Fane, arranged
for me to get into Anderson base there for the steak dinner and the Filipino band.
Fane was an ex-naval marine who talked often about his underwater raids into North
Korean harbors during the Korean War.
(Fane enjoyed fame in Japan as the father of children borne by the subsequently well-known
writer and commentator, Yoko Kirishima. She in turn gained fame by telling Japan
how she was a mikon no mama - a mother who has children out of wedlock -something
few were willing to admit at the time.
She also gave strong support for the US adventure in Vietnam, which was where and
how she had met Fane.)
At dinner I got to chatting with one of the B52 crews. They invited me back to the
barrack room they had to share. The sharing was to promote four-man B52 crew camaraderie.
On bunks under walls festooned with cutouts of Playboy nudes and genitalia they told
me casually about how they had to set out on their bombing missions early before
dawn each day, fly for six hours, drop their bomb loads, turn round and head back
home.
There main aim was to get back in time for the steak dinner and the Filipino band.
I asked one of them what they saw as they dropped their bombs. His reply: "Just
a lot of pretty green fields."
Rarely have I come so close to the face of evil.
Years later a brave AP reporter went into the area of south-east Cambodia they had
been bombing. It was not just pretty green fields that had suffered. Village after
village had been destroyed.
There is no warning of a B52 attack. You have no time before you are turned into
pulp. Strangely, no one uses the words 'killing fields' for the area of Cambodia
that suffered that bombing.
Oh, and by the way, the bombing raids were completely illegal. The US was in no
state of war with Cambodia.
But that did not matter since the aim as to bring superior US -style values and civilization
to those villagers. True US values and civilization at the time consisted of little
more than indiscriminate bombing from people obsessed with Playboy genitalia.
But once victory was realised things would improve - MacDonalds and Coca Cola to
begin with.
And talking of civilization, how can we explain the
Western determination to ignore one of the more incredible facts of 20th century
warfare , namely the almost complete lack of revenge shown by the pro-Hanoi Vietnamese
as they emerged victorious from their cruel, decade long struggle against the US-supported
pro-Saigon Vietnamese.
Here, in the behavior of the pro-Hanoi Vietnamese, we see real civilization at work.
At the very least we deserve some kind of apology and explanation from the rightwing
commentators and 'experts' such as Australia's Denis Warner who told us darkly of
a future 'bloodbath' in the event of a Hanoi victory - warnings that were then used
to justify even greater and more continued brutality against pro-Hanoi Vietnamese.
Having failed to get their bloodbath, the same people then turned round and told
us how cruel it was that some of the higher-placed pro-Saigon Vietnamese should be
put into re-education camps after Saigon's defeat. Before that they told us that
US airmen captured after their vicious bombing raids over North Vietnam had suffered
some discomfort in the 'Hanoi Hilton'.
Curiously the people worried about such terrible treatment against people on our
side never managed to show much of an interest in the treatment of people on the
other side who were captured.
The lucky ones were killed or tortured to death on the spot, often with the cooperation
of US interrogators. The unlucky ones had their heads blown off.
A standing joke among the military in Saigon was the do-gooder who showed up wanting
to know where all the captured Vietcong were kept.
Why Hanoi never sought to retaliate for this barbarity remains one of the greater
mysteries of that conflict. That, together with the lack of rancor towards the US.
Something in the Vietnamese psyche perhaps.
Whatever it is, it was clearly superior to the values and civilization those B52
bombers wanted to impose on the Cambodian people.
CHINA INTRIGUES, AND THE PINGPONG DIPLOMACY
But back to Japan, and my attempts to be a journalist.
China was a big news item at the time. In those days, and unlike today, China held
semi-veto power over Japan's choice of political leaders.
To be seen as anti-Beijing, or to be branded as such by Beijing, was the kiss of
political death.
In his push for power the devious Sato Eisaku (prime minister of Japan, 1964 -72
) had made overtures pretending to want better relations with Beijing. When he had
that power he gradually reversed course and embraced Taiwan.
In the process he did enormous damage not just to Japan-China relations, but also
to those in China who had seen his earlier overtures as genuine.
With some difficulty I had tracked down many of the details in this dangerous game.
I regard it as one of my better journalistic efforts in Japan.
The other had been helping to organise a small part of China's pingpong diplomacy.
One of my leads of the China-Sato story had been the former Nikkei correspondent
in China, Samejima Keiji.
Like some other Japanese journalists in China at the time he had been close to the
senior pro-Japan Chinese politician, Liao Cheng-chih.
Liao had been educated in Japan and spoke good Japanese. No doubt that also made
him a magnet for Japanese journalists.
But with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, Samejima was suddenly arrested and
thrown into jail for some years (some with inside information have since suggested
he was imprisoned not so much for his Liao connection but because he had a double
mission in China)
Eventually he was released, but only after Nikkei had exerted all the pressure and
influence that it could.
