BETWEEN
FOUR WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA;
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS: DIPLOMAT, ECONOMIST, JOURNALIST AND
JAPANOLOGIST;
BETWEEN
FOUR LANGUAGES: ENGLISH, CHINESE, RUSSIAN AND JAPANESE
Chapter
7a
CHINA, AUSTRALIA AND THE PING-PONG DIPLOMACY –
1971-74
1.
Organising a Ping-pong Team to China
2. Taking a Ping-pong Team into China
3. China and Australia
4. Cultural Revolution Realities
1971.
The moderates in China led by Premier Zhou Enlai 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 I would suddenly be propelled into China -
a China that was still struggling to overcome the harm
caused by decades of insane domestic policies.
1.
Organising a Ping-pong Team to China
The
story begins with me in Tokyo in the cold, wet spring of
1971.
We have already had wind that something involving China
will happen at the world table tennis championships being
held in Nagoya in April of that year.
The championships get underway and we soon discover that
all the 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.
No
Ping-pong Diplomacy for Australia?
I, and presumably the other Australian journalists in
Tokyo, set out urgently to contact a Dr (medical) Jackson,
the manager for the Australian team to the championships.
My secretary locates him eventually, and by complete
chance. He is visiting a factory on the outskirts of
Nagoya.
Over a shaky phone connection I ask him the all-important
question - has the Australian team also been invited to go
to China?
After all, if even a US team has been invited, and has
accepted, and Washington has given approval, then an
Australian team should also be going.
Jackson simply 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 in Japan, and to visit Taiwan after
that.
China is not on their itinerary.
I have to assume he is telling the truth (why would any
self-respecting team want to pass up the chance to go to
China?)
Maybe Australia has been ignored because its anti-Beijing
policies are even more strident and virulent than
Washington’s.
Even so, it is a mystery.
The
Mystery Unravels
But I am reluctant to give up on the story.
After all, it involves China and China is still very much
on my mind.
I suggest he call me if and when his 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, and it has to be cheap.
I give him the address of a ryokan (Japanese-style inn) and
suggest he check it out.
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. He wants a hotel, not a horse stable.
By this time it is early evening. Finding somewhere else
cheap to stay in Tokyo on a rainy night will not be easy.
Reluctantly I say he can stay at my place instead.
He shows up accompanied by the Number One Australian lady
player in his team - a buxom 16 year old.
A menage a trois gets underway.
He and the 16 year old are camped in a Western-style
bedroom at one end of my Waseda condo.
I am sleeping on straw mats at the other end.
We meet occasionally over breakfast.
Sometime, around about day four, I tell him what a pity it
was they did not get the invitation to go to China like
everyone else did at Nagoya.
He asks why the pity.
I pass across that morning's Japan Times. It has a large
front-page photo of the US team in Beijing, shaking hands
with premier Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People.
The paper says the whole world is being shaken by the
event.
I tell him how if he had got an invitation, he and his team
could have been part of the global sensation.
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
even heard about the onset of something being called
ping-pong 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 (pointing to the photo): "That’s the manager of
the US team. I know him well.”
Me: “Well, you could be there with him, on the front
page too, if you had been invited to go to China.”
His eyes narrow again.
He: “But to tell the truth, Greg, I was invited to go
to China."
Me: "What! You were invited to China and you did not go?
Why?"
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 communists. So
it had arranged, through the Taiwan Embassy in Canberra,
for the team to go to Taiwan immediately after the
championships.)
Me: "But you didn’t go to Taiwan."
He: "Right. The team broke up after Nagoya. Some were
invited to go to Tokyo to practice with top Japanese
players. The rest went back to Australia."
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. When we got the invite to go to
China I had no choice but to say no. The Canberra people
had arranged everything for us, including visas, to go to
Taiwan"
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 (the buxom 16
year-old). In any case, surely it is too late now to go to
China?"
Me: "No matter. China is very serious about this ping-pong
diplomacy. It wants as many teams to visit as possible.
I will check for you 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.
(I also contact the Australian embassy in Tokyo to find out
whether Canberra would move to prevent a China visit. They
come back to me studiously neutral.)
I send a telegram to Beijing in his name, saying he now
wants to accept the invitation, that he will get his team
together, and that he wants one Gregory Clark to cover the
visit.
That very evening a message comes back from Beijing
inviting him to bring his team as soon as possible, all
expenses paid, and for one Gregory Clark to go with the
team.
For me, who has spent years trying to get to China, the
euphoria is boundless.
No Team,
And No Money
But there are two major problems.
One: Dr Jackson has no team to take to China.
No team, and I lose my long awaited chance to go to China.
I also lose the scoop I am planning to send Sydney about
the team going to China (the other Australian journalists
in Tokyo have no idea of what is going on).
Two: But even if he had a team they have no money.
The only route into China in those primitive days was
across the Lo Wu border post outside Hongkong. Beijing is
only paying expenses from Hongkong and around China.
