Foreigners under Mao: Western Lives in China, 1949–1976 9789888208746, 9888208748

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on transliteration
List of Abbreviations
Chronology of Mao’s China
Introduction: Living under Mao
Part I: ‘Foreign comrades’
1. Into Mao’s China
2. Identities and roles
3. Interactions
Part II: POW ‘turncoats’
4. Choosing China
5. Disenchantment
Part III: Diplomats
6. ‘The world within’
7. Licensed contacts and beyond
8. Cold War diplomacy
Part IV: Correspondents
9. ‘Our life and hard times’
10. The web of relationships
11. ‘Dateline—Peking’
Part V: ‘Foreign experts’
12. Helping China?
13. Personal and political dynamics
Part VI: Students
14. Studying, Maoist style
15. Breaking down the barriers?
Part VII: The Western community(ies)
16. Across divides
17. After Mao
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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FOREIGNERS UNDER MAO

Foreigners under Mao: Western Lives in China, 1949–1976 is a pioneering study of the Western community during the turbulent Mao era. Based largely on personal interviews, memoirs, private letters, and archives, this book ‘gives a voice’ to the Westerners who lived under Mao. It shows that China was not as closed to Western residents as has often been portrayed. The book examines the lives of six different groups of Westerners: ‘foreign comrades’ who made their home in Mao’s China, twenty-two former Korean War POWs who controversially chose China ahead of repatriation, diplomats of Western countries that recognized the People’s Republic, the few foreign correspondents permitted to work in China, ‘foreign experts’, and language students. Each of these groups led distinct lives under Mao, while sharing the experience of a highly politicized society and of official measures to isolate them from everyday China.

China / History

Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China

BEVERLEY HOOPER

Beverley Hooper is emeritus professor of Chinese studies at the University of Sheffield in the UK. She is the author of Inside Peking, Youth in China and China Stands Up: Ending the Western Presence 1948–1950.

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‘A well-written survey about the variety of Westerners who lived and worked in the People’s Republic of China between 1949 and 1976. This is a welcome addition to the “sojourner” literature about foreigners who lived in twentieth-century socialist countries. The scholarship, which includes the review of memoirs, archival materials, and secondary works, is impressive and comprehensive.’ —Stephen R. MacKinnon, Arizona State University; co-author of China Reporting: An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s

Western Lives in China, 1949–1976

‘This book is enjoyable and engaging. The author introduces a small but dynamic collection of enthusiastic international participants in post-1949 China showing unquestioned loyalty to Mao’s ideals. Equally intriguing are the alternate stories of diplomats and reporters existing far outside the mainstream of Chinese life and trusted by neither the Chinese nor the international supporters.’ —Edgar A. Porter, Professor Emeritus, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University; author of The People’s Doctor: George Hatem and China’s Revolution

FOREIGNERS UNDER MAO

Western Lives in China, 1949–1976

FOREIGNERS

UNDER

MAO

Western Lives in China, 1949–1976 B E V E R L E Y

H O O P E R

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Foreigners under Mao

Foreigners under Mao

Western Lives in China, 1949–1976

Beverley Hooper

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org © 2016 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8208-74-6 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover images (clockwise from top left): Reuters’ Adam Kellett-Long with translator ‘Mr Tsiang’. Courtesy of Adam Kellett-Long. David and Isobel Crook at Nanhaishan. Courtesy of Crook family. George H. W. and Barbara Bush on the streets of Peking. George Bush Presidential Library and Museum. The author with her Peking University roommate, Wang Ping. In author’s collection. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The author apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful for notification of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on transliteration List of abbreviations Chronology of Mao’s China Introduction: Living under Mao

vii viii ix x 1

Part I ‘Foreign comrades’ 1. Into Mao’s China 2. Identities and roles 3. Interactions

11 22 37

Part II POW ‘turncoats’ 4. Choosing China 5. Disenchantment

51 65

Part III Diplomats 6. ‘The world within’ 7. Licensed contacts and beyond 8. Cold War diplomacy

79 94 105

Part IV Correspondents 9. ‘Our life and hard times’ 10. The web of relationships 11. ‘Dateline—Peking’

125 140 151

Part V ‘Foreign experts’ 12. Helping China? 13. Personal and political dynamics

163 178

Part VI Students 14. Studying, Maoist style 15. Breaking down the barriers?

195 208

vi

Contents

Part VII The Western community(ies) 16. Across divides 17. After Mao

225 237

Notes Bibliography Index

247 267 277

Acknowledgements

While researching and writing this book, I have been indebted to a large number of people and institutions. My interest in foreigners in Mao’s China was sparked by my first two Chinese language teachers in Canberra, Pierre Ryckmans (aka Simon Leys of Chinese Shadows fame) and Con Kiriloff, who lived in China until the late 1950s, and then by studying in the PRC in 1975–77. My roommates at the Peking Language Institute and Peking University made me appreciate the constraints under which people were living during those difficult times as well as something of what lay behind the official images. I thank the British Academy and the Universities China Committee, London, for grants which enabled me to do research in China and to develop relations with the Modern History Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. I have also benefited from access to a wide range of libraries and archives, including the National Archives in London, the Archives of the French Foreign Ministry in Paris, and the Foreign Ministry Archives in Beijing. I am especially grateful to the archivists who located materials for me in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia, and to graduate researcher Bai Xiaoyu who did the same for me in China. I also thank Sir John Weston for permission to reproduce part of the poem Peking Rap from his collection Chasing the Hoopoe and John Butler at Photovalet for his restoration work on several photos. At Hong Kong University Press, I am particular grateful to Christopher Munn, Yuet Sang Leung, Sherlon Ip, Winnie Chau and Penny Yeung for their enthusiasm, guidance and efficiency. My greatest debt is to the people (mostly Westerners but also some Chinese) who shared their personal memories of the Mao years. Although I have been able to cite only a fraction of their comments, their reminiscences informed the book as a whole, as well as making the project a hugely enjoyable one. I also thank the friends and former colleagues who have shown an interest in the book and who kept urging me to finish it. Several people have read one or more chapters and I thank Judy Bonavia, Michael and Paul Crook, Miles Flint, Peter Griffiths, Isabel Hilton, Bruce Jacobs, Adam Kellett-Long, Michael Rank, Sandra Schatsky, and two anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments. Tim Wright read the whole manuscript more than once and I owe him special thanks for his ongoing support.

Note on transliteration

The pinyin system is used for Chinese words, place and people’s names, except when the spelling is used within a quotation. The major exception is Peking rather than Beijing (apart from when I am writing about the post-Mao years). As well as being used in the English-language documents of the Mao era, ‘Peking’ continues to be the preferred option for people talking about their experiences in China during that period. The familiar spellings of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek are also retained. The following, listed in pinyin plus the spelling used at the time, appear regularly in the book. Beida Beidaihe Chen Xiuxia Chongqing Deng Xiaoping Fudan Jiang Qing Jinan Lin Biao Mao Zedong Qi Mingcong Qinghua Song Qingling Tiananmen Tianjin Xi’an Xinhua Xinqiao Yan’an Yang Xianyi Yanjing Zhou Enlai

Peita Peitaiho Ch’en Hsiu-hsia Chungking Teng Hsiao-p’ing Futan Chiang Ch’ing Tsinan Lin Piao Mao Tse-tung Ch’i Ming-ts’ung Tsinghua Soong Ch’ing-ling T’ienanmen Tientsin Sian Hsinhua Hsinchao Yenan Yang Hsien-i Yenching Chou En-lai

Abbreviations

ADM AFP AO BDOHP CCP CPGB FCO FLP FO GYL JAP MAE MFA NAA NCNA PRC SCMP SOAS TNA UNRRA WSP

Admiralty Agence France-Presse Asie Océanie British Diplomatic Oral History Programme Chinese Communist Party Communist Party of Great Britain Foreign and Commonwealth Office Foreign Languages Press Foreign Office Gladys Yang Letters John Addis Papers Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Peking National Archives of Australia New China News Agency People’s Republic of China Survey of China Mainland Press School of Oriental and African Studies The National Archives, London United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration Winifred Stevenson Papers

Chronology of Mao’s China (events mentioned in book)

Year

Internal developments

1949

Establishment of PRC

1950

Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries begins

Foreign relations/Westerners Britain, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland recognize PRC Sino-Soviet Treaty Start of Korean War

1951 1952 1953

Korean War Armistice

1954

Twenty-two Korean War POWs arrive in China

1955 1956

Reuters and AFP correspondents arrive

1957

Hundred Flowers Campaign Anti-Rightist Movement begins

1958

Great Leap Forward begins

1959

Start of ‘three hungry years’

Globe and Mail correspondent arrives Deterioration in Sino-Soviet relations

1960 1961 1962 1963 1964

Sino-Indian border war Socialist Education Campaign

Zhou Enlai visits African countries Recruitment of ‘foreign experts’ France recognizes PRC French exchange students arrive

Chronology of Mao’s China

Year

xi

Internal developments

Foreign relations/Westerners

Cultural Revolution begins

Foreign students leave China

1965 1966 1967

1968

Red Guard demonstrations at Soviet and French embassies Leftist riots in Hong Kong Burning of British diplomatic mission Start of ‘down to the countryside’ movement

Imprisonment of several resident ‘foreign comrades’

1969 1970 1971

Italy and Canada establish diplomatic relations with PRC Disappearance of Lin Biao

Henry Kissinger visits PRC admitted to United Nations

1972

US President Richard Nixon visits Britain’s relationship upgraded Germany, Australia and New Zealand establish diplomatic relations with PRC

1973

United States liaison office opens Several Western leaders visit Student exchanges under way

1974

Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius Campaign Campaign against Antonioni’s Chung-kuo

1975 1976

Jan: Death of Zhou Enlai April: Qingming demonstrations Campaign against Deng Xiaoping and the ‘right deviationist wind’ July: Tangshan earthquake Sep: Death of Mao Zedong Oct: Arrest of ‘Gang of Four’

Introduction Living under Mao

China under Mao Zedong has commonly been viewed as one of the world’s most insulated nations, cut off from the West and largely inaccessible to Westerners. The closest parallel in the twenty-first century is probably North Korea, often described as being like ‘another planet’. That small country, though, has only 25 million people as against China’s 541 million when the Communists came to power. In Cold War discourse, particularly but not only in the United States, the bamboo curtain between ‘Red China’ and the West was often portrayed as being virtually impenetrable.1 The reality was somewhat different. In addition to its visiting ‘foreign friends’ and invited delegations, Mao’s China had a resident Western community—or more accurately a number of small and distinct communities, each with its own identity and internal dynamics. By the time a few American visitors began rediscovering China after a gap of more than twenty years, following the lifting of their government’s ban on travel to ‘Communist China’ in 1971, several hundred British and European diplomats and their families had already experienced life in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The British and French news agencies, Reuters and Agence FrancePresse (AFP), had been permitted to operate in Peking from the mid-1950s. Some politically committed Westerners (including Americans) had made their homes and brought up families in Mao’s China, while ‘foreign experts’ and students had worked and studied there. Living under Mao was not for the faint-hearted but, despite the restrictions and problems, it provided everyday experience of a nation about which very little was known in the outside world. This is not to suggest that the Western presence under Mao was comparable with, far less a continuation of, the presence in the pre-revolutionary era. It was tiny in comparison and lacked the two largest pre-1949 components, businesspeople and Christian missionaries, denounced by Mao as the major perpetrators of a centurylong ‘history of imperialist aggression’ against China.2 The Western presence, having reached its peak in the 1910s and 1920s, declined substantially following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and again during the Civil War. Even as the Communists’ victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists became increasingly likely during 1948 and early 1949, though, Western businesses (including the great ‘hongs’

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Jardine Matheson and Butterfield & Swire) and Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary organizations decided to retain a presence in China in the effort to protect their interests. Any hopes they had were soon dashed. Almost as soon as Westerners came under Communist control, they were subjected to a range of pressures, as discussed in my book China Stands Up: Ending the Western Presence 1948–1950. Businesses were not expropriated (China’s new rulers were pragmatic as well as being strongly nationalistic and ideologically committed) but squeezed through heavy taxes and labour demands; Christian missions were also put under strong pressure. Life for Westerners in Shanghai and the smaller expatriate/settler communities became increasingly uncomfortable, prompting the departure of the majority of those who had stayed on. The pressures intensified following China’s entry into the Korean War in October 1950, when some of the remaining Westerners (particularly but not only Catholic missionaries) were imprisoned and/or expelled as imperialist spies, while businesses finished up handing over their assets ‘voluntarily’ to the government. Within three to four years of the Communists’ victory, little remained of more than a century of Western business and missionary activity in China, of the Western enclaves with their distinctive lifestyles and exclusive clubs, or even of ‘bourgeois’ Western culture which was denounced as antithetical to ‘healthy’ socialist culture.3 While it was eradicating what remained of the Western ‘imperialist’ presence, the new government was already implementing its own policy towards the admission of Westerners, and more generally of foreigners, to the PRC. In future, their presence would be strictly on China’s terms and limited to people considered useful or necessary for the regime’s own purposes, essentially in accordance with the principle of yang wei Zhong yong (using the foreign to serve China). Throughout the Mao era, entry to China was tightly controlled: whether for short-term visitors who were hosted as part of the PRC’s programme of cultural diplomacy or, even more stringently, for sojourners and potential long-term residents. This book is structured around the six main categories of Westerners who lived in China during the Mao era—most for a few years, some for the whole period. In practice, only two of the categories conformed to Zhou Enlai’s statement, made on 1 January 1949, that the further entry of foreigners to China would be prohibited with the exception of those who were disposed to be ‘friendly’.4 The first was a small group of ‘foreign comrades’ or ‘international friends’, often regarded in the West as traitors to the free world. Some lived in the PRC from the start of the new era while others arrived in the fifties or early sixties. A second, distinct group of twenty-two young men (all Americans apart from one Briton) arrived in early 1954. Recently released Korean War POWs, they chose China rather than repatriation to their home countries where they were denounced as ‘turncoats’.

Introduction

3

Two other groups, diplomats and foreign correspondents, were regarded as anything but friendly towards the new regime. Rather they were Cold War enemies. The presence of a small number of diplomatic personnel and their families was the outcome of China’s establishment of relations with the handful of Western countries— Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations—that recognized the new government.5 They were joined by the French in 1964 and representatives of most other Western governments from the early 1970s. The Chinese also allowed a handful of non-communist Western correspondents to work in the PRC from the mid-1950s, in return for being permitted to locate a few Xinhua (New China News Agency) correspondents in Europe. The two other groups of Westerners, ‘foreign experts’ and students, were more politically diverse, ranging from committed Maoists to apolitical Chinese culture enthusiasts. In the mid-1960s, the Chinese government recruited some individual foreign experts to teach foreign languages (primarily English and French) and to polish its foreign language publications after the breakdown of its relationship with the Soviet bloc and Western communist parties. The students, in the mid-1960s and again from the early to mid-1970s, were mostly participants in government exchange programmes when China wanted to send students abroad for advanced language training. A few earlier arrivals fitted the politically friendly category. Foreign comrades, POW turncoats, a few diplomats, fewer correspondents and some foreign experts and students made up the new Western presence in China. These categories were not all-encompassing: a number of engineers worked periodically on PRC contracts with European companies, the odd businessman cooled his heels during prolonged negotiations, and a few remnants of the past lingered on in increasingly straitened circumstances.6 But the six groups featured in this book cover the vast majority of Westerners (from Britain, Western Europe, North America and Australasia) who lived under Mao. Unlike the earlier widely dispersed presence, the new one was centred very largely on Peking, once again China’s capital, with only a few people living in Shanghai or other large provincial cities. The Western residents were part of a broader foreign community—in Italian foreign expert Edoarda Masi’s words ‘we are all foreigners insofar as we are not Chinese’—that ranged from Soviet experts and a dwindling number of White Russians in the 1950s to students from ‘friendly’ developing countries and Latin American and Southeast Asian political exiles.7 But the Westerners also had a distinct identity that was linked to their home countries’ relations with China. The ‘history of imperialist aggression’ became embodied in the ‘century of national humiliation’ discourse which influenced, and continues to influence, China’s attitudes to the West, as demonstrated in Zheng Wang’s Never Forget National Humiliation and William Callahan’s China: The Pessoptimist Nation.8 In addition, Westerners were from countries that were currently

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viewed as the Cold War enemy. The United States was denounced as the primary imperialist but other Western nations were also firmly located in the imperialist camp. While their diplomats were seen as the direct representatives of imperialism, even Westerners with proclaimed allegiances to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were vulnerable to suspicion during periods of heightened political fervour. Whether one regards the Mao era as one of extreme authoritarian rule implemented largely through terror, as Frank Dikötter’s The Tragedy of Liberation and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story have argued, or as a sustained effort to create a model socialist society as Western Maoists viewed it, they were years of ‘politics in command’ under the banner of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. The population was constantly being mobilized to support and participate in the latest political ‘campaign’ or ‘movement’ (both translations of the Chinese word yundong). All aspects of society came under state control: the economy (with the decline and then disappearance of the private sector), the media, culture, and individuals’ working, social and even personal lives. ‘For us it would be an impossible sacrifice of liberty,’ British ambassador John Addis wrote in his valedictory despatch in 1974.9 Politics did not penetrate as deeply into Westerners’ lives as it did into those of Chinese people, but it still had a heavy impact. CCP media policy, directed at controlling all information published in and about the PRC, severely hampered the work of correspondents and influenced the materials that foreign experts polished for Chinese publications, while the foreign comrades themselves played an integral role in the state’s propaganda work. The growing dominance of ‘redness’ over ‘expertise’—politics over professionalism—in educational policy, particularly from the early 1960s, affected both Western teachers and students. The highly politicized environment itself divided the small Western community, whether reinforcing the ideological divide between foreign comrades and diplomats or creating dissension among foreign experts and students. Western residents, whatever their political views and role in China, also shared the experience of being ‘managed’ by the state. Long-held attitudes towards foreigners as a distinctive category continued into the Mao era, though with a heavy overlay of communist ideology. Political scientist Anne-Marie Brady has described CCP policy on managing foreigners (from soon after the Party’s establishment in 1921 right through to the twenty-first century) as an ‘unusual blend of Marxist-Leninist-MaoistStatist-Confucian foreign relations’.10 This applied not just to resident and visiting ‘foreign friends’, who were the focus of her book Making the Foreign Serve China, but to all the groups featured in the present study. The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist aspects were at their most intense during the Mao era.

Introduction

5

In managing Western residents, China’s new government pursued a strategy of what might be called ‘privileged segregation’, which isolated and insulated them from the harsh realities of everyday life that ran counter to the publicized images of ‘new China’. The privileges included access to special stores for products that were of higher quality and/or difficult, if not impossible, to buy in regular shops. Westerners employed by the government were paid higher salaries than their Chinese counterparts, as well as being provided with superior accommodation, dining and other facilities. When discussing these privileges, the Chinese prefer to use the word youdai (‘preferential treatment’ or ‘special consideration’), which they formally distinguish from the earlier formal privileges (tequan) enjoyed by Westerners under the ‘unequal treaties’.11 The official rationale for treating Westerners in a distinctive manner was that they were not accustomed to China’s very low living standards. There is no doubt that some, maybe most, would have found it difficult to lead an ordinary Chinese life, but the preferential treatment was usually enforced even if they tried to reject it. The government also took specific measures to segregate Westerners, and more broadly foreigners, from everyday China. There were strict controls on where they lived, on their movement (in Peking limited to twenty kilometres from the centre of the city) and on travel. When they were permitted to travel at all, it was usually in the company of minders and limited to select locations. Contact with Chinese people was kept to a minimum, with official pressure exerted on the local population not to associate with foreigners. This applied particularly to those whose ‘bourgeois ideology’ and possible links with the imperialist enemy were seen as potential threats to the values being inculcated by the Communist Party. For Westerners who spent only a few years in China, the experience depended to some extent on the political environment at the time. In the mid-1950s the hysterical anti-Western atmosphere of the Korean War and the Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries gave way to a short phase of relaxation, relatively speaking, when some of the Korean War POWs who had moved to China were allowed to marry Chinese women and the first non-communist resident correspondents were admitted to the PRC. From the late 1950s there was a general tightening up: first with the Anti-Rightist Movement, which included the denunciation of any remaining Western bourgeois influences, and then with the Great Leap Forward followed by the massive three-year famine when most Westerners were protected by their privileges, marginalizing them even more. The launch of the Cultural Revolution in mid-1966 heralded the tensest phase of the Mao era for Western residents, as for many Chinese people, with the British diplomatic mission being torched by Red Guards and even some foreign comrades imprisoned as imperialist spies. Then, from the early 1970s, China’s tentative reopening to

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Foreigners under Mao

the West prompted a substantial increase in the numbers of Western diplomats and correspondents, as well as the revival of the foreign expert and student presence. At the same time, they were years of domestic political wrangling, with the periodic dominance of so-called radicals (including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing) who denounced Western culture and created a tense atmosphere for foreigners. The Western experience also varied across the different communities, essentially according to their political trustworthiness. For example, the foreign comrades were given somewhat greater leeway, whether in being allowed to visit places that were normally out of bounds or in their contacts with Chinese people. But they were also the most personally vulnerable of all Westerners during the Cultural Revolution when their ideological loyalty was questioned. Although the intrusion of politics and being managed by the state were part and parcel of Westerners’ everyday lives under Mao, this did not mean that they were simply passive objects of CCP policy. Substantial parts of this book look at how they responded to their situation. Some, particularly but not only diplomats, created a lifestyle that was largely independent of the world around them. Others, especially but not only students, made sustained efforts to break down the barriers imposed between them and everyday China. Even they, though, found themselves forced back on their own community which, like some of the other communities, was a breeding ground for political and sometimes personal dissension. Living in China, even for a few years, was a very different experience from that of the three- or four-week ‘foreign guest’ who, as British youth theatre director Michael Croft described it, was swept up in ‘red carpet days’ of free cigarettes and civic receptions, solidarity and toasts to peace and friendship.12 A Western resident’s sense of group identity only tended to be confirmed by meeting a visitor or two. When a few Italians arrived at Shanghai Mansions in early 1976, foreign expert Edoarda Masi asked herself: ‘Why is it I feel no impulse to strike up a conversation with these people?’ In contrast, she was delighted to meet up with the Italian ambassador and his wife. ‘But they and others from the embassy live here, like me and like the students,’ she explained, whereas the visitors ‘are passing through, they are not much more than tourists’.13 One of the aims of this book is to give a voice to those Westerners who lived in Mao’s China, whether for a few years or for the whole era. They are heard through their memoirs, some of them published (the bibliography includes a list of first-hand accounts), and through letters, diaries and other personal papers, some in private collections and others in archives in Britain, Europe, North America and Australasia. The despatches of foreign correspondents are available in the newspapers of the day, while diplomats speak to us through Foreign Ministry records that have been declassified with the passage of time.

Introduction

7

I also interviewed, either in person or via the internet, a broad selection of Westerners who lived in China during the Mao years. They ranged from other sojourners I met while studying in Peking during the year before Mao’s death to a few people who had been in the PRC ever since the early years of the Communist era. For the 1950s, I was also able to draw on some interviews I conducted for my earlier book. Oral history, of course, has its limitations: memories are selective, particularly at a distance of five or more decades, and can be influenced by subsequent knowledge and experience. Even so, my interviewees provided a wealth of first-hand information, filled in gaps in the written record, and brought to life the challenging experience of living under Mao.

Part I ‘Foreign comrades’

1 Into Mao’s China

‘We wanted to be participants, not observers,’ 93-year-old Canadian Isabel Crook recalled in 2009. It was just over sixty years since she and her British husband, David, had arrived in Peking with the victorious Chinese Communists after spending eighteen months in areas under their control. Isabel was speaking to me in the modest flat at the Foreign Studies University where she and David had brought up their three sons. ‘Our role was to be the West in China. Now I’m trying to sum it all up—but there isn’t enough time.’1 A few miles away at the Friendship Hotel, where he had moved temporarily while his courtyard house was being renovated, 94-year-old American Sidney Shapiro greeted me with a smile and a firm handshake: ‘There aren’t many of us old buggers left now.’ Shapiro had come to Shanghai in 1947, worked as a lawyer, married a Chinese actress with links to the Communist underground, and opted to stay on when virtually all the other Americans left. A Chinese citizen since 1963, he had worked throughout the Mao era—and for some years beyond—as a translator and editor. He had just embarked on a new project on women during the revolution, he told me.2 The nonagenarians were two of the handful of Westerners who were still alive out of a few score who had committed themselves to ‘new China’, and lived there for all or a large part of the Mao era. To the Chinese Communists, they were foreign comrades or international friends, as publicly supportive of the PRC as their governments were opposed to it. Along with some select visitors and a few short-term residents, they symbolized the proclaimed ‘friendship between the Chinese people and other peoples throughout the world’. Their contributions to new China were featured in the media, they were fêted on important occasions, and when they died they were usually honoured with ceremonies at the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery at Babaoshan. In the West, they were viewed at best as misguided ‘commies’, at worst as Cold War traitors to their home countries and the ‘free world’. Western diplomats and correspondents in China, who rarely if ever saw them, referred to them disparagingly as ‘the renegades’, ‘the misanthropes’ or ‘the malcontents’. Britain’s first chargé d’affaires, Humphrey Trevelyan, called them ‘the twilight brigade . . . They were pathetic. Who knows what private disturbance or maladjustment had caused them to tear up their

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roots and plunge into the Chinese Communist world.’3 In a similar vein, Anne-Marie Brady argued in Making the Foreign Serve China that they were ‘as much linked by displacement from their own societies as they were by a strong ideological commitment to Chinese communism’.4 Who were these people, living in Mao’s China and prepared to ally themselves with it politically in an era of Cold War hostility? Blanket generalizations do not adequately explain their motivations. Some, as communist internationalists, saw the PRC as a bright new hope for socialism and were keen to participate in building a revolutionary society. Others described their underlying motivation as ‘humanitarianism’: China had turned them to communism rather than the other way round. Having lived in China since the 1930s or even earlier, they were not the only people to conclude that the Communist Party seemed to offer the best way out of the country’s poverty and corruption. Later arrivals included émigrés from Cold War McCarthyism. And for a few women, in particular, the decision to live under Mao was closely linked to their personal relationships. There were some similarities between the PRC’s long-term Western residents and those who went to the Soviet Union following the 1917 revolution. A number shared the idealistic motives: the desire to be part of a communist society in the making. Politically, too, both countries became places of exile during the McCarthy era. But the personal identification with China, its culture and people that prompted a few to stay on indefinitely did not really have a Soviet counterpart. And those moving to the PRC generally lacked the economic imperatives that, as Tim Tzouliadis graphically portrayed in his book The Forsaken, prompted thousands of Americans, as well as other Westerners, to go to the Soviet Union during the 1930s depression.5 In terms of its overall profile, the long-term resident community was mostly middle-class and professional, including doctors, lawyers, journalists, economists and teachers (though some individuals had working-class roots). Mainly but not solely Anglo-American, it had a much higher proportion of Americans than any of the other Western communities, apart from the small cohort of Korean War ex-POWs. There was a noticeable Jewish presence, reflecting the general Jewish involvement in leftist politics and, for some Europeans, displacement from their home countries by Nazism. ‘We were all very different though,’ Sidney Shapiro stressed. ‘Take Sol Adler and Frank Coe—both American Jews. Sol was very involved with Jewish affairs, very Hebraic. But Frank was a very proper churchgoer in the American establishment.’ Characteristic of socialist groups, the long-term residents included a number of strong-minded women. Some were married, like former nuclear physicist Joan Hinton, anthropologist Isabel Crook (though her husband David was outwardly the more gregarious), and the ‘formidable’ Elsie Fairfax Cholmeley, who provoked comments for the way she towered over her husband Israel Epstein. Others were single, or in some cases divorced, and did not escape the chauvinism of their male

Into Mao’s China

13

colleagues. ‘Those tough old birds—the battle-axe ladies,’ Sidney Shapiro responded when I mentioned American Betty Chandler and Austrian Ruth Weiss. ‘Actually they were quite nice when they weren’t on their personal bandwagons.’ As individuals, the long-termers can perhaps best be categorized according to the circumstances in which they began living under Mao. The most prestigious, not just in official Chinese eyes but sometimes in their own as well, were those who had ventured into territory held by the Communists before their eventual victory against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. They found their way to Yan’an, the revolutionary capital in north-west China, or to other areas as they came under Communist control. There they enjoyed personal contact with the top Communists, perhaps eating some of Mao’s favourite Hunanese dishes with China’s future leader or playing cards with his faithful lieutenant Zhou Enlai. While not maintaining this close relationship after the establishment of the PRC, they would always be officially regarded as the oldest of China’s ‘old foreign friends’: both the most favoured and the most publicized supporters of new China. Lebanese-American George Hatem (often known by his Chinese name Ma Haide) arrived in China in 1933, soon after finishing his medical studies. He practised medicine in Shanghai and, disillusioned with the dire economic and social situation, joined a leftist study group. The group had close links with Song Qingling, the American-educated widow of Sun Yat-sen and a communist sympathizer who became the foreigners’ main channel to the CCP. ‘The Red Army in the northwest sent down a message that they wanted an honest foreign journalist and a doctor,’ Hatem later wrote. ‘They didn’t ask for an honest doctor, so they took me.’6 In fact, he had already been thinking about trying to join the Communists, while at the same time

George Hatem with Mao Zedong at Yan’an in 1945. (Edgar Snow Collections KC: 19/27/00, 4, George Hatem Collection, UMKC University Archives)

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resisting strong pressure from his family to return to the United States. In March 1936 Hatem travelled into CCP territory with the ‘honest foreign journalist’, Edgar Snow, who would introduce the Chinese Communists to the world—but not mention George Hatem’s presence—in his classic book Red Star over China. Although future PRC diplomat and foreign minister Huang Hua thought the 25-year-old doctor was initially ‘committed to China’s cause through a humanitarian spirit and not a Marxist ideology’,7 within a year of his arrival Hatem joined the CCP. Rejected by one and then another young Chinese woman he attempted to court, in October 1939 he met a beautiful actress named Zhou Sufei, who had just arrived in Yan’an. The couple married in early spring. Almost exactly seventy years later I met Zhou, still elegant at the age of ninety, at a function commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the death of American journalist Agnes Smedley. Not everyone approved of her marriage to a foreigner, she admitted: ‘Things were initially quite difficult for us.’8 She had earlier told her husband’s biographer, Edgar A. Porter, about how upset she had been when her closest friends did not turn up for the wedding celebrations, though both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were there.9 A few more Western medics, at least two of whom stayed on in China, also worked with the Communists. Both refugees from Nazism, German doctor Hans Müller and Austrian Richard Frey (who had had to give up his medical studies) found their way to Yan’an in 1939 and 1941 respectively. Neither they nor Hatem, though, achieved the fame of Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune, who arrived at Yan’an in January 1938 and died of blood poisoning less than two years later. Just six weeks after his untimely death, Bethune’s name was enshrined in CCP mythology following the publication of Mao Zedong’s famous article In Memory of Norman Bethune, which became required reading for school children and adults alike for much of the Mao era. By the mid-1940s, being a foreigner at Yan’an was less of a novelty as the Communists attempted to garner international support for their cause. Representatives of UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) delivered supplies, a medical team from the Friends Ambulance Unit worked at the International Peace Hospital, and a range of journalists and ‘progressives’ came to have a look at what the Chinese Communists were trying to achieve. There were even visits from American officials, including the US Army Observation Group, which was better known as the Dixie Mission. In March 1947, though, the Communists had to evacuate Yan’an in the face of the Nationalists’ assault. Only a few foreigners remained with them as they moved on the cities during 1948. One, Sidney Rittenberg, was to become the most controversial of all the longterm Western residents. The American had been a member of the US Communist Party as a student, studied Chinese when he was drafted into the army, and arrived in China shortly after the Japanese surrender. In mid-1946, the 24-year-old made his

Into Mao’s China

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way to Communist-held Zhangjiakou (then known to foreigners as Kalgan) before moving on to Yan’an. There he was given a job at the CCP’s nascent news agency, Xinhua, where he polished English translations. Within a month of his arrival he was also working closely with visiting American socialist correspondent Anna Louise Strong, whom he had known in the United States, and acted as her interpreter when she interviewed Mao Zedong. Rittenberg was permitted to join the CCP, despite blotting his copybook by having a one-night stand with a woman and then refusing to marry her when she made a public issue of it. He had already fallen in love with another young woman, Wei Lin, during his brief sojourn in Zhangjiakou, and the pair married after she transferred to Yan’an. By the time of the Communists’ victory, though, Rittenberg was in prison, having been arrested as an ‘imperialist spy’. The American’s detention in January 1949 was linked to Soviet suspicions of Anna Louise Strong who was detained in Moscow and, after six days at the dreaded Lubyanka Prison, expelled for allegedly ‘spying against the interests of the Soviet state’.10 According to CCP politburo member Ren Bishi, Rittenberg had originally been recommended to the Chinese Communists by Strong.11 The American would spend over six years in prison before being released in April 1955, shortly after Strong’s own exoneration by the Soviet government. It was an early example of the fine line that existed between being regarded a ‘friend of the Chinese people’ and a representative of the imperialists, even a spy. The American Hinton family had also begun its long association with the Communists in the early post-war years. William (Bill), an agricultural specialist, worked on an UNRRA-funded tractor programme in a communist area in southern Shanxi province. He then joined a land reform team and collected material for what would become Fanshen, the classic Western account of Chinese land reform. Bill’s sister Joan joined and married her fiancé Erwin (Sid) Engst in Yan’an in early 1949. A dairy specialist and Bill’s former college roommate, Engst had arrived in China in 1946, also initially as an adviser on an UNRRA project. Although Bill returned to the United States in 1953, his estranged wife Bertha stayed on in China with the couple’s three-year-old daughter Carma. David and Isabel Crook, both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), travelled to communist territory with the specific objective of studying land reform in a ‘liberated village’. In November 1947 they arrived at Shilidian, which they wrote about as Ten Mile Inn, located in the CCP’s north China base area. After finishing their research, they moved to the city of Shijiazhuang, also under communist control, where they planned to write up their findings. Instead they were asked to teach English at the Foreign Affairs Language School that had already been set up in the nearby village of Nanhaishan to train future diplomats. It was a shift of focus that would change the couple’s lives.

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Foreigners under Mao

David and Isobel Crook at Nanhaishan. The blackboard features the lyrics of the musical rendition of the Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention to be observed by the Communist armies. (Courtesy of Crook family)

The Crooks represented two of the main types of Westerners motivated to live in Mao’s China: the communist internationalist and the radicalized China empathizer. David had grown up in a middle-class Jewish family in London and become involved in leftist politics at Columbia University in New York. Having joined the CPGB, he served in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, first in the combat troops and later spying on Trotskyists on the instructions of the Comintern. In 1938 he was sent to China to continue this work. Isabel, in contrast, was born in China and spent her early years there, the daughter of Canadian missionary educators. After completing bachelors and masters degrees at the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics, she returned to China in 1938 to do anthropological field research, becoming increasingly concerned about the country’s economic and social plight. The couple met in Chengdu in 1941 and married in London a year later, but they were apart for most of the remaining war years. Although Isabel also became a dedicated communist, joining the CPGB while they were living in London, the couple’s different backgrounds had a continuing influence on their lives. ‘For David it was mainly the Party,’ Isabel explained. ‘I was always much more into China.’ Along with some of the other foreign comrades, the Crooks arrived in Peking with the victorious Communists after the Nationalists surrendered the city, following a six-week siege, at the end of January 1949. Isabel, pregnant with her first child, watched the victory parade on 3 February with George Hatem.

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We climbed up onto the Qianmen gate. There were a lot of us up there, including Lin Biao, commander of the troops that liberated Beijing, but it didn’t seem in the least strange that a few foreigners mingled among high-ranking officials. We were all wearing the standard-issue military uniforms. When some resident foreigners in the Legation Quarter saw us, they stared in astonishment!12

Another small group of long-term residents in Mao’s China had been living under the Nationalists when the Communists came to power. Invited to work for the new government, they stayed on after virtually all of their fellow nationals left China, either as a result of the Communists’ early pressures or during the Korean War when a number of Westerners were imprisoned as imperialist spies.13 Most were already known to the CCP because of their involvement in leftist circles in Shanghai in the 1930s—the Song Qingling connection—or through contact with Madame Song or Party representatives in Chongqing, the Nationalists’ temporary capital, during the Sino-Japanese War. A few had also visited Yan’an and worked with the CCP underground in Nationalist China. Even so, Westerners who had arrived with the victors did not see them as having equivalent political credentials. ‘They were different from us. We were communists,’ Isabel Crook responded when I mentioned some of their names. Best-known of the group was New Zealander Rewi Alley, a former soldier and farmer who had arrived in China in 1927 at the age of 29. Employed as the Shanghai Municipal Council’s chief factory inspector, he was horrified by the workers’ conditions and became part of the leftist group that included Ruth Weiss and briefly George  Hatem. During the Sino-Japanese War, Alley helped establish the industrial cooperatives movement in west China and worked clandestinely with the Communists, spending several months at Yan’an in 1939. At the time of their victory, he was running a boys’ vocational school, one of several he had set up, in Gansu province. After more than twenty years’ immersion in China’s economic and social problems—and with a keen interest in the country’s future—what could New Zealand offer the 51-year-old? Although Alley’s biographers disagree on the level of his political commitment versus his simple desire to stay in ‘the country that had become his home’, as Anne-Marie Brady expressed it, they do not dispute the fact that he was intent on remaining in China.14 American Robert (Bob) Winter was also keen to stay on. A peripatetic teacher of English and French literature, he was 35 when he arrived in China in 1923, subsequently teaching at Peking’s Qinghua University and becoming a well-known figure in the city’s foreign community. (He appeared as ‘Bill Luton’ in John Blofeld’s entrancing book City of Lingering Splendour.) During the post-war period, Winter also became well-known for his leftist sympathies, secretly helping students who were underground Communists. Described as a confirmed bachelor—it was rumoured that he had left Chicago in a hurry because of a ‘homosexual indiscretion’—Winter

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Foreigners under Mao

lacked the family responsibilities that contributed to the departure of Western university colleagues who were also sympathetic to the CCP.15 In 1979, when I asked the 92-year-old why he had not left China, he replied: ‘I did visit the US in 1943 but I thought it was a racist and permissive society. I’d become used to living here and I was optimistic about the new government.’16 To Isabel Crook, Winter was the elderly American who ‘just floated along on top of everything that happened. I’ve  never known anyone who floated so high.’ Unlike Alley and Winter, American lawyer and former GI Sidney Shapiro was a relative newcomer to China when the Communists came to power. Thirty-one when he arrived in Shanghai in 1947, Shapiro had studied Chinese in the US Army and later at Yale. A few months after his marriage to Communist underground activist Feng Zi (whom he called Phoenix in English) in mid-1948, the couple attempted to travel to CCP territory but, after a series of mishaps, finished up awaiting the Communists in Peking and then adapting themselves to life in new China. Why had he not gone back to the United States like virtually all of his fellow nationals? ‘A number of things made us decide against leaving,’ he told me. I’d been a young idealist who didn’t want to be involved in things like mortgage foreclosures—I’d travelled 10,000 miles to get away from that sort of life. Now there was McCarthyism as well. And what would Phoenix do in the United States? It would have been the death of her as a professional. So from both our points of view we thought we’d better stay.

Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi on their wedding day in Chongqing. (Courtesy of Yang family)

Other Westerners who remained in China included a number of women who had married Chinese men studying in the West (mainly the United States, France and Britain) during the 1930s or 1940s. Now back in China, they concurred with their husbands’ wishes to stay on and help the new nation rather than seek refuge abroad. Some, like Grace Liu in Tianjin and Shirley Wood in Kaifeng, became enthusiastic

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advocates for new China. Gladys Yang (née Tayler) was somewhat different from the others, having grown up in China as a member of a British missionary educator’s family. While studying Chinese at Oxford in the late 1930s, she fell in love with a student named Yang Xianyi who had eclectic interests ranging from traditional Chinese culture to European philosophy. In 1940, 21-year-old Gladys returned to China with Xianyi and, despite opposition from both families, they got married. In the post-war period, Xianyi became active in leftist politics in Nanjing, joining an underground anti-Nationalist political party. By the time the couple moved to Peking in 1952, they had three children. Deciding to stay on in ‘Communist China’ was a big decision: moving there from the Western world an even more dramatic act. It is difficult now to comprehend the intensity of the ideological divide in the Cold War era, particularly during the McCarthyist hysteria of the 1950s. Anyone abandoning the ‘free world’ for ‘red China’ (or for the Soviet Union) was labelled a defector. It was a world in which ‘working for the other side’ was seen as treachery and where even being suspected of having communist sympathies could lead to the loss of one’s job, particularly but not only in the United States. From the Chinese side, anyone seriously thinking of making the life-changing move to the PRC first had to demonstrate that he or she was politically friendly to the Communist regime. This usually meant having contact with the new government, sometimes through Song Qingling who continued her role as a channel for foreigners. Madame Song, unlike her sister Song Meiling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek), stayed on in China and was to play an active if largely symbolic role in the new order as the revered widow of the leader of the 1911 Revolution. For all the deterrents, a few Westerners did move to the PRC. A handful, like Israel Epstein (known as Eppy) and his wife Elsie Fairfax Cholmeley, had previously lived in China but left before or during the Sino-Japanese War. Epstein had grown up in Tianjin with his Russian émigré parents and was educated in English. He became a journalist after leaving school, spent part of the war in Chongqing, worked in Hong Kong for Song Qingling’s China Defence League, and in 1944 visited Yan’an. British-born Elsie, the daughter of a Yorkshire squire, had worked with leftist associations in Hong Kong and then Chongqing, where the couple married. Since 1945 they had lived in the United States, where Epstein’s involvement with groups opposing American support for Chiang Kai-shek put him under FBI surveillance. After making overtures to the new Chinese government in late 1950 about returning to China, he received an invitation from Madame Song to help edit China Reconstructs, an English-language magazine that was being set up under her auspices.17 Anna Louise Strong was the best known of the female returnees. The American socialist author and journalist had travelled widely in China in the late 1920s and

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Foreigners under Mao

also in Communist-held areas in the mid-forties, becoming well-known for her 1946 interview with Mao when he proclaimed that ‘all reactionaries are paper tigers’. Strong, already over 60, had wanted to stay on with the Communists when they had to evacuate Yan’an in March 1947 and was disappointed when Mao said she must leave because of the dangers. She went to the Soviet Union, where she had spent much of her working life, and then to the United States following her expulsion in 1949. Strong was keen to return to China and, with an invitation from the government, finally did so in 1958 at the age of 72. Most newcomers, though, went to China through arrangements made by their national communist party. Briton Michael Shapiro, economics graduate and member of the Stepney Council, arrived in 1950, along with fellow-communist Alan Winnington, who had already spent some time with the Chinese Communists in 1948–49. Four years later, orthopaedic surgeon and long-time Marxist Joshua Horn arrived in China with his wife Miriam, 10-year-old son David and 6-year-old daughter Jessica. ‘I do not wish to give the impression that our coming to China was in any way based on humanitarianism,’ Horn wrote in his book Away with All Pests. ‘It was a question of how, in a particular situation, one could make one’s best political contribution.’18 What the committed communist did not mention was that he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, though it was in remission. Over fifty years later Jessica reflected: ‘Some of his fellow doctors told him there was no MS in China and that maybe the climate there might be good for his health.’19 For a few individual communists, China offered an alternative vision of a socialist future when their enthusiasm for the Soviet Union started waning with the exposé of Stalin’s crimes and the invasion of Hungary in 1956. ‘An earlier god had failed,’ as  David Caute expressed it in his book The Fellow-Travellers.20 One of the best known political émigrés, at least in her own country, was Canadian Dorise Nielsen, who had been the first Communist Party member of the Canadian parliament. Like Joshua Horn, Nielsen did not make the move purely for political reasons. Arriving in Peking in 1957, she assumed a new identity as Judy Godefroy, ostensibly the wife of Constant Godefroy, an engineer with whom she had embarked on a relationship and whose wife refused to divorce him.21 Not all of the Westerners who went to the PRC through their communist party stayed for more than a few years. Party members were sometimes sent for a fixed term (in the French case usually three years) specifically to help the government with its foreign propaganda network.22 The British party, though, encouraged members (including couples Nan Green and Ted Brake, and Patience Darton and Eric Edney) to stay for as long as possible because, as it readily admitted, it had trouble finding people to go there.23 Sending communists to China wound down during the 1960s when individual Western parties (New Zealand was an exception) eventually came down on the Soviet side in the dramatic rift between the PRC and the Soviet Union.

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21

The PRC also became a political refuge from the McCarthyist witch-hunts in the United States. For some, like left-wing neurophysiologist William (Bill) Hodes, China was a temporary sanctuary. A few spent the rest of their lives there, the most prominent of whom were two American economists, Frank Coe and British-born Solomon (Sol) Adler. Coe had been a senior US Treasury official before becoming secretary of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), while Adler had served as the Treasury representative in Chongqing for much of the period 1941–47. Both were investigated, named by the FBI as part of the alleged ‘Silvermaster ring’ that had gathered government information for the Soviet Union, and forced to resign their positions. The defectors, as they were widely known, arrived in Peking in 1958 and 1962 respectively, accompanied by their wives and, in Frank Coe’s case, daughter Kate. Adler’s wife and fellow economist, Dorothy, died tragically only a few months after their arrival; less than a year later he married Pat Davies, who was teaching English in Peking as a foreign expert. This selection of people covers most of those who appear in the next two chapters, but it does not include every Western ‘comrade’ who lived in Mao’s China for the long term.24 Nor was there always a clear line between those who finished up becoming long-termers, who are the main focus of this part of the book, and those who spent a few years there—whether some of the people sent by Western communist parties or political radicals among the individually recruited foreign experts who are the subject of Part V. And of the long-term residents, not all initially planned to live in Mao’s China indefinitely. ‘We thought we’d be here for eighteen months, not the rest of our lives,’ Isabel Crook told me, while Joan Hinton recalled: ‘We never intended to stay in China so long, but were too caught up to leave.’25 The longer the foreign comrades lived under Mao, though, the less inclined many were to return to their former countries, whether because they became ‘too caught up’ or because of the employment and other problems of re-establishing themselves and their families. Americans, in particular, faced a hostile reception if they went home. When William Hinton returned to the United States in 1953, his passport and notes on land reform (the basis of his book Fanshen) were confiscated, and he was harassed by the FBI and unable to get a job. John Powell, who had edited the ‘progressive’ China Weekly (later Monthly) Review in Shanghai, was indicted for sedition when he also returned in 1953, while his wife Sylvia and associate editor Julian Schuman were accused of conspiracy—charges that were not finally dismissed until the early 1960s. Even when the hysteria of McCarthyism subsided, returning ‘home’ was likely to lead to the loss of an American passport. For many, the decision to live under Mao turned out to be a decision for life.

2 Identities and roles

‘I’ve lived here for almost fifty years—China’s my home. But I’m still British,’ Pat Adler commented.1 Juggling these two identities was not always easy in a Cold War environment where the Chinese denounced all aspects of Western society as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘capitalist’. A further complexity was the identity imposed on the long-term residents by the government: that of ‘foreign comrades’ or ‘international friends’. As comrades and friends they were political allies, unlike the majority of other Western residents, and had prescribed roles in new China. But their underlying identity as foreigners meant that, like other Westerners, they were treated in a distinctive manner that helped keep them apart from everyday China—even if they thought of it as home. When physician E. Grey Dimond visited China in 1971 with the first American medical delegation, he was surprised at the lifestyles of three of the Western residents he was allowed to meet. ‘Alley, Hatem and Müller have comfortable, substantial homes, automobiles, chauffeurs, domestic help, summers at the seashore, and winters in the south . . . In spite of their communistic convictions, one never feels that their considerable standard of living is an embarrassment to them.’2 The three men were favoured old hands, well-known to the Communists before 1949. While the foreign comrades as a whole were given preferential treatment like other Westerners in China, the old hands were more privileged than most, enjoying lifestyles on a par with the Party officials described by Jung Chang in her bestseller, Wild Swans. Anna Louise Strong was also, in her own words, ‘well looked after’ by her hosts— the China Peace Committee.3 Like Rewi Alley, she had a large apartment in the Peace Committee’s complex, formerly the Italian legation. Alley initially lived upstairs, moving into Strong’s downstairs apartment following her death in 1970. After his 1971 visit, Dimond described the apartment, with its veranda and European-style courtyard, as ‘shaded and cool, cut off from the heat and noise of the crowded capital’.4 In her will, Strong had made provision for her cook and also for the gardener who, she said, had always ‘kept her rooms decorated with flowers’.5 Most lived more modestly, either in part of a courtyard house or in a complex attached to their workplace—albeit sometimes located in a special block and more similar to accommodation provided for senior officials than for their Chinese

Identities and roles

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colleagues. The new government did not expect, indeed it would not permit, its foreign comrades to live like ‘the masses’: often a family to a room or two, no bathroom, a communal toilet. A few of the later arrivals lived in the comfortable flats at the Friendship Hotel, which became the long-termers’ main meeting place and a focus for their activities during the Cultural Revolution. The preferential treatment also included high salaries (relatively speaking) and other benefits. Classified as ‘foreign experts’ following the establishment of the Foreign Experts Bureau in 1955, the long-term residents’ incomes averaged 400–600 yuan (approx. US$120–180) a month, five or more times a Chinese professorial salary.6 When Sidney Shapiro refused to take more than 300 of his 440 yuan, the authorities insisted on putting the difference into a special bank account for him. With minimal rent and free medical care, he and Phoenix, who edited a cultural magazine, could easily afford a live-in cook and an ayi (nanny) for their daughter. There was also a free vacation trip each year, as well as fares for periodic home leave, an entitlement the Americans could not take advantage of until the 1970s. With ongoing economic shortages in China, one of the most significant privileges was access to the special shops that were reserved exclusively for foreigners and high officials. These included the show-piece Friendship Store, which opened in 1954 and moved to larger premises in 1973, and its branch at the Friendship Hotel. A Chinese English-language student who sneaked into the store discovered ‘a voyeur’s dream come true . . . The store felt velvety with the silent abundance of fine things, things rarely found in any Beijing store.’7 When Gladys Yang wanted to replace her clappedout bicycle in the mid-1960s, she searched the Chinese shops but, having no luck, finished up going to the Friendship Store and buying a Phoenix, one of Shanghai’s top brands. She was furious when, barely two months later, it was stolen from the passage outside the family’s flat at the Foreign Languages Press.8 The differences between the long-termers’ lives and those of most Chinese people, including even their colleagues, were starkest during the famine years of 1959–62 following the Great Leap Forward. David Crook was keenly aware of the disparities. We ‘foreign comrades’ were given special treatment and spared the effects of the shortages from which Chinese people suffered . . . For we could supplement our diet with food bought at the special shop at the Friendship Hotel, to say nothing of the substantial breakfast and supper we ate at home. On Sundays, too, when the children were home from the nursery school where they boarded during the week, we had a good western dinner in the ‘small dining-room’ reserved for the school president and his Soviet wife and other senior personnel.9

In contrast, Crook recalled, ‘the students and teachers were plucking the leaves of elm trees that were cooked in the steamed buns to provide extra vitamins’. When he mentioned this in a letter abroad, submitted ‘voluntarily’ to the English Department’s Party secretary for approval, the comment was censored on the grounds that ‘it would

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Foreigners under Mao

feed foreign “rumours” about starvation in China’.10 Estimates of the number of deaths during the famine years now range up to 45 million. The long-term residents’ second formal identity, as politically friendly comrades, underpinned their distinctive roles in new China. To AFP correspondent Jacques  Marcuse, the faithful retainers, as he called them, were ‘eminently usable rather than eminently useful’.11 They did not make this distinction themselves: being of service to the Chinese revolution was part and parcel of their perceived role. ‘I must have been useful. Otherwise it would all have been wasted,’ Israel Epstein told a former childhood friend in the early 1990s.12 As representatives of the West in China, to use Isabel Crook’s words, the longterm residents were active participants in the PRC’s ‘people-to-people diplomacy’ (or ‘friendship diplomacy’) which, like its Soviet counterpart, was directed towards influencing foreign public opinion, especially in the West.13 In her book A History of China’s Foreign Propaganda 1949–1966, PRC journalist and author Xi Shaoying saw the long-term residents, along with short-term invited ‘friends of China’, as playing an integral role in the government’s ‘foreign propaganda work’.14 The foreign language propaganda network included publications ranging from magazines to books and pamphlets, broadcasting (Radio Peking) and releases from Xinhua (New China News Agency). In the West, the long-termers’ most contentious activity was their support for the PRC against their own governments. During the Korean War—the first real opportunity to demonstrate their commitment—they wrote articles and signed petitions denouncing the American imperialists and their activities, including the alleged but unproven use of germ warfare. To the US and British governments, the two most controversial figures were Alan Winnington and Michael Shapiro who, along with Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, reported the war from the North Korean side. The journalists’ contact with American and British POWs in prison camps close to the Chinese border led to accusations that they were involved in ‘brainwashing’ them. After a White Paper on British POWs in Korea was released in 1955, some politicians demanded that the men be tried for treason.15 With Winnington and Shapiro living in China, all the government could do was withdraw their British passports. The long-termers also wrote articles praising the Chinese government’s domestic policies, helping to present what Leonard Lazarick described as ‘China’s smiling face to the world’ in his study of English-language magazines during the first decade of the PRC.16 Some wrote stories highlighting the nation’s socio-economic progress, in which they were often portrayed as ordinary Americans or other Westerners living in Mao’s China with their families. One early article by American Grace Liu focused on her Chinese husband Liu Fuzhi as a model worker and included a photo of the happy family in Tianjin: Grace, her husband and their three children.17 Others, like Michael Shapiro, Israel Epstein and Sidney Rittenberg—three of the most politically

Identities and roles

25

active long-term residents—explained the latest political campaigns, including the Cultural Revolution as it unfolded during the second half of 1966.18 Rewi Alley and Anna Louise Strong, who were classified as ‘permanent guests of the Peace Committee’, were essentially full-time promoters of new China.19 After attending the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference in Peking in 1952, Alley became ‘a sort of international Peace Worthy’, to use British communist Nan Green’s words.20 The former soldier, farmer, fire-fighter, factory inspector, organizer of collectives and school administrator became best known, though, as a prolific writer. One of the few Western residents allowed to travel all over the PRC, including Tibet, he acclaimed the nation’s economic and social achievements in more than twenty books that were available at the Foreign Language Bookstore and in left-wing bookshops overseas. Alley was also the knowledgeable foreigner who presented the palatable face of new China to invited foreign visitors. ‘It almost goes without saying that we spent considerable time chatting with Rewi Alley,’ Simone de Beauvoir wrote after she and Jean-Paul Sartre spent two months in China in 1955.21 The elderly Anna Louise Strong continued her writing career after she arrived in Peking in 1958, producing books and pamphlets on the people’s communes, Tibet, Laos and Vietnam. She also wrote long letters to friends abroad and in 1962 Zhou Enlai suggested that she formalize these into what became Letters from China, initially mimeographed and later printed. In the words of her biographers Tracey B. Strong and Helene Keyssar, Strong ‘began to see herself as the Chinese leaders did: as China’s mouthpiece to English-speaking countries’.22 Her 1963 New Year Letter included contributions from a number of ‘friends’ whom Strong introduced as though it was the most normal thing in the world for Westerners, even Americans, to be living in Communist China. They included: Israel and Elsie Epstein, formerly of New York, writers and editors in Peking; Sidney Rittenberg formerly of Charleston, S.C., Palo Alto and Yenan [Yan’an], now in radio work in Peking and father of three beautiful little girls; Rewi Alley, famous New Zealand author and cooperator, my neighbour here.23

Unlike Alley and Strong, the other long-term residents also had regular jobs where they served new China in more practical ways. The old hand Western doctors who had worked with the Communists at Yan’an were incorporated into the new medical system, although they had mixed views on politically influenced medical policies. During the Cultural Revolution, George Hatem paid lip service to the Maoist notion that doctors, like other professionals, should ‘learn from the peasants and workers’, while being privately angered by the glorification of folk remedies that included chicken blood injections for a multitude of diseases.24 Trauma surgeon Joshua Horn, in contrast, was swept up in the drive to take medicine to the masses that included ‘barefoot doctors’ doing paramedical work with minimal formal education. ‘It is

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Foreigners under Mao

difficult to write about the Cultural Revolution without running into a plethora of superlatives,’ he wrote in his book Away with All Pests.25 American dairy specialist Sid Engst and his wife Joan Hinton were virtually the only long-term residents living outside Peking, Shanghai or a provincial capital. After almost three years on a dairy farm in Inner Mongolia, in late 1952 the couple were transferred to the Yanzhuang Dairy outside Xi’an which supplied the city with most of its milk. Although there were rumours in the United States that the so-called ‘blonde atomic traitress’, a former nuclear physicist, was working with the Chinese on their nuclear programme, her skills were directed mainly towards designing basic farm machinery that included a silage chopper. In 1966, as the Cultural Revolution gained momentum, the couple and their three children were moved under protest to Peking. It was only in 1972 that they were finally transferred, not back to the dairy farm near Xi’an but to the Red Star Commune just outside the capital. For the Chinese government, the long-termers’ skills in English or another major Western language, sometimes in conjunction with their professional background, were often considered their most useful attribute. Prominent economists Frank Coe and Sol Adler kept the government up-to-date with the latest economic developments in the West. Sol, according to his wife Pat, spent most of his time reading articles in Western newspapers and journals at the Institute of World Economy, part of the Academy of Sciences. Most others, regardless of their background, were employed polishing foreign language materials, already translated into what native English speakers sometimes disparagingly called ‘Chinglish’. They satisfied part of the need for foreign language expertise right across the PRC’s foreign propaganda network. During the 1950s the government also called on foreign communist parties for assistance and, after the Sino-Soviet split, it resorted to recruiting some non-communist foreign experts on two-year contracts. Several of the long-termers worked for Xinhua or on foreign language magazines that included People’s China (later the Peking Review), which focused on the PRC’s domestic achievements and foreign policies, and China Pictorial with its glossy colour photos. Journalist Israel Epstein spent the whole of his PRC career as an editor at China Reconstructs, which featured articles on everyday life in ‘new China’. His wife Elsie was a polisher at the magazine, as was British communist Nan Green for a number of years. ‘I polished and polished and polished with great satisfaction—the simple satisfaction of helping to make China known to the rest of the world,’ Nan wrote in her autobiography. After a while, though, she became conscious that virtually every article, whether on women’s changing status in society, factory workers, peasant life or the new socialist culture, had a ‘dismal tendency’ to follow the familiar ‘before liberation/after liberation’ formula. ‘But don’t you think that such ceaseless repetition may bore and antagonize foreign readers?’ Nan asked a Chinese colleague. ‘It is what we want to say, comrade,’ he replied sternly.26

Identities and roles

27

Promoting ‘new China’ and its policies.

Some of those employed at the Foreign Languages Press (FLP) had more variety in their work. Chinese language graduate Gladys Yang and her husband Yang Xianyi became the PRC’s foremost translating/polishing team, their work including China’s most famous modern writer, Lu Xun. Probably their most challenging task, though, was China’s famous historical novel Hong Lou Meng (A Dream of Red Mansions or, more commonly, Dream of the Red Chamber). One of their colleagues at the FLP was Sidney Shapiro, who had turned his hand to translating after realizing ‘there was no longer any role for an American lawyer in China’—and having studied Chinese at Yale and Cornell.27 Among Shapiro’s translations were the great classical novel Outlaws of the Marsh (also known in English as Water Margin and All Men are Brothers) and Ba Jin’s ever popular Family, which encapsulated the traditional Chinese family under pressure from ‘modern’ ideas in the 1920s. The FLP, though, was highly vulnerable to shifts in official policy. During the Cultural Revolution all pre-revolutionary and even most post-revolutionary literature was banned. Gladys’s personal letters during 1967–68 were peppered with comments such as: ‘I’m writing this in the office, because there’s no work today’ and ‘there is still no work in the office’.28 Even Chinese Literature, normally published monthly and promoting China’s new socialist culture, appeared only intermittently during this period. In the eyes of the Chinese government, the most important polishing task with which Westerners were entrusted was the English translation of Volume IV of Mao’s Selected Works and the revision of the first three volumes. The fourteen-member Chinese-English team included five foreigners: Michael Shapiro, Israel Epstein,

28

Foreigners under Mao

Sidney Rittenberg, Frank Coe and Sol Adler. Selected for their perceived seniority as foreign comrades, none was a professional linguist. The team laboured over their task for almost two years, sometimes spending hours debating the appropriate translation of an individual expression. According to Rittenberg, the team ‘tended to split into two camps, literalists and stylists’: always an issue in translating texts but magnified when dealing with languages that are vastly different structurally, not to mention Mao’s earthy rather than refined writing style.29 Apart from polishing and translating, the other main occupation for long-termers—including several of the wives of Chinese men—was foreign language teaching. Although Russian was the major foreign language during the 1950s, there was still a need to train some Chinese people in other European languages. With the Sino-Soviet rift, English became the PRC’s first foreign language, followed by French. David and Isabel Crook were native-speaker stalwarts of the English Department at the Foreign Languages Institute, continuing the work they had started at its tiny predecessor near Shijiazhuang. China’s premier tertiary institution for foreign language learning, the institute (renamed the Beijing Foreign Studies University in the post-Mao era) was affiliated with the Foreign Ministry and the major source of recruitment for a new generation of diplomats and others dealing with China’s foreign affairs. The differences in David’s and Isabel’s work reflected their individual personalities as well as continuing perceptions of gender roles. David taught mainly the senior grades. For the first three years he was also deputy dean of the English Department, though not without some ructions with his Chinese colleagues. ‘My crude concept of Western efficiency apparently needed polishing and adapting to the subtleties of Chinese society,’ the Briton admitted. ‘Eventually our joint torment came to an end.’30 Looking back on her husband’s work, Isabel commented: ‘David had leadership qualities, but there were problems. I think he had a much more difficult time than I did.’ In contrast to David, the more flexible Isabel thrived on collaboration and described it as the most satisfying part of her work. ‘That’s why I was happy in China—I was part of a team.’31 The Crooks’ work was not limited to teaching and administration. They were also busy writing up their 1947–48 research on land reform, as well as their repeat visits to Ten Mile Inn. In 1959 they published Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn, in 1966 The First Years of Yangyi Commune, and in 1979 Mass Movement in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn—all with Routledge & Kegan Paul in London. Although Isabel was a Western-trained anthropologist, to non-leftist reviewers the books were as much reflections of the authors’ revolutionary romanticism as scholarly analysis.32 American Bob Winter, already sixty-two at the time of the Communists’ victory, lived on the Peking University campus where he taught a few classes on English literature and was consulted on the finer points of English grammar. As he grew older, though, his main interests were going swimming at the Summer Palace and

Identities and roles

29

cultivating the flower garden he planted next to his small house. The American’s Chinese colleagues appreciated the plants he gave them—at least until the early days of the Cultural Revolution when, with even growing flowers considered ‘bourgeois’, they dug them up and threw them into the university lake. A few long-term residents had an occasional side-line: as actors in the PRC’s burgeoning film industry. Historical encounters with the foreign imperialists called for duplicitous Western ambassadors and consuls, generals and businessmen. Sidney Shapiro’s roles included that of an American professor living in China in the 1962 film After the Armistice, which portrayed the breakdown of negotiations between the Nationalists and Communists in late 1946. ‘I was no actor but Jerry was wonderful as the American general,’ Shapiro told me, speaking of Gerald Tannebaum, another GI who had stayed on in China and worked with Song Qingling at the China Welfare Institute. The good-looking American became the closest to a professional actor of any Westerner in Mao’s China. His best-known performance was in Bai Qiu’en Daifu (Dr Norman Bethune), made in 1964, in which he played the lead role of the famous Canadian doctor who had worked with the Communists at Yan’an. Delayed for release by the start of Cultural Revolution—this was no time for a positive portrayal of a Westerner—it eventually became one of the Mao era’s most popular films and is now available in China on DVD. If the long-termers ever had doubts about their usefulness, they were periodically reassured of their importance to new China, not just in flattering media articles which themselves contributed to the government’s foreign propaganda work but now and again at dinners and receptions. Anna Louise Strong, described as the ‘famous American journalist’, was singled out for special attention following her arrival in 1958. When the veteran correspondent reached the venerable age of 80 in November 1965, the Peace Committee chartered a plane and flew her to Shanghai, along with members of her ‘circle’ (including Hatem, Epstein, Alley, Rittenberg, Adler and Coe) as well as a host of officials. There she was honoured at a lunch attended by Mao and a dinner hosted by Zhou Enlai. The occasional foreign comrade who became disenchanted with Mao’s China could be cynical about the way that Strong and some others were used for political purposes. In his autobiography, Alan Winnington claimed that the American ‘reflected every twist of official policy and was given flattering opportunities to do so. Her international reputation was built up by Mao and Zhou Enlai and she paid with hypocrisy for the dubious honour of being their trusted mouthpiece.’33 For the true believers, though, helping to promote the PRC was an integral part of their perceived role in new China. ‘I disagree with almost everything that Eppy writes nowadays,’ AFP correspondent Jacques Marcuse wrote in the mid-1960s of Israel Epstein, who had been a pre-war colleague in Hankou. ‘But, after all, the Epsteins have made their choice and stuck to it not with forced loyalty, but with their

30

Foreigners under Mao

very hearts and conscience. They have accepted a certain discipline and become converted to a certain faith.’34 For those who were less completely committed, being of service to their adopted nation was part and parcel of the deal they had made with the Communists when they decided to live under Mao. This did not mean that life was all smooth sailing. The pervasiveness of politics and the official controls over everyday life were constant challenges, even for a true believer. David Crook admitted in his autobiography that, within just a few years of the Communists’ victory, he was already weary of the constant political campaigns and ‘longed for respite from improving myself ’. He also thought that decisions about people’s work assignments should be discussed with those involved, ‘not peremptorily handed down from a higher level’, and admitted that he would have been happier writing than teaching. ‘This heretical idea was no doubt attributed to my “bourgeois ideology”. The Party knew best and should be unquestioningly obeyed. Despite my continuing admiration for the Chinese Communist Party I never outgrew this heresy.’35 Serving new China did not mean that one could simply slough off one’s background and culture. In juggling their identities as Britons, Americans or other Westerners living in the PRC for the long term, the foreign comrades had to make decisions about the extent of their contact with the Western world, their citizenship, and the level of their integration into Chinese society—so far as it was possible. Although often seen in their former countries as renegades who had simply abandoned the free world for Communist China, most maintained some contact with the West. For Americans, the main barrier was not the PRC but the US government. Even receiving a letter from China was politically suspect in the United States during the McCarthy era. Grace Liu’s letters to her family, which praised the revolution and criticized American involvement in the Korean War, may have been designed partly to impress the Chinese authorities. But her family became nervous when they received a letter from the US government asking whether they had any relatives living in a communist country, particularly as Grace’s brother Tom worked at the Atomic Energy Commission’s establishment at Oak Ridge. They, and then Grace, stopped writing. Apart from informing Grace in 1954 that her mother had died, there was no contact for almost twenty years.36 Some Americans did correspond occasionally with their families, increasing the level of contact as the extremes of McCarthyism wound down from the late 1950s. Sidney Shapiro even sent his widowed mother some money now and again to help her get by. Like Grace, they were often more conscious of possible Chinese, rather than American, attention to their correspondence. Even as Sino-American hostility began to thaw in the early 1970s, Guangzhou resident Ruth Earnshaw Lo was still cautious: ‘I took great care that my letters, like a sun dial, should record sunny hours.’37

Identities and roles

31

People of other nationalities usually had more contact with their former countries, though there was always some restraint as both sides assumed their letters were opened by the Chinese postal service. Gladys Yang commented on the ‘erratic nature’ of the mails to and from Britain in some of her letters to Bill and Delia Jenner, who had become close friends during their sojourn as foreign experts in 1963–65. After the Cultural Revolution got under way, Gladys peppered her letters with comments such as ‘Don’t worry about us. Trust the Party, trust the masses.’ She also wrote: ‘I enormously appreciate the books you send, but perhaps you’d better cut out paperbacks with lurid covers.’38 Maintaining contact with the West sometimes itself served a political purpose. The long-termers corresponded with the international China friendship network, in  some cases continuing the leftist associations they had had in China in the 1930s. Rewi Alley, Israel Epstein, David Crook and others often wrote to Maud Russell who had worked for the YWCA in Shanghai, become part of the leftist circle around Song Qingling, and visited Yan’an in 1939. Russell had returned to the United States during the Sino-Japanese War and from 1952 published The Far East Reporter, a pro-PRC magazine that led to her surveillance by the FBI. The Reporter regularly featured articles written by Russell’s China correspondents which they sent her in the form of letters.39 While the Soviet government often prevented Western residents from leaving the country, the Chinese provided fares for periodic home leave. The Crook family spent a full year in Canada and Britain during 1957–58, and again in 1966, while the Horns went back to Britain for three months every four years. Rewi Alley made a number of visits to New Zealand. Apart from seeing relatives, all used the visits to promote new China and explain the latest political developments. As the Cultural Revolution unfolded in the second half of 1966, the Crooks found themselves in England. Isabel and the three teenage boys returned to Peking in November but David stayed on. ‘I followed three months later after completing a hectic coast to coast speaking tour of Canada and U.S.A., striving to explain “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” of which I like the rest of the world understood precious little.’40 Until the early 1970s, visits by Americans to the United States were out of the question, with the possibility of arrest or at least official denunciation as had happened to William Hinton, the Powells and Julian Schuman. The turnaround came in April 1971 when, having approved the famous ‘ping pong visit’, the US government also allowed medical and youth delegations, as well as a few individuals (including Bill Hinton and Hatem’s brother Joe) to visit China. Sidney Shapiro was the first American long-term resident to take advantage of the slight thaw in relations and in November set off to visit relatives. In 1975 Sid Engst did a whirlwind tour of twentyfive American cities, mostly giving talks about China, in response to an invitation from the US-China People’s Friendship Association. Three years later he was back in

32

Foreigners under Mao

the United States, this time on the recommendation of his Chinese doctors to have a heart valve replacement. When the US$10,000 that the government gave its loyal foreign comrade for the operation and his and Joan’s expenses proved insufficient, the Chinese embassy in Washington handed Joan a cheque for a further $10,000.41 A thornier personal issue than contact with the outside world was that of citizenship. Should one retain the citizenship of a distant country from which one was politically alienated—or become a citizen of the country where one lived and to which one was committed? In the Soviet Union, adopting Soviet citizenship was officially regarded as a symbol of political loyalty; the authorities sometimes confiscated Western residents’ passports and threatened to expel them if they refused.42 The Chinese government, while permitting foreigners to become citizens, was more ambivalent. On the one hand, a Western-turned-PRC citizen was useful for domestic and overseas propaganda. But nationals of Western countries also had a political role, in Isabel Crook’s words, as ‘the West in China’—symbols of international friendship at a time of Cold War hostility. A minority of long-term residents became Chinese citizens. Some were previously stateless, like Israel Epstein who was not a US citizen as many people assumed; he himself called being American his ‘pretended identity’.43 Before returning to China in 1951, travelling was always a problem and he arrived back in the country on a US affidavit of identity. In 1957 Epstein became a PRC citizen; his wife Elsie Fairfax Cholmeley retained her British citizenship. Hans Müller, Richard Frey and Ruth Weiss—all displaced from their home countries by Nazism—also became PRC citizens. Giving up the citizenship of a Western country to become a Chinese citizen was a more dramatic step; like most countries at the time China did not accept dual citizenship. The few who did become citizens usually had a Chinese spouse, itself part of the shift towards a China-oriented identity. George Hatem became a Chinese citizen immediately on the establishment of the PRC, but it took fellow American Sidney Shapiro rather longer to take the plunge. He had not initially had a strong political commitment, he told me. ‘But by the early 1960s I was getting closer to socialism. I decided I wanted to live in China permanently and I became a citizen in 1963.’ A few American women married to Chinese men also became citizens. After the early death of her husband in 1955, Grace Liu decided to stay on in China with her three children (the youngest was already fourteen) and she became a citizen two years later. Even for some of the most politically committed, though, Chinese citizenship was a step too far. David Crook later admitted that, although he had lived in China for over forty years, his ‘emotional and cultural attachments’ were ‘still divided between China, Britain and USA . . . I have never wanted to give up my British citizenship.’ In contrast, he wrote, Isabel ‘at times has favoured our taking Chinese citizenship’.44 When I asked Isabel about this, she said: ‘Well, we did discuss it now and again—but

Identities and roles

33

we didn’t take it any further.’ In other cases pragmatic considerations, including the ease of travelling, were uppermost in people’s minds. And Bob Winter was not the only long-term resident who saw his or her foreign citizenship as something of a safety valve in a politically tumultuous country. ‘It’s been reassuring to feel that I could always get out if I had to,’ he told me in 1979, even though he had not left China since 1943.45 (In fact, one also needed an exit permit to leave.) The PRC government itself advised a few Westerners not to become citizens, judging that—as foreign rather than Chinese nationals—they would be seen as having a more independent perspective in promoting new China. I asked Sidney Rittenberg about his citizenship status, having read that he became a PRC citizen but finding no reference to it in his autobiography. I applied for Chinese citizenship, as part of throwing in my lot with the Chinese Revolution, following my release from prison in 1955. Zhou Enlai’s response was: ‘We can easily approve your citizenship application. But think about it— is it better for the world to have one more Chinese revolutionary? Or is it better to have one more American revolutionary?’ I decided he was right, withdrew my application, and never thought about it again.46

Rewi Alley was a similar case. According to his biographer Anne-Marie Brady, the New Zealander applied for Chinese citizenship but was advised that ‘it would be better for travel purposes’ if he retained his New Zealand passport. As Brady saw it, Alley’s role was ‘to be a permanent outsider, and to have his otherness constantly emphasized so that he could claim objectivity’.47 Whether or not a Westerner became a Chinese citizen, there was still the question of one’s personal identification with China vis-à-vis the Western world. As David  Crook expressed it, ‘how much should we try and merge with Chinese society and how much should we retain of our British identity?’48 Completely forsaking Western culture was a step too far for most, even though that culture was constantly denounced as bourgeois and capitalist. Western novels sat on bookshelves alongside the works of Chairman Mao, gramophones played Western music, and shortwave radios tuned into the BBC or the Voice of America when they were not jammed. Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, when Western literature was being excoriated and physically destroyed by rampaging Red Guards, Gladys Yang continued to subscribe to Time and Grace Liu to the Saturday Review. Attitudes towards integration into Chinese society varied substantially, sometimes within the same family. David Crook compared Isabel’s view with his own. ‘Having been born in China into a family with long associations and fast ties with the country, she has always felt more strongly than I about integration into Chinese society. I have also favoured integration, but less single-mindedly.’49 Isabel told David that she wanted to mix as much as possible with her Chinese colleagues rather than with foreign residents. But as some foreign comrades were to complain during the Cultural

34

Foreigners under Mao

Revolution, their exclusion from many day-to-day political activities marginalized them from everyday Chinese life. Integration was impeded not only by official actions. Many of the Chinese with whom residents had the closest contact—the people they worked with on a daily basis—had been educated in the West or in missionary colleges in China and were constantly under pressure as ‘bourgeois intellectuals’. During periods of intense ideological fervour, personal contact even with a comrade from the West was not just unwise but could be politically dangerous. Early in the 1957–59 Anti-Rightist Movement, for example, most of Bob Winter’s Chinese colleagues at Peking University stopped visiting his house on campus; several were subsequently denounced as ‘rightists’.50 At the everyday level, language was an important marker of personal identity, as well as facilitating or impeding social integration: a common feature of immigrant and exile communities. When I asked Pat Adler whether she had ever thought of becoming a Chinese citizen, she replied: ‘How could I be a Chinese citizen? I can only speak a bit of Chinese and I can’t read it at all.’ With busy jobs and lots of political study, there was little time for formal language training and the Chinese authorities, always keen to marginalize foreigners, did not consider it a priority. For most, the everyday working environment, whether at a magazine like China Reconstructs or in a foreign languages department in a university, was usually in their own language. While the majority were eventually able to speak Chinese to varying degrees, ranging from fluency to just getting by, the inability to read Chinese created a sense of psychological distance from everyday China. With a few exceptions like Rewi Alley, the only long-termers who were really literate were those who had studied the language formally before they arrived in China. George Hatem, who spent over a decade living and working alongside Chinese people before the Communists’ victory, came to speak the language fluently but, according to his wife Sufei, never really learnt to read and write.51 And after living in China for sixty years, Isabel Crook told me: ‘I can more or less read Chinese, but I can’t write it.’ Overall, the long-term residents’ children were more sinicized than their parents, reflecting a pattern of social integration common to the offspring of first generation immigrants. Most grew up with Chinese as their first language. While their parents were busy working and doing ‘political study’, the second generation were initially spending their days in a Chinese nursery or being looked after by an ayi. Later, at least in some cases, they boarded at their school from Monday to Saturday like many local children. Even if their parents used their own language at home, unlike the Crooks who insisted on speaking to their sons in Chinese, the children rarely became bilingual. ‘Bertha Sneck tried to speak English to Carma, and Joan Hinton and Sid Engst also tried with their three kids’, Michael Crook recalled. ‘They were for ever pushing them, but had very little luck.’52 Even Jessica Horn, whose first language had been