Some time after Samejima's return to Japan, Nikkei began to run a series of very
interesting front page articles detailing how Liao and others in the pro-Japan faction
in the Chinese leadership had accepted Sato's assurances of wanting better relations
with China.
But when Sato moved to a pro-Taiwan, anti-China policy, they had had the legs cut
away from under them.
According to the articles, radicals in the Chinese leadership had then used this
debacle to discredit not just the pro-Japan faction but all other progressive elements
in China. This in turn had greatly helped the launch of the Cultural Revolution
insanity.
For me, as a longtime China watcher, these and other insider details in the Nikkei
articles were information nuggets of pure gold. The world, and not just Japan, had
to be informed.
First step was to confirm who wrote the articles, since they had been run anonymously.
To me it was obvious that it could not have been anyone other than Samejima. No
one else in Nikkei could have written with such detail and authority.
The articles were anonymous because a condition for his release from China was that
he be kept under wraps.
As fellow Chinese speakers we already had a friendship. An ambiguous reply I had
from him at a chance meeting was all I needed to confirm that he had indeed been
the author.
At the time I had a deal with Derek Davies of the Hongkong Far Eastern Economic Review
to send him the in-depth stories I could not get published in The Australian. The
Liao affair was just such a story. In the article I had no hesitation in suggesting
strongly that the recently-released Samejima was the source.
In those days the FEER carried a lot of weight in Japan. My article was inevitably
brought to Nikkei's attention. I was summoned to Enjoji's office for a formal reprimand.
My relationship with the paper never really recovered.
For any normal Western newspaper, people trying to guess at the authorship of anonymous
articles, especially if they are important, would be taken for granted.
But for a Japanese newspaper, as for almost any other Japanese organisation, avoiding
embarrassment is far more important that preserving integrity. Japanese gangsters
feed on that mentality, incidentally.
The Liao incident was important in itself. But it was also an insight into the
ease with which the moderates in one nation can have their policies derailed by
hawks in another nation.
One of the worst examples was the way Khruschev's efforts to gain détente
with the US were undercut by US hawks determined to keep military and diplomatic
pressure on the USSR. Soviet hawks then used the failure of those efforts to depose
Khruschev and return the Soviet Union to Cold War confrontation.
Our hawks and hardliners, on both sides, have a lot to answer for.
If, as seems possible, the roots of China's Cultural Revolution can be found in the
devious behavior of one Sato Eisaku, then he too has a lot to answer for. At the
very least, the Nobel Prize committee should demand the return of the Peace Prize
they foolishly awarded him in 1974.
The award of that Peace Prize was also yet another example of Sato's deviousness,
and foreigner ignorance of Japan. It was given to him because of his alleged contribution
in keeping Japan out of the Vietnam War.
To anyone who knew Japan, it was the pacifism of the Japanese public and the intelligence
of LDP progressives such as Ohira Masayoshi that kept Japan out of that war. Sato
and his fellow-LDP hawks did all they could, covertly, to encourage the US in that
war.
But to come back to China and the pingpong diplomacy. Thanks to that diplomacy,
the evil done by men like Sato was finally unravelled.
By 1971 the moderates in China led by Premier Zhou Enlai had been able to stage something
of a comeback against the Cultural Revolution fanatics.
Zhou in particular was searching for a way to open ties to the outside world without
inviting reprisals from the still active Gang of Four radicals. Inviting pingpong
players from around the world to visit China was the best he could do in those anxious
days.
The plan succeeded. One result was putting an end to the decades of harmful Cold
War isolation policies imposed on China by the US, Japan, Australia and a host of
other Cold War worthies.
Another was that someone who had spent years vainly trying to involved with China
(myself) would finally and almost without notice be propelled into China... a China
that was still struggling to overcome the harm caused by decades of insane domestic
policies.
HOW TO GET TO CHINA, IN TEN EASY LESSONS
The story begins with me in Tokyo in the cold wet spring of 1971. We - the foreign
journalists in Tokyo - have already had wind that something involving China would
happen at the world table tennis championships being held in Nagoya that year.
Soon news leaks out that with the ending of the championships, all the participating
teams have been invited to visit China. I set out urgently to contact a Dr (medical)
Jackson, the manager for the Australian team to the championships.
My secretary locates the good doctor eventually, and by chance, visiting a factory
on the outskirts of Nagoya. Why is he visiting a factory? I never find out. But
I do ask him over the phone the all-important question - has the Australian team
also been invited to go to China?
After all, even a US team has been invited, and has accepted. Washington has even
hinted that it would like the US team to go.
Jackson says that for some reason there was no invite for the Australian team. In
any case, he and his team had already planned to do some travel and training Japan,
and to visit Taiwan after that.
I have to assume that he is telling the truth, and that maybe Australia has been
ignored because of its virulently anti-Beijing policies. Even so, I am reluctant
to give up the story. I suggest that he call on me if and when his Japan travels
bring him to Tokyo.