If the team wants to go to China they will have to pay the
Tokyo to Hongkong leg of the trip from their own pockets,
which are already bare from the expense of traveling around
Japan.
I have to find a solutions, quickly.
First,
find your Ping-pong Team
The next day my secretary makes a frantic telephone search
of Tokyo's dark, dingy ping-pong halls.
She is asking whether there are any Australian team members
there.
We locate three of them.
The buxom 16 year old is sent out to tell them to pack
their bags for a trip to Hongkong, and China.
Meanwhile in deep secrecy I have told Deamer at The
Australian head-office in Sydney what I am doing.
Can the paper come up with the fares to Hongkong? If they
do, I can give them a world-shattering scoop.
Deamer comes back very quickly saying 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 ping-pong balls all day
with Japanese players in those dark, sweaty table-tennis
halls.
Jackson
into Hongkong
What to do?
I have already promised Sydney a scoop.
So I tell Jackson to go to Hongkong, talk to the Chinese
there, and get permission for himself to go into China as
advance guard to arrange a future table tennis tour for
Australian players, hopefully brought up from Australia.
That way I will at least get the basis of a mini-scoop
reporting the ‘Jackson initiative.’.
But my mini-scoop, 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.
The ping-pong diplomacy excitement has gathered even
greater momentum. The world is beating a path to
China’s door.
A visit by any team, even a hastily assembled Australian
team, is going to be big news.
Even the Ecuadorians are in the headlines for sending a
team!
And sure enough, in just a few hours the Hongkong press
have tracked Dr Jackson down to his Hongkong hotel (the
Hongkong media get hold of hotel guest name lists as easily
and you and I get names from a telephone directory.)
They are beating a path to his
door.
Jackson rings me in panic.
Not only has his room been discovered (I can actually hear
the journalists banging on his door). Even worse is the
fact that Beijing’s office in Hongkong have told him
they are not interested in any advance guard nonsense.
He has to have a team ready to go to China, and
immediately.
And, Jackson adds, since his trip to Hongkong was my
brilliant idea, I have to get that team together, and get
it down to Hongkong, immediately.
The
Ogimura Connection
At this point I recall that the man who gave the Australian
team members the invite to play in Tokyo after Nagoya is
none other than Japan's table tennis association chief,
Ogimura Ichiro.
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, he
will agree to tell the Australian players how important it
is that they stop their training in Japan, and go to China.
The scheme works.
24 hours later I have a team.
Or rather, a sort of a team — the buxom 16 year old
and two more (one other has decided he does not want to go
to China anyway).
As we clamber aboard the last plane to Hongkong that 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 Beijing’s Hongkong office are there to
meet us.
I spend the evening with a bunch of excited journalists at
the Hongkong press club, all trying to grab details of the
scoop I have already sent for tomorrow’s paper.
The next morning Dr Jackson, three bleary eyed Australian
table tennis players, and two Australian journalists
(myself included), are standing at the Lo Wu crossing,
waiting to get into China.
(The other journalist, Vince, is from the very conservative
and anti-communist Melbourne Herald.)
(He, rather than a journalist from the less rightwing
Fairfax group, has probably been invited because Melbourne
hosts the miniscule pro-Beijing faction of the miniscule
Australian Communist Party, and Beijing no doubt sees
Melbourne as a center of keen pro-Beijing sentiment.)
2. Taking
a Ping-pong Team Into China
But my problems are still not over.
We have handed over our passports. But for some reason we
are all left standing in the hot sun at the Lo Wu 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.
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 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 Hongkong, we are allowed in. As we board the train for
Canton (as it used to called in English in those
politically non-correct days; today it has its proper name
of Guangzhou) I can barely contain the excitment.
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 policies I have researched and have
defended to some extent - I am finally being allowed to
board a slow train headed for the Middle Kingdom.
The emotion is something large.
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 Peking especially by the Chinese
Foreign Ministry to look after us.
We are taken to the famous 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 prestigous 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.
I don’t have much money on me and 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.
He has little interest in things like the global
significance of ping-pong diplomacy.
Instead, 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 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 for a moment.
I have spent much of my adult life learning Chinese,
writing a book explaining Chinese foreign policies,
thinking about China, defending China from insults.
What’s more I have defied my own government and
single-handedly organized the ping-pong team China wants so
badly to 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.
Watching
Ping-pong, Around 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
Shanghai is not much better than Canton - disheveled
crowds, slogans everywhere, somber hotels.
One evening I am watching yet another boring ping-pong
marathon 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 is the Fairfax representative in Tokyo, and he has
been badly scooped.
Not only did I nobble the Australian team from under his
nose in Tokyo, but I also managed to get it out of Tokyo
and into Hongkong without him or any other Australian
journalist realising that something was afoot.
It was a classic, old-fashioned scoop, executed in a manner
that the old-timers especially would appreciate.
But Suich’s Sydney bosses are not impressed. He has
to do something to match me, or else.