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35

English, soon became much more comfortable in Chinese. ‘My English basically stayed at the level it was when I arrived in China—that of a six-year-old.’53 Social and political acculturation went hand in hand with language. While their parents had consciously adopted communist beliefs, the younger generation absorbed the ideology in the same way as Chinese children. From an early age, they also learnt to differentiate between China’s friends and its enemies. Alan Winnington’s wife, Esther, wrote of their two small boys coming home from nursery school in the mid1950s and playing anti-imperialist war games. ‘The children would say: “You be the imperialist today.” “No, I was him yesterday: I want to be the people’s soldier”.’54 For all the acculturation, were the second generation still conscious of being foreigners? ‘Not on the institute campus or at school—on the whole we were accepted,’ Michael Crook recollected. ‘But if we went somewhere different in town, people would gather and stare. It’s one of the things we used to joke about—we called ourselves the yanggui (foreign devils).’ It could be a problem, he said, when other foreigners caught sight of him. ‘I remember once when I was quite little. We were passing the Friendship Store and I saw a party of foreigners coming. There was a boy about my own age. I was so afraid I might be accosted—and he would discover I didn’t know ‘foreign speak’—that I hid behind a column.’ The identity issue was potentially even more complex for children who had a Chinese mother or father (the hunxue’er, literally ‘mixed blood children’) and were living in a society where their Western parent was part of a tiny minority and treated in a distinctive manner. Historically, the Chinese had viewed people of mixed race no more positively than they were often viewed in the West. Married to a half-Chinese, Alan Winnington thought that Eurasians were ‘regarded with as much or more disdain than foreigners as a whole’.55

Identity issues? Yang Ying (left) and Yang Ye with their British mother Gladys Yang. (Courtesy of Yang family)

36

Foreigners under Mao

Growing up in even more of a Chinese environment than foreign children, not least because they had Chinese relatives, the biracial generation usually identified itself essentially as ‘Chinese’. Fifty years later, Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi’s daughter Yang Zhi put it simply: ‘I was, and I am, Chinese.’56 Focusing on their Chinese identity was often encouraged by parents, aware of the problems their children might experience with such a clear line being drawn between Chinese and foreigners. ‘I constantly sensed their determination to eliminate any kinds of Western influences on us,’ Zhi’s elder sister Ying recalled. ‘At home we were not encouraged to join the adults when there were foreign visitors.’57 By identifying themselves as Chinese, even though their appearance set them somewhat apart from their Chinese friends, the sisters largely avoided the identity confusion faced by some children of mixed ethnicity as they grow to adulthood. Their sensitive brother Ye, though, was never able to come to terms with his mixed Chinese-foreign parentage, which provoked serious mental problems. Visitors to the Yangs’ flat in the mid-1960s noticed that the young man, by then in his early twenties, was behaving oddly, claiming that he was totally Chinese and rejecting his foreign mother. Then, after his parents were released from prison in 1972, he completely rejected his Chinese identity, insisting he was an Englishman named David and that Xianyi was not his father. In 1974, Gladys accompanied Ye to England, where he subsequently lived with her sister Hilda Brown and appeared to settle down. But all was not as it seemed, as Ye’s father wrote of what had happened four years later. At Christmas, Gladys’ sister was invited to go away; she left him alone in the house, unaware of what was going to happen. He bought a can of petrol which he set alight in his room, setting the house on fire and causing serious damage. He himself was burned to death.58

It was a tragedy from which Xianyi and Gladys never recovered. ‘Our son’s death was the most tragic and crippling blow of our lives.’59

3 Interactions

To outsiders, the long-term residents seemed tightly knit, conscious of their group identity and wary of Westerners who did not share the mantle of ‘foreign comrade’ or ‘international friend’. But the small community also had its internal dynamics, reflecting the length of time that people had spent in China as well as their nationality, personality and political attitudes—even within the socialist range. The turbulent politics of the era, including the Sino-Soviet split, also impinged on relations within the community, while the Cultural Revolution had a dramatic impact on individuals’ lives when their official designation as comrades and friends became subordinated to that as suspect foreigners. Some, like George Hatem and Rewi Alley, were close friends throughout the Mao era—and beyond. The two men, who had first met in Shanghai in 1933, saw a lot of each other during Alley’s visit to Yan’an in 1939. When Hatem was planning his wedding to Zhou Sufei the following year, Alley sent him 200 yuan—in response to a telegram from his friend—to pay for a wedding banquet for a hundred guests. The two met regularly after Alley moved to Peking in 1953, later forming a trio with Hans Müller (also from Yan’an days) for afternoon tea or dinner in Alley’s spacious flat in the Peace Committee compound. Alley and Hatem often holidayed together, particularly as they grew older: in winter on the island of Hainan and in summer at Beidaihe where Isabel and David Crook’s son, Michael, remembered them as ‘kindly souls’ wandering along the beach.1 Then there were flexible social groupings. Sidney Shapiro described a regular all-male gathering on the balcony at Kaorouji, Peking’s famous Mongolian barbecue restaurant overlooking picturesque Houhai. We drank and got drunk. If we were drunk enough, in winter we went skating on the lake. Then we all sat around and sang. Michael Shapiro was a very devoted Jewish communist from London. In his loud voice he’d sing old working-class songs like ‘I’m the man, the very fat man, that waters the workers’ beer’. And ‘It’s the same the whole world over. It’s the poor what gets the blame’.2

The long-termers got together most frequently, though, for political study sessions—either at the Friendship Hotel or in one of their houses or flats—to discuss the

38

Foreigners under Mao

latest CCP pronouncements and attempt to understand the intricacies of the current political campaign. The British communists also had their own sessions, forming a Party cell (or Party group as they called themselves).3 As well as Michael Shapiro, Alan Winnington, the Crooks and the Horns, in the mid-1950s the group included Party members sent to China for a few years. While Shapiro was the major link with the CPGB, it was Nan Green who kept General Secretary Harry Pollitt up-to-date with more personal news. ‘We’re going to have a beer-and-skittles do on Christmas Eve,’ she wrote in December 1955.4 Like other small immigrant and political émigré groups, the long-termer community also had its internal tensions, provoked not just by personality and politics but more generally by the somewhat incestuous environment. Nan Green’s comment that the inward-looking nature of the British group ‘sharpened personal failings, ambitions, attitudes and other tendencies’ could well be applied to the community as a whole.5 Sidney Rittenberg, perhaps the most gregarious of all the long-termers, provoked the greatest amount of controversy, even though he was out of prison for barely half of the Mao era. Fellow Americans Nancy and David Milton, who worked in China during the 1960s as foreign experts, thought he was a ‘maverick of remarkable charm . . . on whom Peking’s entire foreign community leaned for information, expertise, and wisdom regarding China’.6 Others were less enthusiastic. Sidney  Shapiro called his fellow American ‘an obvious hustler, a typical high-pressure salesman. Broad-smiling, back-slapping, he would have been spotted immediately in any Western metropolis.’7 George Hatem, too, fell out with Rittenberg and barely spoke to him after the early months of the Cultural Revolution. Rittenberg, in turn, played down the fact that Hatem had already been a Party member for almost a decade when he (Rittenberg) arrived at Yan’an. In any case, Hatem ‘wasn’t very political, or very involved in party life’, he claimed. Rewi Alley, according to Rittenberg, was ‘a crotchety New Zealander . . . two hundred per cent behind the party in public, testy and highly individualistic in private’.8 In contrast, the confident American effused about his own role: whether being part of the ‘elite team’ that polished Volume IV of Mao’s Selected Works, setting up a network to translate Anna Louise Strong’s Letters from China into other languages, or periodically meeting with senior officials. After his release from prison in 1955, the Chinesespeaking American had become a major official channel to the foreign residents, giving them occasional snippets of information, encouraging them to maintain their loyalty during the Sino-Soviet dispute, and generally attempting to keep them in line. ‘My star was rising,’ Rittenberg wrote of his situation in 1964.9 More broadly, there were tensions between those who tended towards what Nan Green called ‘holier-than-Maoism’ and those who were sometimes sceptical of the CCP’s frequent policy shifts. Gladys Yang and Bob Winter, who were close friends

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despite an age difference of thirty years, had little time for the true believers or ‘sunshiners’, as they called them. ‘She sits at the table of the group now known as the sunshiners,’ Gladys wrote scornfully of a new arrival in early 1966.10 Sometimes the long-termers engaged in competition for the allegiance of newcomers. When the niece of well-known British communist lawyer Jack Gaster arrived in Peking, Michael Shapiro warned her to stay well away from the Yangs.11 Political differences even among the most ardent had surfaced from the late 1950s as China’s relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated and eventually provoked a dramatic split in the international communist movement. For those who belonged to Western communist parties, the crisis came when those parties—apart from that of New Zealand—supported the Soviets. ‘It was awful. We were in a terrible dilemma, basically split in two,’ Isabel Crook commented on the British group.12 Michael Shapiro, regarded by both the CPGB and the Chinese as the group’s leader, supported the CCP and had an ugly falling out with the British party. By 1963 his correspondence with its president, Willie Gallacher, had reached breaking point. ‘You try to tell me from over there that something is rotten over here,’ Shapiro wrote. ‘You don’t have to guess what’s happened to me—I’ll tell you in a nutshell. I’ve stuck to communist principles.’13 The political crunch had also come for Alan Winnington, though in the opposite direction. Increasingly disenchanted with China, he had already approached the CPGB about leaving. Such a move, however, was complicated by the confiscation of his British passport because of his allegedly traitorous activities in North Korea. In mid-1960 he left China with his wife Esther and their two young children, bound not for Britain but for East Germany. (His passport was eventually restored in 1968.) In his memoir Breakfast with Mao, Winnington ridiculed Shapiro and some of the others. ‘They were self-programmed to succumb to the pervading air of ideological manipulation and they reformed themselves and others fervently.’14 For Nan Green, too, the British party won out. Quizzed in Peking on her loyalties, ‘my reply in all cases was that I was a member of the British Party and adhered to its “line”’. With the Chinese attempting to maintain the loyalty of their foreign comrades, Nan’s colleague and boss at China Reconstructs, Israel Epstein, took her out on a boat in Beihai Park and told her she should stay in China ‘for the rest of your life, Nan. You will be taken care of in your old age.’ Nan realized that the conversation was official, not personal, which ‘finally and decisively put my hackles up and decided me’. She wrote to the CPGB asking that it ‘send for her’.15 Her husband Ted Brake, with whom her relationship had deteriorated, stayed on in China a few years longer. The Sino-Soviet rift had a different and somewhat convoluted outcome for David and Isabel Crook, who had already thought about leaving China on more than one occasion. According to Isabel, ‘David thought our main job was to help the British party’ and in 1959 they finally made up their minds to leave. As they were planning

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their departure over the summer of 1960, though, the Soviet Union suddenly withdrew its specialists and the rift with China was out in the open. ‘If we left at that point, it would have looked as though we were supporting the Russians against China, so we asked if we could stay. I was delighted, but I think David was disappointed.’ The split in the international communist movement was distressing, but the Cultural Revolution just a few years later was the most traumatic period of the foreign comrades’ years in Mao’s China. As Mao’s attacks on alleged class enemies within the CCP and China at large intensified during the second half of 1966, it was no longer a matter of pledging loyalty to one communist party or another but whether one should become involved at all. The first rift came when a few of the old hands, including George Hatem and Rewi Alley, argued that foreigners should stay out of China’s internal politics. ‘George had good reasons for his attitude,’ Sidney Shapiro told me. ‘He’d been through the Party’s rectification movement in the early 1940s when he himself was under suspicion as a foreigner. He thought “oh no, here we go again”, and told his friends to stay out of it.’

Old friends George Hatem (left) and Rewi Alley, pictured here in 1973, had urged foreigners not to become involved in the Cultural Revolution. (Edgar Snow Collections KC: 19/27/00, 4, George Hatem Collection, UMKC University Archives)

But participating in a truly revolutionary movement was exactly what some had been waiting for. ‘Mao said that in a revolution everyone had to choose  .  .  . I  had made my choice,’ Sidney Rittenberg later wrote, while Israel Epstein maintained: ‘To move in step with revolution had been my choice since boyhood.’16 David Crook,

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on leave with his family overseas for only the second time in two decades, was ‘eager to return and take part in this earth-shaking movement in the land we had lived in for the last twenty years’.17 These were no youthful, starry-eyed idealists, but middleaged men who sometimes had children the ages of Mao’s Red Guards. Crook was 57, Epstein 51, and Sidney Rittenberg somewhat younger at 45. The Chinese, though, initially signalled that, as Hatem and Alley argued, the Cultural Revolution was a purely domestic matter. When dazibao (big character posters) started appearing at the Foreign Languages Press in June 1966, the rooms where they were located (including even the dining room) had notices on the doors: ‘No admittance to foreign friends.’18 But if Chinese people were writing dazibao to express their views, why shouldn’t foreigners do the same? The initiative came from Joan Hinton who, following her family’s transfer from the dairy farm to Peking, was unimpressed by the foreign residents’ privileges and their marginalization from Chinese political life. Joan mobilized her husband Sid Engst, sister-in-law Bertha Sneck (Hinton) and a recently arrived American foreign expert friend, Ann  Thomkins, to help draft a poster which was polished in accurate Chinese by Bertha’s 16-year-old daughter Carma.19 The dazibao revealed publicly the private grievances held by at least some longtermers about their treatment by officialdom. Couched in CCP-style numerical discourse, the authors complained that foreigners experienced five ‘have nots’ and ‘two haves’. The five ‘have nots’, which focused on their isolation from everyday life Maoist-style, were physical labour, ideological remoulding, contact with workers and peasants, participation in class struggle, and participation in production struggle. The ‘two haves’, expressed in less politicized language, were high living standards and special treatment. ‘What kind of thought is behind this treatment?’ the poster asked rhetorically. ‘This is Khrushchevism, this is revisionist thinking, this is class exploitation!’ The signatories demanded the complete dismantling of foreigners’ special treatment and their full participation in Chinese political and economic life.20 But when the dazibao was displayed at the Foreign Languages Press and the Foreign Experts Bureau on 29 August, it provoked controversy among foreign residents. ‘Many posters went up in the Youyi for and against the poster,’ Canadian Dorise  Nielsen reported.21 Not all agreed with the signatories’ demands, as Gladys Yang wrote in a letter. ‘A scathing one has just gone up accusing them of being un-Marxist and slagging the CPC [Communist Party of China], and saying if foreigners get paid more than they need they can donate it to a worthy cause, don’t have to buy furs and jewels etc., and supporting this with copious quotations from Lenin and Mao.’22 Less than two weeks after the dazibao became public, its authors—together with the Epsteins, who had put up a supporting poster—were called to a meeting with Foreign Minister Chen Yi. To their surprise, they were informed that Chairman Mao himself had seen the poster and expressed his basic agreement with it.23 Although

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word of the meeting got around, it was not until four months later, on 28 January, that Chen Yi held a meeting of Western and other foreign experts to present the government’s formal and more cautious response. The foreigners might have different views, he said. Those who so wished could attend political meetings, participate in physical labour, reduce their wages, and have their children treated in the same way as Chinese. They may also have the same living accommodation, except that ‘special care should be exercised as regards the provision of sanitation’—a proviso that astutely recognized foreigners’ sensibilities.24 The statement that most enthused some of the long-termers, though, was that foreigners would be permitted to form their own political organizations and establish contact with ‘certain’ Chinese organizations (though not with right-wing or ‘reactionary’ ones).25 The activists had actually anticipated Chen Yi’s statement by already establishing a group they called the Bethune-Yan’an Rebel Regiment. Its membership eventually totalled some ninety people: Western and other foreign long-term residents, as well as some of the more politicized short-term foreign experts who were still in China. The subsequent events, which were later described by several of the participants— most perceptively by ‘radical’ foreign experts David and Nancy Milton in their book The Wind Will Not Subside—were as convoluted as they were intense.26 From the start, members had varying agendas: some wanted to focus on their full integration into Chinese society in accordance with the demands made in the dazibao, others on participating wholeheartedly in the Cultural Revolution. Even those who were keen on political participation disagreed on how far they should support rebel political groups about which they knew very little. ‘What I did not foresee was the rapid advance into ruinous factionalism,’ Israel Epstein later admitted,27 although he and Michael Shapiro, with Sidney Rittenberg reportedly pulling the strings behind the scenes, led a radical takeover of the group’s original broadly based leadership. At one meeting in early August, according to Canadian Dorise Nielsen, ‘open struggle broke out. Some people left the meeting in disgust . . . Rittenberg was forced to go to the podium to try and restore order, but he failed. The meeting broke up in disorder.’28 As the Miltons saw it, the radicals then ‘proceeded to involve themselves in a larger politics which proved to be their undoing’, while often acting in the name of the Bethune-Yan’an Rebel Regiment.29 Of all the Western residents, Ritttenberg became involved at the highest level. After what the Miltons described as ‘a complex and involuted series of power seizures and counter power seizures’ at Radio Peking, Rittenberg actually became head of a three-man committee running this key propaganda organ on behalf of the radicals on the Cultural Revolution Group that was directing the political movement as a whole. But after Rittenberg’s main patron, Wang Li, lost his influence in the factional struggle within the group, the American also lost

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his position. Not all the foreigners were sorry to see Rittenberg in trouble. ‘He has climbed so high, and fallen so low,’ proclaimed one dazibao at the Friendship Hotel.30 In January 1968, almost exactly a year after foreigners were told they could become involved in the Cultural Revolution, the CCP Central Committee decided they should no longer participate. According to a later statement by Zhou Enlai, ‘some had supported this faction and some that’ in a situation where ‘bad people were stirring up trouble’.31 The foreigners now had to face the fact that, as the Miltons expressed it, they had ‘encroached on the intimate world of a family fight’.32 For years, the foreign comrades had publicly supported the PRC and spoken out against imperialism. But the oft-cited official distinction between ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ foreigners was becoming increasingly blurred in the mounting political hysteria. In the same month as foreigners were removed from the political movement, word went around about a speech by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who said ‘we must watch out for foreign spies’. There were spies, she reportedly claimed, ‘who had come into China for many years, even before Liberation, but they had been pretending to be friends and experts working for us’.33 David Crook had already been ‘kidnapped’, some three months earlier, by the faction at the Foreign Languages Institute opposed to the one that he supported. Initially his friends thought it was a misunderstanding. But his subsequent imprisonment and accusations that he was an imperialist spy reflected the growing xenophobia and spy mania of the Cultural Revolution. Isabel Crook, angered and puzzled by the allegations, wrote to the authorities stating that she had always shared in his activities: ‘If he is a spy, then I must be one too.’ Her challenge backfired. She was not imprisoned but later detained in a room on campus for some three years. In early 1968 the main activists were incarcerated. Rittenberg was detained on 21 February, having been under house arrest since late December. Almost a month later, Epstein, his wife Elsie and Michael Shapiro were also arrested. ‘What had happened to me, and why?’ Epstein asked himself. ‘For years I had been keen to help China’s Revolution. Personally long-known to its leaders, editor of one of its publications, I had followed its stated logic at every turn . . . Yet here I was suddenly, in jail.’34 The net spread well beyond the activists. On the night of 1 May, Gladys Yang was detained. The arrest of her husband Xianyi half an hour earlier was not wholly unexpected; he had already been the target of denunciations at the Foreign Languages Press. But Gladys had played little part in the political dramas and her friends were puzzled. With the authorities’ investigations extending to the pre-Communist era, Xianyi thought the accusations against the couple as imperialist spies may have harked back to their friendship with the British military attaché in Nanjing before the CCP victory. Sidney Shapiro, Gladys’s close colleague at the Foreign Languages Press, had a different explanation. ‘Gladys loved her drink, and when she was drunk she said something sarcastic about Mao. It immediately spread—here was this foreigner

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Israel Epstein and Elsie Fairfax Cholmeley are greeted by their patron Song Qingling at a function in 1962 marking the tenth anniversary of China Reconstructs. Six years later both foreign comrades were in prison. (Israel Epstein, My China Eye)

speaking scornfully and impolitely about our great leader Mao Zedong.’ Nor were Gladys’s letters abroad, even after the start of the Cultural Revolution, quite as discreet as they might have been. Unlike many Chinese, Westerners were usually spared humiliating public denunciations. One exception was Grace Liu, living on the campus of Nankai University in Tianjin where she taught English. After being criticized on posters and in loudspeaker broadcasts, the 67-year-old (still not fully recovered from a breast cancer operation) was escorted to the university’s main auditorium. The scene was witnessed by her 26-year-old son William. Up on the stage two young women guards brought my mother forward, holding her by her arms, one pushing her head down, the other pulling her arms up . . . ‘We are here to repudiate this heinous American spy and counter-revolutionary, Grace Liu!’ shouted the leader . . . Some in the crowd rose to their feet and raised fists in an aggressive gesture of condemnation as they shouted agreement.35

Grace’s ‘crime’ was to have written letters to a Swiss friend, Olga Li, who taught German at the Foreign Languages Institute in Peking. ‘My mother could be very outspoken,’ William told me. ‘I tried to censor the letters she wrote overseas. But I didn’t read the ones she wrote to Olga.’36 Olga, whose Chinese husband had died several years earlier, was herself detained for allegedly supplying information to the Swiss embassy. Three days after the public denunciation, Grace was returned to the bungalow she shared with William, but within a few days they were both moved to a small

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room, about 10 by 10 feet, on another part of the campus. At least they were allowed to take their books with them, leading to an incongruous incident at a time when Western culture—from literature to gramophone records—was being physically destroyed. ‘Both of my jailers were former English students,’ William recounted. ‘One of them asked to “borrow” the copy of Arthur Hailey’s Hotel and during the day, while I was supposed to be writing my denunciation materials, he would ask me to explain various English idioms he encountered in the book.’37 No one, it seemed, was untouchable. Already over 80, Bob Winter survived the early onslaught but later had his house on the Beida campus ransacked by Red Guards who smashed his precious collection of Western classical music records. They also trampled his much-loved garden, telling him ‘you can’t eat flowers’. After being left alone for a few months, he was summoned to a meeting, told he had ‘committed heinous crimes’, and locked in a small room on campus to write his confession. Three  months and 1,200 pages of confession later, he was released, but not before being reminded of the major crime to which he had not confessed: that he had been an imperialist spy in pre-revolutionary China. ‘I’d been named in the confession of a fellow American who had spent four years in jail in the early 1950s,’ he told me over a decade later. The American was Fulbright scholar Allyn Rickett, an alleged imperialist spy who had been told to name all the foreigners with whom he had had contact in China.38 According to Joan Hinton, things got to the stage where ‘you had to call people up and see if they still answered the phone to figure out if they had been grabbed or not’.39 Many were nervous, particularly those who, like Joshua and Miriam Horn, had been actively involved. ‘My parents were very disturbed by all of this,’ Jessica commented. ‘When each person was taken away, my father said: “Well, we could be taken any time now.” I don’t really understand why they weren’t. Maybe my father’s organization protected him.’ 40 The arrested Westerners were held in Qincheng Prison, the main gaol for political prisoners which was located on Peking’s north-west outskirts. Even in prison the foreigners received differential treatment. While Chinese political prisoners, including Yang Xianyi, often shared overcrowded and unsanitary cells, the foreigners had private cells—or were placed in solitary confinement depending on how one viewed it. For much of their incarceration, reading matter was limited to the four-volume Selected Works of Chairman Mao, the little red book of Mao’s quotations, and—for those who could read Chinese—the Party newspaper, People’s Daily. They had no contact at all with other prisoners and virtually the only opportunity for verbal communication occurred during the regular interrogation sessions when they were pressured to admit that they were indeed ‘imperialist spies’. ‘What made it possible to live through years of solitary confinement?’ Israel Epstein asked in his autobiography, My China Eye. As the months went by, he established

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‘self-devised’ routines, both physical and mental: taijiquan exercises, re-reading in memory major books that had influenced him, telling himself Jewish jokes, humming songs and melodies.41 Gladys Yang talked to herself, something she had trouble stopping even after her release, and recited poetry out loud, wishing that she had learnt more off by heart.42 David Crook slowly taught himself to read Chinese with the aid of his bilingual copy of the little red book and later, when it was allowed, a ChineseEnglish dictionary.43 All spent a lot of time worrying about what was happening to other members of their family with whom they were allowed no contact. Most of the imprisoned Westerners were released as China emerged from the extreme years of the Cultural Revolution and extended an olive branch to Western countries. Gladys Yang was freed in March 1972 after almost four years’ detention; Xianyi had been released a few days earlier and told to prepare their flat for his wife’s return. Conditions gradually improved for David Crook, Michael Shapiro and the Epsteins, with better food, more reading material and even the occasional visit from their families, though they had to wait until January 1973 to be released. Sidney Rittenberg remained in prison, accused of having become entangled with the activities of an ‘anti-Party clique’. 44 It might seem surprising that, despite their Cultural Revolution experiences—whether in prison or simply surviving in the hostile environment—most of the long-term residents stayed on in the PRC. ‘Old friends and new asked me why I did not leave China after “the Chinese” had treated me the way they did,’ David Crook asked rhetorically. His response that ‘it was not “the Chinese” but Chinese enemies of China’, a classic CCP formula for evading responsibility for actions it later repudiated, provided justification for maintaining his communist beliefs—in spite of everything. At the same time, he admitted there were practicalities to consider. ‘My work was here; most of my friends were here . . . In China, I felt, I could do the most useful work now that I was no longer young.’45 A few did leave, or had already left following the imprisonment of some of their colleagues. In 1969, after spending fifteen years in China, the Horns decided to return to Britain. Jessica, who had spent most of her childhood and all of her teens in the PRC, was 21, her elder brother David 25. For all of their parents’ political idealism, the decision to leave China—like the one to go to China fifteen years earlier—was triggered by medical issues. ‘The most important reason we left was that my mother was very ill and wanted to go back to England,’ Jessica recalled. As the PRC’s relations with the United States began emerging from the deep freeze following Nixon’s visit to China and the establishment of small liaison offices in Peking and Washington, a few American women whose Chinese husbands had died decided to leave, even though it sometimes meant painful separation from one or more family members. In failing health, 75-year-old Grace Liu left in 1974 with

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her unmarried son William, keen to rekindle contact with the relatives she had not seen for forty years. Her two daughters, both married to Chinese, remained in China. A few members of the second generation also left in the first half of the 1970s, even if a parent or parents stayed on. After participating in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, which for some included travelling around the country ‘making revolution’ with their fellow students, most found themselves in local factories making machine tools or doing truck repairs. When Bill Hinton visited China in mid-1971, he took 21-year-old Carma back to the United States with him. She returned to Peking briefly but then moved to the US to have the university education she was missing out on in China. In 1974, Carma’s cousin 22-year-old Fred Engst set off alone for the United States, initially joining his Uncle Bill’s second family on their farm in Pennsylvania.

Crook brothers Carl (third from left) and Paul (second from right) with fellow-workers at Peking’s No.1 Automobile Repair Factory. (Courtesy of Crook family)

The Crook sons began thinking about leaving China even while their father was still in prison and their mother under detention. ‘About 1971 I decided I’d had enough,’ Michael told me. ‘I was twenty and I wanted an education. There was a new programme for training doctors and I applied—but I was rejected. That made me very, very cross.’ His application for an exit permit to leave China, though, was not approved, and the three brothers were still in Peking when their father was released in January 1973. (Isabel had been freed from detention the previous year.) David had the impression that his sons thought him ‘slightly mad’ for continuing to support the Communist Party. When Carl went out one day leaving a half-finished letter on the table, he couldn’t resist reading it. ‘He doesn’t even know how to read between the lines of the newspaper,’ Carl had written. ‘Simply takes it at face value. It’s pathetic.’46

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Carl, Michael and Paul left a few months later, having finally been granted exit permits. They all eventually made it to university: Michael and Paul in Britain and Carl in the United States. And all three became middle-class professionals, an outcome that would please most parents—but not theirs. ‘My naive, ultra-leftist hopes of having three proletarian sons were dashed,’ David Crook wrote in his autobiography. ‘In justice to myself I may say that Isabel had held those hopes more ardently than I.’47 Like David and Isabel, most of the senior generation stayed on in China to watch the unfolding of a new phase in the nation’s history, in many cases having personally witnessed both the beginning and end of the Mao era. During those twentyseven years, they had served ‘new China’, brought up families, survived internecine conflicts, and in a few cases spent several years in gaol. It had not always been easy to remain a true believer, David acknowledged. ‘My faith was maintained for decades in China by individual and collective study.’48 With writers like Frank Dikötter, Jung Chang and John Halliday now vividly presenting some of the horrors of Mao’s China to Western readers, it would be easy to dismiss the resident foreign comrades as seriously misguided and heavily blinkered, even if they were not fully aware of what was happening at the time.49 This underestimates the hopes that they, like many Chinese people, held for the country’s future under communism, as well as the extent to which—in a confined environment far removed from the West—they became caught up in the politics of the moment, the work they were doing, and the sheer practicalities of day-to-day living. And even if some had their faith in Chinese communism shaken, or if it had never been as strong as that of the Crooks, moving elsewhere did not always seem a viable option— whether for family, economic or political reasons.

Part II POW ‘turncoats’

4 Choosing China

On 24 February 1954, twenty-one American GIs and a British marine crossed the border from North Korea into the PRC. The former prisoners-of-war had chosen to live in Mao’s China rather than to be repatriated to the United States or Britain. More than four thousand Americans and almost one thousand Britons had already gone home.1 This small footnote to the Korean War came to renewed public attention in the 2005 Canadian documentary They Chose China. Its director, Shuibo Wang, had grown up in Jinan where he remembered seeing his first foreigner, ‘as alien to me as a creature from outer space’, riding a bicycle down the street. That foreigner, formerly US Army Private James Veneris, and most of the others had died by the time Wang made the film. But he was able to bring the former POWs’ experience to life through interviews with two of the men’s families and Chinese and American archival footage. Publicity for the documentary described the men as ‘courageous’; their more common label was ‘turncoats’. In some ways, this small group of former POWs provides a postscript to the previous chapters. Like some of the foreign comrades, they moved to China in the Cold War environment of the 1950s, a number married Chinese women, and a few worked in the same organizations. But the POWs were far less prepared for life in Mao’s China. Their decision to live in the PRC was made in isolated prison camps and they lacked either a lengthy commitment to socialism or a strong cultural identification with China. Even communist correspondent Alan Winnington, who helped to ‘educate’ the POWs about China, acknowledged that not one of the men ‘fully realised the difficulty of settling in a new country so different from their own’.2 If they couldn’t settle, they potentially faced even greater tribulations than other foreign comrades when they returned to the McCarthyist United States and even to Britain—not just as alleged traitors but as deserters. Both the men’s reasons for going to China and their reception if they went home are an integral part of their story. Who were these twenty-two men and why did they choose China? All but one were regular servicemen, not reservists or draftees. The most senior of the Americans, 26-year-old Sergeant Richard Cordon, was recognized as the men’s leader.

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Briton  Andrew Condron was a royal marine in the highly regarded 41 Independent Commando. Nineteen of the men were white and three African-American. Their average age was 23; the oldest, 32-year-old James Veneris and 29-year-old Howard Adams, were both veterans of the Pacific Campaign in World War II. Three of the men were only 20 and the youngest, David Hawkins, had enlisted at 16 and been captured at 17.3 The twenty-two men had spent from two to three years in POW camps in North Korea, right on the Chinese border. Over half were captured by Chinese troops in just three days, between 30 November and 2 December 1950, during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir which was described at the time as one of the biggest defeats in American military history. Most of the men had endured the exceptionally harsh winter of 1950–51 when many of their fellow soldiers died during the enforced march to the POW camps. Initially run by the North Korean army, the camps had come under Chinese control from mid-1951. The US government and media, shocked that any soldier would choose ‘red China’ ahead of the ‘free world’, had a simple explanation for the men’s defection: they had been brainwashed to become communists. Newspaper and magazine articles featured headlines such as ‘Fruits of Brainwashing’ and ‘Brain-washed Korean POWs’.4 In her book 22 Stayed, written after visiting the men’s relatives soon after their defection, journalist Virginia Pasley declared: The story of how the Chinese Reds subjugated twenty-two prisoners-of-war to the point where they refused to come home, is a horror story without relief . . . of how the compassionate techniques of modern psychiatry are perverted to the cold business of changing an individual into a utility.5

What did the men themselves say about why they rejected repatriation and went to China? The most detailed personal accounts of their experiences were produced by white American Morris Wills, African-American Clarence Adams, and Briton Andrew Condron. Both Wills and Adams wrote books (Adams’s was published posthumously). Condron wrote a series of articles and later taped over four hours of interviews with the Imperial War Museum in London. Supplementing these men’s accounts were shorter personal accounts and interviews. Each publication had its own agenda, of course, and interviews were subject to distortion by the media in the Cold War environment. Whatever the individual differences in the men’s explanations, there was a common theme that to some extent accorded with the emotive accusations of brainwashing. After taking over the camps from the North Korean army, the Chinese pursued their so-called leniency policy which, instead of punishing soldiers as the enemy, was directed at convincing them of the superiority of communism and the evils of their own government. The United States and Britain admitted that their soldiers had not

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been trained for this type of POW experience. In the words of one British intelligence officer: ‘The treatment they received in Korea caught them completely unprepared.’6 The twenty-two men were among an estimated 5–10 per cent of all American and British POWs who became what the Chinese called ‘progressives’. When mass ideological education had limited results, the Communists’ propaganda efforts focused on those who were demonstrating progressive tendencies. The men participated in small group ideological study sessions and were encouraged to use the camp libraries. ‘Of course the books were selected by the Chinese,’ Clarence Adams commented. ‘Most were by Russian and Chinese writers.’ There were also works on Marxist theory and communist pamphlets and newspapers, including the American and British Daily Worker. ‘Among the few Western authors were Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Jack London, and W. E. B. du Bois, whom I later met in China. The Chinese considered these writers to be Progressives who exposed the dark side of capitalism.’7 ‘The more I read in the library, the more I was convinced,’ Morris Wills wrote of his changing views. ‘Well, my God, this is just the thing that is needed. Equality for everyone. Everything’s organized, planned, secure. On paper, it looks very nice, especially to someone who doesn’t know anything about it.’8 Andrew Condron recalled: ‘I read these things—just for something to read, and became more interested in what they had to say . . . They were answering questions that I had had consciously, or subconsciously, most of my life.’9 For two years or more, the men were presented with uncontested images of Communist China as a society that was peace-loving, egalitarian, offered opportunities for education and work, and lacked the belligerence, crime and racism of the United States. There was only one way to find out whether this was true. ‘Personally, I went to China to compare what I’d heard with what they actually practiced in China. I went because I was very curious by nature,’ David Hawkins explained.10 While Condron was impressed by what he had seen of the Chinese in the camp and become interested in Marxism, he admitted that he ‘knew very well that what I’d been reading about was the theory, not necessarily the same as practice. Well, it might be an idea to go to China.’11 For the three African-Americans, there was a strong racial element that was highlighted during the men’s ideological education in Korea. ‘White, Sullivan and I had our own reasons for going to China,’ Clarence Adams wrote. ‘We wanted to escape the racism we had suffered in our own country and in the military as well. We also wanted an education, a decent job, and to be treated with respect.’ Adams, the only one of the three from the segregated south, added: ‘I wanted to be treated like a human being instead of something subhuman.’12 There were also strong disincentives for returning to the United States—or even to Britain. To Western governments the men were collaborators, making them liable to prosecution. Certainly they were far from being the only POWs who were later

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given this label. In his book Why They Collaborated, Eugene Kinkead estimated that almost one out of every three Americans prisoners collaborated in some way with the Communists who, in his words, treated the POWs with ‘a highly novel blend of leniency and pressure’.13 The progressives, though, were the most collaborative of all the POWs, and the twenty-two ‘turncoats’ collaborated more than most of the other progressives. Their activities including writing pro-communist articles for the camp publication Towards Truth and Peace, making recordings for communist broadcasts, circulating peace petitions, and serving on various camp subcommittees. Andrew Condron became deputy to the Chinese head of the main committee running Camp 5, where most progressives were eventually concentrated, and ‘the chief political stooge in the camp’ as a British intelligence officer saw it.14 The men were only too aware that they would be in trouble with their government if they returned home. ‘I knew I would face a court-martial and likely a dishonourable discharge, if not worse,’ Clarence Adams later commented, while William Cowart claimed the main reason he declined repatriation was that he ‘feared political persecution in the United States’.15 The fears were not unfounded. Even the two Americans who changed their minds at the last moment about going to China were sentenced to twenty years and ten years for collaboration, although this was eventually reduced to four and three and a half years. Overall, 240 of the more than 4,000 Americans repatriated from North Korea were seriously investigated, though only fourteen were eventually tried for collaboration; all but three were convicted. The British returnees were all interviewed by A19 (Prisoner of War Intelligence) but, in the words of one of the interrogators, there was no ‘wave of premature prosecutions against collaborators’ as occurred in the United States.16 The Chinese themselves played a role, though a somewhat ambivalent one, in the men’s decision against repatriation. Overall, the aim of the leniency policy was not to encourage POWs to ‘defect’ but to imbue them with political views that they would promote in their own countries, helping the spread of communism and hopefully world revolution. But the armistice agreement of 27 July 1953 included the ‘voluntary repatriation’ of POWs, insisted on by the Americans because of the large number of North Korean and Chinese POWs who did not want to be repatriated. With so many men going over to the other side, the defection of even a small number of Americans and Britons would be a useful counter-propaganda measure. ‘Somebody came to talk to us,’ David Hawkins recalled. ‘He said that part of the agreement was that those prisoners-of-war who did not want to go back home could choose a country. They could go wherever they wanted to go—if that country would have them.’17 China was the country that came into, or was put into, the men’s minds. Making the final decision, though, was not easy. ‘I constantly thought about home and my mother, but the America of my youth seemed so very far away,’ Clarence Adams recalled.18 Andy Condron remembered spending ‘a whole day in solitude on the banks

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of the Yalu River, with China on the opposite bank, debating with myself. And after a huge soul-searching, I made my decision.’19 Morris Wills also prevaricated—until he finally had to decide by the following day. ‘I hardly slept that night . . . Sometime in the early morning, I remember well, I gave myself five minutes to make up my mind—the final decision. At the end of that five minutes, I decided I would go.’ 20 On 24 September the Chinese had their propaganda coup when Xinhua published a joint statement by the Americans, plus a separate statement from Condron, about why they were refusing repatriation. The Americans’ statement read, in part: When we were captured and treated more like friends than POWs some of us thought at first that was ‘just propaganda’. But now we know that we caught a glimpse of a society where there is no contradiction between what is preached and what is practised, a society where there is freedom for our ideas. Under the American ‘way of life’ we are given lots of high-sounding statements about peace and freedom but in action both are trampled underfoot.21

The language was characteristic of Chinese Communist discourse, the work of journalists Alan Winnington and Wilfred Burchett who had made a number of visits to the POW camps. Even then, the men’s decision was not irreversible. Like other POWs refusing repatriation, including 327 South Koreans and over 22,000 North Koreans, they had to spend ninety days in a neutral zone in case they changed their minds. Before the end of the ninety days, two of the Americans left the group: Claude Batchelor, who had received a pleading letter from his Japanese wife, and Edward Dickenson. There was another thirty-day period of grace before the decision was final.