Sure enough, a week later he rings. He is at Tokyo Station and needs to find a place
to stay. He adds that he is travelling with the Number One Australian lady player
in the team - a buxom 16 year old. I give him the address of a ryokan (Japanese-style
inn).
An hour later he is back on the phone. He is at the ryokan and they are insisting
that he has to sleep on straw mats - something impossible. Reluctantly I say he can
stay at my place instead.
A menage a trois gets underway, with him and the Number One lady player in a Western-style
bedroom at one end of my condo (by this time I have moved from the Japanese house
to a high-rise 'mansion' near Waseda), and me on straw mats at the other end. We
meet occasionally over breakfast.
On about day four I tell him, and her, what a pity it was they did not get the invitation
to go to China like everyone else. I pass across that morning's English language
newspaper, which has a large front-page photo of the US team in Beijing, shaking
hands with premier Chou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People.
The paper says the whole world is being shaken by the event.
I tell him that if he had got an invitation, he and his team could have been part
of the global sensation.
Dr Jackson's eyes narrow. To this date he has known nothing about what has been
happening to the other teams visiting China. He has not heard about the onset of
pingpong diplomacy. He did not even know there were English language newspapers
in Japan which could tell him about such things.
A conversation gets underway.
He: "But in fact I was invited to go to China." Me: "Well, why didn't
you accept?"
He: "Because the Australian government had insisted that we visit Taiwan after
Nagoya."
(It turns out that Canberra, like Washington, had had advance notice that the Chinese
would be handing out invitations at Nagoya. But unlike Washington, Canberra was determined
to avoid any contact whatsoever with the evil Chinese regime. So it had arranged,
through the Taiwan Embassy in Australia, for the team to go to Taiwan immediately
after the championships.)
(In other words, and as I had discovered over Vietnam earlier, once again Canberra
was even further to the right of Washington in its blind hostility to Asian communism.)
Me: "Well, are you going to Taiwan?" He: "No, the team has broken
up. Most of them were invited to spend some weeks practicing with Japanese in Tokyo,
and they decided they preferred that to going to Taiwan."
Me: "You mean, you turned down this Chinese invitation just because you were
supposed to go to Taiwan, and you have not gone to Taiwan anyway?" He, sheepishly:
"Well, yes. At the time I had no choice but to say no."
Me: "Would you like to go to China now that you are not going to Taiwan?"
He: "Well yes. But I have no idea where the other team members are now - except
her, of course (ie the buxom 16 year-old)."
Me: "No matter. At the very least, do you mind if I check whether the Beijing
invitation is still alive?. You can decide what to do later." He: "Fair
enough"
I get from him the name of the Chinese sports organisation that had invited him,
and head straight to the local telegraph office. In his name, I send a telegram
saying he now wants to accept the invitation, that he will get his team together,
and that he wants me to cover the visit.
That very evening a message comes back from Beijing inviting him to bring a team
as soon as possible, and for me to go with the team.
Mission accomplished, I think, except for two problems: One, he still has no team.
And two, even if he had a team they have no money to get to Hongkong (the only route
for Westerners into China in those primitive days was across the Lo Wu border post
outside Hongkong, and Beijing is only paying the fares from Hongkong).
The next day is spent in a frantic search around Tokyo's various pingpong halls trying
to find team members. The 16 year old is sent out to tell them to pack their bags
for a trip to Hongkong.
Meanwhile in deep secrecy I have told Deamer at The Australian head-office in Sydney
what I am doing. I ask them if the paper can they come up with the fares to Hongkong
in exchange for this world-shattering scoop I am about to give them.
Deamer says yes. But the 16 year old comes back saying no. The team members do not
want to go to China (where's China, one was reported to have asked?). They much
prefer to stay hitting pingpong balls all day with Japanese players in Tokyo's dark,
sweaty table tennis halls.
What to do? I have already promised Sydney a scoop. So I tell Dr Jackson to go
to Hongkong, talk to the Chinese there, and get permission there to go into China
as advance guard to arrange a future pingpong visit. This concocted plan will give
me the basis of a semi-scoop, I think.
The only problem is that my story, run fairly low key in The Australian the next
morning, has alerted the world to the fact that the good Dr Jackson is in Hongkong,
and that Australia could soon be joining the queue of nations with teams inside China.
By this time the media have decided that a visit by any team, an Australian team
especially, is big news. And sure enough, in just a few hours the Hongkong press
have tracked Dr Jackson down to his Hongkong hotel.
He rings me in panic (I can actually hear the journalists banging on his door). Not
only has his room been discovered. Even worse is the fact that the Chinese in Hongkong
have told him they are not interested in him if he does not have a team ready to
go to China immediately.
I have to get that team together, and get it down to Hongkong immediately, or else.
At this point I recall that the man who gave the team members the invite to play
in Tokyo is none other than Japan's table tennis chief, Ichiro Ogimura. Ogimura
is famous for all he has done in the past to promote sporting ties with China.