They need not have worried. The highly-competitive Suich is
already on the move.
From the moment my story has hit the news stands, he has
been on the phone to Beijing daily, demanding a visa for
the Fairfax group of papers.
After a week of constant calls, Beijing relents.
And when he does get the visa, he not only flies direct to
Beijing a day or two before we arrive. He even tries to
scoop me.
He sends off a story telling the world that he is the first
legitimate Australian journalist to arrive in the Chinese
capital since the 1949 revolution.
(Wilfred Burchett, of course, has been there before him,
but Burchett is not ‘legitimate.’)
Dateline
Beijing
Arriving in Beijing, we are given the welcome usually
reserved for potentates from African countries seen
friendly to China.
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.
Somewhere is the large moldy box where I keep photos, I
also have a very faded 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 tickets
to see it – that our journalist credentials are
enough.
But a guard says no tickets, no entry. And 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 him 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 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 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 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 defended China 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 me praise or thanks.
He says the Ministry has just received reports from a Mr
Zhang and an unnamed policeman claiming 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.
3: China
and Australia
As it turns out, our ping-pong visit does help to open the
doors between China and Australia.
But some rather unpleasant people will do all they can to
make sure I do not pass through those doors.
Wheat
Diplomacy
On the last day of our Beijing visit, Suich, Vince and
myself are invited to a farewell banquet organized by the
Foreign Ministry.
It is to give us something myself and Suich have been
asking for - a formal briefing on the state of
Australia-China relations.
In careful, measured tones we are told how China might find
it very hard to continue to buy wheat from Australia if
Canberra persists in its hostile, anti-Beijing policies.
Indeed, and in future, China might be inclined to buy much
more of its wheat from Canada, which is much friendlier to
China.
Suich and myself have no problem realizing the importance
of the message we were receiving. Vince is more cynical.
“Typical communist propaganda,” he sniffs as we
all go off to file our stories.
But later Vince is to give me a quote I have used often in
connection with writing.
Early on the morning after the banquet, Yu calls on us to
make sure we had got the message from the night before, and
to give us some extra material on Beijing’s
determination to exclude Australia from future wheat
purchases.
Suich and I have already filed our stories from the night
before. But delayed deadlines mean we have the chance to
re-file.
(Vince was still in bed and missed the Yu briefing as I
recall.)
On the way to the airport that morning, myself and Suich
are frantically trying to rewrite our earlier stories.
Vince looks on with mild contempt.
“ The first rule of good journalism,” he says
sagely, “is to get your stories right from the
beginning. That way you won’t have to
re-write.”
It is good rule (in circumstances other than that morning)
, and I admire people who can keep to it.
Sadly, I am a chronic re-writer.
The
Australian Reaction
Needless to say, our ‘Peking Threatens Wheat
Ban’ stories ran prominently in the Australian
newspapers the next day (though Vince’s story,
predictably, had been more about the food at the banquet).
Equally predictably, Canberra’s conservative
Liberal-Country Party government was greatly upset.
No wheat sales and the Country Party coalition partner
would have to face some very angry supporters.
Up till then it had been trying to claim that the wheat
deals were quite separate from, and unharmed by, its
anti-Beijing stance.
Our reports would have been a major embarrassment for them.
Indeed, the very fact of our visit had already embarrassed
them, thanks to the enormous publicity it was getting in
the media.
On May 11, even as our ping-pong visit was underway,
Foreign Affairs announced it was making a review of
relations with China.
Foreign Affairs had long been at the head of
Canberra’s anti-Beijing offensive. Its volte-face was
significant, especially since it had also been the prime
mover in trying to get the ping-pong team to go to Taiwan
rather than to China.
The
Whitlam Connection
Realising that big things were happening, the senior Labor
party official, Mick Young, decided to set about organising
a visit to Beijing for the ALP leader, Gough Whitlam.
That would make life even more difficult for the ruling
anti-Beijing conservatives in Canberra, he hoped.
One of his first moves was to ring me when I got back to
Tokyo to confirm the wheat ban story and to find out what
kind of reception Whitlam would receive.
He added that Whitlam was very hesitant about making this
visit into hostile territory, and needed all the assurance
he could get.
(Mick's links with China went back to his years as a very
leftwing trade union representative very welcome in China
as a result. I had got to know him quite well through Walsh
and Menadue in Canberra, and in Tokyo on his trips 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 deep
popularity within the ALP and across a broad spectrum of
Australian society 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 little hint of
class difference between company drivers and their elite
passengers. But in China, despite its claimed
egalitarianism, drivers behaved with inferiority.)
Thanks to Mick's efforts, the Whitlam visit went ahead in
July of that year, three months after our ping-pong 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 of the Whitlam visit was to follow up on our
wheat story, to prove that Canberra's anti-Beijing policies
were indeed likely to do great harm to Australia's rural
industries.