Off to prepare for their new lives, 29 January 1954. From left: Albert Belhomme, Clarence Adams, Andrew Condron, John Dunn. (Getty Images)

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On 29 January 1954, the remaining twenty-two men appeared at a press conference at Panmunjom (the site of the truce talks) which was attended by Chinese and Western reporters. They marched into the conference carrying banners proclaiming ‘We stay for peace’ and ‘This was U.S. war’. Richard Cordon read out a lengthy statement and the other men each made a brief comment. The reporters were then permitted to ask questions. According to Morris Wills, he and the others had been trained by Burchett and Winnington on ‘how to answer them. We were to stress the McCarthy theme and imperialism and peace . . . They were pretty much what we had expected.’ 22 At the conclusion of the press conference, the men boarded two Soviet trucks decorated with large banners proclaiming ‘Down with McCarthyism’ and ‘We stay for Peace’ and drove off. The men looked relaxed, at least outwardly, as their train crossed the Yalu River on 24 February and travelled across north-east China. Dressed in newly made Westernstyle suits, they were filmed smoking and laughing; Morris Wills played the guitar. Although Wills later commented that the Chinese ‘really didn’t know what to do with us’,23 they did know that they wanted to avoid concentrating the men in Peking where there were embassies and a few other Westerners. They continued on to the industrial city of Taiyuan, some two hundred miles south-west of the capital. To Wills, ‘it was as though we had entered the U.S. at New York and been sent to a city in Wyoming’.24 In Taiyuan there was an official welcome, duly filmed for propaganda purposes, and what Clarence Adams described as a ‘tremendous banquet. In my entire life I have never seen so much food.’25 The men’s new home, albeit temporary, was a grey brick building in a typical walled compound where they lived two or three to a room. For the next eight months they had Chinese language classes and were given lectures on the history of the CCP, the nation’s economic and social development, and China’s international relations (Alan Winnington gave a lecture on Vietnam). On the heels of their general ideological education came the intense criticismand-self-criticism sessions that the men had already experienced before leaving Korea. The sessions were characteristic of Chinese ‘thought reform’, already used by the Communists on their own soldiers, former Nationalist soldiers, political prisoners, and even some imprisoned foreigners. In the West the procedure became popularly known as ‘brainwashing’ after American journalist and intelligence agent Edward Hunter coined the term in 1950. Robert Lifton and Edgar Schein individually developed the concept in their respective books (Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and Coercive Persuasion) on the experiences of Korean War POWs. As Morris Wills described the experience: ‘The Communists try to put a repellent layer on your mind to repel all sort of non-Marxist ideas and temptations.’ Not only were the men criticized; they had to criticize one another.

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Each small group gets together every day. You sit there from morning till night. Every member of every group must confess his sins and every member must criticize every other member . . . And you have to criticize everyone—for something. You cannot remain silent. You have to speak against the others. You can’t just sit there. When it’s your turn you’ve got to say something. If you fail to criticize a person, they will blast you for that . . . Once it’s over, you feel better. A sense of exhilaration comes over you. You walk out feeling that you have cleansed yourself. You really feel close to them. You feel that you have been wrong. You have repented.26

The men’s stay in Taiyuan was interrupted by a group visit to Peking for the May  Day parade in Tiananmen Square. Wearing their Western suits once again, the men were on show in the stand reserved for dignitaries. Twenty-seven-year-old Rufus Douglas, though, did not make it to the capital. Diagnosed with a heart condition, he had been hospitalized soon after the men’s arrival in Taiyuan. His condition worsened and on 22 June he died, shocking the remaining twenty-one. The Chinese insisted on organizing a Christian funeral which Morris Wills thought ‘was ironical because we all considered ourselves rather Marxist in those days’.27 After almost eight months in Taiyuan, the men were considered ready to lead regular lives. Their overall welfare was in the hands of the Red Cross Society of China which, while under firm political control, maintained contact with the international committee of the Red Cross and some of its national organizations. At the everyday level, the men were subject to the authority of their danwei (work unit), like other resident foreigners as well as Chinese people. The dual authority was to have some advantages for the men. Whenever they were dissatisfied with their danwei they appealed to the Red Cross—and vice versa. As Morris Wills expressed it: ‘In time we learned to play one organization against another.’28 Before leaving Korea, the men had been told they would be able to choose whether they wanted to work or to study in China. While there was some element of choice, towards the end of their time in Taiyuan they were tested on what they had learnt and on their aptitude for further studies. Three were sent to a farm in Henan province, about a hundred miles south of Kaifeng, to work as tractor technicians. Seven went to a paper-making factory in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Despite their limited formal education, the other eleven men were selected for two years’ study at Renmin University in Peking, established in 1950 with a strong focus on ideological education. They shared rooms on the top floor of a student dormitory building and ate in the same dining hall as a few students from Eastern Europe. The men received 90 yuan (approx. US$25) a month, the standard government scholarship for foreign students, most of which they spent on food and cigarettes. Their studies were characteristic of those for students from friendly foreign countries doing

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preparatory university courses: Chinese language together with Chinese history and politics, as well as ideological education. Prominent British journalist James Cameron was surprised when, on a short visit to China soon after the men’s arrival, his Chinese minders allowed him to meet Andy Condron —and even more surprised when the Scot suggested that he ‘come home and meet the lads’, obviously with official endorsement.29 Having read about the men as ‘communists’ and ‘traitors’, Cameron was nonplussed when he met them in one of the dormitory rooms, ‘sitting around the camp bed beside the stoves, studying books of characters, mending their cotton-padded suits against the cold’. It looked like any scene out of an American campus movie. They grinned, they hi-ya’ed, they made room on the beds  .  .  . It was wholly unreal. There was no practical way of explaining it. They were not Young Communists of the familiar pattern; they spoke never a word of politics nor asked one question about the things I must know and they not; they sat there in the desolate heart of this remote planet, buried, it might be, forever in this insulated political vacuum and they talked like second-year students of Princeton and Glasgow and Durham and St. Andrews. 30

As the eleven former POWs approached the end of their language studies—and in some cases before the two years were up—there was a further selection process that dispersed another seven of the men away from the capital. Two were sent to the paper factory in Jinan and five to the central Chinese city of Wuhan: two to an auto repair factory and three to Wuhan University for further studies. In Peking, Andy Condron was assigned to the Foreign Languages Institute to teach English, adding a Scottish flavour to the British and Canadian English that students were learning from David and Isabel Crook. Two others stayed on at Renmin University and Morris Wills, who had shown the greatest aptitude for Chinese, went to Peking University (Beida), China’s premier tertiary institution. It had all been a bit of a lottery. The three men sent directly to the farm in Henan found themselves sharing the hardships of local peasants. Economic historian Jean-Luc Domenach portrayed Henan in the 1950s as economically backward, isolated from the more dynamic coastal areas, and plagued by poverty, unemployment and illiteracy.31 The men’s main ‘privilege’, a 50 yuan (around US$15) monthly wage subsidy, was more than the average Chinese working wage but did little to alleviate the poor conditions or the sense of isolation. Following mounting complaints, they were transferred to an agricultural implements factory in Kaifeng, still in Henan province but at least providing an urban environment. Even a provincial capital like Jinan, though, seemed ‘remote and primitive’ to Morris Wills when he visited the men at the paper factory in 1957. As he described it, his fellow Americans ‘did their eight hours of drudgery each day at the factory and rode back home by bicycle’. In the evening they ‘would lie around with their ears

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glued to the Voice of America—it was the only thing they had from the outside world’. The men questioned Wills about his situation in Peking, which he acknowledged ‘was much better than theirs’.32 Declassified documents in the Chinese Foreign Ministry archives reveal a picture of growing disquiet among the men, who told the factory they wanted better food and living conditions. They also asked for more money, even though some of their Chinese fellow workers were already complaining about the 50 yuan monthly subsidy. The men fell out completely with their Red Cross minder/interpreter, Wang Shuihua, whom they accused of being obstructive and vindictive, only to be threatened with the withdrawal of the existing subsidy. Tensions flared into open conflict, with Lowell  Skinner reportedly punching the factory’s Party secretary on the nose and even getting into a fight with the local police commissioner. He was then accused of raping a young Chinese woman and sent to prison. (‘Rape’ had very broad connotations in China, covering everything from having sex outside marriage to actual rape.) Some of the other men, including Howard Adams, spent short periods in detention for allegedly behaving like ‘hooligans’. When reports of the deteriorating situation reached the Ministry of Public Security in Peking it launched an investigation, eventually concluding that some of the cases had been ‘handled inappropriately’. The provincial bureau was instructed to take a number of measures to calm the situation, which included releasing Skinner from prison as the case against him had not been proved. Although Adams had shown signs of ‘hooliganism’, the report stated, he had usually behaved well in the past and was to be ‘educated’ rather than incarcerated. The Red Cross was instructed to continue to pay the men’s 50 yuan monthly wage subsidy, while explaining the situation to their Chinese fellow workers. The ministry also concluded that Wang Shuihua’s behaviour towards the men had been inappropriate and that the Red Cross should ‘deal with him’.33 Peking’s intervention defused the ugly situation to some extent, but the men soon had more to worry about: the ‘hungry years’ of 1959–62 following the Great Leap Forward. When Andy Condron visited the men in 1960, having been warned by the Red Cross about the poor conditions in Jinan, he was appalled at their situation. ‘Some of them were showing signs of malnutrition—the puffy and unhealthy face, the skin disease.’ Not surprisingly, they eagerly devoured the coffee, butter and jam he had brought them. 34 Life for those in Peking, while austere, was much more comfortable than in the provinces. Even during the hungry years there was a reasonable amount of food for foreigners as the government attempted to conceal the famine from them. Like other Western residents, the former POWs had access to special rations. Condron later commented on his monthly allowance of two dozen eggs, a veritable luxury, while Wills received four pounds of meat and three pounds of cooking oil a month

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(compared with his Chinese wife’s token allowance of only two ounces of meat and three ounces of oil).35 The men in Peking were also less isolated. There were quite a few foreign students at Beida and Renmin University, mainly from the Soviet bloc but also the occasional leftist Western European. After all his ideological education, though, Morris  Wills thought they ‘didn’t seem very socialistic. They talked rather frankly, played jazz records and horsed around.’36 Having had a room of his own for a year, he was allocated a Soviet student named Sasha as a room-mate. ‘They probably wanted to put someone in with me who would help me to develop along Marxist lines,’ Wills later wrote, although Sasha tried to win him over to the Soviet side as his country’s relations with China deteriorated.37 After Sasha, Wills shared a room with Swedish student Per-Olow Leijon, who remembered him as ‘thoughtful and clever—by then his Chinese was very good’.38 For exercise, Wills played basketball and was soon known across the campus as ‘the American’ on the Beida basketball team. In Peking, too, there was the small community of Western residents, including American Bob Winter on the Beida campus and temporary political exiles Bill and Jane Hodes with their virtual open house for Americans and other Westerners. Even Wills succumbed. ‘We used to make a night of it—dancing, playing poker—indulging in all the “corrupt” things the Chinese were trying to do away with.’39 Another drawcard was Alan Winnington’s home, where the communist journalist hosted lively parties that provoked criticism from some of his foreign comrade colleagues. Andy Condron was a regular visitor, dropping in to ‘make himself what I believe is called a chip butty, fried potatoes with vinegar and salt between two slices of bread and butter’.40 It was Winnington who came to the rescue when Condron was told that he was being transferred to Wuhan after an angry confrontation with the Foreign Languages Institute over a thwarted romance. Still a member of the British communist party, Winnington tried to persuade the authorities to rescind the transfer. When that failed, he invited his young friend, now officially without a home or job, to move in with the Winnington family. The result was a standoff: the Chinese refused to withdraw the transfer and Condron continued to refuse to leave Peking. Eventually, the matter was solved unofficially with the stubborn Scot being directed to a small flat in central Peking and given some work polishing Chinese-English translations; from then on he worked as a freelance polisher. Following their graduation from universities in Peking and Wuhan in the early 1960s, Morris Wills, Clarence Adams and William White were all assigned to the Foreign Languages Press, where they polished and sometimes translated texts alongside a few of the long-term residents. Their salaries of around 250 yuan a month were at the lower end of the foreign experts scale, though more than twice the salary of a senior Chinese professor. With the Hodes and Winningtons now gone, things

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were somewhat quieter on the social front. There was bridge with Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi, who lived downstairs in the same block, and American Betty Chandler (who also worked at the press) became a close friend. Adams also found a social niche with the Cuban embassy, as well as with the Africans; Guinea established diplomatic relations with China in 1959 as did both Ghana and Mali in 1960. The Ghanaians were particularly welcoming and, for all of their government’s socialist character, held very lively parties. ‘We probably did too much drinking together,’ Adams later admitted.41 It was a two-way relationship: he also became a willing informant to the embassy, telling the Ghanaians what he knew about China and the Chinese. ‘I received no money for doing this, but when I  asked for something I got it. For example, when the embassy sent someone to Hong Kong, I’d ask him to pick up some Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch, Gordon’s Dry gin, and vermouth.’42 Diplomats could bring in goods without paying the usual hefty import duties, and there was a lively market in Peking for Western spirits. Ever since his youth in America’s segregated south, Adams had been enterprising and resilient. Working as a room service waiter at the top hotel in Memphis, he had charged US$5 for a bottle of whisky, having bought the whisky himself outside the hotel for $1.80. ‘I was a hustler, which meant I always knew where and how to make a buck.’43 Along with their long-termer colleagues, the men continued to be drawn into politics. With the escalation of the Vietnam War, they were mobilized to participate in meetings and demonstrations. Adams visited the Peking office of the Vietnam National Liberation Front and taped two broadcasts to black American soldiers in Vietnam. ‘You are supposed to be fighting for the freedom of the Vietnamese,’ he told them, ‘but what kind of freedom do you have at home?’ Adams controversially urged the men not to fight in Vietnam but to return home and fight for equality.44 The former POWs encountered a very different society from the one where, only seven or eight years earlier, American GIs had enjoyed the dance halls, bars and brothels of Peking and other cities. The new Communist government was attempting to suppress all vestiges of what it described as ‘bourgeois decadence’ and China was becoming more puritanical by the year, much more so than the Soviet Union. In 1958 two Swiss nationals still living in Shanghai were arrested for ‘consorting with Chinese women’; one had previously been warned by the police about his ‘promiscuous conduct’. They received gaol sentences of two and three years, though these were subsequently commuted to immediate deportation.45 The Chinese were less concerned about how foreigners behaved with one another, but even in Peking young foreign women were few and far between. In the early years there were still some stateless White Russians for whom marriage to a Westerner promised a way out of China, seen as preferable to emigration to the Soviet Union

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whose government pressured them to become citizens. On holiday in the coastal city of Qingdao with a Yugoslav student in 1957, Morris Wills found the Russian girls ‘quite aggressive . . . they chased any foreigner, hoping to get married’.46 A few of the men had Russian girlfriends when they were studying Chinese in Peking and, according to Wills, sometimes stayed away from the university for two or three days at a time. David Hawkins married his girlfriend Tanya in 1956. Some others met young women from the Soviet bloc studying at universities; John Dunn married a Czech student in Peking and Harold Webb a Pole in Wuhan. Pursuing a relationship with a young Chinese woman was more problematic, with official puritanism, Chinese cultural conventions and increasing efforts to marginalize Westerners all standing in the way of what the men considered normal dating behaviour. ‘It’s particularly hard for foreigners to date Chinese girls,’ Wills later wrote. Up to the late 1950s ‘it could still be done if one was careful. But you certainly couldn’t have an affair with a girl; she’d be sent away to a camp.’47 For young Chinese women, spending time with a member of the opposite sex was regarded as virtual betrothal, and in Jinan Arlie Pate took fright when a girl with whom he thought he was having a casual liaison started talking about marriage. Eventually eight of the men did marry Chinese women and another a half-Chinese, nearly all in the more lenient early years. The pathway to marriage, though, was rarely smooth, as Andy Condron later commented. ‘There is no law in China against a Chinese girl marrying a foreigner. But if a Chinese girl does fall in love with a man from another country she can find herself in a precarious situation.’48 Clarence Adams met his wife Liu Linfeng (whom he called Lin) through some North Korean students soon after his arrival at Wuhan University, and the couple had a courtship of more than a year before deciding to get married. Lin’s family did not oppose the marriage, with the exception of her brother-in-law’s brother, who was a dean at Wuhan University. ‘If you really want to marry an American, at least marry a

Clarence Adams marries Liu Linfeng, 20 December 1957. (Courtesy of Della Adams)

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white man,’ he allegedly told Lin, an attitude that Adams attributed to the man’s years in the United States in the 1940s rather than to the well-known antipathy to Chinese women going out with heiren (black men) that later provoked friction between Chinese and African students. Lin’s work unit, the Wuhan University of Technology where she taught Russian, tried to dissuade her from marrying Adams. When this failed, she was told the marriage would not be approved (all Chinese had to have their work unit’s permission to marry). The university relented only after Adams appealed to the Red Cross, saying he had been told before coming to China that he ‘could marry anyone who would have me’.49 In Peking, fellow American Morris Wills had a difficult time after he met 18-yearold Kaiyan in 1959. Kaiyan, the sister of the girlfriend of one of Morris’s university friends, had grown up in Hong Kong and been sent to Peking to study, living with her uncle. The two were appropriately introduced, started seeing each other and, in  Morris’s own words, ‘fell in love’. When Kaiyan’s uncle found out that she was spending time with a foreigner, he ordered her to stop seeing Morris—but she defied him. Wills later found out that her uncle then got together with the Red Cross (whom Wills had already told he wanted to marry Kaiyan), Peking University and the college where Kaiyan was studying, and arranged for the young woman to be transferred to Tianjin, some sixty miles away. The move, though, failed to prevent the couple from meeting at weekends. One Sunday evening Kaiyan was arrested as she left Peking University (allegedly for stealing the money that Morris had given her for her rail ticket) and, following interrogation, sent to a detention camp outside Tianjin. It was ten months before Kaiyan was released. The couple decided to get married straight away, but it took another two months to obtain permission. When they eventually registered the marriage, ironically it was the Red Cross that provided a banquet for thirty-six guests at the upmarket Xinqiao Hotel. They then came up against accommodation problems when Peking University refused to allow Kaiyan to move in with Morris. The couple lived with a friend until, following a plea to the Red Cross, they were told ‘unofficially’ that they could both live in Morris’s room at the university. In Peking, too, Andy Condron had a series of romantic problems. Even the British diplomatic mission heard that two girls had found themselves in ‘serious political difficulties when he became “too friendly” with them’.50 One, a student at the Foreign Languages Institute where Condron was teaching, broke off the relationship when she came under heavy pressure from both her family and the institute, provoking Condron’s angry confrontation with his employer. Then, on holiday at Beidaihe in the summer of 1959, Andy was introduced to ‘a striking girl’ named Jacqueline whom he had admired from a distance on the beach. The pair began spending time together, only to be harassed by the police. After Jacqueline was interrogated, the couple decided to return to Peking, but not before Andy had proposed—and been accepted.

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‘We had known each other less than a fortnight. But we had fallen in love,’ he later commented.51 Back in the capital, Andy and Jacqueline applied formally to get married. When they were summoned to the local marriage registration office on 14 September, Andy assumed it was only the beginning of a ‘long and tortuous process’. To his surprise, they were each given a marriage certificate and asked for a payment of 5 fen (a bit over a British penny). ‘It was just another mystery in that strange country,’ he later wrote.52 The couple’s friend Alan Winnington attributed the easy approval to the fact that Jacqueline was only half-Chinese, likening the situation to the lack of official opposition to his own marriage to Esther Cheo Ying who had a British mother.53 Jacqueline’s French diplomat father, Philippe Baudet, had left China over twenty years earlier. Her mother, Rose Xiong [Hsiung], subsequently married the Anglo-American writer Robert Payne, who described Jacqueline with great affection in his book Eyewitness.54 The former POWs’ problems in forming personal relationships and the sometimes tortuous path to marriage were just two of the frustrations many were experiencing in their new lives. Choosing China ahead of repatriation to their home countries had been a dramatic act, almost impossible to comprehend in the West and even by their fellow POWs. Living in China under Mao led most of them to question that decision.

5 Disenchantment

Overall, China had failed to live up to the former POWs’ hopes. The grand socialist narrative of international peace and equality for all seemed to have little relevance to their everyday lives. The daily grind, whether working on a farm or in a factory— or even the hard slog of learning Chinese—was not quite the adventure that some had anticipated. There was also the low standard of living and the realities of everyday life in a strictly controlled society, even without the sense of isolation from the outside world. Before long, too, the attitudes of Chinese officials differed from the men’s initial experiences. First they were called comrades, then peace fighters, Clarence Adams explained. ‘Then they started addressing us as plain Mister—that was the worst thing you could be called.’1 It did not take a lot of imagination to realize, as Morris Wills did, that the men were essentially ‘a liability, a problem. We’d been used and were being gradually discarded.’2 The former POWs may have undergone thought reform but, to the Chinese government, they were neither as politically reliable nor as potentially useful as the ‘foreign comrades’. Homesickness and thoughts of family loomed more and more in some of the men’s minds. But there were still disincentives for returning to the United States. McCarthyism was in full flow and, at least initially, there seemed every likelihood of arrest and prosecution. The men were only too aware that the two Americans who had changed their minds while in the neutral zone had received hefty prison sentences. When there were media reports that some of the former POWs were planning to leave China, the White House, together with the State, Defence and Justice Departments, issued a statement declaring that any men who returned to the United States would be held accountable ‘for any wrongful act they may have committed’.3 Despite the fears, the momentum to go home was under way within barely a year of the men’s arrival in China. The first to make moves to leave were the three men who had been sent to Henan province: first to a farm and then, following their complaints about the isolation, to Kaifeng. One of the three, Otho Bell, had a special reason for wanting to go home. In the United States he had a wife, as well as a young daughter

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he had never seen. When Chinese officials prevaricated, the men embarked on a campaign to be uncooperative. By mid-1955 the central government had decided to let the men leave, establishing the basic principle that ‘the men came to China of their own free will; they will be permitted to leave of their own free will’.4 This was a more moderate stance than that taken by the Soviet government which, as Tim Tzouliadis wrote in The Forsaken, did not just make it difficult for American immigrants to leave the country but sent some of them to labour camps. And the handful of American soldiers who crossed directly from South into North Korea during the 1960s found themselves virtually trapped. Charles Robert Jenkins subtitled his 2008 memoir, The Reluctant Communist, ‘My desertion, court-martial, and forty-year imprisonment in North Korea’. Rather than letting the three men go quietly, the authorities made political capital out of their departure. On 18 June, the Red Cross held a press conference in Peking, attended by Chinese and foreign communist correspondents (there were no noncommunist Western correspondents working in China at the time). Also present were the seventeen Americans and one Briton who were not leaving, brought together in an ostensible show of solidarity. The three departing men did not attend the press conference. Nor did two Belgians who had also been sent to the farm in Henan; they were not former POWs but had deserted from South Korea after the armistice and now wanted to go home. The vice secretary-general of the Red Cross, Lin Shixiao, told the gathering: ‘When you came to China, the Chinese people welcomed you as friends; when you are leaving, the Chinese people still regard you as friends, respect your wishes and are willing to assist you in every way.’ Lin said the government recognized the difficulties faced by the men in adapting to life in China and spoke of its effort to help them adjust. This included providing interpreters, subsidizing the wages of those who worked in factories and on farms, ‘taking into account their former living standards and customs’, and promising that they would permit relatives to visit and even take up residence in China.5 The departees had arrived in Peking on 7 June and found themselves waiting for over four weeks while the Red Cross, through its neutral Indian counterpart and the British diplomatic mission, made arrangements for them to return to the United States via Hong Kong. Pleased to be in the capital but impatient to leave China, the men set about trying to enjoy themselves. Alan Winnington was unimpressed. ‘Good-time boy has last spree in China,’ he wrote in an article for the Daily Worker after an interview with William Cowart. The young man had told him: ‘They take life pretty seriously here. I can’t make the grade. This is what I like—find a place like this [a café in Peking], sit drinking some beer, find a girl, go dancing.’ Cowart’s family had sent him 500 dollars. ‘What the hell, I’m spending it.’6

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Far from keeping the men’s activities under wraps, the authorities publicized the details in graphic language to discredit them, reviving memories of the behaviour of some American GIs in the late 1940s. ‘In the more than twenty days since their arrival here, some of them had repeatedly disturbed public order, creating disturbances after drinking, deliberately making trouble, provoking and manhandling people, reviling police officers, insulting women, etc.’ 7 Because of their behaviour, the Red Cross stated, the men were being transferred to the authority of the Public Security Bureau (the police). There were sighs of relief, not just from the Chinese but from the British diplomatic mission which had semi-official responsibility for American nationals in China, when the men finally left Peking on 8 July in the company of Chinese officials and were subsequently handed over to the British Red Cross at the Hong Kong border. Barely six weeks later, a crack appeared in the remaining men’s ostensible solidarity when the first of those working at the Jinan paper factory applied to leave China. Still only 22, Richard Tenneson wrote to the Red Cross saying he wanted to go to India, no doubt because of the likelihood of prosecution if he returned to the United States. Bearing in mind his fellow Americans’ recent clashes with the authorities, he promised that he would abide by the laws and asked that his application be kept confidential until everything had been finalized.8 Chinese Foreign Ministry documents on the Tenneson case reveal both the high official level at which individual cases were discussed and the range of information compiled on each man. Tenneson’s letter, along with a personal report on the former POW, was forwarded to the Ministry of Public Security in Peking. The report stated that Tenneson had been ‘shaky’ ideologically ever since his time in Taiyuan and that his relations with some of the other Americans in Jinan had deteriorated, leading to his increasing isolation. According to the report, though, ‘the immediate cause of his wanting to leave China was a failed relationship with a female worker’.9 Less than two weeks later, the Minister of Public Security, Luo Ruiqing, wrote a lengthy memorandum to Premier Zhou Enlai stating that he had already discussed the case with Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua as well as with the Red Cross. Luo recommended that, if the Indian Red Cross rejected Tenneson’s application to go to India, which he accurately predicted, the American should be persuaded to go directly to the United States. (He knew that Tenneson had already told officials at the paper factory he was prepared to do this if India would not accept him.) The recommendations were endorsed, including minor details including a grant (the same as made to the three earlier returnees) of 150–200 yuan for clothing plus 100 Hong Kong dollars.10 By the time Tenneson left China in early December, he knew that he would not be prosecuted on his arrival home. On 8 November, the US Supreme Court ruled that the three earlier returnees, who had been arrested on their arrival in August,

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could not be court-martialled by the army because they, along with the other POW defectors, had been officially discharged back in January 1954. A prediction by the New  York Times that the Supreme Court decision would ‘open the gates’ for other former POWs to leave China proved correct.11 Another two men left Jinan in late 1956 and the two at the auto-repair factory in Wuhan left in 1957. The following year Richard Cordon, also in Wuhan, was the first man studying for a university degree to leave. His departure surprised both the American and British governments because he had been seen as the most politically committed of the men ever since their time in the ‘neutral zone’ in late 1953. In Peking, Andy Condron became increasingly disillusioned with China after his confrontation with the Foreign Languages Institute and the official efforts to transfer him to Wuhan. By the time he met Jacqueline, he had already decided that he wanted to go back to Britain at some stage. But there was a hitch. Unlike the Americans, Condron had not been officially discharged, which meant he might be prosecuted if he returned home. There was, in fact, a thick Admiralty file on the former POW, with confirmation that he would indeed be arrested as a ‘deserter’ on arrival in Hong Kong or other British territory. As late as January 1961, the Foreign Office advised the British diplomatic mission in Peking: ‘It is essential that Condron should not (repeat not) leave China for the UK under the impression that he may not (repeat not) have to face charges on arrival here.’12 Later the same year, Condron applied for a passport at the British diplomatic mission. With his return likely to become a reality, Condron’s file went up the government hierarchy, eventually reaching the first lord of the Admiralty and the attorney general. By January 1962, the earlier decision to prosecute him had been reversed, mainly because of the length of time since his desertion and, in the attorney general’s view, the possibility of adverse media publicity including sympathy for his wife and young child. The couple eventually left Peking on 9 October, flying to Britain via Moscow, where they were met by the resident correspondent for London’s Daily Express. With Condron’s departure, only eight of the twenty-one men remained in China. A further two had left shortly before Condron, not for the United States but for their wives’ home countries: Poland and Czechoslovakia. Communications between the Red Cross, the Public Security Bureau and the Foreign Ministry expressed concern at the exodus, with international publicity and the men’s media comments threatening to undermine the government’s ongoing efforts to promote positive images of ‘new China’. The authorities decided to make a last-ditch effort to impress the remaining eight men, including three in Jinan who were already planning to leave, by organizing a six-week ‘all expenses paid’ summer trip. Acknowledging that the men had ‘little interest in agricultural and industrial construction’, the usual diet for foreign visitors,

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they arranged a purely tourist excursion (including a trip up the Yangzi and a visit to the Buddhist grottoes at Luoyang) which they anticipated would be more appealing, even though its stated purpose was to encourage them ‘to recognize the current good situation and understand the superiority of socialism’.13 While Morris Wills acknowledged that ‘the trip did mellow us a bit’, the men who had already applied to leave China did not change their minds.14 They included Lowell Skinner, whose relations with officials at the paper factory in Jinan had never really recovered after the angry confrontations of 1958. The government had a further inducement for the two men left in Jinan: the opportunity to study in Peking. Both James Veneris and Howard Adams, the oldest of the former POWs, had expressed an interest in studying (which would probably mean moving to the capital) after almost nine years at the paper factory. The Red Cross made the appropriate arrangements, even though it expressed concern that the two ‘mature age’ students, who had gone straight from Taiyuan to Jinan, would find even a preparatory university course difficult.15 According to long-term resident Gladys Yang, Adams’s spelling and grammar were ‘unconventional’, even in English.16 Soon after the summer trip, the men moved to Peking with their families to take preparatory courses at Renmin University. Apart from Veneris and Adams, the only former POWs still in China were the three men working at the Foreign Languages Press who also had Chinese wives and young children. The political atmosphere was becoming increasingly tense with the Socialist Education Movement, Mao’s latest effort to remove so-called reactionary elements, which would lead into the Cultural Revolution. Now approaching their mid-thirties, the men were also well aware that, the longer they stayed in China, the more difficult it would probably become to re-establish themselves in the United States.

Morris and Kaiyan Wills, together with baby daughter Linda, arrive in Hong Kong on their way to the United States. (LOOK Magazine Collection, Library of Congress, 1998004542)

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In mid-1965, two of the men left China with their families: Morris Wills and Kaiyan had a toddler while William White and Xie Ping had two young children. Wills was not just disgruntled with China—he felt unwanted. ‘As time went on, it became increasingly apparent that they didn’t want me, that I was no longer useful to them, and the clearer this became to me, the more dissatisfied I became with the Chinese.’17 Kaiyan was also keen to leave, though she would have preferred to go to Hong Kong, where she had grown up, rather than to the United States where she feared the crime and racial problems she had heard so much about from the China media. That left Clarence Adams who, as he expressed it, felt ‘pretty much alone’ after the departure of White and Wills.18 Then, as suspicion of foreigners increased in early 1966, Red Cross officials questioned him about his embassy contacts and also the Sunday get-togethers he hosted in his flat for African students who had been complaining about their treatment in China. The crunch came when Adams was told that he was being transferred to Jinan to work in the paper factory because the Foreign Languages Press no longer needed so many polishers. This was ‘certainly untrue’, he maintained. ‘I knew that to send a college-educated person to work in a factory was a punishment, so I refused to go.’19 Long-term resident and colleague Gladys Yang, who had become a close friend, was furious when Clarence told her what had transpired. ‘I was so shocked that I asked my Party boss to check up and see if his version was correct, and since she has given me no answer, I assume it was.’20 For Adams, the time had come to leave China: ‘I had clearly worn out my welcome.’21 The hurdle to the Adams family’s departure was Lin who, unlike Jacqueline Condron and Kaiyan Wills, was reluctant to leave China. ‘We had many heated arguments with lots of screaming and crying,’ Clarence recalled. ‘Several times Lin agreed to go, but then she would change her mind.’22 Lin was somewhat reassured that the United States might not be as bad as its portrayal in the Chinese media when she received letters from Kaiyan and Xieping, and she eventually agreed to the move. In May 1966, just as the Cultural Revolution began to get under way, Clarence, Lin and their two children (7-year-old Della and 21-month-old Louis) left China. A little over twelve years after the twenty-two men had crossed the border into the PRC, only two remained. At 32 and 29, James Veneris and Howard Adams had been the oldest to make the decision to go to China. Now 44 and 41, they were probably the most likely to face problems of readjustment if they went back to the United States. The returnees, whether in the mid-1950s or a decade later, soon discovered that they could not simply take up where they had left off many years earlier. They might have become disenchanted with ‘red China’, but in the stridently anti-communist environment of the United States their recent life could not simply be swept under the carpet. Most immediately, they had to cope with an aggressive media, first in Hong Kong and then in the United States. The arrival of the first three returnees in Hong Kong

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on 10 July 1955 was a big media event, resulting in international headlines such as ‘3  Turncoats, Out of China, Condemn Communist “Hell”’, ‘The Return of the Turncoats’, and ‘Reception for Turncoats’. The men, relieved at finally being out of China and keen to be seen recanting, let fly with their condemnations of the People’s Republic. ‘Death is better than communism,’ more than one proclaimed.23 A few of the more articulate were able to use the media to their personal advantage, not just image-wise but financially. When the popular magazine Look heard in mid-1965 that Morris Wills, reportedly ‘one of the most intelligent and stable of the defectors’, was planning to leave China, it sent a journalist and photographer to meet him in Hong Kong.24 The outcome was two lengthy features, ‘Why I Chose China’ and ‘Why I Quit China’, authored by ‘Morris Wills as told to J. Robert Moskin’.25 They were followed by a book entitled Turncoat: An American’s 12 Years in Communist China.26 Both the articles and the book were masterly exercises in self-criticism, the technique Wills had learnt in ideological study sessions. ‘Today, when I look back over the fourteen years that followed my capture by the Chinese Communists in Korea, I am ashamed of going to China, of turning my back on the United States and on my family.’27 Look, of course, had its own political agenda in the midst of the Vietnam War, describing Wills as ‘a tragic figure in the worldwide tug-of-war between communism and freedom’.28 Clarence Adams thought that his friend had written ‘some terrible things about China that were certainly not true’, but Wills later told him that he ‘should have done the same thing because doing so would have made things easier for me after my return’.29 Adams did write a partial memoir and his daughter Della videoed his recollections. But it was not until 2007, eight years after his death, that his autobiography An American Dream was published, edited by Della and POW historian Lewis Carlson. In a different era, the book’s promotional material stated: ‘Throughout his life, Clarence Adams exhibited self-reliance, ambition, ingenuity, courage, and a commitment to learning—character traits often equated with the successful pursuit of the American Dream.’30 As the only British POW to have gone to China, Andy Condron had a story that was highly marketable in the United Kingdom. ‘The Condron Story’, published in five instalments in the Daily Express, was a personal narrative largely devoid of the anti-communist rhetoric that characterized Wills’s articles and book. Condron wrote of his ‘struggle of conscience’ in deciding to go to China rather than being repatriated, the difficult economic conditions in China following the Great Leap Forward, the stark differences between his own life in Peking and that of the men working in Jinan, his eventual decision to leave China, and coming home with a ‘mixed bag of impressions and memories’. Two of the articles were on his personal life: one about the doomed romance at the Foreign Languages Institute and one about meeting and marrying Jacqueline. Unlike Wills, Condron was unrepentant about his decision to

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go to China, still believing that under the armistice agreement the POWs had the right to choose where they wanted to live. He had already told a Daily Express correspondent: ‘I’d do it again.’31 As well as dealing with the media, the men had to face officialdom. As the US government had forewarned, the first three returnees were arrested on their arrival in San Francisco. After being allowed to speak briefly with their families, they were escorted to a guardhouse at the Fort Baker army base. When the Supreme Court ruled three months later that they could not be court-martialled because they had already been dishonourably discharged back in January 1954, the irony was that that the two men who had changed their minds about repatriation at the last moment were already serving lengthy gaol sentences.