I tell myself that if Ogimura knew about my problem it is very likely he will tell
the Australian players how important it is that they now leave Japan and go to China....
The scheme works, and 24 hours later I have a team. As we clamber to board the
last plane to Hongkong that next day, I am handing down to my secretary on the gangplank
the last page of my second, and this time, hopefully, more accurate scoop.
Four hours later we are landing at Hongkong's Kai Tak airport. Officials from China's
Hongkong office are on hand to meet us. I spend the evening with a bunch of excited
journalists at the Hongkong press club trying to grab details of my scoop.
The next morning Dr Jackson, some bleary eyed Australian table tennis players, and
two Australian journalists are standing at the Lo Wu crossing, waiting to get into
China.
But our problems are still not over. We are left standing at the frontier for some
hours. 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, and I have a used visa.
People with visas to visit the territory of that enemy regime cannot be allowed
into China, the guard says.
Only Vince, the other Australian journalist with us, can be allowed in.
I invent some excuse for the visas, and emphasise the importance of our mission.
Eventually after calls to and from the Chinese representative office back in Hongkong,
we are allowed in. As we board the train for Canton I can finally breathe relief.
At Canton we are met by a small delegation, including a Mr Yu, a sophisticated official
sent down especially by the Chinese Foreign Ministry to look after us. I breathe
more relief. The Chinese realise the political importance of our visit.
We are taken to the Dongfang (East, as in The East is Red) hotel - the main hotel
for welcoming foreign guests. I am even more reassured about the importance of our
visit.
But those small satisfactions also turn out to be premature. At the hotel post office
I discover Beijing has done nothing to give us press accreditation. As a result
if I want to cable a story it will cost one US dollar a word, and I will have to
pay.
So I do no more than file a brief story saying that we are all in China, and that
the first breach in the wall of traditional Australian hostility to China has been
made.
But this does little to solve the problem of my travelling companion, Vince. Vince
comes from the conservative Melbourne Herald.
He is the only other Australian journalist to get a visa to go with the team, presumably
because the main pro-Beijing communist party is in Melbourne. Fairfax, Australia's
main newspaper group, has been ignored.
Vince does not speak a word of Chinese, and has little interest in abstract things
like pingpong diplomacy. Instead, his first story out of China is a 3,000 word opus
on the splendid food and welcome we have been receiving on our first evening in China,
and that the beer tastes good.
Unfortunately, he does not have the 3,000 dollars needed to pay for this fine piece
of journalistic excellence. He tells the cable office he will pay later, and heads
for the bedroom I have to share with him. I am exhausted since I have hardly had
any sleep for three days.
As we lie prostrate in our beds in the sticky Guangdong heat, I hear a frantic knocking
on the door. It is exactly midnight. A group of angry Red Guards is demanding entrance.
It seems that all cable bills have to paid before midnight, and Vince still has not
paid.
Needless to say, the Red Guards are speaking in Chinese, and very rapid, angry Chinese
at that, and it all passes over Vince's Chinese-illiterate head. The Red Guards get
even angrier, and try to pull him out of bed.
I intervene to 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 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 there is nothing they can do about the semi-comatose, Vince. They
leave, swearing vengeance.
The next day I go down to breakfast and discover a group of Chinese officials viewing
me with intense loathing and silence. With them is Mr Yu, and he is looking very
worried.
Yu takes me aside. In a low and serious voice he says that he and the rest of the
group have been up all night dealing with those Red Guards. They have been demanding
my immediate expulsion from China for unacceptable behavior (no mention of the true
culprit, Vince).
Only after six hours of intense 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 for a moment. I have spent most of my adult life learning Chinese,
writing a book defending Chinese foreign policies, circling and thinking about China,
and then when I finally get to China I discover there are people who want me expelled
on my first evening. Brilliant.
But I stomach my pride and do what Mr Yu says. I am allowed to stay in China.
From Canton we fly to 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.
Shanghai is not much better than Canton - disheveled crowds, slogans everywhere,
somber hotels. One evening I am watching yet another boring pingpong match when
Mr Yu comes up and says he has some good news for me -
a fellow Australian journalist will be joining us from Tokyo.
It is a Mr Ssu, a Mr Ssu... He repeats the name often, trying to get the right pronunciation.
His Shanghai accent does not help.
But he needs say no more. I have already guessed. Mr Ssu can be no other than Max
Suich.
Suich had been badly scooped. Not only did I nobble the Australian team, but
I also managed to get it out of Tokyo and into Hongkong without any other Australian
journalist getting even a hint that something was afoot.
His Sydney bosses are not impressed by his failure. But he is determined to make
a comeback.
From the moment my story has hit the news stands, he has been on the phone to Beijing,
demanding a visa for the Fairfax group of papers. After a week of constant calls,
Beijing relents.
When he does get the visa, he flies direct to Beijing, and scoops me by claiming,
effectively even if slightly inaccurately, to be the first legitimate journalist
to arrive in the Chinese capital since the 1949 revolution.