It culminated in an historic meeting with Zhou Enlai, whom
we had met a few months earlier, and also in the Great Hall
of the People.
The Whitlam 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 deferential in his
meeting with Zhou Enlai (he was supposed to have lectured
the Chinese on the evils of their communist ways, it
seems).
Back in Canberra, the LCP government of the very
forgettable Billie McMahon tried to score anti-China points
by saying that Zhou had played Whitlam 'like a trout.'
Bad move, Billie.
Just a day or two later the world discovers that at almost
the same moment the 'trout' had visited Beijing, Henry
Kissinger was making his own very secret and momentous
visit to Beijing - to organize a visit by Richard Nixon in
February the next year.
The
‘Trout’ Turns
Whitlam had decided to return to Australia via Tokyo.
I was able to meet him in his Tokyo hotel room and give him
that day’s news about the secret Kissinger visit.
Whitlam’s erupted with that special Whitlam mix of
sarcastic joy.
As strode back and forward around the small hotel room he
kept rubbing his hands together: “So I was played
like a trout, was I? Well when I get back to Canberra I
will show them just who is the trout, and who is doing the
playing."
Washington had told its allegedly close Canberra ally
nothing about the Kissinger visit in advance. Back in
Canberra, Whitlam ‘played’ McMahon to the hilt.
The Liberal Party leader never recovered from the setback.
His government went to crashing defeat in the November
elections the next year.
More
China Visits
With Whitlam elected as prime minister in November 1972,
diplomatic relations with Beijing were quickly established.
In the space of little over a year I would end up making
three more visits to China.
One was to cover the opening of the embassy there (with
Stephen Fitzgerald sent as ambassador), and then staying on
to cover trade minister (and later deputy prime minister)
Jim Cairns leading a group of top Australian businessmen on
a trade mission to China in May 1973.
The next was to cover Gough Whitlam’s historic visit
to China as prime minister in November 1973.
The last was to cover a trade exhibition opened in Beijing
by Jim Cairns in October 1974.
The visits did little to teach me about Australia-China
relations, which were still very limited in those days.
But they did teach me a lot about China, and about
Australian politics.
Jim
Cairns in China
As I mentioned earlier, I had had dealings with Cairns back
in the anti-Vietnam war days.
This time too he remained as flaky as ever. He was hard man
to get to know properly.
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 visible on every side.
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.
He even brought a model airplane – the
Australian-produced Nomad.
But the Chinese did little to help him.
They gave little sign of realizing the political capital he
had expended in organizing the exhibition.
They not only bought almost nothing. When the exhibition
ended I got a minor scoop by discovering how the Chinese
were insisting the exhibitors had to take all their goods
back to Australia.
Failing that, they had to hand over their exhibits to China
for free.
In some cases even the exhibitors, who had spent so much
bring their unsold goods to China, now had to pay good
money for their disposal.
Needless to say, neither Cairns or the embassy was
impressed by my story, and its implications.
Later Cairns was to make sure that I was not included in
the press coverage for his next overseas trip (to Hanoi).
(He took with him the rightwing Michael Richardson of The
Age instead.)
Fitzgerald was even less impressed, since it undercut badly
his claims that Australia had a great trade future in
China.
Which it was to have eventually, but not by selling Nomads.
During the Cairns visit I ran into a precursor of that
future - an old contact from my Hammersley and CRA visiting
days, Tom Barlow (who was later to head Hammersly).
He did not want to admit it, but he was in Beijing to
arrange the first contract for export of Australian iron
ore to China.
That too had given me quite a good story, even if at the
time none of us realized just how big the story would
become.
I had pestered Barlow into giving me the name of the hotel
he was staying at so I could arrange a follow-up talk (he
had been trying to emulate Kissinger-style secrecy and keep
journalists at bay).
But when I tried to contact him at that hotel I was told
insistently – in Chinese - that there was no Barlow
there.
I knew Barlow quite well and did not think he would
deliberately have given me the wrong hotel name. So I
persisted.
It took me some time to realise that Barlow in Chinese
means the eighth floor (baa low), and the hotel only had
five floors!
The May 1973 Jim Cairns visit had been little better in
terms of cementing a China-Australia relationship.
He had with him the cream of the Australian business
community. But the Chinese showed little sign of
excitement.
After Beijing we all set off on a Potemkin-like tour of
China.
As we wandered round factory after factory it was obvious
to all of us that the Chinese were far more interested in
handing out Cultural Revolution slogans than in serious
manufacture.
We visited a factory allegedly making transformers
somewhere in the countryside outside Shanghai.
After we got into our cars for the trip back to town, I
decided for toilet reasons to go back to the factory -
something I could do fairly easily because my car was at
the back of the carefully-regulated car queue.
A few minutes 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 purely show performance.
As we traveled around China I had to share a car with the
journalist Mungo McCallum, in those days a fairly keen
leftwinger and later a devout Whitlam admirer.