Military Police escort (from left) Otho Bell, William Cowart and Lewis Griggs to the guardhouse following their arrival in San Francisco. (Bettman/Corbis)

The fact that the later arrivals could not be prosecuted did not prevent lengthy interrogations by the FBI, which already had a dossier on each man based on interviews with former POWs. Clarence Adams had the most difficult time, called before the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) in Washington and charged with disrupting the morale of American fighting forces in Vietnam through his radio broadcasts. Although the charges were dropped after a week’s interrogation, Adams continued to be interviewed regularly by the FBI and believed that he was under surveillance for the next decade.32 In Britain, though, Andy Condron felt that he was questioned, rather than interrogated, about his reasons for going to China and what he did there. He later claimed that he actually quite enjoyed the experience of being interviewed by five officials at the War Office.33

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Once the men arrived home, they also faced the challenge of earning a living after absences of between five and sixteen years. Some found a job only to lose it when their employer found out about their past and the media was not hesitant in reporting their misfortunes. In June 1961, Time magazine claimed that, of the first returnees, William Cowart was working as a dishwasher, Otho Bell earned US$1.70 an hour in a plant nursery and lived in a small house trailer with his wife and four children, and Lewis Griggs’s efforts to ‘peddle a book on his experiences’ had failed and he was back living with his mother.34 Returning to his home town of Memphis, Tennessee, Clarence Adams found his university degree and professional experience of little use. After a long and depressing search even for unskilled work, he eventually got a job as a delivery truck driver. Clarence’s entrepreneurial spirit was not completely suppressed, though, and six years later he and Lin opened the first of several Chinese takeout restaurants that they would own in Memphis. The family gradually moved up the property ladder: from a small apartment to a comfortable house in what Clarence described as ‘a very quiet and safe neighbourhood of mostly middle-class whites’.35 Shortly before he died he said to his Wuhan-born daughter Della: ‘I think we did okay.’36 Morris Wills was an exception to those who had problems on their return to the United States. Before leaving China, he had not only arranged to tell his story in a way that would minimize hostility towards him, but had written to some of America’s leading universities, offering his Chinese translation skills and enclosing a personal reference from Peking Globe and Mail correspondent Charles Taylor. Wills landed on his feet, first as an associate at Harvard’s East Asian Research Centre and then obtaining a fellowship to do a master’s degree in librarianship at Columbia University. Following graduation, he was appointed to a librarian position at Utica College, a liberal arts college in central New York State. The family settled in Utica (some still live there) and Morris and Kaiyan had another two children. Not everything went smoothly though. Some six years after he left China, Morris told Per-Olow Leijon, his old Beida room-mate, that Kaiyan ‘had problems adjusting to life in the United States’.37 When Andy Condron and his wife Jacqueline moved to Britain with their baby son in 1962, they did not settle in Andy’s native Scotland but opted for the anonymity of London. Andy was initially in and out of work, at one stage trying his luck as an Encyclopaedia Britannica salesman; later he worked mainly as a proof-reader on various newspapers. On the day of his daughter’s birth in February 1969, he wrote to his old journalist friend Wilfred Burchett: ‘After a couple of somewhat unsettled years finding my feet and taking up once again the threads of life here, I am more or less flourishing in a reasonably favourable environment. Both Jacqueline and I are working, of course. It’s the only way one can live a fairly comfortable life in London.’38 In 1986 he relived his Korean and Chinese experiences in a series of wide-ranging

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interviews for the Imperial War Museum’s oral history collection. By then, though, the marriage that had been hatched at the seaside resort of Beidaihe was over. While nineteen of the former POWs were readjusting to life outside China, Howard Adams and James Veneris continued to live in their adopted homeland. When their studies in Peking were disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, they were sent back to the paper factory in Jinan. In June 1967, Adams told Gladys Yang he had become a ‘revolutionary rebel and witnessed and taken part in stirring, somewhat violent scenes’.39 Before long, though, he was trying to get a transfer. ‘Howard Adams is back from Tsinan [Jinan] for a holiday,’ Gladys wrote to friends seven months later. ‘He wants to stay in Peking and hopes the Red Cross will find him a factory job here if there’s no teaching post available.’40 His hope was not fulfilled. James Veneris, described by a fellow-POW as ‘the only one of the twenty-one who really did believe in Communism’,41 was a political activist well before the Cultural Revolution. In 1964, while studying in Peking, the gregarious ex-GI gave a rousing anti-Vietnam War speech to some 10,000 students in the Great Hall of the People. Back in Jinan, he became actively involved in the Cultural Revolution but, like some of the long-termers in Peking, came under suspicion as an imperialist spy. He managed to survive relatively unscathed after his fellow workers supported him. Veneris had a much more complicated personal life than Adams, who was married to Xin Lihua from 1956 until her death in 1993. After his first wife died of tuberculosis, Veneris married fellow worker Bai Xirong, a widow with four children. The couple had a further two children of their own but later divorced; Veneris blamed the rift on the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. He had a third marriage to a botanist, before divorcing her and remarrying Bai Xirong. In a Chinese television interview in the late 1990s, he conveniently ignored the break in the relationship, portraying Xirong as his ‘life companion’ of forty years. ‘We are inseparable. We will be together for ever.’42 The two Americans remained in Jinan and were both eventually given jobs teaching English. As Sino-American relations improved, Veneris began to think about visiting the United States. In July 1976, after being granted a passport at the US Liaison Office in Peking, he set off to see his 80-year-old mother, three sisters, and a host of nieces and nephews he had never met. Howard Adams waited until 1980 for his first trip back to the United States. After their respective travels, both men returned to China, their families and their jobs. In the 1990s interview with Chinese television, Veneris spoke expressively in Mandarin with a Shandong-American accent: ‘I chose China and have never regretted it.’43 But Adams told a close friend in 2012 that, for almost sixty years, he had felt himself an outsider: ‘a traitor in the United States and a foreigner in China.’44 The story of the twenty-one Americans and one Briton who refused repatriation after the Korean War was largely forgotten until Chinese Canadian Shuibo Wang

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made the documentary They Chose China in 2005. By then, James Veneris was dead and 80-year-old Howard Adams continued to refuse foreign media contact. Wang was accompanied to China by 72-year-old David Hawkins, who had been the youngest of the ‘turncoats’. The pair went to the auto-repair factory in Wuhan where Hawkins worked briefly before his departure in 1957. In Jinan they visited Veneris’s grave and talked to his widow Bai Xirong and their daughter. (Their son had moved to New York, where he said he could make more money as a taxi driver.) In Memphis, Tennessee, Wang met Clarence Adams’s widow, Lin, and his daughter Della who showed him some of the video film that Clarence had recorded about his life. Although it was over fifty years since the men had chosen China, the issue was still controversial and it had taken Wang longer to raise money for the film than he anticipated. Screened during 2006, They Chose China won a number of festival awards, including the Golden Gate Award for the best television documentary at the San Francisco Film Festival. A review in Film and History stated: ‘Shuibo Wang is to be lauded for this exploration of what is still a contentious part of American history, and for his contribution to the historical debate by suggesting that perhaps these men, too, could be considered POW-heroes.’45 Wang’s portrayal of the Korean War, though, was too one-sided for some viewers, with the use of official Chinese footage of the POW camps and his description of the men as ‘heroes’, barely mentioning their later disenchantment with China. A reviewer for Educational Media Reviews Online put the film in the ‘recommended with reservations’ category. ‘Ostensibly, it claims to serve the goals of historical documentation and world peace; but, perhaps, these worthy goals are being interpreted from a particular perspective.’46 The film also opened some deep wounds, especially for the families of those who had died in the POW camps. ‘They were a pack of traitors, whatever excuses they may make,’ one blogger declared on a website discussion.47 Even after half a century, for some there was still no room for compromise.

Part III Diplomats

6 ‘The world within’

To many other Western residents, the lives of embassy staff and their families seemed a world away from their own. Invited to stay in a diplomatic apartment on a visit from Shanghai in 1974, Australian student Sally Borthwick found it ‘hard to realize that the world outside the windows had anything in common with the world within’.1 Outside was Maoist Peking, its blue and grey cotton clothed inhabitants battling to get on crowded buses or cycling past the city’s low grey buildings and billboards urging them to ‘build socialism faster, better and more economically’. The world within was light and bright, a reproduction of a modern Western apartment with all its trappings—and in the evening the scene of many a party as people ate, drank and tried to enjoy themselves in defiance of the austere world outside.

Peking: the world outside the windows. (In author’s collection)

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Peking’s diplomats had always led a sequestered life. Describing the inhabitants of the walled legation quarter during the 1910s and 1920s, Italian diplomat Daniele Varè wrote: ‘They lived a life of complete detachment from that of the Chinese, in a sort of diplomatic mountain-fastness.’2 Social life revolved around dinner parties, balls, tennis tournaments and picnics, described by Julia Boyd in her book A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking’s Foreign Colony. Even so, the legation quarter’s residents had the opportunity to meet a range of Chinese people and occasionally ventured on independent expeditions far from Peking. During the Mao era neither was possible. The sense of isolation under Mao was compounded by the tiny number of Western embassies, at least until the 1970s. For most of the period, the Western diplomatic corps was the smallest of any major world capital as most governments (including the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Australia) continued to recognize the Nationalists, who were now in Taiwan, as China’s legitimate government. Britain, keen to maintain a foothold in China, was the major Western nation to recognize the Communist regime soon after it came to power; the only others were Switzerland, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. ‘It was an agreeable little community,’ British Chargé d’Affaires Humphrey Trevelyan wrote of the mid-1950s. The Danish ambassador, he claimed, was a specialist on Iceland and a collector of clocks, while the Finnish ambassador was said to be a communist dentist. Norway’s chargé d’affaires reportedly drew on a special subsistence allowance because he had convinced his government that his actual post was Shanghai. And the Swedish ambassador’s American wife ‘bore with equanimity the torrent of abuse of her country which poured out’ from the media.3 Although the makeup of the Western diplomatic corps was very different from what it had been in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, whether in Peking or when diplomats reluctantly spent some of their time in Nanjing after it became the Nationalist capital in 1927, there was some continuity in its dynamics. Arriving in Peking in 1959, Canadian correspondent Frederick Nossal found that the British were ‘still the leaders of the Western diplomatic community’, unlike most capitals where they had been replaced by the Americans.4 Even so, Britain’s diplomatic mission lacked embassy status (it was officially called the Office of the British Chargé d’Affaires) because of continuing tensions with the PRC, particularly over Taiwan. Indeed, until 1954 British diplomats existed in a sort of diplomatic no man’s land after the Chinese responded to British recognition by agreeing only ‘to negotiate on the establishment of diplomatic relations’.5 Britain’s dominance was challenged in 1964 when De Gaulle’s France became the first major Western nation to establish ambassadorial level diplomatic relations with the PRC, to the alarm of most of its NATO allies and the fury of the United States.

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Then, at the end of the 1960s, China’s ever-worsening relations with the Soviet Union were paralleled by its tentative rapprochement with the West. Canada and Italy were the first newcomers on the diplomatic scene following their recognition of the PRC in late 1970. US President Richard Nixon’s visit in February 1972 initiated high-level discussions between the two governments and in 1973 a small liaison office was established in Peking to negotiate for the establishment of diplomatic relations. By  this time, the majority of Western nations had relations with the PRC and, although US representation was very low-key—diplomatic relations would not be established until 1979—the national makeup of the Western diplomatic corps more closely paralleled its counterparts in Moscow and elsewhere. The small number of Western embassies in Peking in all but the final years of the Mao era only magnified the changed profile of the international diplomatic corps in the post-war, post-colonial years, with the independence of countries in Africa and Asia (including India, Pakistan and Indonesia which all established diplomatic relations with the PRC) and the Cold War ideology of the Soviet bloc. By the time Canada launched the new wave of Western recognition in late 1970, almost forty countries already had diplomatic relations with the PRC, of which only eight were West European. Peking was not just another posting for Western diplomats, whether in the 1950s or the 1970s. Similar to Japan and the Arab world, it was considered specialist territory because of the time needed to learn the language. While not all diplomats sent to Peking were ‘specialists’, a high premium was placed on language skills, a feature characteristic of attitudes within the Western community as a whole. In the words of a visiting Australian official towards the end of the Mao era: ‘The diplomats affect one-upmanship over each others’ language abilities. In describing a recent arrival the fact that he or she “speaks good Chinese” is usually the person’s most important and noticeable characteristic.’6 Prior experience of post-revolutionary China also gave a diplomat considerable kudos. In the early and mid-1970s, when most Western diplomats were having their initial experience of the PRC, British ambassadors John Addis and Edward (Teddy) Youde were on their third and fourth postings. Although Addis never achieved Youde’s high level of language proficiency, he was entranced by Chinese culture and became a keen collector of Ming porcelain. At the end of his first China sojourn in November 1950, he wrote to his sister Susan: ‘China caught my fancy as no other country has or could. This is not a place to visit: you must give your life to it or go away.’7 He had another Peking posting in the mid-1950s and was frustrated when his requests to go back to China in the sixties were stonewalled. Addis was already known in official circles as a Sinophile, not a laudatory label in officialdom but one that suggested he was overly attached to the country. This did not, however, prevent his appointment as

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Britain’s first ambassador to the PRC when diplomatic relations were finally upgraded in 1972. Adding to the diplomat’s somewhat idiosyncratic reputation was his oft-cited personal status as a ‘confirmed bachelor’. Addis’s successor Teddy Youde, one of the few British diplomats who lacked a public school/Oxbridge background, had revealed an early aptitude for languages and studied Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). After serving as a naval attaché in China in the mid-1940s, he was appointed to the Foreign Office. Along with other embassy staff, including John Addis and young administrative officer Pamela Fitt, Youde experienced the Communists’ early months in Nanjing, following a daring but unsuccessful sole venture across the Yangzi to try to persuade the approaching army to release the Amethyst, a British frigate they had fired on and captured. By the end of his China posting in 1951, he and Pamela were married and the couple became prime examples of ‘partners in diplomacy’, to use the title of Beryl Smedley’s book on British diplomatic wives. They had further postings to Peking in the mid-1950s, from 1959 to 1961, and finally as British ambassador and ambassadress. For all of his linguistic and management skills, Youde gained a reputation during his ambassadorship for a somewhat puritanical streak that included banning the embassy’s roulette evenings, popular under his predecessor. Neither of the two long-serving French ambassadors during the Mao era, Gaullists Lucien Paye and Étienne Manac’h who between them spent eleven years in Peking, had previously lived or worked in China. Paye, an Arabist, had spent most of his career in north Africa, where he developed a strong interest in education, and later served briefly as France’s minister for education. Manac’h was better prepared for his China role, having served for the previous nine years as director for Far Eastern affairs at the Foreign Ministry. The Breton had risen from humble origins, as unusual in the French foreign service as in the British, to become an influential socialist scholar on international relations and later a diplomat. By the time American and other diplomats arrived on the scene from the early 1970s, some had already spent several years analyzing Chinese politics in Hong Kong, Taipei or their own capital. For the first two US liaison office heads, though, China was a novel as well as a brief experience. The distinguished diplomat David Bruce, appointed to Peking at the age of 75 (he was three weeks older than Zhou Enlai), spent only sixteen months in China. His successor, George H. W. Bush, chose Peking over London and Paris after being passed over for the position of US vice-president, and returned to the United States to head the CIA after barely a year. The personal diaries of their Peking sojourns reveal that China was a steep learning curve for both men. While Bruce spent a lot of time reading books on the country’s history and politics, though, the future US president preferred spending most of his free hours on the tennis court.

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The ambassador or chargé d’affaires was only the person at the apex of each nation’s diplomatic community. The total British contingent, including not just staff but spouses, children and the odd nanny or tutor, ranged from around thirty up to more than fifty people across the Mao era, with a dip during the Cultural Revolution. Within a year of recognition in 1964, the French community slightly outnumbered the British. The Scandinavians, Dutch and Swiss all had tiny communities of no more than a dozen or so people. The new arrivals in the early 1970s usually started off with similarly small numbers, increasing their representation as they became established. For Ėtienne Manac’h, France’s ambassador from 1969 to 1975, Peking was a world away from Paris. No theatres, no concerts, no nightclubs. Social life is restrictive: an embassy secretary cannot have a love affair with a young Pekinese . . . A weekend getaway in the countryside is impossible: the way is barred beyond twenty kilometres from the centre.8

Like Moscow, Peking was categorized as a hardship post, with fairly short postings (usually two years, sometimes only one for junior staff ), additional allowances, and paid leave outside China. Compared with the physical dangers, local security issues and health problems experienced in some countries in Asia, as well as in Africa and the Middle East, the PRC could hardly be described as one of the world’s toughest diplomatic postings. But its isolation from the outside world, the pervasiveness of politics and the almost complete lack of Western culture made it seem more alien than many other hardship posts, including Moscow with which it was sometimes compared. ‘We thought we lived at the end of the world,’ Douglas Hurd (a future British foreign secretary) recalled of Peking as a young diplomat in the mid-1950s.9 Even twenty years later, when most Western countries had diplomatic representation in China, American John Holdridge thought it was ‘almost like living on another planet so far as our accustomed norms of life were concerned’.10 Embassies and their staff were increasingly concentrated in a new diplomatic quarter, later two quarters, to the east of the city wall. A few initially managed to retain their premises in the old legation quarter, described by K. M. (Sardar) Panikkar (nationalist scholar and India’s first ambassador to the PRC) as having ‘stood so much for European domination in the East’, but in the late 1950s the government began requisitioning the spacious compounds.11 For most, the new workplace was a bland European-style building on a dusty road bordered by building sites. When diplomat Percy Cradock arrived in Peking in 1962, he was unimpressed with the premises the British had been allocated three years earlier. ‘Blank, ugly, virtually treeless, the new site was a far cry from the pavilions of the English Palace, but it conveyed more accurately the nature of the new relationship with the Communist authorities.’12

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Home was usually the waijiao dalou, a concrete apartment block for diplomatic staff and their families. ‘The flat was not beautiful, more or less Council house within and without,’ Winifred Stevenson (the wife of a junior British diplomat) wrote soon after the move from the legation quarter in late 1959.13 Occasionally a diplomat was allowed to rent a traditional single-storey Peking house (albeit one that was modernized with sanitation and heating) in the maze of hutong that were one of the city’s most distinctive features. For Janet Donald, the rare experience of living in a local neighbourhood with her husband and three young children did ‘help us remember that the blank faced officials and the hysterical propaganda doesn’t make up the whole of China’.14 But during the Cultural Revolution this small opportunity to observe at close quarters, if not to mingle with, the local population was denied to diplomats. Like their predecessors, embassy staff and their families in Peking replicated their domestic lives ‘at home’ as far as possible, albeit with servants and substantial allowances. Locally bought food, mainly from the Friendship Store, was supplemented with imports. ‘Every winter we had an order from Finland via the trans-Siberian,’ Pamela Youde recalled. ‘The butter came frozen and it would last us through to the next winter.’15 One of John Addis’s ‘eccentricities’, according to his mid-1950s Peking colleague Alan Campbell, was that he ‘ate nothing but Chinese food (with chopsticks of course) and drank green tea and rice wine; and this is what he would offer to his guests’—rather than the Campbells’ offerings of steak and kidney pie and French wine.16 In the 1970s, the rare visit of a special plane carrying a high level official entourage provided an opportunity to boost provisions. The British embassy was disappointed when Prime Minister Edward Heath’s proposed visit in January 1974 was cancelled at the last moment, having placed an order for its commissariat that included: 96 small pork pies 15 lb black pudding 72 packets Carr’s water biscuits 144 packets Surprise peas 2 crates fresh grapefruit 6 × 12 lb Maxwell House ground coffee 2 × 12 tomato ketchup 4 small sides pre-sliced smoked salmon17

The Australians were more single-minded. ‘Would it be possible for Qantas to carry 500 lb chilled meat?’ the Australian embassy asked its Department of Foreign Affairs in October 1973, referring to the plane that was bringing the prime ministerial entourage from Tokyo to Peking. Meat meant beef: 300 pounds of rib-eye, 100 pounds of tenderloin and 100 pounds of rump steak.18 Hong Kong, though, was the main link to the outside world. ‘We relied on a fragile lifeline from the merchants Lane Crawford in Hong Kong for many of the

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conventional needs of European life—coffee, wine and spirits, toiletries,’ Douglas Hurd wrote of the mid-1950s.19 Just three weeks after arriving in Peking in the summer of 1965, 19-year-old French secretary Solange Brand found herself taking not just the embassy’s fortnightly diplomatic bag to Hong Kong but a shopping list for the whole embassy. When it was junior diplomat Jean-Pierre Angremy’s turn to accompany the diplomatic bag, a colleague whispered ‘des capotes anglaises’ (‘some condoms’) in his ear.20 Getting to Hong Kong was quite an undertaking in itself, as an Indian diplomat recalled of the same period. That journey was rather more adventurous than most would have preferred, starting off from Beijing at 6 o’clock in the morning in a Russian IL-14 or IL-16 aircraft  .  .  . with refueling stops at 3 cities before reaching Guangzhou, for an overnight halt in a hotel, and the next morning a train to the border, the walk across the bridge, and on to the cornucopia of consumerism which the Crown Colony represented even then.21

By the late sixties there was a twice-weekly direct plane to Guangzhou, but even at the end of the Mao era still no through train from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, let alone a direct Peking–Hong Kong flight. The colony was also the usual destination for anyone with a major medical problem. Emergencies like meningitis and encephalitis, with which the Chinese had a lot of experience, were treated in a special foreigners’ section at the Capital Hospital (formerly the Rockefeller-funded Peking Union Medical College). Some women preferred to have their babies in Hong Kong. ‘When I said I intended to have my baby— my first—in Peking, some of the people at the embassy disapproved,’ Pamela Youde recalled of 1955. The casual hospital environment came as something of a shock both to Pamela and five years later to Winifred Stevenson, whose first baby had been born in Britain. ‘The hospital atmosphere is disconcertingly vague and slow moving,’ she wrote to her cousin. ‘One expects briskness and a certain amount of regimentation based on a rigid time-scheme, and the lack of it is slightly bewildering.’22 Embassy staff, like their colleagues in many countries, sent their children home to boarding school from quite a young age—and particularly for their secondary education. Before it was finally taken over in the Cultural Revolution, the Convent of the Sacred Heart (a rare survival of pre-revolutionary times, courtesy of the Pakistani ambassador’s pressure on the Chinese authorities) taught children of a range of nationalities in English, and following their arrival in 1964 the French set up a school to cater for French speakers. With the expansion of the diplomatic corps from the early 1970s, a number of embassies set up small schools, often in an apartment. A few tried out the Chinese-run Fangcaodi primary school which taught the local curriculum, albeit in a separate block for foreign students. For Australian Cultural Counsellor Jocelyn Chey, whose sons Stephen and Jonathan attended the school for

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a year, ‘the isolation of the two communities (the Chinese and the foreign children) from each other is what upset me the most’.23 Everyday life for embassy staff and their families revolved around the diplomatic community. ‘It’s there that friendships and intrigues are shaped, that quarrels occur, and misfortunes and passions,’ Ėtienne Manac’h commented.24 The community’s small size, particularly in the early years, did not prevent people from having a busy social life. As counsellor and second-in-charge at the British mission in the mid1950s, John Addis took full advantage of still living on the glamorous old legation site with its ornate pavilions and its bungalows set among carefully tended gardens and manicured lawns. In August 1955 he wrote to his sister Robina: ‘Having had a dinner for 22 this week, I have dinners for 12 both next week and the week after.’25 In such a tiny community, Addis found himself rustling up dinner guests from right across the ‘friendly’ diplomatic missions. ‘My dinner party for 12 last night consisted of 2 Burmese, 2 Indonesians, an Afghan, a Swiss, a Dutch girl, an Indian, a Finn and 2 English,’ he told Robina some months later.26 (In the Cold War environment, contact with representatives of the Soviet bloc was limited mainly to formal receptions.) Even so, maintaining personal morale was an ongoing challenge, particularly among those who lacked representation allowances and a professional interest in China. The British mission had its own version of the ‘little Englands’ that existed at hardship posts across the globe, described by Katie Hickman in her book Daughters of Britannia.27 Humphrey Trevelyan wrote of the mid-1950s: ‘We had our own facilities for recreation, a tennis-court, a squash-court, a library and a social club, a hall with a stage in which we held dances, Scottish reel parties, whist drives, film shows and bingo parties, something for all tastes.’28 There were revues, plays and individual recitals. After the diplomatic mission moved to its new site, replicating these as far as possible was a high priority, albeit in more modest surroundings. With the largest non-Communist diplomatic mission before the arrival of the French, the British also assumed something of a pastoral role for the ‘friendly missions’, including countries that had recently shaken off colonialism. ‘Our social club was a centre for the non-Communist diplomatic colony,’ Trevelyan recalled. ‘Our rare films, however bad or old, drew practically every member of it, starved for nonideological entertainment.’29 And after ‘the ladies of the compound’ organized an English-style garden fete, John Addis told his sister: ‘All the children from the friendly missions came—Burmese, Indians, Indonesians, Finns and Norwegians—and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.’30 Following their arrival on the Peking scene in 1964, the French showed films, held dances, and tried to think of more innovative ways to entertain the diplomatic community. On Easter Sunday in April 1966, just weeks before the Cultural Revolution began to unfold, they held a car rally around the city and suburbs

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The cast of the British revue ‘Compound Interest’ (1957). The backdrop is the entrance to the British diplomatic mission which was still located in the old legation quarter. (Courtesy of David Alan Chipp Collection)

of Peking. Swedish cultural attaché Per-Olow Leijon, who had previously spent four years studying in the capital, was an enthusiastic participant. ‘I knew the city well—it was like my home town—and I had previously done rally driving.’31 French secretary Solange Brand, though, had doubts about the whole exercise as she checked the twenty-five cars through at the Bell Tower: ‘I thought it was a folly—like colonial times.’32 Nor were the local police impressed when they saw one foreign car after another driving around Peking and its suburbs. The embassy was told firmly that there would be no repeat performance. For all of the communal conviviality, there were still class and social divisions even within individual missions. People from different backgrounds were thrown together in Peking more than they were in many places because of the diplomatic community’s small size, the disappearance of the former expatriate community, and the isolation

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from local life. Heads of mission like Humphrey Trevelyan might refer to the British as ‘a family’ and even discount the idea that there were any social distinctions, but keener observers saw things differently. ‘It was a problem,’ Pamela Youde told me. ‘The security guards and their wives, for example, found themselves among what they saw as a lot of snooty diplomats who thought they were the only ones who mattered.’ Solange Brand, who had not previously encountered France’s diplomatic elite, commented: ‘They thought they were very superior. I didn’t want to live in that sort of society again.’ Richard Scott described the social differences at the British mission in the late 1950s, which in his case were magnified by being a representative of the much maligned Ministry of Works, not the Foreign Office. ‘We hate the Ministry of Works,’ a Foreign Office appointee told him on his first morning in Peking, even though he was the person responsible for a smooth move to the mission’s new premises. Scott’s fine baritone voice may have been a welcome addition to the British choir but it took several months, he recorded in his diary, before he and his wife Sybil were ‘fairly well accepted by the diplomatic staff and were tending to be treated as one of the family’. For the senior Ministry of Works officer, their acceptance meant that, when Sybil was invited to coffee parties, ‘she found that her fellow guests were not necessarily wives of the guards or DWS [Diplomatic Wireless Service] operators’—the people at the bottom of the social pecking order.33 The expansion of the Western diplomatic corps in the early 1970s introduced not just more European embassies but the less formal and class-bound diplomatic cultures of the ‘new world’. George H. W. Bush was only too aware that some diplomats looked askance at his own efforts at informality. On 1 August 1975 he noted in his diary: ‘Swiss national day. I have now gone to open neck, short sleeve shirts . . . the Europeans for the most part insist on coats and ties.’34 Bush also preferred entertaining diplomatic colleagues rather less conventionally than was the normal practice. ‘In the evening we had a bunch of ambassadors over and showed the “Hustler”—fine old movie . . . Popcorn. Relaxed and informal. The kind of thing I like to do.’35 And while most heads of mission drove around in chauffeured Mercedes, Bush often preferred his bicycle. Other newcomers also had their distinctive styles. The Australians’ Down Under Club provided Friday night conviviality and even a band with the signature tune Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’. If the British had a reputation for Scottish dancing and whist drives, the Australians ‘became renowned for their parties’, in the words of Reuters correspondent Jonathan Sharp. They hosted fancy dress parties, masked balls and ‘special nights’ (Roman, medieval, Elizabethan), all with the challenge of locating the appropriate decorations, food and costumes, and sometimes accompanied by fairly risqué behaviour. At one Australian party Sharp witnessed what he described as ‘Peking’s first recorded streak . . . a modest effort by world standards—merely a

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George H. W. and Barbara Bush on the streets of Peking. (George Bush Presidential Library and Museum)

dash across a crowded room by a young diplomat clad only in a white scarf and his diplomatic immunity’.36 The Chinese usually allowed foreigners to pursue their bourgeois, decadent activities so long as they were taking place behind the walls of an embassy or block of diplomatic apartments. But the behaviour of the six American marines, who served as US liaison office guards, went a step too far. The marines’ club, housed in a diplomatic apartment and named the Red-Ass Saloon, became a problem because of its popularity as virtually the only social venue in Peking for foreigners, a magnet for everyone from journalists to Western and African students. The liaison office’s Chinese staff were reportedly horrified by stories of the marines’ Halloween party where the costumes included Count Dracula and a mafia gang. When the Chinese authorities objected strenuously to the marines’ behaviour, David Bruce reluctantly instructed them to close down the club and to cancel their forthcoming annual ball. The presence of marines as security guards, the general practice at American embassies around the world, had antagonized the Chinese from the start as an alleged affront to Chinese sovereignty. Bruce had forebodings, he wrote in his diary, when Washington insisted on the marines wearing full uniform (complete with Vietnam medals) at the initial ‘raising the American flag’ ceremony.37 The Chinese authorities demanded the marines’ withdrawal and the US government eventually agreed to replace them with civilian security guards, a process that was completed within a year of the office’s formal opening.38

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Outside the walls of the embassies and residential compounds was ‘diplomats’ Peking’. Despite the city’s ongoing physical and economic transformation, it had some resonance with former times, though without the polo-playing and the Sundays at Paomachang (the racecourse) featured in Julia Boyd’s A Dance with the Dragon. Some of the city’s top restaurants continued to operate, albeit under state control from the mid-fifties: Mongolian hotpot at the Dong Lai Shun, spicy Sichuanese cuisine at the Chengdu (once the residence of Yuan Shikai, the first president of the Chinese Republic), and famous regional dishes at the Feng Ze Yuan. The ‘special prices’ for foreigners, who were allocated separate rooms away from the ‘masses’, were high by Chinese standards but still low for embassy personnel, even after they increased following the diplomatic influx of the early 1970s. George H. W. Bush waxed lyrical over an eight-course dinner at the Kangle, one of the diplomats’ favourites, for the fairly standard price of 10 yuan (under US$5) a head.39 A few Chinese tailors continued to ply their trade, delighted to be able to make something other than the blue or grey trouser-and-jacket combinations (albeit in high quality cloth) for senior Party officials. The sartorially elegant David Bruce became an enthusiastic advocate of the Hongdu tailors’ shop, having what he described as an elaborate ‘Mandarin dressing-gown’ made from a traditional Chinese long pao (dragon robe).40 Even Bush succumbed, though he preferred the ‘theatre shop’ (officially the Peking Arts and Crafts Trust Company). ‘Amazing theatre shop down there has amazing antiques all mixed in with a bunch of junk but nevertheless there are some marvelous old copper things, bronzes, some porcelains . . .’41 Also on the diplomatic circuit were the remaining traditional stores in Liulichang with their scrolls and porcelain (at ever increasing prices) and Dashalan’s tea and silk shops. The diplomatic community shared with other foreigners the limits on travel: a  radius of twenty kilometres from the centre of the city. At that point there were signs proclaiming ‘Out of bounds for foreigners without special permits’. Within the limit, the Summer Palace on the city’s north-west outskirts was a favourite destination. In winter there was skating on the palace’s Kunming Lake, followed in the British case by hot pies and thermoses of tea. In the warmer months, the Summer Palace was the venue for many a party, just as it had been in old Peking. As the first waves of the Cultural Revolution were being felt in mid-1966, the British farewelled Michael  Wilford in what fellow diplomat Percy Cradock described as ‘an elegant entertainment . . . Boatmen rowed the revellers over the lake as the sun went down.’ Viewed in hindsight, Cradock likened the occasion to ‘dances at the Orangery at Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution’.42 A favourite spot for a Sunday picnic was the valley of the Ming Tombs which, along with the Great Wall beyond it, was exempted from the twenty kilometre limit for most of the Mao era. ‘We can picnic in peaceful isolation away from the constant stare of Chinese and the petty irritations of our somewhat restricted life,’

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Briton Richenda George wrote of a visit to one of the unrestored tombs in 1966.43 Ten years later, the De Ling Tomb was the venue for a farewell function for Australian ambassador Stephen FitzGerald and his wife Gay, complete with long trestle tables, white tablecloths, and crockery and cutlery from the ambassador’s residence. At least there was no risk of kidnap as occurred in Anne Bridge’s 1932 novel Peking Picnic, only a few local peasants looking on with amazement at the odd antics of the foreigners. But even a Sunday excursion to the Ming Tombs or the Great Wall could be a driving hazard. Bicycles and the odd donkey cart travelled at snail’s pace while trucks, buses and the occasional official car wove in and out with little regard for any traffic rules. In December 1974 British correspondent David Bonavia wrote: ‘A number of traffic accidents involving cars by foreigners has been one of the saddest chapters in the expansion of Peking’s diplomatic community.’44 Just over a year earlier, 37-yearold American diplomat Nicholas Platt had been driving his family to the Great Wall in his red Toyota. As Platt remembered the incident more than thirty-five years later: ‘Suddenly, out of nowhere, a young teenage girl cyclist coming in the opposite direction swerved in front of us. I jammed on the brakes, trying desperately to stop, but could not.’ The car hit the bike and the girl came flying off. Seriously injured, she died in hospital the same afternoon.45 After investigating the accident, the police concluded that Platt had violated the municipal traffic regulations (though he denied speeding). They ordered the withdrawal of his driving licence and a payment of 25,380 yuan (approximately US$13,000) compensation to the family of the deceased. Platt and the US liaison office thought that was the end of the matter, but just over a week later the Foreign Ministry informed them that ‘previously when deaths have been caused by diplomats stationed in Peking, the diplomats have invariably been recalled on their own initiative’.46 The Americans felt they had no alternative but to withdraw Platt from China, despite his strong China specialist credentials: a decision the diplomat still endorsed over thirty years later. ‘We were right to yield. Other missions who fought the ruling ended up with the offending diplomat declared persona non grata and given hours to leave.’47 Getting permission to travel further afield varied according to the political situation. Apart from a few years during the Cultural Revolution, there was usually no problem going to Beidaihe, located about 180 miles away on the Bohai Gulf and the summer retreat for diplomats and other expatriates since the early twentieth century. ‘Some wives would go down there for the whole summer with their young children,’ Pamela Youde recalled of the 1950s and early 1960s. For a while one could almost forget that one was in Communist China: staying in a European-style villa overlooking the sea and having a chocolate sundae or iced coffee at Kiesslings, a branch of the former Austrian-owned bakery/restaurant Kiessling & Bader in Tianjin and a rare survival of past times.

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Elsewhere, the most ‘open’ cities were Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Nanjing. Permission to go elsewhere, when it was granted, was mostly to places that would become familiar to cultural and other delegations invited to the PRC. There was the eastern Shanghai-Hangzhou-Suzhou-Wuxi circuit, the north-eastern industrial cities circuit, maybe a trip to Yan’an to see the Communists’ pre-revolutionary capital along with Taiyuan and Xi’an. But before the Cultural Revolution, some diplomats were also allowed to travel to places that would not again be accessible (with a few special ‘exceptions’) until the post-Mao years. In 1955, and again in 1957, British diplomats visited the south-west province of Yunnan and did the Yangzi gorges trip from Chongqing to Wuhan. Such trips were encouraged and funded by the Foreign Office to give diplomats the opportunity to practise their Chinese, to gain more experience of China, and for ‘intelligence purposes’.48 A diplomat’s travel programme, like that for other foreigners, was usually tightly managed, with the individual or group making the usual escorted visits to industrial enterprises, rural cooperatives (and later communes) and educational institutions— with a few tourist sites thrown in. In mid-1957, young British diplomat Gerald Warner had the unusual, though in his case unwelcome, experience of venturing outside ‘the programme’ when his wife Mary became ill during a visit to Anhui province. She was eventually admitted to hospital in Wuhu, rarely visited by foreigners. The hospital was very crowded, dilapidated, the sanitation system had become over-burdened and the lavatories would have been unthinkable in a Western hospital. The staff appeared efficient, and were certainly very kind and gentle. They were inordinately curious, and doctors’ visits were normally attended by some ten or fifteen male nurses and orderlies . . . until I objected mildly and the practice was discontinued.49

While a break away from Peking—or even just from a diplomatic quarter—was always welcome, activities were normally pursued with members of the diplomatic community, more often than not of one’s own embassy. ‘I had the feeling that people live more in each other’s pockets than at any other post I have ever visited, including Moscow,’ a senior Australian foreign affairs officer reported after a visit in 1976. ‘This naturally creates all sorts of personal tensions and problems.’50 Canadian Globe and Mail correspondent Colin McCullough had put it more bluntly a few years earlier when writing about the diplomatic (and the much tinier foreign correspondent) community. ‘Men who occasionally drank too much in their own countries became near-alcoholics in China, high-strung women ended up as neurotics; husbands who had previously only glanced sideways at other women became galloping libertines.’51 Peking was not, of course, the only hardship post where there was ‘more than the usual quota of marital tensions and infidelities’, to use the words of British diplomat George Walden, and where the everyday atmosphere could be claustrophobic.52 While studying in Peking in the mid-1970s and later researching this chapter, I was struck

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by the diplomatic community’s similarities to its counterpart in Moscow where I had spent two years working at the Australian embassy in a similar Cold War environment. But in Moscow the Western diplomatic community was a lot larger, there was Romeo and Juliet at the Bolshoi, one could blend in with the population by wearing one’s plainest clothes, and it was only a short flight to a number of Western capitals.