Such is the game of competitive journalism.
Arriving in Beijing, the team is given the welcome usually reserved for potentates
from obscure African countries seen as friendly to China. There is a large official
banquet. We are taken to the Great Hall of the People to meet Premier Zhou Enlai.
Somewhere is a large mouldy box I still have a very faded photo of that meeting.
Zhou is looking straight at me. I am bowing slightly, Japanese style.
I come away from the meeting with two 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, the feeling that this is a man of depth
and intelligence, who has known power, and the suffering that went before it.
But meeting Zhou does little to end my problems in China. I move quickly from the
sublime to the ridiculous.
The next day our little band of newspeople (some Australian TV people have arrived)
head for the main pingpong stadium to see a match with the Chinese national team.
But we do not have tickets; we had thought that as journalists covering the visit
we would have automatic right of entry. A guard says no tickets, no entry. What's
more, he is very determined.
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 Mr Zhang that we have come all the way
from Australia to see this match, and now we will all have to go all the way back,
empty handed.
And when we get back we will all write stories how a Mr Zhang stopped us from reporting
on the great and historic match. Does he mind?
Mr Zhang decides that he does mind, and reluctantly lets us in. But there will soon
be repercussions.
After the match, I am in a taxi with Max Suich, heading for the Chinese Foreign
Ministry where we are supposed to make a formal visit to present our credentials.
Suich stops the car to photograph some small Chinese slum children.
In those days photographing slum scenes was tantamount to slandering the great Chinese
people and their leader. 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. We are allowed to go, but again there will be repercussions,
and soon.
When we arrive 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 defended China in the past etc etc.
In particular, I will get some recognition for defying Canberra and getting the
team to China. The Chinese authorities must be grateful for all that.
How wrong can you be. Eventually a very stern-faced official enters the room, singles
me out, and says the Ministry has just received reports from a Mr Zhang and an unnamed
policeman to say that an Australian journalist has been behaving in ways insulting
to the great Chinese people.
Is that person you, Mr Clark?
I confess my guilt, mumble something about being misunderstood, and watch on as the
official welcomes all the other journalists. He says they have helped open the door
between China and Australia. I am ignored.
MORE CHINA VISITS
As it turns out, our pingpong visit does help to open the doors between Australia
and China. Relations are established, and in the space of little over a year I end
up making three more visits to China.
One was to cover the opening of diplomatic relations (with Stephen Fitzgerald sent
as ambassador), and then staying on to cover Jim Cairns leading a group of top Australian
businessmen on a trade mission to China in May 1973.
The next was to cover the historic Gough Whitlam visit to China in November 1973.
The last to cover an Australian trade exhibition opened by Jim Cairns in October
1974.
The visits did little to teach me about Australia-China relations which were still
fairly non-existent in those days. But they taught me a lot about Australian policies
and politics.
Cairns remained as flaky as ever: he was determined to see China as the leader of
some great liberating revolution in Asia, despite the shambles of the still lingering
Cultural Revolution.
For the 1974 trade exhibition he had persuaded many Australian firms to spend a lot
of money to bring their goods to China for display.
But the Chinese bought almost nothing, and at the end insisted that exhibitors had
to take all their goods back to Australia or else hand them over to China and pay
for their disposal.
The May 1973 visit had been little better. After Beijing we all set off on a tour
of China. It was a Potemkin-like exercise, designed to impress rather than to inform.
We visited a factory allegedly making transformers somewhere in the farms outside
Shanghai. After we got into our carefully allocated cars for the trip back to town,
I decided for toilet reasons to go back to the factory, something I could do easily
because my car was towards the back of the queue.
Earlier the factory had been a scene of concentrated industry, with workers too busy
even to glance at us foreign visitors as we wandered through. Now, just a few minutes
later, it was deserted. It had all been a show performance.
Seated with me in my car was Mungo McCallum, in those days a fairly rabid leftwinger
and later a devout Whitlam admirer. I was fated to spend much of the Cairns visit
with him since the protocol-minded Chinese insisted that we always sit in the same
car allocated to us.
I recall Mungo's indignation when I described the crowds brought out in the streets
to welcome us in Hangchou as Cultural Revolution 'serfs.' He thought the Revolution
had been a great idea, and that the welcome was genuine.
But at the formal reception for us that evening Cairns had to play second fiddle
to a much larger reception for a bunch of rightwing Chilean generals in the same
hotel at the same time. It was yet another reminder of the ease with which the Chinese
put national interest well ahead of friendship links.
Or rather, if they emphasise a friendship link, they do so because they see that
in the national interest. And who can blame them. If I had been through as much
degradation and humiliation as China suffered from the West in the past, I would
be the same.
The one useful thing to come out of the visit was a move to open contact with Cambodian
government in exile. But even that was partly frustrated by the hardliners in Canberra.