(The protocol-minded Chinese had insisted that we always
sit in the same car, and that the car should always be in
the same position - at the back of the car queue.)
I recall Mungo's indignation when I described the crowds
brought out in the streets to welcome us in Hangzhou as
Cultural Revolution 'serfs.'
He thought the Revolution had been a great idea, and that
the welcome was genuine.
A lot of other leftwingers back in Australia had been
equally gullible, though I suspect Cairns was more savvy.
The Chinese showed little sign of realizing Cairns’
political significance as head of Australia’s
embattled leftwing in those days. (Whitlam was still much
more interested in keeping his credentials as a centrist,
even as the disaster in Vietnam was unfolding).
At the formal reception for us that evening in Hangzhou,
Cairns had to play second fiddle to a much larger reception
in the next room, for a bunch of rightwing Chilean
admirals, some of whom were no doubt already plotting the
overthrow of the Allende regime at home.
Earlier in Beijing I had seen US air force people, some
possibly fresh from napalming Vietnamese villages, being
welcomed for some reason at the hotel where we had been
staying.
In those days China was desperate for any recognition it
could get. It did not look too closely at the blood on
peoples’ hands.
A
Cambodian Connection
One useful thing to come out of the Cairns May 1973 visit
was a move to open contact with Cambodian government in
exile.
On the 1971 ping-pong visit to Beijing I had got to see
Sihanouk, then already in exile from his native Cambodia
where the US had installed the puppet Lon Nol regime.
(Who today even remembers the names of people like Lon Nol,
Nyguen Ky and a host of other military types the US had
tried vainly to install as leaders in Indochina?)
(The US is unique in many ways. One of them is that it does
not even bother to pretend to preserve the façade of its
puppets when their CIA-installed regimes collapse.)
Sihanouk had invited me and some others to the very
comfortable house the Chinese had given him. He had shown
us a film of the then emerging Khmer Rouge guerrilla
armies.
He was relying on them to overthrow Lon Nol and bring him
(Sihanouk) back to power.
As I looked over faces of the young, dedicated, guerrillas,
many female, lined up in the jungle I was reminded of the
photos Burchett had shown me some years earlier in Moscow
of the emerging Vietcong armies in the South Vietnam
jungles.
For me the honesty and truth of a revolutionary army can be
judged by the willingness of women to volunteer for it.
By that standard the Khmer Rouge, in their early stages at
least, had to rank high.
(Later, I was to be made very aware of the dreadful B 52 US
bombing raids these young people would have to suffer,
simply to return control of their own country to their own
hands.)
During the Cairns visit I set out to renew 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 of this historic meeting. It went directly
on to the front page of The Australian the next day.
(An irony of China in those days was that it was much
easier to send photos abroad than text. The former could
move uncensored.)
By my standards at least it was a good story, though my
newspaper colleagues were not so admiring.
(A constant problem for me in China was the attitude of
other Australian journalists. They did not appreciate, for
example, my being able to use by contacts with Sihanouk and
Cairns to get the Penn Nouth story.)
(They saw it as quite unfair.)
(I recalled the UPI photo manager who said he hired photogs
not on the basis of camera ability but by the political
sense to know where the story was and to be there at the
time to point the camera in the right direction.)
(Maybe it is time to hire journalists on the same basis,
rather than on ability to write colorful beat-ups.)
(My other problem was the virtual contempt they had for
anyone of their group, myself included of course, who spoke
any Chinese.)
(That too seemed unfair to them. As well, one detected a
racial factor – that it was un-Australian to be out
there yabbering away in a language no dinky-die Australian
would ever want to learn or speak.)
(I got especially annoyed when in a superior tone of voice
they would ask you to interpret something for them, as if
that was your job to do so in the first place.)
(Please note, Brian Johns. Later of ABC fame, he was one of
the worst offenders in China.)
Opening contact with the Sihanouk regime should have been a
top priority for any progressive regime in Australia
anxious to see stability and democracy in Asia.
But Canberra was not impressed by this Cairns initiative.
To its eternal discredit, the Whitlam government with the
rightwing Lance Barnard as deputy prime minister, was
insisting that the US puppet, Lon Nol, was the sole
legitimate ruler of Cambodia.
Cairns received a formal reprimand for seeming to flout the
government policy of not recognizing any aspect of the
Sihanouk regime.
(Earlier in Tokyo I had seen Barnard turn quite hostile
when someone suggested that Australia’s support for
the Lon Nol regime was misplaced.)
(How do the intelligence agencies and other uglies get at
these rightwing ALP types, and why do they succumb so
easily, and remain dumb for so long? Later in Canberra I
was to run into the same problem with Whitlam over policy
to Japan.)
I also tried to arrange for Cairns to visit Sihanouk. That
plan was killed by direct order from Canberra.
Ironically, Whitlam, on his November 1973 trip to Beijing
just six months later, was to gain media bouquets for going
out of his way to call on Sihanouk.