7 Licensed contacts and beyond

‘We could meet no Chinese except officials,’ Humphrey Trevelyan commented on his two-year sojourn in Peking in the mid-1950s. ‘I only managed to meet other Chinese twice.’1 It was the same for embassy wives. ‘I have to pass among them as an alien and a stranger, subject to their criticism as an “imperialist” and consequently to be disapproved,’ Winifred Stevenson wrote to her cousin in late 1960.2 For all of their self-contained lifestyles, embassy staff and their spouses were used to developing local contacts even at hardship posts. Indeed part of a diplomat’s job, as described in British Foreign Office guidelines, was ‘to build and maintain a wide range of friends or contacts among officials, “opinion-formers” and private citizens of the host country’.3 The inability to do this in Peking, with the partial exception of officials, proved frustrating. Meetings with other Chinese people not only had to be requested through the Protocol Department of the Foreign Ministry but normally took place with one or more officials present. ‘One longs for an hour’s personal chat with a Chinese poet or historian, a painter or a composer,’ Ėtienne Manac’h wrote plaintively in June 1970, ‘but the ear of the censor intervenes in the most innocent of discussions, a  secretary’s pen takes note of the slightest word.’ 4 Three years later John Addis, always keen to meet specialists on Chinese porcelain, told his sister Robina that he had attempted to make direct contact with the Imperial Palace Museum. But the Protocol Department phoned to remind him that ‘such business should always be transmitted through them’.5 Despite the restrictions, there was a small amount of ongoing personal contact, at least before the Cultural Revolution. Writing anonymously, a French diplomat described how he managed to meet a Chinese friend in out of the way places during 1964–65.6 Around the same time, British diplomat David Wilson was delighted to have ‘one or two friendships’ with Chinese people, even though he was conscious of the conditions under which they operated. ‘Although these relationships were semi-clandestine, I am absolutely sure that they were actually known to the Chinese Security Services . . . It was a sort of game—a sort of theatre, and both sides understood the rules.’7

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Almost without exception, these friendships were with people who, as diplomats expressed it, were ‘licensed for contact’ with foreigners. Usually from the academic or cultural world, they often had long-standing Western connections which were virtually impossible to maintain in the new political environment. The numbers were small. In 1958 the British mission compiled a list of all the Chinese people who were known unofficially to its staff; the total number was sixteen. Only some were regular contacts who, as Chargé d’Affaires Duncan Wilson concluded, were very likely ‘obliged to give information about us as a matter of routine’. This did not make them ‘any less useful from our point of view . . . In fact, we deliberately use them in some cases to “convey” our views on current questions to official circles’.8 In November 1959, Winifred Stevenson told her cousin that she and her husband Ian had been to a restaurant the previous week ‘with a Chinese whose wife is English’. After dinner they were invited back to their house—the Stevensons’ first visit to a Chinese home. For Winifred, this seemed like a breakthrough. ‘It was so nice to be with a real Chinese on normal friendly terms,’ she wrote, though she added that ‘real friendships would hardly be possible or fair to them’.9 The couple were the Foreign Languages Press translators Yang Xianyi and his British wife Gladys. As Yang Xianyi revealed in his autobiography, published in Hong Kong in 2002, this was a characteristic licensed contact. Yang, who spoke excellent English and had known some members of the diplomatic community in Nanjing in pre-revolutionary days, had been approached by a Chinese official (whom he assumed was from the Ministry of Public Security) and asked to ‘pick up such contacts again and supply the party with news and views’. In return for his agreement, after he had discussed the matter with Gladys, the couple were assigned a courtyard house in the eastern part of Peking, closer to the diplomatic quarter than their flat at the Foreign Languages Press. ‘We enjoyed living there very much and stayed for about three years.’10 The Yangs’ dinner with the Stevensons was far from their first with a British diplomatic couple. The mission had been surprised by what it described as the Yangs’ ‘determined effort’ to get to know the British from mid-1957, not least because the couple had previously avoided contact. Gladys had even twice cut John Addis, whom she had known in Nanjing, when they passed each other in the street. Nor were diplomats entirely convinced by the Yangs’ story that ‘they had decided that the time had come when they could resume the friendly relations which they had had with the British Embassy in the old days’.11 Three months after the initial contact, Anthony  Elliott wrote to the Foreign Office: We are puzzled by the Yangs. Their sudden and forceful move in our direction made us wonder whether they were operating on instructions from a Chinese organ  .  .  . We shall continue to cultivate them as one of our few contacts in a Chinese institution, and be on our guard against the possibility that they are equally deliberately cultivating us.12

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While Yang Xianyi had been encouraged to make friends with British diplomats, his experience illustrated the risky nature of such contact for Chinese people even with official endorsement. When his mission ended after three years, apparently because he had little to report, his official contact implied that he might, in fact, be a double agent working for the imperialists.13 Although he ridiculed this notion, Yang was always a suspect intellectual and had only narrowly escaped detention in the AntiRightist Movement. Early in the Cultural Revolution, the street committee in the area where the family had lived for three years accused them of having ‘mysterious foreign connections’ and of leading a bourgeois lifestyle which included Gladys’s ventures to the Friendship Store.14 At that stage they were protected by Foreign Languages Press, which refused to hand them over for a ‘struggle meeting’, though they later fell victim to the political struggles within the institution itself. A more sustained licensed contact for British diplomats was the actor Ying Ruocheng. Known to the British as Stephen Ying, he would become familiar to Western audiences in the mid-1980s for his role as the governor of the detention camp in the spectacular Bertolucci film The Last Emperor. Ying had studied Western literature at Qinghua University in the late 1940s and, unlike his well-known educationalist father Ying Qianli, decided to stay on in China as the Communists came to power. Following graduation, he embarked on a career as a professional actor and translator, which included translating English plays into Chinese and which brought him into contact with people at the British mission. Meetings with Ying often took place over dinner and sometimes included wives; Ying was married to former fellow student, Wu Shiliang, also known to the British as Julia Ying. Teddy Youde commented on the early 1960s: ‘Our meetings were always discreet, often at out of the way restaurants, but we saw them fairly often.’15 Ying continued to meet diplomats Alan Donald and Theo Peters when the political environment was becoming increasingly tense during the first half of 1966. In late June, as the Cultural Revolution got under way in earnest, Peters reported: ‘In recent meetings with Stephen Ying we have spent much time discussing the current internal political situation here . . . To our considerable surprise he is still willing (or allowed) to see us.’16 Within days, though, Ying cancelled planned dinners with both men, and they did not hear from him again. Some two months later, when Alan and Janet Donald went for a stroll near Ying’s home, their friend failed to acknowledge them as he rode past on his bicycle.17 When Donald informed the Foreign Office, David Wilson (now back in London) noted on the file that there would be ‘a large hole in our information if he is a victim. I suspect, and hope, that he is just lying low.’18 By October, with no further news of Ying, Donald was surmising: ‘It looks fairly clear that Stephen Ying had a “licence to operate” for ten years or so and that he must have received some guidance and direction from the Public Security organization below P’eng Chen (Peng Zhen).’19

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Peng, the mayor of Peking, had been the first senior official to come under attack as the Cultural Revolution got under way in May. In his autobiography, published posthumously in 2009, Ying Ruocheng revealed that he had, indeed, been recruited by Chinese intelligence as early as 1950 when, at the age of 21, he was asked to provide information on foreigners at Qinghua University. This included collecting evidence on Allyn and Adele Rickett, who were arrested as American spies the following year. In 1952 Ying was approached directly by Peng Zhen, already mayor of Peking, who had seen the list Ying provided about his foreign acquaintances. Peng asked him, in the actor’s own words, to ‘go on associating with these people, and whatever their reactions are—especially when it’s about some big event . . . Just give us some idea of what these people are thinking.’20 While Ying’s collaborator on his autobiography, Claire Conceison, found him ‘reluctant to discuss his role as a government informant’, Ying did admit that he talked with public security officials after his meetings with diplomats, as well as filing reports on them. Some were written jointly with his wife, Wu Shiliang, who was formally attached to the People’s Art Theatre, but according to the couple’s son Ying Da, had actually been employed by the Peking Public Security Bureau since 1958. The narration read at her funeral in 1987 stated that she had for thirty years ‘made an important contribution through her counter-espionage efforts and intelligence work’.21 Despite the role playing and mutual reporting, friendships of a particular type did develop—at least as perceived by normally wary diplomats. ‘Stephen and Julia Ying were great friends of mine and of my former wife’s,’ Richard Evans noted on a Foreign Office minute about Wu’s reappearance as an interpreter for visiting Western dignitaries in 1973.22 Pamela Youde also remembered Ying with great affection, pointing him out to me in a photo in her London flat: ‘We were old friends from way back.’ Somewhat ironically, two of her best friends in Peking before their arrest in July 1951 had been Americans Allyn and Adele Rickett, whom Ying helped to incriminate.23 There was one group of Chinese people licensed for contact with the diplomatic community on a daily basis: those who worked at embassies and in the homes of staff. As in Moscow, all new employees had to be recruited through the government’s Diplomatic Services Bureau, but quite a few (including translators and accountants) had been with a diplomatic mission since well before the establishment of the PRC. Having learnt English or French in a missionary school or college, or even overseas, they were often themselves to varying degrees ‘Westernized’. This included using Western-order names like the British mission’s C. P. (or John) Chen, Y. H. Liu, Wilson Chang, and also Andrew Yu—described by diplomat Percy Cradock as ‘a man of bourgeois tastes and elegant personal lifestyle’.24 Andrew’s father had worked at the French diplomatic mission before the Sino-Japanese War and his brothers Antoine and Odilon were

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the ‘two Chinese pillars’ in the life of the new French embassy, according to young diplomat Jean-Pierre Angremy.25 Like other bourgeois intellectuals, particularly those with a Western education or former connections, embassy staff were under constant pressure to demonstrate their loyalty to the Communist government. This sometimes included participating— to their embarrassment according to observers—in anti-imperialist demonstrations against their employers. But they were always politically vulnerable. Wilson Chang was arrested in early 1958 during the Anti-Rightist Movement and most others, including Chen, Liu and the Yu brothers, were replaced by PRC-trained employees during the Cultural Revolution.26 When I asked Pamela Youde to compare her relations with the British diplomatic mission’s Chinese staff in Nationalist China and the PRC, she responded: Almost as soon as I arrived in Shanghai in 1948, they sort of took me under their wing and let me go around with them. I also met some of their families. But after the communists came—I was in Nanking and then moved to Peking—the Chinese had less and less to do with us apart from in their working role. In any case, we weren’t allowed to have personal friendships, far less relationships. There was always the possibility of blackmail.

Just occasionally, though, a close friendship did develop, despite the strictures on both sides. ‘Life here is still as usual except for the gap which your departure has created for me,’ John Chen wrote to John Addis in May 1957, soon after the 42-yearold diplomat had returned to the Foreign Office in London.27 Addis had already met the translator and his beautiful young wife, as he described her, at the British diplomatic mission in 1950, and the two renewed their acquaintance when Addis served as counsellor from 1954 to 1957. In the three years following Addis’s departure, Chen corresponded with the British diplomat at some length; twenty-two of his letters remained in Addis’s personal papers when he died in 1983. In the political environment of the Mao era—and even for a while beyond— ongoing personal correspondence between a Chinese person and a Western diplomat was highly unusual. ‘We were always very careful. We didn’t want to get anyone into trouble,’ Pamela Youde told me. Even ignoring Chen’s more personal comments, the letters’ contents contrasted with the conventions of appropriate diplomatic behaviour for which Addis was regarded as a stickler. Chen wrote about, and Addis apparently offered detailed comments on, the comings and goings at the diplomatic mission, including his personal impressions (not always favourable) of new arrivals, the general office chit-chat, and his family of five young children—all girls. From the correspondence, it is almost certain that Addis sent his letters through the diplomatic bag and Chen presumably managed to do the same. During his Peking sojourn, Addis had warned his sister to be very careful about what she wrote in

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airmail letters, as distinct from those sent by bag. ‘I always assume, as I hope you do too, that all letters are read both by the Chinese and by the Russians.’28 Apart from the fact that neither man would have risked exposing his comments to official eyes, from mid-1957 any Chinese person maintaining Western links was vulnerable to official denunciation as a rightist. In February 1958, Chen himself told Addis of the arrest of the diplomatic mission’s Wilson Chang.29 Chen’s more personal comments, as well the confidences in Addis’s own letters to which he referred, indicate that the Chinese translator and the man often described as a confirmed bachelor had been more than just office colleagues, even if one allows for a certain amount of Chinese sentimentality and the fact that Chen was not writing in his native language. Whatever the exact nature of the relationship, it had given Addis a degree of personal Chinese contact that was normally impossible in the new political environment and that he missed from his pre-revolutionary days in Nanjing. ‘My dear John,’ Chen began his letter as usual on 28 June 1958: Although you have been away from Peking for more than a year, the things we did together in Peking, however, still remain fresh in my memory as if they were done yesterday. With these memories in my mind it is a matter of certainty in me that however long we may have parted, separation will not in the least matter or affect our friendship.

Chen’s letters were scattered with personal confidences. I hope by this time you have got over the sense of loneliness . . . I shall not mention again anything about your getting married, for from experience I have come to learn that you are quite firm in leading a life you have chosen and I respect.30 Somehow I hate the idea of seeing a different host in the same house (No. 5) that housed my old friend.31 Your dream about me was really quite fascinating.32

During the course of the correspondence, Chen thanked Addis for sending him a ‘fragrant leaf ’ from his garden and apologized when his friend scolded him for not writing more often. Addis had described the family home Woodside (bought by his banker father, Sir Charles Addis) near Tunbridge Wells, including his bedroom and the curtains swathed around the bed which Chen thought ‘quite unique’, though he wondered about air circulation. The two exchanged presents at Christmas or Chinese New Year, usually after asking each other what they would like. The gifts included a woollen jumper for Chen, as well as one for his wife, and a Chinese bedsheet for Addis. ‘Your choice is a very sentimental one,’ Chen wrote.33 In mid-1959, the correspondents had an ongoing discussion about Addis’s decision to decline the opportunity to return to Peking. Although the diplomat later told the Foreign Office that he saw his professional future being tied to China, at the time

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he felt that some broader experience would benefit his career. When he asked Chen whether he thought he had made the right decision, Chen admitted that he ‘did feel rather sad and disappointed . . . I long to see you at an early date’.34 The correspondents were still discussing the implications of Addis’s decision more than two months later. ‘How encouraging particularly is the news that you are likely to be posted early next year to some place near me where I could go even during my leave!’ Chen wrote.35 After Addis was appointed ambassador to Laos in early 1960, the two men discussed the possibility of Chen visiting Vientiane. As Chen accurately surmised: ‘I am only afraid that under the present circumstances, it may not be possible to make my trip to Laos a reality.’36 The correspondence apparently petered out after Addis became alarmed that one of Chen’s letters may have gone astray. The last letter from him in Addis’s personal papers, dated 16 October 1960, gave no indication that the contact was about to come to an end, but marks the end of the trail. By then Addis was keen to go back to Peking, telling the Foreign Office that, although he was enjoying his work in Laos, the country had an ‘almost complete lack of anything to be interested in’.37 But he would have to wait more than eleven years for another posting to China, this time as Britain’s first ambassador. By then, Chen was no longer working at the diplomatic mission. Along with most other long-time employees in Peking embassies, the translator had been officially assigned ‘to do labour in accordance with Chairman Mao’s directive’ during the heady days of the Cultural Revolution.38 Soon after arriving back in Peking in early 1972, Addis wrote to the Foreign Ministry asking to meet former staff from his earlier sojourn but, like some of his

Back in Peking. British Ambassador John Addis (second from right) pictured in June 1972 with visiting British politician Anthony Royle, Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua (second from left) and Song Zhiguang, the PRC’s first ambassador to the UK. (John Mansfield Addis Papers, School of Oriental and African Studies, London)

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other requests, this does not seem to have been met.39 Then, in a letter to his sister Robina in April 1973, he mentioned that a ‘friend from the old days’ had come for supper. ‘He was very cautious and can only see me rarely . . . I feel that the Cultural Revolution has interposed such a barrier that no resumption on the old terms would now be possible.’40 One can only conjecture that the visitor was John Chen. While Addis and Chen had managed to keep their close contact under wraps, a personal relationship that began a decade later resulted in a spy case, international publicity, and two gaol sentences. Blackmailing foreigners through sexual entrapment was never an issue in the PRC the way it was in the Soviet Union—any personal approach would normally have seemed both incongruous and highly suspicious— but there was one striking instance of the use of the ‘honey trap’ in Mao’s China. This was the case involving the young French embassy employee, Bernard Boursicot, and a Peking opera singer, voice coach and part-time language teacher named Shi Peipu. The web of intrigue, more like Peking opera than real life, inspired the play and Hollywood film M. Butterfly (with a great deal of dramatic license) and was analyzed in detail in Joyce Wadler’s book 1993 book Liaison. The case provoked international publicity not so much because Boursicot spied for the Chinese as because of the sexual ambiguity of his relationship with Shi Peipu. The bisexual Boursicot consistently maintained that he believed that Shi, who dressed as a man, was actually a woman who allegedly produced a baby from the relationship. When it was eventually revealed that Shi was in fact male, the public revelations stretched popular credulity and made Boursicot a laughing stock. While the physiological aspects of the case dominated the Western media—‘Is the male Peking opera singer a woman spy?’ asked Libération—Boursicot’s entrapment had followed a fairly standard pattern: an intelligence service targeting a young, naïve embassy employee who did not really fit into diplomatic life.41 Only 20 when he arrived in Peking, Boursicot had left school at tenth grade, travelled and done clerical work in Algeria, and then secured a one-year contract to go to Peking as a junior accounts clerk. In the words of Marianne Bastid, who was teaching French in Peking at the time, he was a ‘very ordinary young Frenchman’.42 Junior diplomat Jean-Pierre Angremy referred to Boursicot in his diary as being of jovial appearance, despite having somewhat greasy hair and bad acne.43 Boursicot met Shi Peipu in December 1964, two months after his arrival, at an embassy party for the first group of French students. The daintily featured Frenchspeaking 26-year-old, who gave Chinese lessons to a number of diplomats’ wives, was described by Angremy as a man of ‘perfect courtesy’ who had ‘a special place at embassy receptions’.44 When Boursicot introduced his new Chinese friend to Nicholas Komaroff, who worked at Foreign Languages Press, his fellow Frenchman was puzzled because of his own inability to have social contact with local people even

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though he worked in a Chinese institution, not a Western embassy.45 Alarm bells should already have started ringing. Boursicot had undergone the standard security briefing before going to Peking but, as one of his young embassy colleagues later commented: ‘France had only just established relations with China. The briefings they gave us were based on their experience of the Soviet Union. They seemed altogether too alarmist for China.’46 In the first half of 1965, when politically conscious diplomats with licensed contacts were well aware of the game that each side was playing, Boursicot was seeing Shi clandestinely two or three times a week and the pair increasingly shared personal confidences. According to Boursicot, one day Shi confessed to him that he was actually female, but that he had been brought up as a boy. The two embarked on a more intimate relationship, sometimes at Boursicot’s apartment and sometimes at Shi’s courtyard house located in Nan Chizi, just a few houses along from Reuters correspondent Vergil Berger. Shortly before Boursicot left for Paris at the end of the year, Shi told him ‘she’ was pregnant with their child. Boursicot’s actual entrapment came after he returned to Peking for a second posting in September 1969. Even licensed contacts had been lying low since the Cultural Revolution swept the country (if they had not been imprisoned or sent to May 7th cadre schools for ideological education and reform through labour). For months, Boursicot and Shi were able to have little more than the occasional exchange on a busy street. Then, in early spring, Shi telephoned Boursicot to say that his/her work unit, the Writers’ Federation, had granted them permission to meet twice weekly in his apartment to ‘study the thoughts of Chairman Mao’. Some two months later, it was not Shi but two Chinese intelligence officers who greeted Boursicot to discuss Chairman Mao, with the Frenchman being allowed to stay on afterwards to see Shi. Boursicot began supplying his instructors, who called themselves Kang and Zhao, with documents from the French embassy. He believed, no doubt accurately, that it was the only way he could continue to have contact with Shi, as well as finally meet the son that his lover had told him about. Employed this time as an archivist, he sorted the contents of the fortnightly diplomatic bag on its arrival from Paris, and also saw incoming and outgoing cables. Boursicot removed the documents—his instructors had told him they were interested in material on the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia—from the embassy, delivered them to Kang at Shi’s apartment, and later returned them to the mailroom or archives room. Despite his cooperation, Boursicot did not get to see his son, Dudu, who Shi said was with friends in the countryside because of the political disorder, and he left China in May 1972. Eighteen months later Boursicot was back in China for a visit after Peking approved the issue of a visa, to the surprise of China Travel Service in Hong Kong. On arrival, he went straight to Shi’s apartment and finally met Dudu (whom Boursicot called Bertrand). The boy, who seemed to have mixed Chinese-Western features, looked

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quite a lot like him, he thought. During this visit, and a further trip in 1976, Kang also visited the apartment. After Boursicot was posted to Mongolia the following year, he made regular visits to Peking, arriving not just with the diplomatic bag but with documents he had photocopied for the Chinese intelligence agent. Compared with Peking, though, the tiny three-man embassy in Ulan Bator received little in the way of confidential material. Although the rest of the story belongs to the 1980s, well into the post-Mao era, it is told here because of its links with the earlier period. In October 1982 Shi secured a formal invitation for a three-month visit to Paris to lecture and demonstrate Peking opera, and obtained French visas for himself and Dudu/Bertrand. He was quite a hit in Paris, performing Peking opera and even having a TV documentary made about him, and obtained a further one-year visa. France’s domestic intelligence agency, though, became suspicious when it discovered that a foreign service employee was living with a PRC national in an apartment on Boulevard de Port-Royal. After further investigation, it suspected ‘cooperation between Bernard Boursicot and the Chinese intelligence services through the intermediary of Shi Pei Pu’.47 Boursicot was arrested on 30 June 1983 and Shi a week later.

On trial: Bernard Boursicot and Shi Peipu, 5 May 1986. (Philippe Bouchon/AFP/Getty Images)

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What initially looked like a standard spy case turned into a media circus. Boursicot told police the full personal story as he saw it, apparently thinking his interrogators might understand his desire to protect Shi Peipu and their son. Shi initially told police the same story but then crossed out his statement that he had told Boursicot he was female. To solve the gender confusion, the Justice Ministry ordered a medical examination which revealed that Shi was ‘definitely male’. Further tests revealed that Dudu was neither Boursicot’s nor Shi’s son; he had actually been adopted (or bought) by Shi in the western province of Xinjiang, which accounted for his somewhat non-Chinese features. Boursicot was reportedly psychologically shattered and slit his throat in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Boursicot and Shi were eventually put on trial in mid-1986: not for offences committed in 1969–71 (because of the statute of limitations) but for providing documents to the Chinese government between 1977 and 1979 when Boursicot was stationed in Mongolia. Both were found guilty and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. Less than a year later, though, Shi was given a presidential pardon following pressure from the Chinese government on François Mitterrand. Boursicot was pardoned four months later. The two men went their separate ways and had only sporadic contact. Boursicot eked out a modest living; he eventually realized the profits of his celebrity with royalties from the play M. Butterfly and Joyce Wadler’s book Liaison. Shi stayed on in Paris, supported mostly by Dudu/Bertrand. ‘I always thought this was a three part story: Bernard’s point of view, Shi Peipu’s, and Dudu’s,’ Wadler told me. ‘But I only heard Bernard’s.’48 Although Shi had talked to the journalist for an early article in People magazine, she was not convinced that he was telling the truth.49 He refused further contact, even though Wadler offered him the same deal as Boursicot: a share of the royalties for cooperating on the book that was to become a bestseller. When Shi died in 2009 at the age of 70, he had still not told his story. The PRC’s intelligence files remained closed.

8 Cold War diplomacy

‘The diplomatic community receives about the same treatment from the Chinese as in a luxury leper colony,’ an Australian official commented after a visit to Peking towards the end of the Mao era.1 Like their Cold War counterparts in Moscow and the Eastern bloc, Peking’s diplomats not only lived in a hostile political environment but had difficult, sometimes fractious, relations with the host government. Even the two basic features of diplomats’ working lives, conducting their government’s bilateral relations and political reporting, were severely curtailed during the Mao years—the former more than the latter. Looking back on his sojourns in the PRC, Briton Percy Cradock compared diplomatic work in the early post-Mao years with that during his two postings in the 1960s. ‘China had become a country we had to deal with, rather than simply study . . . In the past our major concern had been reporting and analysis.’2 During the course of an individual diplomat’s two or three-year Peking sojourn, it was unusual for there not to be some dramatic political development for analysis: from the early mass campaigns followed by the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s (with the subsequent famine), to the tumultuous events of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-sixties and the ongoing manoeuvring for power in the early 1970s. By the time most Western countries had diplomatic representation in Peking, the big issue was the succession. What would happen after the death of Mao Zedong? The diplomats’ China-watching (or Pekinology) paralleled the Kremlinology of their Moscow colleagues, though there was access to even fewer sources of information. Largely cut off from the world around them, diplomats had to rely mostly on a small selection of publications to which access varied according to the political climate. In the early years they were allowed to subscribe to a few local newspapers as well as the major national ones, but during the Cultural Revolution decade they were officially restricted to little more than the People’s Daily, Guangming Daily and the ideological journal Red Flag. Under official auspices and control, the publications were at least ‘an authoritative guide to the thinking of national leaders’, in the words of British diplomat Roger Garside. ‘Small changes in emphasis, the reformulation of a set phrase, the appearance of a new slogan or the quiet dropping of an old one

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occurred only by design and reflected a political development whose meaning one must search for.’ 3 When the Cultural Revolution hit the streets in mid-1966, there was more to do than pore over the People’s Daily or Red Flag, as Briton John Weston recalled. ‘Life was actually very exciting for those of us who had to get about in town reading Red Guard wall posters, buying Red Guard newspapers, trying to understand what was going on.’ Active China-watching, though, was not without its tensions. ‘We were often involved in melees and violent arguments on the streets, sometimes surrounded by Chinese who thought we were up to no good, sometimes pursued, sometimes victimized in other ways.’ 4 In this situation, the diplomats’ language skills were put to the test when they attempted to memorize the contents of dazibao, rather than being seen taking notes, and writing them down when they returned to the office. They had to be even more careful when, in June 1967, two young Indian diplomats were arrested and expelled as ‘spies’. China’s foreign relations were also high on the reporting agenda throughout the Mao era. The Sino-Soviet relationship, which also exercised the Kremlinologists in Moscow, was a major focus of attention: from the establishment of the alliance in 1950 to its decline from the late fifties and the vituperation of the sixties. Also demanding attention was the PRC’s wooing of African countries, its relations with its Asian ‘brothers’, and its role in the region including the Korean War, the Sino-Indian War, and the lengthy confrontation in Vietnam. From the early 1970s, the US-China relationship was central to diplomatic reporting, with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s visit to Peking in October 1971 (he had already made a secret trip in July), President Nixon’s historic visit in February 1972, and the establishment the following year of small liaison offices in Peking and Washington. Following each of Kissinger’s further visits in 1973 and 1974, senior diplomats virtually queued up at the liaison office to find out what progress, if any, had been made towards the normalization of US-China relations. David  Bruce was ‘as forthcoming as [he] thought possible’ in dealing with inquiries,5 while George H. W. Bush found himself being guarded even with ambassadors who had become personal friends. ‘FitzGerald digs very hard,’ he commented on the Australian ambassador. All were ‘curious as hell’.6 Peking’s diplomats, like some of their colleagues elsewhere in the world, did not always see eye-to-eye with their foreign ministries. There was little chance of their becoming overly attached to Communist China, as the Japanologists and Arabists were sometimes accused of doing for Japan and Arab countries. At the same time, living and breathing the PRC led some diplomats to regard Chinese Communism as being rather more nuanced—and the government somewhat less belligerent—than the Cold War images portrayed in the West, particularly the United States. Although John Addis’s love of China’s traditional culture did not extend to enthusiasm for the

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Communist regime, his earlier experience under the Nationalists made him rather less hostile than some people, at least in the early years. In his ambassadorial valedictory despatch in 1974, he wrote: During the cold war years there were so many adverse preconceptions about Communist China that those who knew a little were always on the defensive. Communism in China was held to be an alien system imposed by force on an unwilling population and therefore to be a state of affairs that could not endure . . . Arguments to the contrary were discounted as special pleading, and those who put them forward were viewed askance as ‘pro-Chinese’.7

When I asked Addis about this in 1979, he put it more bluntly: ‘The Foreign Office was McCarthyist in the fifties.’8 He was still angry about the treatment of his former colleague and friend Derek Bryan, whose appointment in Peking had been terminated in 1951 after he told an American diplomat, while on leave in London, that he approved of Mao’s social reforms. The diplomat reported the conversation to the State  Department, which reported it to the Foreign Office, which then informed Bryan that he was being transferred to Peru. The China specialist, who had spent eighteen years in China in the consular and then the diplomatic service, resigned from the Foreign Office and subsequently became a well-known ‘friend of China’. Although Bryan was persona non grata with officialdom, Addis still visited him and his Chinese wife Liao Hongying when he was in London. General Western perceptions of the PRC began to shift from the early 1970s, as Colin  Mackerras discussed in his book Western Images of China, particularly with Nixon’s visit and growing American interest in the PRC.9 Even so, Australian Ambassador Dr Stephen FitzGerald did not have an easy relationship with his Department of Foreign Affairs which had been unenthusiastic about the appointment of the 34-year-old China scholar and former junior diplomat by the new labour prime minister, Gough Whitlam. Looking back on his Peking sojourn forty years later, FitzGerald claimed that some senior officers had ‘objected to almost any initiative to engage more closely with the Chinese government’.10 Declassified diplomatic documents reveal ongoing friction between the department and the embassy. For example, when FitzGerald was rapped over the knuckles in September 1975 for giving a Chinese Foreign Ministry official some extracts from a record of conversation between the Australian ambassador in Indonesia and the Indonesian Foreign Ministry, he retaliated by expressing concern ‘that a certain rigidity may be beginning to reappear in the Department’s thinking about China’.11 David Bruce and George H. W. Bush both had ongoing issues with Washington, though it was more the difficulty of getting themselves heard at all. Henry Kissinger, as national security adviser and from September 1973 also secretary of state, frequently bypassed the US liaison office, negotiating direct with the Chinese through their mission to the United Nations in New York and during his own visits to Peking.

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Bruce managed to maintain a reasonable relationship with Kissinger, using the liaison office’s direct channel to the White House (bypassing the State Department) to communicate with him. Bush, though, was decidedly unimpressed. ‘The policy matters are held tightly [by Kissinger],’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I am wondering if it is good for our country to have as much individual diplomacy.’12 Bush also had ongoing issues with the State Department which was not always enthusiastic about his efforts at informality, not just with fellow diplomats but with Chinese officials; some thought he should have a ‘concept of his proper role’.13 While political reporting went on apace, albeit with heavily restricted sources, bilateral relations with the PRC were very limited for most of the Mao era. Working on the China desk at the Foreign Office in the mid-1960s after a stint in Peking only reinforced John Boyd’s sense of ‘how slim the bilateral relationship was with China’.14 After the initial courtesy calls, even a head of mission found it difficult to maintain contact with senior Chinese officials. Requests for information, including frequent British inquiries about the welfare of its imprisoned nationals, went unanswered. When diplomats did meet officials, they encountered the diplomatic culture of a nation that continued to be highly sensitive to China’s ‘century of national humiliation’ and that, in the Cold War environment, constantly denounced Western governments as part of the American imperialist camp. While the Chinese could be genial hosts, particularly towards visitors, they could also appear difficult and prickly. In his valedictory despatch in 1971, British Chargé d’Affaires John Denson wrote: ‘When the Chinese decide to be unhelpful their officials can act with a degree of cold-blooded unpleasantness, arrogance and self-righteousness which is unparalleled in my experience.’15 Even Stephen FitzGerald, described by David Bruce as an ‘enthusiastic admirer of the PRC’, later wrote of the ‘patience and sense of humour that was so necessary in China in that period’.16 French ambassador Étienne Manac’h was one of the few Western heads of mission to have substantial ongoing contact with high-level Chinese officials. Over the course of his six-year sojourn in Peking, he developed what others saw as a close relationship with Premier Zhou Enlai, whom he met regularly, mostly to discuss the Indo-China situation on which Manac’h was a specialist (as well as being critical of US policy). His meetings with Zhou gave him a glimpse of the working habits of a man who reportedly slept only three or four hours a night. On one occasion, having been forewarned that the premier would like to see him fairly late in the evening, Manac’h was not finally summoned until two in the morning. When he arrived at the Great Hall of the People, 73-year-old Zhou was with his usual entourage of officials and secretaries. As the discussions progressed, there was a sequence of refreshments: first cake, then fruit, then ‘excellent coffee’—even to a Frenchman. ‘Two or three times, I thought we’d finished and I got up to leave, but Zhou Enlai stopped me,’ Manac’h wrote in his diary. Finally the meeting was over and the ambassador was driven back to his

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residence. ‘It was almost 5 a.m. The only sign of life in this corner of San Li Tun was the security guard.’17 Although the new wave of diplomats in the 1970s complained about the paucity of contacts with officialdom, these were much greater than their predecessors had experienced. Sporting and cultural exchanges, which had occurred only intermittently before the Cultural Revolution with the few countries that recognized the PRC, began to take off. In 1973 the London Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra re-introduced the population to the Western classical music that had been banned since the start of the Cultural Revolution. (There was a slight hiccup when Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, roundly denounced Western culture the following year.) With Western business keen to get back into the China market, several countries organized trade exhibitions. One of the most popular exhibits at an Australian exhibition in 1974 was a sheep shearing demonstration by some rugged shearers that attracted up to 16,000 people a day. Qantas had received special permission to fly to Peking for the occasion—with ninety sheep on board.18 Embassies were also kept busy with the growing number of visiting delegations. Even seasoned travellers were often functioning outside their normal comfort zone and diplomats tried to ensure they did nothing to upset the delicate state of their country’s relations with the PRC. The conduct of two Labour MPs, Joel Barnett and Robert Sheldon, during the visit of a British parliamentary delegation in September 1972 infuriated Ambassador John Addis. The men’s behaviour, which included quarrelling with a Chinese official over their programme and walking out of an officially organized excursion to the Great Wall, even prompted media publicity in Britain. Addis vented his anger in a letter to his sister Robina. You will have read in The Times that the visit of the Parliamentary Delegation has been marred by the conduct of two of the Labour MPs. Their attitude from the first was ‘No one’s going to push me around or pull the wool over my eyes. I want to see the Top Brass and don’t you dare fob me off with any junior official’. I am so sorry it has happened. It is a jarring and shocking episode which makes me ashamed and will have deeply offended the Chinese.19

Even the normally unflappable David Bruce was sorely tested by some American visitors. A congressional delegation in July 1973, led by powerful Democratic Senator Warren G. Magnuson, incurred his special wrath as he wrote afterwards to Henry Kissinger. ‘The visit of this delegation has from the beginning been a disaster due to the attitude and personality of its chairman, Magnuson [who] was as petulant as if he were suffering from ptomaine poisoning’.20 Magnuson was disgruntled that the delegation was not met by top officials on its arrival and that his time was being wasted on sightseeing (always a feature of official entertaining in China) instead of having substantive discussions. When he was eventually received by Zhou  Enlai, he annoyed the premier with questions about Taiwan and Cambodia, and then

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by recounting the details of their supposedly confidential discussions to visiting American journalists. According to the deputy chief of the US liaison office, Al Jenkins, ‘one of the chief results of the trip was to reconfirm the Chinese belief in the superiority of their own system of government’.21 As more Western countries recognized the PRC, the visit of a president or prime minister (usually preceded by that of a country’s foreign minister) became a regular occurrence. In September 1973, French President Georges Pompidou visited the PRC, followed by Canada’s Pierre Trudeau in October and Australia’s Gough Whitlam in November. Britain fell behind, with Prime Minister Edward Heath cancelling a planned visit for early January 1974, barely two weeks before he was due to arrive in China, because of a political crisis at home. (He visited China in May but as leader of the opposition.) It was not until 1982 that Margaret Thatcher would make the first visit by a British prime minister, with talks centred on Hong Kong’s future after 1997. Western governments created extra work for themselves, and hence for their embassies in Peking, if they wanted to deviate from the usual formula for official guests. Instead of allowing the Chinese to arrange Pompidou’s return banquet, hosted and paid for by the visitor, the French were keen to impress them with la civilisation française by holding the function at the embassy. On board one of the three planes transporting the French entourage to Peking were three French chefs (in addition to Pompidou’s personal chef), a pâtissier and a florist, as well as the food and wine for the banquet.22 Manac’h had taken advantage of the forthcoming occasion to have the ambassador’s residence redecorated with the help of a specialist from Paris: new curtains, furniture, lamps, paintings, and even some of the ‘ultra-modern ornaments’ that the president was said to like. ‘This is the first time in Peking that a foreign head of state’s return banquet is being held in an embassy,’ Manac’h wrote in his diary.23 It was also the first time that the diplomatic corps had not been invited, with the number of guests limited by space constraints to 128 (of whom 92 were Chinese), compared with around 700 at the premier’s welcome banquet. Nevertheless, the guests were duly impressed when twenty waiters—lined up in two columns—strode in bearing the first course of langoustes en Bellevue decorated with the lobsters’ antennae. ‘It shows China what we are still capable of doing!’ the ambassador noted proudly.24 For all of the time-consuming preparations, the visit of a president or prime minister could be the highlight of an ambassador’s term in China. As well as Premier Zhou  Enlai, virtually the entire Party leadership appeared at the banquets and discussions, even while intense political rivalries were being played out. It  was Deng Xiaoping, recently emerged from the political wilderness and wearing sandals and white socks, who accompanied Pompidou and his entourage on a visit to the Imperial Palace. But Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and one of Deng’s principal antagonists,

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President Georges Pompidou with Jiang Qing and Zhou Enlai. (Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos)

joined Zhou Enlai in hosting the French president at a performance of The Red Detachment of Women, her favourite revolutionary ballet. The symbolic prize, though, was a meeting with Mao Zedong himself: the chance not just to see in person the man who appeared on millions of posters but to assess his ailing health amid constant diplomatic speculation about the succession. When Mao met Nixon on 21 February 1972, he was able to walk (or at least shuffle) towards the US president and had a coherent one-hour conversation with the visiting American.25 He was still in command of his faculties at his meetings with the French president and the Canadian and Australian prime ministers in late 1973, though he was feeble physically.26 But by the time he met New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon on 20 April 1976, he was lolling in his chair and could only mumble a few words that had to be deciphered by a nurse even before being translated, leading diplomats to speculate that ‘the end may be near’.27 On 27 May he had his last meeting with a foreign leader (Pakistan’s Ali Bhutto) and died just over three months later. At the same time as it was conducting its formal diplomatic relations, the Chinese government was also pursuing an anti-imperialist propaganda war that was to assume hysterical proportions during the Cultural Revolution. With the number-one imperialist, the United States, not represented in China for most of the period, the British and later the French diplomatic mission were physically targeted as its surrogates as well as for their own alleged misdemeanours.