On an earlier Beijing visit I had got to see Sihanouk, then already in exile from
his native Cambodia where the US had installed the puppet Lon Nol regime.
Sihanouk had invited me and some others to the very comfortable house the Chinese
had given him, and had shown us a film of the then emerging Khmer Rouge guerrilla
armies on which he was relying on for support.
As I looked over the line after line of young, dedicated, guerrillas, many female,
I was reminded of the photos Burchett had shown me some years earlier in Moscow,
and of the dreadful US bombing raids these young people would have to face.
During the Cairns visit I renewed the Sihanouk contact. I was able to arrange for
Cairns to meet with Penn Nouth, prime minister in Sihanouk's government in exile.
With my trusty Polaroid camera in hand I was also able to get a good photo about
this historic meeting on to the front page of The Australian the next day.
But Canberra was not impressed by this diplomatic breakthrough. The Whitlam government,
to its eternal discredit, was insisting that Lon Nol was the legitimate ruler of
Cambodia. Cairns received a severe reprimand for seeming to flout government policy.
I also tried to arrange for Cairns to visit Sihanouk, That plan was killed by direct
order from Canberra, which gave me another story in the paper. But it also around
hostility from my journalistic colleagues who had been scooped. They accused me
of mixing politics with journalism.
Oh well, I guess you can't please everyone.
On his November 1973 trip to Beijing just six months later, Whitlam was to gain media
bouquets for going out of his way to call on Sihanouk. The rivalry and jealousy
between Whitlam and Cairns had done a lot of damage to ALP foreign policy formation
over the years.
During the Whitlam 1973 visit I was to see a lot more of Canberra's conservative
wisdom. Eric Walsh was travelling ahead as PR agent for the mission. He showed
me the briefing for the visit which, unbelievably, was reciting the usual rightwing
platitudes about Chinese aggressive intentions in Asia, as if there had been no change
of government in Canberra.
That too gave me a story, and considerable hostility from the Whitlam camp, including
Fitzgerald, who as ambassador was trying to pretend that Australia was a good friend
of China.
With Whitlam was his Foreign Affairs chief, Alan Renouf, also trying hard to pretend
to be progressive minded. He promised me all kinds welcome if I ever wanted to come
back Canberra and into the Department.
Two years later when I did get back to Canberra, he went out of his way to make sure
than I never even got near his Department. But more on that devious personality
later.
Another good story came while covering Whitlam's visit to the famous Coal Hill
gardens on the northern outskirts of Beijing. A small man wearing a 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 Deng Xiaoping on yet another of his attempted comebacks from Cultural Revolution
exile. I asked him: "Are you Deng Xiaoping?"
When he giggled agreement, I felt certain I had quite a nice story to report. Sadly
it was cut to pieces by sub- editors in Sydney who, like the large group of Australian
media people on Coal Hill, did not have the slightest idea who Deng was.
Yet anyone with a memory extending back beyond the last horse race at Randwick would
have known that Deng had been prominent in the mid-sixties when together with Zhou
Enlai he had tried to move China to more moderate policies.
I also thought I had got quite a good story by interviewing a defector from the former
Taiwan Embassy in Canberra, Wang Wei-ping. But once again the sub-editors managed
to get it wrong. I had tried to save cabling costs by sending his name as Weidashping.
Sure enough, a brief story about me talking with a Chinese gentleman called weidashping
appeared in the paper the next day. Such were the joys of writing for The Australian
in those days.
(One of the worst editorial boo-boos came during a Japan-Australia talkfest in Kyoto,
where the head of the Australian delegation, Sir Edward Warren, went out of his
way to tell me how he was going to be given the high Japanese award of the Sacred
Treasure.
The story that appeared in the paper the next day said he was going to be given the
high Japanese award of the Secret Pleasure.)
The four day Whitlam visit had been tumultuous enough in itself. To cap it off,
an RAAF VIP plane was provided to take him and all the rest of us back to Australia.
The plane would try do something never before attempted in history - fly direct from
Beijing to Canberra in one hop. But there were load problems since the plane needed
much fuel, the Beijing runway was short, and the journalists on board were heavy.
In the gathering dark of a late autumn evening, we just managed takeoff. For the
rest of the night the party celebrated as China and the rest of Asia slipped away
beneath us. No one, not even Whitlam, even pretended to try to sleep very much.
Arriving in Canberra in the cold light of an early spring morning, I discovered that
the strict protocol in the line up of official cars there to meet us was almost identical
to the one we had left behind in China.
I was also to discover another Chinese feature of the Australian scene - the ease
with which rivals can ensure you become a non-person, and your activities are non-events.
Many can claim credit for Australia's opening to China. But to suggest that our
pingpong visit did little or nothing in that direction is going a bit far, surely.
Yet that precisely is what Whitlam, Fitzgerald and other Whitlam camp followers have
tried ever since to imply. It is time to set the record straight.
That publicity we were able to give to that visit not only forced the Australian
public to take much more notice of China and the Chinese people. It also had a direct
impact on Canberra's policies to China.