The rivalry and jealousy between Whitlam and Cairns was to
do a lot of damage to ALP foreign policy formation over the
years.
Australia’s
Non-China Policy
During the Whitlam 1973 visit I was to see more of
Canberra's still lingering conservative wisdom.
Eric Walsh was traveling ahead as PR for the mission. He
showed me the confidential 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.
(I was to discover much more of the same during my 1975
stay in Canberra, of which more later.)
That gave me quite a nice 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.
Whitlam had brought his newly-appointed Foreign Affairs
chief, Alan Renouf, also trying hard to pretend to be
progressive minded.
Renouf promised me all kinds welcome if I ever wanted to
come back Canberra and into his Department.
‘Greg, we need people like you.’
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.
(Renouf was a devious personality.)
(His previous posting had been Washington, where he had
played a key role in making sure Canberra got militarily
involved in Vietnam.)
(But the moment Whitlam was elected he commenced a not very
subtle campaign to persuade the ALP that he was a
progressive and a longtime admirer of the ALP, even if
diplomatic duties had forced him to be silent at times.)
(Whitlam seems to have been taken in by this toadyism,
foolishly, because it was to do much damage to
Whitlam’s foreign policies later.)
Deng
Xiaoping and other Non-scoops
One day during the Whitlam 1973 visit 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, 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 not only had quite a nice story to report
for my paper, and also a worldwide scoop.
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 the large group of Australian media people on
Coal Hill, did not have the slightest idea who Deng was.
In fact, Deng had been prominent in the mid-sixties when,
together with Zhou Enlai, he had tried to move China to
more moderate policies.
He was to become even more prominent later.
I also thought I had got quite a good story by tracking
down and interviewing a defector from the former Taiwan
Embassy in Canberra, Wang Wei-ping.
The defection had been big news in Australia, and much of
Asia at the time.
But once again the sub-editors managed to get it wrong.
I had tried to save cabling costs by sending the
defector’s name as Weidashping. I assumed they would
realize the ‘dash’ was a – and not a
name.
But sure enough, the story in the paper the next day had me
talking with a Chinese gentleman called Wang Weidashping.
Such were the joys of writing for The Australian in those
days.
(One of the worst of their sub-editorial boo-boos came
during a Japan-Australia talkfest in Kyoto in 1974, 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 appearing in the paper the next day said he was
going to be given the high Japanese award of the Secret
Pleasure.)
Back to
Australia, temporarily
The four-day Whitlam visit had been a tumultuous affair. To
cap it off, a RAAF VIP plane had been laid on to take him
and all the rest of us back to Australia.
The plane would attempt something never before done - fly
direct from Beijing to Canberra in one hop.
That would not be easy.
The plane needed much fuel to cover the distance, the
Beijing runway was short, the journalists’ baggage
was very heavy, and some of the journalists also were very
heavy.
In the gathering dark of a late autumn evening, we just
managed takeoff (I think I was the only one who noticed how
close it had been). The celebrations were already underway.
For the rest of the night as the party roared on, China and
the rest of Asia slipped away beneath us. No one, not even
Whitlam, pretended to try to sleep very much.
It had been a prime ministerial visit to top all prime
ministerial visits.
Arriving in Canberra in the cold light of an early spring
morning, I thought for a moment I was back in Beijing.
The airport with its tiny reception area was surrounded by
sheep and wheat fields.
The strict protocol in the line up of official cars there
to meet us was also Chinese.
I was also to discover another Chinese-style feature of the
Australian scene - the ease with which rivals can ensure
you become a non-person, and that your activities are
non-events.
Rewriting
History
The first surprise came soon after my return to Australia.
A Chinese table tennis team was in Sydney, to reciprocate
the 1971 visit by the Australian team. Fitzgerald took
charge of the various celebrations.
But I was carefully side-lined.
That in itself, did not matter much. By then I was sick of
table tennis people and their games.
What mattered was lack of any recognition that, but for my
1971 efforts, and good luck, that 1973 return visit would
never have happened.
Fitzgerald and is friends were already making it look as if
it was entirely the result of their efforts.
In their writings too it is the same.
The 285 pages of the 1985 book by Fung and Mackerras on
Australia’s breakthrough in relations with China -
"From Fear to Friendship" - devote only one line to our
ping-pong visit, described simply as an example of
Beijing's peoples diplomacy.
Page after page is devoted to Fitzgerald's alleged role.
(Colin Mackerras, I should add, had relied heavily on
government funds, some controlled by Fitzgerald, for his
own and his university department's field studies in
China.)
My much earlier “In Fear of China” book also
gets only one line, even though it seems to have
contributed to the Fung-Mackerras book title.
That one line is followed by the bald and totally
gratuitous statement that Fitzgerald at that time was doing
more than I to make a China breakthrough!
Well, there we have it.