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In the 1950s, some of the largest ‘spontaneous organized demonstrations’, as Reuters correspondent David Chipp cynically described them, occurred in November 1956 over the Anglo-French intervention in Suez, and then in July 1958 after the Iraqi revolution and the landing of British and American troops in Jordan and Lebanon.28 The 1958 demonstrations followed a similar pattern to the 1956 ones, with crowds of placard-waving Chinese, estimated at two million in the PRC media and 600,000 by the British, filing past the British diplomatic mission. Although the demonstrators were kept under official control, a few staff members became targets in a precursor of future confrontations. Chargé d’Affaires Duncan Wilson reported: ‘The stream of menaces and vituperation aimed at those on duty at the gate has reached high tide levels; some stones have been thrown and members of the staff on duty at the gate hit (only slight injuries) and my own car was very mildly man-handled on return last night.’29 The British became accustomed to regular demonstrations and took them in their stride. Junior diplomat David Wilson recalled an occasion in 1963 when he drove up to the mission in his open-top Triumph Spitfire with a Dalmatian dog, which he was looking after for another staff member, sitting next to him. The huge crowds going past the Embassy were shouting anti-imperialist slogans. As I drove up and wanted to turn across these demonstrations thronging the gates of the Embassy, people turned around and saw this sight of a spotted dog sitting on the front seat of a red sports car they fell about laughing and opened up a large gap for me to drive into the Embassy.30

The periodic demonstrations were only a small indication of what was to come during the Cultural Revolution when the Chinese simply ignored the conventions of diplomatic immunity. From early 1967 a series of incidents outside China had dramatic repercussions for individual embassies. The first major target, in mid-January, was not a Western diplomatic mission but the Russians. Once China’s ‘elder brothers’ but now the hated ‘social imperialists’, their embassy came under assault from Red Guards when the Soviet government expelled Chinese students from Moscow en masse following a confrontation with police at Lenin’s tomb. The Peking siege went on for almost three weeks, with movement into and out of the embassy coming to a virtual halt. On 1 February, while the Russians were still under siege, there were vocal demonstrations outside the French embassy—provoked by the alleged police mistreatment of Chinese students in Paris who had been attempting to demonstrate outside the Soviet embassy. While trying to back his car away from demonstrating Red Guards, Commercial Counsellor Robert Richard accidentally bumped against one of their loudspeaker trucks. Richard and his wife Eliane were forced out of the car and surrounded by Red Guards in a ‘circle of hate’ for over six hours in sub-zero temperatures.

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They were then taken to a police station where they were held for a further four hours before being released.31 The following day, the People’s Daily presented its version of the incident which the French ambassador described as ‘total fantasy’.32 The newspaper claimed that Richard had driven his car ‘straight into the crowd, knocking over and injuring several demonstrators’, an act that had ‘aroused the deep indignation of the Peking masses’.33 Thousands of Red Guards demonstrated outside the embassy, waving placards and screaming abuse, as secretary Solange Brand clearly remembered: ‘The noise was so loud that we could hardly hear anyone speaking inside.’34 The French Foreign Ministry instructed Richard to leave China as soon as possible with his family, and there was relief all around when they were granted exit permits and allowed to leave on 11 February.35 In early May it was the turn of the British. The flashpoint was Hong Kong when a labour dispute at an artificial flower factory escalated into widespread leftist demonstrations against the colonial government.36 The PRC entered the fray after the Hong Kong police arrested some of the growing numbers of demonstrators. On 15 May a vice-minister for Foreign Affairs presented a protest note to Chargé d’Affaires Donald Hopson in Peking. The next day the walls outside the diplomatic mission were plastered with posters and thousands of demonstrators, complete with loudspeaker vans, denounced the actions of Hong Kong’s colonial government as well as British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.37 On the same day, Red Guards broke into the British consulate in Shanghai, which had been allowed to continue functioning after the Communists’ victory, albeit with a tiny staff. They frogmarched Consul Peter Hewitt around the grounds for four hours, smashed office furniture and ransacked his house, destroying clothing and even children’s toys. (Hewitt’s wife Joyce, together with the couple’s small girl and twin babies, were locked in a bathroom for their personal safety by more moderate elements.) Plans to evacuate the family were accelerated when the Chinese advised Hopson on 22 May that the British were no longer permitted to have an officer based in Shanghai and that he should leave within forty-eight hours.38 On the 24th, Hewitt and his family, together with Ray Whitney (a first secretary and former army officer sent from Peking to assist), had to face crowds of demonstrators when they arrived at Shanghai airport. Mrs Hewitt and the children were helped by friends to get to the plane, all the while being verbally abused. The consul and Ray Whitney did not escape so lightly, as Hewitt reported in his account of the events. Mr Whitney and I had to run the gauntlet to the aircraft, and even the plane steps were thronged with demonstrators. We were jostled, shoulder charged, tripped and struck with fists and flag sticks, my jacket was torn and my tie pulled so tight a knot that it had later to be forced open with a tea spoon . . . When at last we made the plane the stewardesses refused to give us anything to drink, and

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In Peking, the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War on 5 June only intensified the ongoing demonstrations. On the 7th, Red Guards demonstrating outside the British mission were joined by a large group of foreign experts, mostly Arabs and Africans but also a few of the Western long-term residents. They forced their way into the courtyard, hauled down and wrecked the British flag, flung pot plants through the chancery windows, and entered the front hall where they destroyed the Queen’s portrait.40 Returning two days later, they broke more windows, tried to set fire to a car, and attempted to enter the gate (around 100 metres along the road) to the head of mission’s residence. Staff managed to bar their entry, though first secretary Anthony Blishen was slightly injured and had his spectacles broken. Protests to the Foreign Ministry were greeted with the response that ‘the action of the revolutionary masses was completely justified’.41 In the worsening situation, the person responsible for the welfare of British staff and their families, over fifty people in all, was Chargé d’Affaires Donald Hopson. Later described as ‘Britain’s tough diplomatist in Peking’,42 Hopson had a distinguished World War II record, his bravery as a commando officer earning him the DSO and the Military Cross. Before coming to Peking in May 1965, he had held a number of diplomatic appointments, most recently as British ambassador to Laos, though he had no previous China experience. Tall and prepossessing, the moustached 51-yearold was described by his Peking number two, Percy Cradock, as ‘crisp and military’.43 Was Hopson’s reaction to the critical situation perhaps more that of a resolute military officer than a cautious diplomat? When asked by the Foreign Office on 15 June for his views on whether wives and children should be withdrawn from China (as the Russians had been a few months earlier) and on whether the mission should be reduced to a skeleton staff, he responded with a degree of insouciance. I do not (repeat not) think we have reached the point where we need to evacuate them generally. The presence of wives is good for morale and useful domestically when servants go on strike . . . Evacuation of staff in present circumstances would not (repeat not) help. In times of crisis we need all hands on the pumps and the more the merrier.44

Hopson did request authorization, which was duly granted, for the return to Britain of any wives with or without children who wished to leave. Some, including Denise Hopson, who had been awarded the Croix de Guerre for her wartime role in the French Resistance, joined their children in Britain for the boarding school summer vacation. Others decided to stay on, and in early July five children, aged ten to fifteen, were flown to China for the summer holidays. Shortly afterwards, Hopson and the Foreign Office did begin to discuss—though not with any great

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urgency—whether staff numbers in Peking should perhaps be reduced to the level of a Scandinavian style mission (around half a dozen people), not just on account of the tense atmosphere but because the Chinese staff were refusing to do some of their usual work. A decision was postponed because of the absence, on summer vacation, first of the head of the Foreign Office’s Far Eastern Department and then, until early September, of Hopson’s designated successor, Murray MacLehose.45 Meanwhile, the situation in Hong Kong was degenerating into open violence, bombings, the imposition of emergency regulations by the colonial government, and more arrests. On 21 July, Reuters correspondent Anthony Grey was placed under house arrest in Peking in retaliation for the imprisonment of a Xinhua correspondent in the colony. Exactly four weeks later, on 18 August, a large group of Red Guards burst into his house, subjected him to a hate session, and confined him to one small room.46 By now it was no longer a question of whether the Chinese government’s control over the Red Guards could ‘continue to be so firm’, which had already worried Hopson, but of who was actually in control of China’s foreign affairs. On 19 August, radicals and Red Guards seized power in the Foreign Ministry and locked a number of senior officials (including vice-ministers) in the basement to write self-criticisms. Premier Zhou Enlai later admitted that the ministry was completely out of control for four days as an ultra-leftist faction (as it was later described) dictated policy.47 At 10.30 p.m. on 20 August, Hopson was handed a forty-eight-hour ultimatum. The British government must cancel its ban on three ‘patriotic newspapers’ in Hong  Kong and release fourteen Xinhua journalists and five publishers who had been arrested. Otherwise, the government ‘must be held responsible for all the consequences arising therefrom’.48 On the 22nd, the British staff arrived for work as usual, but by afternoon all movement into and out of the compound had been halted as thousands of Red Guards screamed and waved placards outside the closed gates. In  the words of Hopson’s deputy, Percy Cradock: ‘Twenty-three people, eighteen men, five women (four secretaries and one wife), were now besieged.’49 For all the danger, a scene worthy of a British Carry On film ensued, at least as it was described by Hopson: We dined together in the office hall off a dinner of tinned sausages and peas, claret and biscuits and cheese, prepared by our ladies. After dinner I went to the firstfloor to play bridge, while those staff who were not at work watched Peter Sellers in a film entitled, not inappropriately, ‘The Wrong Arm of the Law’. At 10.30 pm I had just bid ‘three no-trumps’, when I heard a roar from the crowd outside.50

According to plan, the men and women retreated behind a number of security grilles and finally to the strongroom which had an emergency heavy steel door to the outside. When smoke started seeping into the room, they became aware that the

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building was being set on fire. Fearful of being suffocated, the twenty-three—led by Hopson—went out the emergency door to face the mob. Two of those caught up in the melee were 29-year-old John Weston and his wife Sally, who worked in the mission’s library. Over thirty-five years later, following his post-retirement transition from diplomat to published poet, Weston recalled the experience in his poem Peking Rap. Our man’s just bid three-no-trumps when the night roars back, and we catch a glimpse of a Verey flare as a surge of bodies over the wall floods up towards us, ‘THEY’RE COMING IN!’ followed by the din of pole-axed doors, burst windows: shock-, blitz-, bangs-, blows! The twenty-three of us trapped alone fall back fast to the strong-room zone, while ten thousand light the flame for their once-in-a-lifetime bonfire game, and the Lion & the Unicorn’s sole defence pleads honi soit qui mal y pense. Sparks leap up, smoke get thicker, breath in this small room comes quicker; stuff gushes through the window bars, Red Guards shouting ‘sha! sha!’ * * kill, kill (better not translate for the ladies). Fire now rages, hot as Hades, bricks cave in as a pile drives through, (might get stuck if the door jams to). Some of us wonder: is this moment how we’ll know our final moment? Out we stagger to a screaming mass of our fellow-creatures having a gas as they gouge and punch and twist and tear, and somebody’s pulling out my wife’s hair, and someone else rips off her pants, lewd prying fingers leave their prints, my teeth bite deeper into his arm, down we go to the stinging swarm. Our man floats off with a blood-drenched face. While we’re locked in hate’s embrace, arc lights glare and a camera whirrs to shoot us live, and the cri de guerre’s ‘Tell your crimes and bow your head you English dogs, or you’ll be dead!’51

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Hopson’s prose summary of the group’s encounter with Red Guards in his report to the Foreign Office was more sparse but no less dramatic. We were hauled by our hair, half-strangled with our ties, kicked, and beaten on the head with bamboo poles . . . Some were paraded up and down, forced to their knees and photographed in humiliating postures. All were beaten and kicked, and the girls were not spared lewd attentions from the prying fingers of the mob . . . Wristwatches were removed and shirts, trousers and knickers were torn.52

The chargé and most of the others were eventually rescued by soldiers (in plain clothes) who were mingling with the crowd. ‘It seems likely that the army had had orders to save lives,’ Percy Cradock later commented, but ‘beyond that, given their equivocal position, they probably could not go’.53 Eventually most of the Britons were gathered together and taken in a military truck to the diplomatic residential building where they were relieved to find the remaining staff members who had either sought refuge in the Finnish embassy or managed to make their own way back. They were also reunited with their families who, fearful of their apartments also coming under attack, had evacuated to ‘friendly’ missions. While battered and badly bruised, most seemed to have escaped serious physical injury, although Hopson had a head wound and John Seaby, the head security guard, suffered concussion from being hit on the head and, in his own words, was ‘in pretty bad shape’.54 The broader effects were more severe, as Weston continued Peking Rap. One of us did die not long after, another lay motionless for weeks, one went mad for a year. Laughter was not why it hurt to speak

The gutted main hall of the chancery after the Red Guard attack. (Courtesy of Sir John Weston)

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The public image, though, was one of characteristic British fortitude and resilience. On Hopson’s instructions—and in an era before trauma counselling—staff got almost straight back to work in a temporary office set up in one of the diplomatic flats. Just three days after the assault, China-watcher Leonard Appleyard wrote to London: ‘I am afraid that since the burning down of our Office we have been rather behind in our political reporting, but you may like to have the following round up of posters and Red Guard newspapers in Peking.’55 Cables were exchanged with London through the courtesy of the French embassy (the mission’s diplomatic wireless facilities had been destroyed) and secretaries typed Hopson’s and Cradock’s lengthy despatches on borrowed typewriters. Once the initial shock died down, some also had more personal concerns. With Red Guards still on the rampage, Cradock decided to entrust the family silver and some other valued items to a Norwegian archivist who was leaving China.56

Donald Hopson (front centre) and his staff in October 1967, pictured outside the strongroom’s emergency door through which the twenty-three Britons had left the building some two months earlier. (Courtesy of Sir John Weston)

In Britain, the media praised the staff ’s bravery during the assault, highlighting Hopson’s leadership. A Foreign Office colleague confidently told The Times: ‘He had a brilliant war record and is a match for any Red Guard and can be relied on to look after his staff and get things under control in a tight spot.’57 Almost fifty years later,

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John Weston recalled that, although the chargé’s expertise on China was non-existent compared with that of Percy Cradock, ‘he kept a military upper lip throughout and a sense of humour and was respected for that’.58 When the 1968 New Year Honours List was released, Hopson became ‘Sir Donald’ and six staff members were awarded honours, ranging from a BEM (British Empire Medal) for John Seaby to a CMG for Percy Cradock. (Peter Hewitt, the former consul in Shanghai, was awarded an OBE.)59 By then, though, staff and their families in Peking had become pawns in a diplomatic standoff between the British and Chinese governments which also provoked friction between the diplomatic mission and the Foreign Office. For the British government, the diplomatic community’s situation was part of its overall tense relationship with the PRC, tied in with its strong suppression of the leftist demonstrations in Hong Kong and the detention of Anthony Grey in Peking. For Hopson, as well as for Head of Chancery Percy Cradock, the immediate priority was the welfare of staff and their families.60 Looking back on events twenty-five years later, Cradock wrote that this was when he established the ‘rule to which I gave the title of Cradock’s First Law of diplomacy . . . it is not the other side you need to worry about, but your own’.61 Following the assault, the British government decided to evacuate women, children and most of the staff, while stopping short of breaking off diplomatic relations. But the evacuation plan unsurprisingly failed to materialize when, in retaliation for the Peking attack, it informed the Chinese diplomatic mission in London that permits would be required for any staff or their families to leave Britain (these were not granted). The situation was exacerbated by a bizarre confrontation between Chinese staff and British police outside the diplomatic mission in London’s Portland Place. In retaliation, the Chinese government decided to deny exit permits to British staff and their families, as well as entry visas for staff or family members.62 (An exception was made for the five children visiting Peking, who were permitted to leave on 10 September.) Although a few exit permits were subsequently granted on medical grounds, the great majority of Britons could not get permission to leave China. Like their Chinese counterparts in London, they had effectively become political hostages. Bureaucratic inflexibility did not help morale. While the Foreign Office continually expressed its sympathy, obtaining funding to get everyday life back to some semblance of normality could be laborious and frustrating. A request for some books to replace the burnt-out library was initially greeted with the statement that no funds were available. When the Foreign Office eventually said it had ‘found £50’, Cradock expressed his thanks but added, not without a note of sarcasm: ‘I have some idea of the immense difficulties in getting small sums of money like this which do not fall under any known head of expenditure. Getting a loan of some two million pounds or so is easy by comparison.’63 The exit permit standoff was not resolved until almost eight months after the Red Guard assault. In mid-April 1968, the British finally broke the deadlock when the new

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foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, decided to lift the ban on granting exit permits to the Chinese (as well as granting entry visas for replacements). After a few hiccups, with the PRC government initially only granting permits to six junior personnel, senior staff were also allowed to leave. The test came when Donald Hopson, long overdue for replacement in Peking, applied for an exit permit on 3 August. He received it on the 12th and left China the following day.64 With his arrival in London imminent, the front page of The Times proclaimed: ‘Long wait of envoy’s wife ends.’ Denise, who had not seen her husband for thirteen months, was quoted as saying: ‘I have been waiting, waiting, and waiting with great expectation and with hopes going up and down . . . I have been terribly lonely.’65 The French Resistance veteran, though, was putting on a brave public front, not just on the eve of her husband’s return but in a happy family photo taken at his investiture at Buckingham Palace four months later. Shortly before leaving Peking, Hopson had written to his wife telling her that he had fallen in love with another woman. In the none-too-diplomatic words of junior diplomat George Walden, ‘to general astonishment, he took up with a large, loud Danish girl’ who worked at her country’s embassy. 66 Unlike many affairs that thrived in the hothouse atmosphere of small diplomatic communities, this was not destined to be a brief liaison. Lady Hopson was eventually granted a divorce from her husband on the grounds of his adultery and, on 28 May 1971, The Times announced that the marriage had taken place in Copenhagen ‘between Sir Donald Hopson, H. M. Ambassador at Caracas, and Miss Annelise Risbjerg Nielsen, of Hellerup, Denmark’.67 Back in Peking, Hopson’s residence—ransacked but not destroyed by Red Guards—had been cleaned up following the assault and become not-so-temporary office accommodation. For over three years, the burnt-out chancery stood virtually as it had been left by the fire, a stark reminder of that dramatic night. Eventually rebuilt at PRC expense, it was officially reopened on 24 February 1971; the Chinese declined an invitation to attend the reception. Just over a year later, the UK-China relationship was finally upgraded to ambassadorial level and John (later Sir John) Addis was appointed Britain’s first ambassador, the job he had long coveted. ‘His bachelor reserve, precision and fastidiousness are of a kind to tax the heartier British but to please the Chinese among whom these characteristics are built in,’ veteran journalist Richard Harris wrote in The Times. 68 The twenty-three Britons’ traumatic experience at the hands of Red Guards continued to hold vivid memories and in August 1997 a thirty-year commemorative dinner was held at the Foreign Office. The Independent newspaper reported that the function was attended by ‘siege veterans’ as well as diplomats from other embassies who had helped the British.69 Sir Donald Hopson, though, had died only seven years after the assault while serving as ambassador to Argentina. Having survived World War II and the Red Guards, he succumbed to blood poisoning from a minor wound

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at the age of 58, leaving the second Lady Hopson a widow after only three years’ marriage. Others who were not at the dinner included former young China-watchers (Sir) Leonard Appleyard, Britain’s ambassador to the PRC, and (Sir) John Weston, its permanent representative at the United Nations. Weston retired a year later and, after thirty-six years in the diplomatic service, turned his attention to the relative linguistic freedom of poetry. He concluded his poem Peking Rap (based on a recording he made for his family immediately after the events) with a personal summation of the tumultuous Mao years which had provided daily fodder for a generation of China-watching diplomats. Now, as I hear the spool unwind my distant, dated, plummy voice, this brush with danger sounds small beer compared with those who’d had no choice: the millions who the Great Leap Forward starved to death for a Party phrase; the millions who’d been ‘rectified’ or suicide cut short those days; a nation’s children who we watched forfeit their school years and their youth, for whom denouncing parents was the recommended way to truth. I bow to China and her beauty, and hold no grudge, just this conclusion: let Mao be judged by history, and f___ all bloody revolution.70

Part IV Correspondents

9 ‘Our life and hard times’

David Bonavia, the first resident correspondent for The Times (London) in the PRC, summed up the journalistic experience under Mao: Out of such an explosive mixture of battlement, frustration and annoyance are many features printed in the Western press—seemingly quite bland and objective, but actually the products of seething professional dilemmas and doubts about the worthwhileness of the whole exercise.1

Regarded as a necessary evil to allow China to send a few of its own media representatives abroad, Western correspondents were in some ways even less welcome than diplomats. Embassy reports finished up in foreign office files but correspondents’ despatches were in the public arena, potentially undermining the images of new China that the government was trying so hard to project. While diplomats had their own problems, Australian Ambassador Stephen FitzGerald acknowledged that ‘for correspondents, the lack of real communication in the period until the end of 1976 was professionally more taxing than it was for anyone else’.2 On assuming power, the Communists had issued a series of bans on Western news organizations, an action described by American Fulbright scholar Derk Bodde in Peking as a ‘most disturbing act of thought control’.3 After more than a century of reporting China’s tumultuous history, from the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion to the Sino-Japanese War and most recently the Civil War, the end had come for the colourful ‘old China press corps’ featured in Paul French’s book Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.4 Official images to the outside world were presented through the government news agency Xinhua, Radio Peking, and the handful of foreign language publications. Initially the only foreign correspondents permitted to work in the PRC were representatives of the Eastern bloc, including the Soviet news agency TASS, and the odd communist journalist from the West. Briton Alan Winnington wrote for the Daily Worker, as well as polishing English-language texts for Xinhua. After early visits by some Italian communist correspondents, Franco Calamandrei arrived in Peking in

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1953 as the resident correspondent for L’Unità, the Italian Communist Party’s newspaper, together with his journalist wife Maria Teresa Regard. At the Geneva Conference in 1954—and again at the Bandung Conference a year later—Zhou Enlai opened the door slightly to the non-communist world. The premier’s invitation to ‘come and see for yourselves’ applied essentially to short-term hosted visitors, including the occasional journalist whose activities could be carefully managed and tightly controlled. It did, though, extend to two major Western news agencies, basically because the PRC wanted to locate Xinhua correspondents in Britain and Western Europe. After over a year of negotiations, the Reuters bureau was opened in March 1956 by 28-year-old David Chipp, who spent two years in Peking. A Cambridge history graduate, Chipp’s experience with Reuters already included postings to Karachi and Rangoon. ‘I’d tried to get a visa to visit the PRC when I was in Rangoon,’ he told me just a few months before his death in 2008. ‘When I did finally get there, it was a matter of luck. I was back in London—and a bachelor—and I’d had some experience in Southeast Asia. I was thrilled when I was offered the job as Reuters’ first correspondent, though some of the journalists in Hong Kong didn’t think I had the right experience.’5 Agence France-Presse’s early representation was less stable. The first AFP correspondent, Jacques Locquin, was expelled in November 1957 for ‘having contempt for China’s laws and meddling in the country’s internal affairs’, notably for giving sanctuary to a Chinese woman, the sister-in-law of a French friend, who had been denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement.6 AFP’s Director of Information Fernand Moulier, considered a ‘safer pair of hands’, filled in for a few months before the arrival of Jacques Jacquet-Francillon in October 1958. In 1959, Canada’s national newspaper, the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, became the first non-communist Western newspaper to have a resident correspondent in Mao’s China. The Globe and Mail had consistently, though unsuccessfully, urged the Canadian government to recognize the PRC. Following two years of negotiations, the Peking bureau was opened by Frederick Nossal, a 33-year-old Australian who had worked for the newspaper in Canada some years earlier but at the time of his appointment was with the Melbourne Herald. Nossal’s Peking sojourn lasted only eight months before his de facto expulsion and it was not until 1964 that the Globe and Mail reopened its Peking bureau. Over the next twelve years, six correspondents were assigned to Peking, writing articles that were featured not just in the Globe and Mail but in a wide range of syndicated newspapers that included the New York Times. The tiny Western press corps, which from 1964 also included the German news agency DPA (Deutsche Presse Agentur), expanded in the early 1970s, paralleling what was happening in the diplomatic community. New arrivals included

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Scandinavian, Australian and Italian correspondents as well as a second Canadian, plus British, French and West German newspaper correspondents to supplement their countries’ news agency representatives. The total number of Western correspondents in the remaining few years of the Mao era seesawed with periods of leave and the occasional gap but it was never more than the high teens. The United States, still negotiating for the establishment of diplomatic relations, remained conspicuously absent, as David Bonavia commented in 1975: ‘The biggest irony is that while many foreign reporters in Peking cannot wait to get out, the Americans are still vainly battering at the gates to get in.’7 Who were the Peking correspondents? The great majority were what Swedish professor Ulf Hannerz called ‘spiralists’ in his book Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. These were journalists who had a posting to a country for a few years, unlike ‘long-timers’ (including some of the old China press corps) who spent a substantial part of their career in one foreign location, and ‘parachutists’ who arrived to cover a specific newsworthy event. The normal assignment for a correspondent in Mao’s China was two to three years; a few stayed up to four. Most fitted the characteristic profile of a foreign correspondent working in a difficult environment during those years: overwhelmingly male and mostly in their twenties or thirties. The seven Globe and Mail correspondents in Peking during the Mao era had an average age of 31 when they arrived in China (they ranged from 26 to 38). Several were at a fairly early stage of their journalistic careers. Not everyone conformed to this gender, age or career stage profile, particularly among the greater number of correspondents during the early seventies. The London Daily Telegraph’s first correspondent, Clare Hollingworth, was a few months short of her sixty-second birthday when she arrived in Peking with no previous experience of China but with a formidable reputation. The acclaimed war correspondent was best known for breaking news of the German invasion of Poland over thirty years earlier. By the time she arrived in China in February 1973, her eyesight was already failing. When an official gave her a flower from the central table decoration at a banquet in the Great Hall of the People, she mistook it for a morsel of food and ate it! Few of the correspondents arrived in Peking with much knowledge of China or the Chinese language, just as the government always preferred. (The first two correspondents proposed by the Globe and Mail had been rejected because of their China-related expertise.) For the news agency representatives, the Peking assignment sometimes followed one or more postings in the Soviet bloc, regarded as appropriate experience for Communist China. Others, like David Chipp, had previously worked elsewhere in Asia. For virtually all of the Globe and Mail correspondents, though, the China assignment was their first experience outside North America or Western Europe. Of the expanded cohort of newspaper correspondents in the 1970s, more had experience

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considered relevant to the Peking assignment, including The Times’ David Bonavia, Die Welt’s Gerd Ruge and Le Monde’s Alain Jacob, who had all worked in Moscow. Even after the government stopped discriminating against anyone with China expertise, the few Chinese-speaking correspondents stood out as being worthy of comment. The AFP’s René Flipo, who had two postings to China during the Mao era, had studied Chinese in Paris and also as an exchange student in Peking. Swede  Göran Leijonhufvud, who represented several Scandinavian newspapers, had also studied Chinese at university. British Chinese-speaking correspondents included David Bonavia, whose interest in China was only temporarily side-tracked by the Moscow posting, and Reuters’ Jonathan Sharp and Peter Griffiths, who were Chinese Studies graduates of Leeds University, the only British university at the time whose degree had a strong focus on modern and contemporary China. Even more unusual was a correspondent with experience of pre-revolutionary China. Belgian-born Jacques Marcuse had first gone to Shanghai as a 21-year-old in 1932, worked in Hankou and Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War, and was back in Shanghai as head of the AFP bureau when the Communists came to power. Following assignments that included the Balkans, Singapore and Egypt, Marcuse arrived back in China in 1962, although he seemed more redolent of some of the old China press corps. A young Indian diplomat in Peking described Marcuse as ‘a familiar figure, distinguished by his monocle, and his sardonic humour . . . a cynic and sometimes rather sharp in his judgments [with] a fund of jokes, most of which he swore were true stories.’8 These characteristics were reflected in his book The Peking Papers, a satirical account of his two-year sojourn in the capital that amused some readers but not others. Prior knowledge of a country that many found unfathomable, and/or of a language that there were limited opportunities to use, were not always of tremendous help in the restrictive environment of the Mao era. But they did help to demystify China, as well as giving a journalist instant credibility with ‘China specialist’ diplomats. ‘Coming to China without Chinese is an act of total stupidity,’ Australian Margaret Jones wrote in her first article from China, unsurprisingly entitled ‘Peking— another planet’.9 The sense of extreme isolation from the outside world was just one aspect of what the Globe and Mail’s Charles Taylor described as ‘our life and hard times’ in a memoir of his 1964–65 Peking sojourn.10 Like most of the early correspondents, as well as some of the later unmarried ones, Taylor lived at the dour Xinqiao Hotel which was centrally located to the south-east of the Imperial Palace and convenient to the Telegraph Office and the Foreign Ministry. One of a handful of hotels open to foreigners during the Mao era, the Xinqiao also hosted the odd visiting journalist and hopeful businessman, as well as an assortment of delegations.

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Resident correspondents not only lived but worked in the hotel, usually in one room that was shared during the day with their translator. It could all be rather claustrophobic, Frederick Nossal wrote: One half, nearest the door and bathroom, was a bedroom. The few square feet next to the large window had all the trappings of a newspaper office . . . The builtin wardrobe became a storage space of old newspaper files. I filled my entire shoe drawer with scores of rolls of film, both black and white and colour, and chucked my shoes under the bed.11

The other major item was the lifeline to ‘news’ about China: the Xinhua teleprinter that churned out official releases both day and night. Some correspondents were rumoured to sleep with the teleprinter next to their bed; both Chipp and Nossal soon banished it to the bathroom. The Xinqiao’s restaurants became all too familiar to correspondents: the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor and the Western restaurant on the sixth, serving Chinese versions of chicken stroganoff, fish mornay and wiener schnitzel. When Nossal complained about the ‘woeful hotel breakfasts’ to a close friend in Melbourne, his friend contacted Kellogg’s who posted four large packets of cornflakes to Peking. ‘What a morning it was!’ Nossal recalled, when a parcel of letters and newspapers, as well as a tin of Nescafé from his mother, also arrived in the post. ‘I sat gleefully in my room in the sunshine, the newspapers and mail strewn around me on the floor, and munched dry corn flakes.’ 12 While their fellow correspondents in Hong Kong congregated at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which had transferred from Shanghai in 1949, or met at any number of bars in the colony, virtually the only watering hole in the whole of Peking was the Xinqiao bar. ‘Much of my time in Peking was spent sitting in the bar,’ Charles Taylor wrote, even though it had ‘little to offer in the way of charm and atmosphere, consisting as it does of five small tables wedged in among the elevators, the dining room, and the billiard tables at the top of the hotel’. It was, however, one of two places in China (the other was the airport bar) ‘where you can buy a local concoction which bears the name Martini’.13 By the early 1960s, married correspondents were usually able to obtain a flat in the new diplomatic residential compound close to the Friendship Store—or occasionally, like a few diplomats, a much-prized house. The first Reuters’ married couple, Adam  Kellett-Long and his wife Mary, lived in Nan Chizi, an atmospheric street running along the eastern side of the Imperial Palace. The house’s pièce de résistance was a roof terrace that looked straight across to the palace roofs. ‘In warm weather we  had many pleasant evenings sitting out there,’ Adam recollected. The terrace also gave the couple considerable kudos with the diplomatic community. ‘When the wife of the new British Chargé d’Affaires Terence Garvey was due to arrive, he asked

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whether he could bring her to our house for dinner on her first evening in Peking so she could see the view from the roof.’ During the Cultural Revolution, though, correspondents who lived in houses were moved to one of the diplomatic residential compounds. The Globe and Mail’s Norman Webster arrived in China in late 1969 with his wife, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old. A third son was born in Peking. The Globe’s flat turned out to be a bit crowded, what with two parents, three young boys and a Chinese staff of five, including an ‘ahyi’ [auntie or nanny] for the baby. During the day, the children drove me crazy with their shrieks and wails and games that always seemed to take place right outside the door of the bedroom I used for an office. I asked the ahyi to please keep the boys quiet so I could work. No result. I asked again, then again, fruitlessly, until the day, mad with frustration, I turned and punched my fist through the apartment door.14

In the mid-1970s, Daily Telegraph correspondent Nigel Wade’s flat housed not just his office (in the second bedroom) but also the ‘Little English School’ run by his wife Christine in the third bedroom. Registered by the British government, the school taught an average of eight children (4–11 years old, of diverse nationalities) five mornings and four afternoons a week. With Wade’s Chinese translator and household staff, plus two cats and Floppy, the pet rabbit that Christine had rescued from the local butcher’s shop, the flat was always buzzing with activity.15 In his book Foreign News, Ulf Hannerz wrote: ‘Few relationships can be as critically important to foreign correspondents as those with the government in the place where they are stationed.’16 In Mao’s China this relationship was not just important—it was paramount. At the heart of the correspondent experience were fundamentally opposing concepts: the Western view of the media as informative and investigative versus the PRC view that its role was to advance Communist Party interests. ‘The role and power of newspapers’, Mao stated in 1948, was ‘their ability to bring the Party programme, the Party line, the Party’s general and specific policies, its tasks and methods of work before the masses in the quickest and most extensive way’.17 As Charles Taylor saw the conflicting views: ‘It is our job to secure information and report it to our readers. It is their job to withhold most significant information, while flooding us with the greatest possible amount of propaganda. If we both do our jobs honestly, our confrontation brooks no compromise.’18 The correspondents’ access to information was strictly controlled. Their major source was Xinhua’s Daily News Release (in English with less complete versions available in other languages), later called the Hsinhua News Bulletin. The Foreign Ministry also sometimes released official statements before they were published by Xinhua, giving prior notice to correspondents on the phone, sometimes in the middle of the night. Nossal recalled the phone calls. ‘This is the Information Department. We have

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a statement to release. You may come to the Foreign Office and collect it.’19 Some correspondents rolled over and went back to sleep, though not usually the news agency representatives who feared that the statement just might be important and that they would be beaten to the news by Hong Kong or Tokyo. Very occasionally, the nocturnal trip proved worthwhile. On 21 November 1962, a month after a series of border skirmishes between Chinese and Indian troops had flared into open conflict, Reuters’ Adam Kellett-Long broke the news that the Chinese were declaring a unilateral ceasefire. Unlike his AFP would-be competitor Jacques Marcuse, who according to Kellett-Long never collected Xinhua despatches in the middle of the night, the young British correspondent obeyed the summons to the Foreign Ministry and was handed a communiqué. This one was a very thick document—much thicker than usual. When I got back to the office I looked at the last page—and there it was. ‘The Chinese government hereby declare that . . . a ceasefire will apply.’ I picked up the telephone to Moscow—on very big stories we were allowed to telephone the Moscow office which had a direct link to London. Amazingly I got straight through. I was several hours ahead of the Chinese news agency. They ran the statement in full, and it took hours before they reached the last paragraph.

It was the second scoop for Kellett-Long in just over a year. Throughout his career he would be best known as the correspondent who, as a 26-year-old on his first Reuters posting, had broken the news of the closure of the border between East and West Berlin on the night of 12 August 1961.

Reuters’ Adam Kellett-Long with translator ‘Mr Tsiang’. (Courtesy of Adam Kellett-Long)

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Apart from Xinhua releases, the only other non-Chinese media sources were the few foreign-language publications that were carefully polished by long-term Western residents and other ‘foreign experts’. Even in Chinese, correspondents were limited to a handful of newspapers in the same way as diplomats, and the first job each day for a correspondent’s translator was to produce the headlines of articles that might be of interest. Translating from one’s native language into a foreign one is always a challenge, and some of the efforts of the Reuters translator, ‘Mr Tsiang’, brightened up an otherwise dull news day for Adam Kellett-Long. A new stadium has opened in Peking where sporting lovers can practise their techniques all year round. It has snowed but little in North China this year, and when they have dropped they have smelt.