For example, on our last day in Beijing, we -myself, Suich and Vince - had been
invited to a top-level banquet. It had been organized specifically to give us a
formal briefing on the state of Australia-China relations.
This included a warning that China would not want to buy very much more wheat from
Australia if Canberra persisted in its hostile policies.
Our story was given much prominence in the Australian newspapers (though Vince, predictably,
was more interested in writing about the food at the banquet). It also embarrassed
the LCP government, which was trying to insist that the wheat deals were quite separate
from, and unharmed by, Canberra's anti-Beijing stance.
On May 11, even as our pingpong visit was underway, Foreign Affairs announced it
was making a review of relations with China.
Realising that big things were happening, Mick Young then set about organising an
ALP visit to Beijing, headed by Whitlam.
One of his first moves was to ring me in Tokyo to check out the wheat story and to
try to find out what kind of reception Whitlam would receive. As he confided to me
at the time, Whitlam was very hesitant about making this visit into hostile territory,
and needed to be reassured.
(Mick's links with China went back to his years as a very leftwing trade union representative.
I had got to know him quite well in Tokyo on his way in and out of China.
As someone who had worked his way up from the sheep shearing sheds of South Australia,
he had a great sensitivity to the way human beings behaved. His popularity and success
within the ALP was no accident.
He once gave me an insight which I have often used to great effect in my writing
about Japan. This was the fact that in Japan, despite its alleged feudalistic class
distinctions, he sensed no hint of class difference between drivers and their elite
passengers. In China, despite its alleged egalitarianism, drivers behaved with inferiority.
)
Thanks to Mick's efforts, the Whitlam visit went ahead in July of that year, three
months after our pingpong visit. It was clearly aimed to cash in on the publicity
being given to China in Australia as a result of our visit.
Another aim was to follow up on our wheat story, to prove that Canberra's anti-Beijing
policies were indeed doing terrible harm to Australia's rural industries.
Predictably, the visit got good publicity back in Australia, though the usual gaggle
of rightwing journalists from Fairfax and the Melbourne Herald tried to make something
of the fact that Whitlam had been unduly polite in his meeting with Zhou Enlai (presumably
he was supposed to have lectured the Chinese on the evil of their communist ways).
Back in Canberra the Billie McMahon LCP government tried to score anti-China points
by saying that Zhou had played Whitlam 'like a trout.'
As it turned out, the 'trout' decided to return to Australia via Tokyo. I met him
in his hotel room and was able to tell him the news of that day - that Washington
had revealed how at precisely the moment he was being accused to having been played
like a trout, Henry Kissinger had made a secret visit to Beijing to organize a planned
visit by Richard Nixon for February the next year.
Whitlam strode around the room with delight. "Played like a trout" they
said. "Well when I get back to Canberra I will show them who was the trout."
Canberra never recovered from the shock and shame. The LCP government went to crashing
defeat in the November elections the following year.
The success of the Beijing visit in turn was a key factor encouraging the formerly
anti-Beijing Whitlam to put so much emphasis on China the moment he became Prime
Minister. This included the very early appointment of Fitzgerald, who had accompanied
him on the Beijing visit, as ambassador to China.
Some have assumed that I must have held some grudge against Whitlam because of the
Fitzgerald appointment. In fact, by this time I was thoroughly embedded in Japan.
A move to China would have caused problems.
And as I will reveal later, there were hints that I would get some kind of similar
position in Japan. Hawks on both the Australian and Japanese side may have done something
to kill those hints.
But as I will also explain later, if they did so they ended up doing me a favor.
My Japan career would have been far less interesting if I had let myself get embedded
in the rather sterile Japan-Australia political relationship.
What has upset me far more has been the way Fitzgerald and the group around him,
many dependent on his goodwill for cultural and study funds involving China, have
subsequently set out to deny or ignore the importance of the pingpong breakthrough
which I had done so much to organise.
They have tried valiantly to claim that the breakthrough in relations with China
began with the Whitlam visit, ably assisted by Fitzgerald. Before that nothing important
had happened.
Even Mick Young's crucial role in persuading an initially hesitant Whitlam to go
to China, and in organizing the visit, is played down.
Personality cults are not the exclusive preserve of communist societies, it seems.
The first surprise came on my return to Australia after the 1973 Whitlam visit. A
Chinese pingpong team was in Australia, to reciprocate the 1971 visit by the Australian
team. Fitzgerald took charge of the various celebrations. I was carefully side-lined.
In the 285 pages of the 1985 book by Fung and Mackerras on the breakthrough in relations
with China - "From Fear to Friendship" - only one line is given to our
pingpong visit, described simply as an example of Beijing's peoples diplomacy.
Page after page is devoted to Fitzgerald's alleged role. Mackerras, I should add,
had relied heavily on government funds, some controlled by Fitzgerald, for his and
his university department's work and field studies in China.