While I was risking much in the 1960’s to rebut
Canberra’s anti-China hysteria, and Fitzgerald was
keeping his nose politically clean at the ANU job that I
had helped him get while doing little more than prepare
some innocuous research on Overseas Chinese in Asia, I was
doing nothing and he was doing all.
In fact, his main role had been to attach himself to the
July 1971 Whitlam visit to Beijing, itself the direct
result of the April 1971 ping-pong visit which I had been
left single-handedly to organise.
True, Fitzgerald was later to do much to promote the China
relationship, and deserves kudos for that. But he did it
only when it was safe and very politically advantageous for
him to do so.
During the ugly days of the Vietnam War, I had tried time
and time again to get him to join me in public criticism of
Canberra’s China policies. Almost always he would
refuse.
If after 1969 I could not do much more, that was because I
was in semi-exile in Japan, as result of having done a lot
more than most at a time when it was not safe or very
advantageous to do so.
Australia’s
Dragon Club
In Japan they call it the Chrysanthemum Club — the
small clique of US academics and others close to Washington
and Tokyo establishments who try to dominate much of the
academic interflow.
In the case of Australia and China, maybe you can call it
the Dragon Club.
Many can claim credit for Australia's opening to China.
But to suggest that our ping-pong visit did little or
nothing in that direction is like suggesting the Columbus
had little to do with discovering America.
Yet that precisely is what the Club has tried ever since to
imply. The Mackerras book provides fairly brutal
confirmation.
The Club later was to make sure that I would never have the
chance to reconnect with China. Nice people.
(As it so happens, Mackerras, Fitzgerald and myself have a
strange and little-known connection.)
(Back in the mid-sixties we had all applied for a Myer
Scholarship being offered to send someone to Hongkong for
China studies.)
(Mackerras got the valuable scholarship, which in turn was
to allow him to turn himself into some kind of
China-watcher. But at the time he was doing no more than
study Chinese music. How did he get that scholarship?)
(Later I was to get know Ken Myer quite well - his wife was
Japanese and he visited Japan often. He told me that
Fitzgerald and myself were rejected because we had wanted
to study Chinese politics, something regarded as far too
dangerous and controversial in those hysterical anti-China
days.)
(Mackerras got the scholarship because he wanted to study
Chinese opera, a much safer topic.)
Let’s get the record straight, once and for all.
(And this is not some kind of sour grapes, since being
excluded from China meant I was to be even more deeply
embedded in Japan – an existence far more rewarding
and profitable than anything I could have had in hard-nosed
China at the time.)
(Indeed, I could have ended up like Fitzgerald and quite a
few other China-watchers at the time – bitter and
twisted.)
The publicity engendered by that ping-pong 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 Australia’s politics.
It was to lead indirectly to Whitlam’s 1972 election
as prime minister. It was greatly to increase pressure on
Canberra to recognise Beijing.
But thanks to Fitzgerald and the group around him, many
dependent on his goodwill for cultural and study funds
involving China, all this has become irrelevant.
Our 1971 ping-pong visit has become a non-event.
Even Mick Young's crucial role in persuading an initially
hesitant Whitlam to make the July 1971 visit is played
down.
The efforts by that group to erase these facts from the
history of Australia-China relations rank up there with
Stalin’s efforts to prove that he single-handedly
organized the 1917 Russian revolution.
(Fitzgerald was later to do some strange things. After
returning from being ambassador China he went to the ANU
which by this time had about-faced on China and was
welcoming people with China background.)
(Then after leaving academia, and going into business
consulting, he suddenly seemed to decide that China was
evil and that we should all embrace Taiwan. No doubt he had
suffered some bad deals at the hands of the then
exclusivist Chinese.)
(He also got involved in a bizarre campaign to encourage
Australian firms to invest in North Korea of all places.)
Whitlam
Some have assumed that I must have held some grudge against
Whitlam, and by implication Fitzgerald, because of his 1973
appointment of Fitzgerald as ambassador to China.
After all, Fitzgerald was younger than I. He had been
junior to me in Foreign Affairs.
I had much broader experience than he.
Normally I should have been first choice if Whitlam was to
send anyone to China.
But there were several good reasons why this did not
happen.
One was that while I was in Japan, Fitzgerald had been able
to use his ANU position, and his not un-affable
personality, to get close to key ALP people in Canberra.
They, Whitlam and the media had come to see him as
Australia’s main expert on China, which is
understandable. He was in Canberra and very available.
Also, by 1973 I was thoroughly embedded in Japan. I had a
family on the way.
A move to China would have caused personal problems.
Besides, and as I will reveal later, Whitlam was very much
aware of my existence, and there were already hints that he
wanted to get me some kind of senior diplomatic position in
Japan.
I had always got on reasonably well with him, despite my
inability in the 1960’s to influence him over
Vietnam.
So if I have any resentments against Whitlam (and if they
are in any way relevant to world affairs, I should add)
they stem directly from later events, in particular the
Vietnam Cables affair which I will relate later.