My own book on China also gets only one line, even though it seems to have contributed
to the Fung-Mackerras book title. That one line is followed up by the statement that
Fitzgerald was doing more than me to make a China breakthrough.
To this day Fitzgerald's serious academic work on Chinese foreign policies has been
negligible. True, he once did publish a slim volume in which Chairman Mao is heavily
praised. (He was fortunate to get it published by those nice people at the ANU Press
- the people who in the sixties ran away from anything trying to give a serious and
impartial view of China - before it went bankrupt.)
But I doubt whether that contributed much to serious Australian understanding of
China.
(This is quite coincidental, but Mackerras, Fitzgerald and myself have a strange
connection.
Back in the mid-sixties we all applied for a Myer Scholarship being offered to send
someone to Hongkong for China studies. Fitzgerald and myself were rejected because
we wanted to study Chinese policies and politics, something regarded as far too dangerous
and controversial.
Mackerras got the scholarship because he wanted to study Chinese music and opera.
Such was the level of Australian interest in China at the time.)
True, and at the more practical level, Fitzgerald did do a lot to promote the China
relationship. But he did it only when it was safe and politically advantageous for
him to do so.
(He also later did some strange things like deciding that China was unreliable and
that we should all embrace Taiwan, or that Australians should be encouraged to invest
in North Korea of all places. But that was after he had moved out of politics and
academia, into business consulting, and had lost out on some business deals with
China.)
As mentioned earlier, he was very silent back in the sixties when I so badly needed
some support in trying almost single-handedly to break down Australia's anti-China
prejudices.
If I could not do much more after 1973, that was because I was in semi-exile in Japan,
as result of doing a lot more when it was not safe and advantageous.
One curious result of this seeming imperative to downgrade the pingpong visit has
been the failure to pick up a key point I have tried to make several times in print,
namely that Canberra opposed the visit even though Washington was in favor.
As I had discovered over Vietnam, and had had published at the time, Canberra had
consistently been to the right, even of the US, over communism in Asia.
For students of Australian foreign policies during this period I can think of no
fact more important than this. Yet even over Vietnam only one or two scholars have
picked it up. Over the pingpong visit there has been complete silence.
If anyone thinks I am exaggerating Canberra's extraordinary role in trying to prevent
the pingpong visit, just ask Dr Jackson. Failing him, the former 16 year old lady
champion. She would remember.
SOME CHINESE REALITY
The China visits also taught me a lot about the shambles caused by Beijing's disastrous
Cultural Revolution - factories more interested in producing Maoist slogans than
goods; demoralised, poorly fed and badly dressed crowds gaping suspiciously at any
foreigner in sight; never-ending 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 ....
At the annual trade fair in Canton I was proudly shown a machine for making zippers.
It had been developed by the workers at XX factory, I was told. I asked to which
other factories it was being sold, only to be told firmly that each factory had to
invent its own machine.
Chairman Mao had decreed self-reliance. So self-reliance it would be, to the point
of every factory having to try to invent and produce its own machines.
In the countryside during an earlier visit I had seen even worse - decrepit shacks
that were supposed to be producing chemical fertilizers on each farm; the debris
of the backyard steel furnaces which had to be fed by valuable pots, pans and needed
farm implements, simply because the Chairman had decreed that there would be such
furnaces ......
China in those days was determined to impress us with its medical skills. After
been taken to see a badly-burned Shanghai worker receiving acupuncture while shouting
long live Chairman Mao I decided I had had enough.
The visits also taught me a lot about the way the Western media flipflops to meet
the public moods of the moment. Thanks to pingpong diplomacy and the frantic rush
by Western journalists to get visas, China had overnight become the flavor of the
month.
In several weeks travelling China I did not see a single construction crane. Meanwhile
journalistic colleagues from the US and elsewhere were writing gushing reports about
China's great economic progress.
One of them wrote about the incredible honesty of the Chinese under Communism. Yet
all he had to do was to walk out of his hotel and he would have noticed that every
parked bicycle had been carefully locked by its owner.
While I was trying to report what I was seeing, many of my journalistic colleagues
were sending back the glad stories of progress and happiness that both the Chinese
and their head offices wanted to hear.
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 nice
to me as they have to a large number of other people they regard as their friends.
Returning to Japan, I tried to make sense of it all. How could an entire nation sink
into such self-destructive fanaticism.
The Chinese were not a stupid people. Many of the officials I had met in Beijing
were more intelligent and intellectually more supple than most of the Japanese I
was mixing with.
But the Japanese did not let themselves get caught up in such mumbo jumbo.
It was my first real lesson in the power of ideology to warp people's minds. That
in turn was to give me the clue that I needed badly to understand the non-ideological
Japanese.
And that clue in turn was to open a new and completely unexpected chapter in my life
- one which wash away all the traumas of the past and allow me complete freedom to
do what I wanted in Japan, a country I was to come to admire and like very much.
More to follow.
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