Ignoring
History
This determination to ignore the role of the ping-pong
diplomacy has had another unfortunate result - namely the
failure of Australia’s diplomatic history students
and researchers to realise that Canberra was to the right
even of the US in its fear and hostility to China.
The attempt to prevent a table tennis team from going to
China matched what I had discovered earlier over Vietnam,
namely that Canberra was also to the right of the US on the
question of military intervention in Indochina.
And it matched to some extent what I discovered later in
Beijing, namely Canberra’s blind refusal to allow any
form of contact with the Sihanouk government.
Canberra’s determination to prevent the ping-pong
opening to China even though Washington was in favor should
have been a topic for serious academic research.
Indeed, for students of Australian foreign policies during
this period I can think of little that was more important
than Canberra’s extraordinary willingness to be to
the right of the US in Asia.
These details are also important in countering leftwing
claims that Canberra was dragged into its Asian policies
– Vietnam especially - by its US master.
In fact, Canberra at the time had its own very independent
foreign policies - designed almost entirely to keep the
mythical Chinese threat at bay.
Dragging the US even further into the Indochina morass was
a key part of that effort.
Canberra’s efforts to kill ping-pong diplomacy were
another, and highly Canutian, push in the same direction.
One or two foreign policy scholars have picked up my
argument about Vietnam policy. But over the ping-pong
visit, and Canberra’s extraordinary behavior, there
has been complete silence.
Well done, the Dragon Club.
Black-balled,
again
Years later the Dragon Club Stalinists were to strike
again.
Still in Tokyo, I began to feel it was time for me to be
re-involved with China, even if only for a year or so. I
needed to do something to keep up my language and previous
interest before it was too late.
I had applied for the lowly post of trade commissioner
being advertised for Australia’s Beijing embassy
A three-person committee to choose the appointee included
Fitzgerald. It rejected my application, in favor of a lady
whose selection for the post seems to have had minimal
subsequent impact on any aspect of Australia-China
relations.
Fitzgerald had played a key role in that decision.
That I should have to suffer this kind of knockback at the
hands of someone whose own China career had depended
entirely on my 1965 generosity was humiliating.
(If at the time I was seen as lacking needed qualifications
I would note that in addition to my background both in
Chinese language, and economics/business, I was also
involved in some official committees and elsewhere dealing
with Japan’s overseas trade relations.)
Soon after I also had rejected a very humble request to the
Australia-China Council, another Dragon Club establishment,
for a temporary unpaid academic slot in Beijing.
The words of Machiavelli are relevant: “Whoever lets
go of his own convenience, for the convenience of others,
only loses his own and gets no thanks from them.”
4.
Cultural Revolution Realities
My 1971 visit and the two 1973 visits had taught me much
about the shambles caused by Beijing's disastrous Cultural
Revolution.
I suspect that my writing about them was also to do little
to endear me with the Dragon Club people, many of whom also
thought the Cultural Revolution was a great idea.
The Face
of Chaos
But the facts were undeniable, and I had to write them -
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 ....
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 backyard steel furnaces which
had to be fed by valuable pots, pans and needed farm
implements, simply because the Chairman had decreed that
everyone had to produce their own steel.
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.
(Experience with the brittle hostility of Chinese crowds
was to give me the clue to understanding the 1989 Tiananmen
incident.)
(Needless to say, my interpretation has little in common
with the Western determination to see the incident as an
unprovoked massacre of thousands of innocent students,
despite the now-unclassified reports from the US embassy in
Beijing at the time painting a very different picture.)
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 which he and others 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 of them would have been carefully locked
by owners.
In several weeks traveling China in 1973 I did not see a
single construction crane. And I wrote that.
But my journalistic 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. (Maybe few
of them had even seen steel mills before.)
Trying to report for The Australian 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 we (myself and two ABC
correspondents) had a gap of six weeks to fill before the
Cairns visit was due.
The authorities agreed to our request to be allowed to
travel around China to fill in the time.
We got to see quite a lot – 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 inefficiency
smothered with Cultural Revolution propaganda.
I set myself the task of trying 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.
What were they arguing over? No one seemed to know for
sure.
But ‘being struggled against’ was the order of
the day for anyone who seemed in any way to deviate from
the official line.
Back to
Japan
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.
I could also relate it back to the anti-China ideological
hysteria I had tried to battle in Australia.
And to some extent it matched what I had seen in the USSR,
though the Chinese versions was much more intense.
We are all vulnerable - not just the Chinese.
But the Chinese were especially vulnerable because they
were such a highly ideological nation. So they were
susceptible to argument and reasoning, even if distorted.
The Australians were vulnerable for a very different
reason, namely the lack of the intellectuality needed to
counter distorted reasoning and logic.
That insight in turn was later to give me the clue I needed
to understand the very non-ideological Japan.
And that clue in turn was to open a new and completely
unexpected chapter in my life - one which would make the
traumas of the past seem irrelevant, almost.
Chapter 7 Part
2
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