Regardless of the topic, the tone of the media reports was similar, whether in English or Chinese. In Charles Taylor’s words: On all sides workers, peasants, and intellectuals are bursting with good intentions and solemn resolve, avidly reading the works of Chairman Mao, helping their fellow men, and leading earnest lives of great frugality and high endeavour . . . The darker side of life is resolutely ignored, and if such things exist in China as murders or other crimes of passion, you would never know it from the Chinese press.20

As correspondents acquired some of the diplomats’ China-watching skills, they began interpreting the official discourse. ‘Once you learn to read them properly, the newspapers often reveal areas of resistance to the regime or examples of policies that have backfired,’ Taylor commented of the mid-1960s. He cited the case of parents stating how happy they were for their teenage children to carry out the ‘noble task’ of moving from Peking to rural areas. ‘It was obvious that the drive to send young citydwellers to settle in the countryside was running into trouble . . . If many parents had not been complaining, there would have been no need for such eulogies.’ And when a rash of articles appeared on water safety and artificial respiration, it was because there had been a spate of drownings after young people had been urged to follow the example of China’s most famous swimmer, Mao Zedong, ‘and throw themselves into lakes and rivers in order to build their bodies and increase their ability to defend the homeland’.21 For more information, as well as interviews, visits to local institutions and permission to travel outside Peking, correspondents were entirely dependent on the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry. To quote Australian correspondent Yvonne Preston: ‘There were no other numbers we could ring for information in that entire city of seven million souls.’22 In the early years, ‘Miss Chen’ or ‘Mrs Chen’

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(Chen Xiuxia), head of the department’s press section, was the name best known to correspondents who were initially surprised by her fluent American English. Chen had studied at West Michigan State College and Columbia University in the 1940s, joining the progressive Chinese student movement and meeting her future husband Chen Hui. Along with other ‘patriotic Chinese’ keen to help build a new society, the couple returned to China soon after the Communists’ victory. To Frederick Nossal, Mrs Chen was ‘a typical Communist zealot . . . the devoted, unswerving, unbending servant of the Communist State’.23 Reuters’ David Chipp recalled his relations with both Chen Xiuxia and Chen Hui, deputy head of the translation section: ‘We had some electric rows. They said I was irresponsible, I said they were obstructionist.’ Chipp recognized that the Chens, like other officials who had been educated abroad or in missionary colleges in China, felt they had to overcome the taint of the American connection. ‘So outwardly they were more conformist than some others.’ That former connection made them particularly vulnerable during periods of extreme ideological fervour. In 2010, more than five decades after Chipp’s encounters with ‘Mrs Chen’, I met the former official who was by then her early eighties. At first it was difficult to reconcile the severe Communist cadre I had heard about with this small, sprightly woman who spoke enthusiastically, in fluent American-accented English, about her responsibilities for the early foreign correspondents. But when I commented that some had described their relations with her as ‘difficult’, I had a glimpse of Mao era officialese. I did everything according to our regulations. I was the one to take care of the details, but I was following the Foreign Ministry’s policies. We treated the journalists on a fair and equal basis. I gave them information and arranged interviews and visits for them to help them do fair and objective reporting on China.24

As the Cultural Revolution got under way, correspondents had contact with what Reuters’ Vergil Berger described as a ‘bewildering succession of cadres’ at a time when the Information Department, like the rest of the Foreign Ministry, was being torn apart by faction-fighting. By early 1967, Qi Mingcong was the correspondents’ main contact. ‘Mr Chi’, as correspondents described him, had recently returned to Peking from the Chinese diplomatic mission in London where he reportedly developed a passion for Western music and technical gadgets. Berger had clear memories of him over forty years later. He was highly civilized, urbane, with impeccably upper class Oxford English and, until the Cultural Revolution imposed its down-market rules, impeccably dressed too. He was often clearly struggling to hide his distaste for what he had to tell us correspondents during the early wild months of the Cultural Revolution, and sometimes I feared on his behalf that he might laugh or sigh or something at the wrong moment and get into trouble.25

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Throughout the Mao era, it was ‘Mrs Chen’, ‘Mr Chi’ or another official such as ‘Mr Ma’ (Ma Yuzhen) who dealt with correspondents’ requests. This was not always done with any urgency, as AFP correspondent Jacques Jacquet-Francillon recalled of a phone call from the Information Department asking him whether he would like to visit a people’s commune the following day. ‘I had been waiting for this phone call for six weeks.’26 Canadian Colin McCullough, who arrived in Peking in the spring of 1968 as the Cultural Revolution was becoming even more xenophobic, would have been happy with only six-week delays. ‘Except on one occasion—when I was allowed to tour a factory in Peking—every request in fifteen months for statistics or interviews or trips to cities other than Tientsin and Canton, or visits to schools or hospitals or other institutions was turned down.’27 Things looked up a little from the early 1970s, though each interview or visit often seemed like a minor achievement. With more correspondents in Peking, the Information Department also organized occasional trips for the whole of the foreign press corps. ‘Sometimes they went to extraordinary lengths to keep us in check,’ Australian Yvonne Preston recalled of the accompanying officials. ‘When we visited one of China’s largest and most intimidatingly boring revolutionary museums, in the city of Nanchang, the doors were actually locked on us to bar our retreat or escape.’ Some of the correspondents eventually found an exit and began looking around the city, only to be chased by desperate cadres who assured them they must return to the revolutionary museum.28 Much of China was still closed to correspondents, though this did not prevent them going through the motions of submitting applications, as Margaret Jones recounted. ‘A  lot of us applied to go to Tibet constantly, and some of the closed areas like Shantung province and Szechuan province.’29 She and others knew full well that such places were, in fact, open to long-term residents like Rewi Alley and Israel Epstein, as well as to visiting international friends including Felix Greene and Han Suyin. Han’s book Lhasa: the Open City would raise eyebrows even in the early post-Mao era. The correspondents were also frustrated by what they saw as the privileged access accorded the occasional ‘special correspondent’ on a one or sometimes two-month visa. Commenting on the mid-1960s, Vergil Berger stated: ‘Visiting foreign journalists, including even on one occasion the New Zealander who headed Reuters in Hong  Kong, always got more access to leaders, more briefings and more travel than I  did.’ Jacques Marcuse described the special correspondent as a VIPP: ‘Very Important Potential Propagandist .  .  . By and large, the shorter the stay, the more favourable the report’. In contrast, he wrote, the resident correspondent ‘was useless as a propagandist and therefore ignored’.30 Then there were the ‘parachutists’ who accompanied visiting dignitaries. Nixon arrived in February 1972 with over ninety journalists and Pompidou in 1973 with

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more than forty; Kissinger also came with a large contingent on his regular visits. Yvonne Preston was unimpressed by their preferential treatment at the banquets held in the Great Hall of the People. ‘The resident journalists were reassured of their lowly status in the scheme of things by being relegated to tables in the farthermost corners of the hall, refused cameras and tape recorders.’ In contrast, the visiting journalists ‘wandered all round the hall snapping, filming and recording—to our intense frustration’.31 As well as having very limited access to information, the Peking contingent completely lacked the network of local contacts that was normally a vital part of a journalist’s everyday work. ‘We had no Chinese contacts at all. It was too dangerous for them,’ René Flipo commented on his two sojourns in Peking with AFP.32 The very rare exception occurred in the early years. David Chipp recalled ‘Chuck’, an Englishspeaking and politically indiscreet school teacher he chatted with periodically at the Black Cat, virtually the only remaining Western style bar in Peking by the mid-1950s. When the Hundred Flowers Campaign turned into the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957, Chuck turned up less often and finally not at all. Almost twenty-five years later in London, Chipp received a message from Chuck via an American visiting Peking. ‘By chance I had a visit to China planned and we had an emotional reunion.’ Chuck told Chipp that he had been questioned from time to time about his relationships with Westerners, ‘particularly the dangerous British imperialist journalist’. Denounced as a rightist in late 1957, he had spent four years in prison, followed by periods working in a factory and the countryside, and then a further seven years’ incarceration during the Cultural Revolution.33 The rare correspondent who had worked in China before the Communist victory was frustrated at being unable to resume contact with earlier Chinese acquaintances. At a performance of a Russian ballet in Peking in 1964, Jacques Marcuse ran into an old friend from the 1930s in Hankou and Chongqing. Marcuse had already heard that Lin, formerly a Nationalist official, was serving in the new government. A short conversation ensued, probably within earshot of two men who had been flanking Lin in the auditorium. ‘Lin, now that we have met again, we must not lose sight of each other. Do ring me up soon.’ ‘You know our discipline. We are not permitted to see foreigners. If you wish to invite me to dinner, then you should write to the Foreign Ministry, asking permission for me to see you.’ ‘Can’t you do that yourself?’ ‘No. That is not allowed.’34

The handful of Western communist correspondents in China before the SinoSoviet split in the 1960s were given somewhat more leeway, whether in terms of

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contacts with Chinese people or being permitted to travel. In 1955, for example, the Daily Worker’s Alan Winnington, Franco Calamandrei of L’Unità, and Maria Teresa Regard (who wrote for two Italian left-wing publications), were taken on a journalistic tour of Tibet along with colleagues from the Soviet bloc; Winnington made a second visit in 1959. Despite their ‘foreign comrade’ status, though, the communist correspondents were still foreigners and subject to bureaucratic controls like other Western correspondents. The Canadian Tribune’s Bert Whyte found it all rather wearing, as he complained to his wife-to-be Monica not long after his arrival in Peking in 1960. ‘The trouble is “channels”—you can’t just visit a factory, or a gymnasium—it takes days or weeks of negotiations.’35 He was also frustrated by the constraints on reporting, even within the Party line: ‘We are expected to cable straight reportage on political stuff—not brought here to record personal impressions.’36 As Alan Winnington had already discovered, ‘straight reportage’ included not deviating from the wording of official statements. When he sent the Daily Worker the ‘hearsay versions’ of the original text (rather than the revised published version) of Mao’s 1957 speech ‘On the correct handling of contradictions among the people’, he was formally reprimanded for his ‘bourgeois journalistic methods’.37 While the communist correspondents were largely complying with officialdom— and being criticized if they faltered—the representatives of the capitalist media made every effort to dig deeper. ‘Our real staple was simply to use our eyes and ears and where possible compare what we saw and heard with the Party line’, Reuters’ Vergil Berger told me. In contrast to the official revolutionary discourse, the Cultural Revolution initially seemed rather harmless to Berger. When the Red Guards first swept into the streets of Peking in summer 1966 proclaiming Mao’s campaign to abolish all old things, customs, traditions and anything redolent of Soviet ‘revisionism’ they seemed more amusing than threatening, adolescent ideological pranksters rather than a serious movement. We laughed when without first briefing the police they declared red the colour of revolution and green as standing for rural tranquility and that traffic must therefore stop at green lights and move ahead at red.

Within weeks, though, the Red Guards had ceased to be amusing. ‘We began to hear credible reports of how they were humiliating and tormenting their teachers and in some cases even their parents, forcing respected professors previously considered Communist loyalists to attend day- and night-long “struggle” meetings.’ 38 In the latter part of 1971, Peking correspondents were part of the international China-watching community attempting to unravel the latest political mystery. Lin  Biao, Mao’s ‘close comrade-in-arms’, had not been seen in public for several months and there were suspicions that he was either ill or had been politically purged, particularly when the 1 October national day parade was cancelled. Soon

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Mao’s young revolutionaries seemed like ‘adolescent ideological pranksters’ in this photo taken by Vergil Berger’s AFP colleague Jean Vincent. (Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images)

afterwards, Reuters’ Jim Pringle was visiting Peking’s main department store with AFP correspondent Jean Leclerc du Sablon. The pair looked at the portraits of senior officials featured on one of the walls. ‘We suddenly realized something was different. A portrait had vanished . . . Where was Lin Biao, a brilliant former military commander and Mao’s chosen successor? His likeness, once placed prominently next to Mao’s, had disappeared.’39 The hunt for Lin Biao was on. Swedish correspondent Göran Leijonhufvud did the rounds of the city’s bookstores trying to buy Mao’s little red book of quotations which included a photo of Mao with his ‘close comradein-arms Comrade Lin Biao’. None was available. ‘I asked for other books featuring Lin Biao—but they had also been removed. He’d become a non-person.’40 It was not until ten months later, following a welter of international speculation and the occasional official hint, sometimes a red herring, that the government formally announced that ‘Lin Piao, the former Defense Minister, had led a plot to overthrow and assassinate Mao Tse-tung and was killed in a plane crash in Mongolia while fleeing the country’.41 While Fred Teiwes, perhaps the most painstaking Western analyst of the period, strongly contests the official line about Lin plotting a coup, it is generally accepted that he had died in a plane crash in Mongolia on 13 September.42

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During the political manoeuvring following Zhou Enlai’s death on 8 January 1976, correspondents were always on the lookout for the latest development. When the ‘radicals’ (including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing) launched a political campaign against the so-called capitalist roaders in the Party, the major target was assumed to be their old enemy, Deng Xiaoping. But Deng was not initially named in the media or on dazibao. After receiving a tip-off from a British student, Peter Griffiths cycled out to Peking University and managed to gain access to the screened off poster compound that was normally closed to foreigners. ‘I got in and out by wearing a facemask, hat and Chinese clothes. There the first posters condemning Deng Xiaoping by name had gone up before he was purged. It was a scoop for Reuters.’43 Griffiths’s venture demonstrated the advantage of being able to read Chinese—he could hardly have taken the Reuters translator with him—and why the authorities preferred correspondents who were not Chinese-literate. Using their eyes and ears, though, was not without personal risk, particularly during periods of political turmoil. As the Cultural Revolution gained momentum, a personal encounter with Red Guards seemed even more threatening than the usual clash with officialdom. Recruited by AFP specifically for his Chinese language skills, René Flipo arrived in Peking at the height of Red Guard activity as second string to experienced correspondent Jean Vincent. He soon discovered that reading dazibao could be hazardous. I remember one instance when I was ‘struggled against’ by a very large and angry crowd of Red Guards, accusing me of being a tewu [spy]. On another occasion, I was chased by Red Guards on their bicycles along Changanjie and was saved only by riding at full speed right through the gates of waijiao dalou [the diplomatic residential compound] which the Chinese were not allowed to enter.

Reporting on the popular demonstrations and riot in Tiananmen Square in early April 1976 was also risky. During the Qingming festival (the annual festival to honour the dead) Chinese people had laid thousands of wreaths for Zhou Enlai, as well as poems critical of the government, at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square. Their removal overnight on 4–5 April provoked angry protests. Peter Griffiths was one of the correspondents who went back to the square on the dramatic day and early evening of the 5th when protesters set fire to official vehicles and the public security building. Suddenly he found himself surrounded by a group of angry young men carrying staves and wearing workers’ militia armbands. They frog-marched him to a room in the outer wall of the Forbidden City where he was held and questioned by security police for about three hours. Even in the charged atmosphere, the interrogation had its lighter moments when officials listened to a tape he had recorded of Peking Mayor Wu De ordering the rioters to disperse. ‘On the back of the tape was a message I had prepared to send to my mother in England. The

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‘Zhou Enlai loved the people.’ Reuters’ Peter Griffiths took this photo in Tiananmen Square on 4 April 1976. (Courtesy of Peter Griffiths)

officials listened to it several times and one, who spoke English, insisted on knowing what “begonias” were.’ Despite the occasional direct confrontation, everyday life for Peking’s correspondents was generally less psychologically stressful than it was for their counterparts in the Soviet Union, whose experiences were vividly portrayed in Whitman Bassow’s book The Moscow Correspondents. ‘The Soviet Government held an array of weapons to cow [sic] the most intrepid reporters, including fear, intimidation, and surveillance.’44 Correspondents were trailed, sometimes day and night, regularly abused in the media, and had to be on constant guard against sexual or financial entrapment. David Bonavia, whose Peking posting followed three years in Moscow, acknowledged that the Chinese authorities mostly shunned the Russians’ methods. ‘This is not to say that the journalist’s work is easier in China than in the Soviet Union. Any foreigner trying to investigate actual conditions in China may be met with a near-solid wall of misleading platitudes or downright lies.’45

10 The web of relationships

Mao’s China was a striking example of Ulf Hannerz’s research finding that foreign correspondents were likely to stick together more closely ‘in cities where there were few of them’. This was particularly the case when ‘they were living under tough conditions and perhaps in an adversarial or at least closely guarded relationship with the host society and especially its government’.1 With a paucity of information at their disposal, Peking’s correspondents often shared whatever was available, whether in the ‘informal three man press club’ in the late 1950s, as Nossal described it (himself, Reuters’ Ronald Farquhar and AFP’s Bernard Ullman), or later. Vergil Berger recalled the mid-1960s: The other three Westerners and I—by then the German news agency DPA had a representative in Peking—had a curious relationship which we studiously kept completely secret from our employers in London, Paris, Hamburg, and Toronto. We quite often shared or exchanged information, especially on stories which we feared might be sensitive or get us into trouble with the authorities. There was some safety in numbers and we felt more secure if we all covered something controversial. We would also sometimes check rumours with each other and try jointly to evaluate how seriously to take them.2

This was also largely true of the expanded press corps of the mid-seventies. ‘Many of us in the Western press community shared a lot,’ Reuters’ Jonathan Sharp recalled. ‘Rare was the day when I was not in contact with Western colleagues to share gossip, titbits, discuss what the hell the latest People’s Daily editorial meant, and so on.’3 The tiny size of the Western correspondent community also prompted more contact with correspondents from the Eastern bloc than was usually the case during the Cold War era. In the mid-1960s, the four Westerners were outnumbered by fifteen correspondents from the Soviet Union and other communist countries.4 (There were also eight correspondents from Japan which, despite the lack of diplomatic relations, signed an agreement in 1964 for an exchange of correspondents.) As Peking’s relations with Moscow became increasingly vitriolic, Reuters’ Adam Kellett-Long and his wife Mary socialized regularly with Eastern bloc correspondents. ‘We were all in the enemy camp, if you like. It was a very unusual situation.’5 There were evenings

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on the Kellett-Longs’ roof terrace and visits to the Polish embassy compound. ‘The representative of the Polish news agency and his wife lived there. They used to invite us for lunch and swimming almost every weekend in summer.’ Although Western correspondents sometimes also exchanged information with their Eastern bloc colleagues, they were still professionally wary of them. Writing of the late 1960s, the Globe and Mail’s Colin McCullough commented: ‘The Russians and their allies were always trying to plant rumours with the Western journalists, since a damaging story about the Chinese in Western European or American newspapers would be a hundred times more effective than a thousand similar stories from TASS and Pravda.’6 In the early 1970s, Jonathan Sharp even felt the need to be on his guard against an approach from—and potential entrapment by—the KGB. When the TASS representative in Peking presented him with a bottle of vodka at Christmas, the young Reuters correspondent thought it ‘might be some sort of overture’ and had doubts about accepting it. ‘But as David Bonavia, who had earlier been expelled from Moscow, wisely advised: “Drink it and forget about it”—which I did.’ Relations with fellow nationals working for the communist media depended as much on personality as on ideology. The early correspondents were none too impressed with Alan Winnington. David Chipp referred to him as ‘a sad character who put on an air of superiority. Our mutual dislike was apparent to everyone.’7 Adam Kellett-Long, who knew Winnington in Berlin, told me he ‘could only agree with Chipp—and more’. In contrast, Adam and Mary saw a lot of Winnington’s Daily Worker successor Ted Brake, who also combined working as a polisher for Xinhua with writing for the Daily Worker. ‘Ted became a very good friend. He came to love China, not just communism.’ Despite their intermittent contacts across the ideological divide, the noncommunist Western correspondents maintained a sense of their own group identity. Some remember an episode in March 1976, which involved their cooperation in agreeing not to report it, as one of the most dramatic chapters of their Peking sojourn. David Bonavia, in whose apartment most of the drama took place, described it only some eleven years later in his book Seeing Red: Personal Encounters with Communism.8 The drama involved a 19-year-old Cambodian student, Kennedy Chem, who had been studying Chinese in Peking when the Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975. A little less than a year later, the excitable young man’s behaviour, which included a public altercation with his Yugoslav girlfriend, came to the attention not just of the Peking University authorities but of the Cambodian embassy. He was forcibly taken to the embassy and scheduled to return to Phnom Penh. Kennedy’s father, Chem Snguon, had been a diplomat in the former regime and, with the Khmer Rouge killings at their height, the prospect of going back to Cambodia terrified the young man. He  managed to escape though a lavatory window and sought refuge in the

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diplomatic residential compound with David Bonavia, whom he had met some time earlier, and his wife Judy. Knowing it would be impossible to conceal the young Cambodian, Bonavia contacted ‘Mr Chi’ (Qi Mingcong) at the Information Department and asked whether Kennedy could be granted an exit permit and allowed to leave China for anywhere other than Phnom Penh. Qi replied: ‘You should tell him to leave your flat, and you should cease interfering in affairs which do not concern you.’ The Bonavias, though, allowed the young man to stay the night. ‘Next day we asked all sympathetic Western correspondents to come round for a conference on the problem, which was bigger than we could handle on our own. One of our first decisions was that we could not use the journalist’s most powerful weapon, publicity. Kennedy’s father had been recalled to Cambodia and could be shot at any time if his son caused an international fracas.’9 (Chem Snguon was in a ‘work camp’ at the time, along with many other returnee ‘intellectuals’, according to Cambodia specialist Ben Kiernan.)10 Kennedy stayed on in the apartment, not daring to venture outside, with most of the Western correspondents rallying around. ‘He was a nice kid, played the guitar, and was very, very frightened,’ the AFP’s René Flipo recalled. ‘We took shifts day and night to look after him and make sure nothing untoward happened.’ (The lift operators and other Chinese staff in the apartment block had been replaced by security officials.) Bonavia sought help from the French, British and Canadian embassies, as well as appealing to the Swedish, Egyptian and Yugoslav ambassadors, who had recently visited Phnom Penh, to try to persuade the Chinese authorities to let Kennedy leave China. John Small, the Canadian ambassador, was the most helpful; he  arranged immigration documents for the young Cambodian but was unable to secure permission for his departure from the PRC. Meanwhile, Kennedy was becoming more and more agitated. ‘We were really concerned as the days went by that he would jump off the balcony in his increasingly desperate state of mind,’ Judy Bonavia recalled.11 Nor did it help, in the words of Reuters’ Peter Griffiths, that ‘at the time David was going through something of a nervous breakdown’, linked with the alcohol and depression that already worried his colleagues.12 The couple were themselves getting close to their scheduled date of departure from China. With avenues for securing official agreement to Chem’s departure seemingly exhausted, the correspondents debated what to do next. According to Griffiths: ‘The favoured course of action, which I supported, was that the correspondents as a group should take him to the airport and attempt to put him on a plane to Tokyo, on the basis that if Chinese or Khmer officials attempted to snatch him from us there would be a major and (for China) embarrassing incident.’ (Japan was the closest non-communist country with a direct air link to Peking at the time.) But as Australian Yvonne Preston

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recalled: ‘Some of the others said we had to let him go as he could cause trouble for us.’13 Perhaps he should throw himself on the mercy of the Cambodian embassy? The outcome of the quandary, as remembered by Judy Bonavia and Peter Griffiths almost forty years later, was that any decision was taken out of the correspondents’ hands when Kennedy—who was in the next room while the correspondents were discussing what to do—suddenly decided to leave the apartment. Some of the correspondents accompanied him to the nearby International Club where he got into a taxi, hoping to go to Peking University to see his girlfriend. He was detained and put on a flight to Phnom Penh. Along with two million or more other Cambodians, Kennedy Chem died in the ‘killing fields’. ‘In different measure, all of us involved have suffered from feelings of self-doubt at the way we handled the situation,’ David Bonavia wrote of the episode. He put the main onus, though, on the Chinese authorities: ‘The most disgusting chapter of this squalid tale occurred a few years later.’ At a reception, a senior Information Department official told a British correspondent: ‘Of course, all you had to do with that Cambodian boy was take him out to the airport, and he could have gone on any flight he wanted.’14 The correspondents’ sense of group identity did not mean a total lack of competition. ‘We at Reuters did our damnedest to outsmart and out-write our main competition, AFP,’ Jonathan Sharp recalled of the early 1970s. The increased number of correspondents also brought a new element into the equation. Now there were representatives of rival newspapers from the same country, or a representative of a newspaper versus a news agency. Most of the time there were few opportunities for journalistic one-upmanship, even with the dramatic events of 1976 prompting international headlines. Individual correspondents duly reported people’s reactions to the death of Zhou Enlai in January, the demonstrations in his support in Tiananmen Square in April, the disastrous July earthquake, and Mao’s death on 9 September. Like diplomats—and the whole of China—they then waited to see what was going to happen next in the ongoing power struggle. Over the weekend of 9–10 October, rumours began circulating in Peking that Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and three other ‘radicals’ had been arrested for attempting a coup  d’état. On Sunday, the British embassy told the Foreign Office it had received this information from ‘a reliable informant with access to low-level Party briefing’ and in the evening a diplomat briefed two British correspondents, Reuters’ David Rogers and the Daily Telegraph’s Nigel Wade.15 On Monday, with the story also spreading among foreign students at Peking University via some of their Chinese roommates, correspondents tried to confirm the reports with the Foreign Ministry but the response was ‘no comment’. At the end of the day there was still no official confirmation of such a dramatic political development.

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But on Tuesday morning, foreigners in Peking woke up to hear news of the arrests on the BBC World Service, based on a report in the Daily Telegraph with the byline: ‘By Nigel Wade. Peking correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and the only British newspaper staff reporter based in China.’ (David Bonavia had left Peking a few months earlier and was covering China from Hong Kong.) The Telegraph’s front page headline proclaimed: ‘Mao’s widow arrested. Four leaders accused of plotting Peking coup.’ The article began: ‘Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s widow Chiang Ching, and her three fellow radicals in the Chinese Politburo, have been arrested and charged with plotting a coup d’état, according to reliable sources in Peking.’16 The following day the story was again front page news, with the headline ‘China purge continues’ and Wade stating that reports in Peking indicated that ‘more radicals had been rounded up and placed under arrest’. The Telegraph’s readers were introduced to Wade in a boxed article, complete with photograph, entitled ‘Our Man in Peking’. Nigel Wade, the only resident British newspaper correspondent in Peking, scored world scoop, according to the BBC, with his report in the Daily Telegraph yesterday that China’s four top radicals, led by Mao’s widow Chiang Ch’ing had been arrested . . . Wade triumphed over the men and women who had been in Peking years longer than he by nailing and reporting among the many rumours floating around the Chinese capital, the story that the four members of the ruling politburo, known locally as the ‘Shanghai Mafia’ had been arrested.17

By then, the news agencies and other Western newspapers were publishing slightly more cautious reports of ‘mounting evidence’ that Mao’s widow and the ‘radicals’ were indeed under arrest.

The political aftermath. Rally on 21 October supporting the arrest of the ‘anti-Party group’ (Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan). (In author’s collection)

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Had Wade broken a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with Reuters to embargo the startling news until there was definite confirmation, as Australian correspondent Yvonne Preston later maintained?18 According to Reuters: ‘Yes, there was an agreement, and yes, Wade did break it.’19 When I asked Wade about a gentlemen’s agreement, he responded: ‘News reporting is no game for gentlemen. My job was to report the news when I had it, not to set up tinpot embargoes. I was not party to any agreement even if the Reuters duo thought I was.’ Wade had been ultra careful to protect his story. Instead of following the normal practice of sending a cable to London, via Reuters in Hong Kong, ‘for obvious reasons, I sought to preserve my scoop by phoning it to London’.20 Only four months into his Peking assignment, Wade’s journalistic initiative had already infuriated the Australian ambassador, as discussed later in this chapter. The 29-year-old, also born in Australia, had earlier gained a reputation as a hard-hitting young journalist for his Daily Telegraph reports on The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and arrived in Peking fresh from three years of the rough-and-tumble of political reporting in Washington which included Watergate. Wade’s latest journalistic initiative brought personal rewards. He was Granada’s 1976 Reporter of the Year and received a congratulatory letter from the Telegraph’s managing editor, who advised him that his annual salary was being increased (albeit by the somewhat meagre amount of £238) ‘in recognition of your Peking scoop’.21 Both socially and professionally, individual correspondents maintained fairly close contact with their country’s diplomats in Peking’s small Western community. Peter Griffiths remembered having ‘closer and better relations with the Brits in China than anywhere else—in Africa, Mideast and Asia’, while the Sydney Morning Herald’s Margaret Jones felt part of the Australian embassy’s ‘family’.22 During the early years, the British diplomatic mission also provided social facilities and even a degree of pastoral care for correspondents whose countries did not have diplomatic representation in the PRC, notably the Canadians, Germans and until 1964 the French. The Globe and Mail’s Colin McCullough recalled the diplomat’s wife who visited his family soon after their arrival in the spring of 1968 ‘carrying a big cardboard carton filled with boxes of corn flakes, mayonnaise, peanut butter and other things unavailable in Peking’.23 Regular contact with diplomats also widened correspondents’ access to the limited amount of information that was available. With the odd exception, they were less likely to read Chinese than at least some embassy staff. Recalling his early days in Peking in March 1967, when new dazibao and Red Guard newspapers were appearing daily, Reuters’ Anthony Grey wrote: ‘The correspondents who didn’t speak Chinese, that is to say all four of the Western correspondents, tended to rush to the embassies to find out what the latest reports, scandals and defamations were.’24

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The relationship was not all one way. Moving a little more freely across the ideological and cultural divides, correspondents sometimes picked up snippets of information or at least gossip that they shared with diplomats. David Oancia, the Globe and Mail’s correspondent in Peking in the mid-1960s, had good contacts with both East European diplomats and Japanese journalists. In August 1966, as embassies wrestled with the intricacies of the unfolding political drama, British diplomat Alan Donald commented that he and others had been ‘reasonably impressed over the last few months with the information which he [Oancia] has been able to pick up’.25 For all of the information sharing, the ambivalent relationship that has always existed between media and government sometimes made itself felt even in Peking’s small community. Alarm bells started ringing in mid-1972 when the Foreign Office heard that The Times was planning to appoint David Bonavia, who had been expelled from Moscow for contacts with dissidents, as its first resident correspondent in Peking. ‘I wonder whether he could be relied on to behave with discretion,’ Richard Evans (a future ambassador to China) wrote in an internal memorandum. ‘He could cause us all a good deal of embarrassment if he were to engage in the kind of activities which led to his expulsion from Moscow.’ As Evans accurately surmised, however, ‘the degree of temptation and opportunity might both be less in Peking’.26 Following the establishment of the US liaison office in Peking in early 1973, news organizations began exerting pressure to send correspondents to China. Even though most major Western countries now had media representation in Peking, Liaison Office Head David Bruce was decidedly unenthusiastic about the prospect, as he cabled Henry Kissinger in October. In USLO’s candid judgment time is not yet ripe for permanent stationing of U.S. newsmen in Peking. We believe that frictions would inevitably arise between U.S. newsmen and Chinese authorities over what constitutes permissible newsgathering activities, which would in turn create problems in US-PRC relations and for USLO itself.27

In any case, the issue was probably a hypothetical one. China was unlikely to accept American resident correspondents so long as Taiwan news organizations had representatives in the United States. It was not until after the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979 (and the breaking of relations with Taiwan) that the first resident US correspondents would finally arrive in Peking. Despite some caution, relations between embassies and correspondents usually ran smoothly. Just occasionally, there was an incident between a correspondent and an embassy that soured relations, for example when confidential information fell into a correspondent’s hands that he or she considered too important to ignore. During Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s visit to China in June 1976, Yvonne  Preston found herself with a copy of the transcript of Fraser’s first day of

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talks with China’s new premier, Hua Guofeng, even though such talks were always surrounded with secrecy. As Preston later commented, the confidential transcript had been ‘carelessly leaked by the embassy, or stolen by us, according to one’s interpretation of the professional ethics involved’.28 There were various versions of how the Daily Telegraph’s Nigel Wade came by the document before giving a copy to the Australian correspondent for whom it was much bigger news. One, which gained fairly common currency, had Wade surreptitiously removing a copy of the transcript from an envelope when it was put down for a moment by a junior embassy officer at the Minzu Hotel, where the visiting Australian journalists were staying.29 ‘That makes me sound too sneaky,’ Wade responded when I cited this version to him. ‘Some flunkey came in with two envelopes and left them on the press table. One was a press handout and when I saw that the other, marked PRESS, contained the secret transcript, I trousered a copy and left.’30 Wade, who had only recently arrived in Peking, wrote a short piece describing Fraser’s ‘very uncomplimentary’ comments about Indonesia, while Preston broke the story in Australia. Entitled ‘Fraser goes “all the way” with Hua’, her article in the Australian Financial Review focused on the prime minister’s strong anti-Soviet stance, which had so pleased the Chinese.31 The weekly National Times, also part of the Fairfax group that Preston represented, published verbatim Fraser’s statement to Hua on the Australian government’s views of the international situation, which included his controversial comment that there was a ‘question mark’ over Indonesia, Australia’s closer neighbour, ‘because of the nature of the present regime’.32 The disclosures, published while Fraser was still in China, severely embarrassed the prime minister as well as the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, which put the onus squarely on Ambassador Stephen FitzGerald, even though it had rejected his request for additional administrative assistance during Fraser’s visit. FitzGerald, in turn, was so angry with Nigel Wade that the Australian-born journalist was refused entry to the embassy’s Down Under Club the next time he appeared there. Thirty-five years later, Yvonne Preston was still unrepentant about the journalists’ actions. ‘In the end, it was a huge blunder on the embassy’s part. Not the journos.’ Although correspondents and embassies did not always see eye to eye, to the Chinese authorities they were tarred with the same political brush. Even with the increased number of correspondents in the seventies, Yvonne Preston found that Chinese officials ‘never could quite adjust themselves to the notion that Western journalists . . . were not employed by their governments’. This perception led to the discriminatory treatment of individual correspondents (for example in being denied permission to travel) when a country’s relations with the PRC were even more tense than usual, and even occasionally made them personally vulnerable.

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Anthony Grey outside the slogan-daubed entrance to his house shortly before being detained. (Anthony Grey Archive, University of East Anglia)

With tensions between China and Britain over Hong Kong reaching fever pitch in mid-1967, it seemed only a matter of time before Reuters correspondent Anthony Grey would be in trouble. Following the labour dispute in Hong Kong in May, the entrance to Grey’s house at 15 Nan Chizi, like the walls surrounding the British diplomatic mission, was plastered with slogans denouncing British imperialism and there were noisy demonstrations on the street. In late June, as the Hong Kong situation further deteriorated with leftist riots against the colonial government, Reuters advised Grey to take a break outside China, even though he had arrived less than four months earlier. He was eventually granted an exit permit and bought a ticket to leave Peking on 11 July, but Reuters then asked him to delay his departure to report on the repercussions of a further serious incident in Hong Kong. It was a fateful request.

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On the evening of 11 July a Xinhua correspondent named Xue Ping was arrested in Hong Kong and charged with ‘inciting a riot’. When Grey attempted to buy a new plane ticket, he was told there were no seats available. On the 19th Xue was convicted and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Two days later Grey was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where a stone-faced ‘Mr Chi’ informed him: ‘From this day onwards you must remain in your residence and not depart from it.’33 It was more than twenty-six months before the British correspondent left the house again. Grey vividly described his incarceration in his book Hostage in Peking and later in The Hostage Handbook, his diary of the experience. Initially he had access to the whole house, was able to make phone calls, and played telephone chess with diplomat friend John Weston. But on 18 August, as demonstrations against the British became ever more frenzied, a group of Red Guards burst into the house. They dragged the 29-year-old out to the courtyard, sloshed black paint over him, glued a pink dazibao to the back of his shirt, subjected him to a ‘hate session’, and dangled the limp body of his hanged cat Ming Ming in front of his eyes. When Grey was led back into the house, there were Mao slogans on the walls, and everything from the bath to the bedclothes—even his toothbrush—was covered with black paint. For the next three months he was confined to a small washroom 8 by 8 feet, before being moved to what had been the dining room for the remainder of his incarceration. Apart from the adjacent bathroom, he had no access to the rest of the house.34 Grey was a hostage pure and simple, held in retaliation for the British government’s actions in Hong Kong. Unlike foreign expert Eric Gordon, whose incarceration in one room at the Xinqiao Hotel (along with his wife and young son) overlapped with Grey’s detention, he had not been detained because of his own actions and was not subjected to regular interrogations and harangued to ‘confess’. He was, though, constantly under the watchful eyes of guards who sat just outside his room, able to escape their gaze only when he was eating, at night, and in the bathroom where he spent a lot of time sitting on the toilet writing a secret diary in shorthand. The British government was firm in its resolve not to release Xue Ping or another fourteen communist journalists who had been detained, arguing that this could provoke further disorder and threaten the political stability of Hong Kong. Like many Westerners finding themselves in hostage situations, Grey was angered by his government’s apparent inaction. When two British diplomats (Donald Hopson and John Weston) were finally allowed to visit him, they were understandably nervous about the reception they would receive. ‘But it was wonderful to see them,’ Grey admitted in his diary. ‘Hell, it has been nine months since I saw anyone like that.’35 By the time of the second diplomatic visit seven months later, though, Grey was so exasperated with his situation that, when Percy Cradock said he would read some messages from well-wishers, the correspondent responded that he ‘had been in solitary confinement for sixteen months and wasn’t really interested in platitudinous messages’.36

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Despite a wave of publicity and pressure from some of the media, the British government stuck to its policy. Grey was finally freed only after the last of the imprisoned Chinese journalists was released on 3 October 1969. Following the Briton’s arrival back in London, Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart explained to him personally why he was not prepared to release the Hong Kong journalists: ‘I don’t expect you to agree with the decision I made but I wanted to explain it to you.’37 On 11 November, the Queen presented Grey with an OBE for involuntarily playing his part in Britain’s efforts to maintain stability in its Hong Kong colony. Almost twenty years later, the former journalist (by then a prominent writer) visited China to make Return to Peking, a BBC documentary about his hostage experience. One of his interviewees was Qi Mingcong, the man who had told him he was under house arrest. Dressed in a smart Western suit, Qi told Grey that the treatment meted out to him ‘had not been meant personally’, even though it must have ‘seemed personal at the time’.38 The former Information Department official—he was now a researcher at the Foreign Ministry’s Institute for International Studies—was well aware that he was still known to Western correspondents as ‘cat-strangler Chi’, blamed for killing Grey’s cat Ming Ming. When Qi met Grey at a formal dinner before the interview, he whispered in his ear: ‘Of course, that story about me and your cat is not true, you know. I never even came to your house.’39

11 ‘Dateline—Peking’

‘Having that little word Peking at the top of your story gave it a kind of magic,’ the Globe and Mail’s Frederick Nossal wrote of his sojourn in China in the late 1950s.1 Magical as the Peking dateline might have been, compared with the more common Hong Kong one, the correspondents’ reports reflected not just the restrictions imposed on their access to information but official efforts to control what they wrote. Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union until 1961, this was not done through formal censorship but through admonitions, warnings, and the non-renewal of residence permits. Expulsion was the last resort. As ‘Mrs Chen’ [Chen Xiuxia] expressed it over five decades later: ‘We did not censor the foreign journalists’ despatches but a few of them wrote articles that were unfriendly or even hostile to new China. We had to resolve those problems.’2 Without formal censorship, the onus was on individual correspondents to decide for themselves what self-censorship, if any, they should exercise in their reporting. As  the first non-communist Western correspondent allowed to live in the PRC, David  Chipp was only too aware that ‘Reuters would not be best pleased if I was thrown out, after all the trouble taken to get me accredited’. On one occasion, he heard rumours that African and Chinese students had clashed in Nanjing, a forerunner of tensions in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘I decided not to report it without attributable confirmation. It wasn’t worth risking expulsion for a para or two on an inner page of a newspaper.’ 3 Frederick Nossal, the first Globe and Mail correspondent, thought that he ‘would cease being a reporter’ if he started censoring himself.4 In practice, he exercised a degree of restraint as correspondents called it. He did not, for example, initially comment on the worsening relations between China and the Soviet Union, already a hot topic when he arrived in Peking in September 1959. It was only in February 1960, when the issue was being widely discussed in the international press, that he finally wrote an article about the widening gap between Peking and Moscow, and then a further piece that was published under the title ‘Can the Sino-Soviet Alliance last?’5 It was already becoming clear that periodic restraint would not satisfy the authorities. Both the second Reuters correspondent, Jack Gee, and the third AFP

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correspondent, Jacques Jacquet-Francillon, were withdrawn by their news agencies after the Chinese complained that they had ‘given offence’. (As already mentioned, AFP’s first correspondent was expelled, but not specifically because of his reporting.) In both cases, the Chinese told the correspondents’ employers that, if the offending reporters were withdrawn quietly, they would have no objection to new correspondents being assigned to Peking. Gee’s PRC sojourn came to an end after a difficult nine months. He antagonized the authorities from the early weeks of his Peking assignment, particularly with a somewhat light-hearted account of the demonstrations against US and British intervention in Lebanon and Jordan in July 1958. ‘The sun blazed down and street vendors of ice cream, melons and tea did a brisk business,’ he wrote in a widely publicized article.6 Gee was attacked in the People’s Daily for allegedly suggesting that the ‘serious angry protest rally’ had a ‘picnic air’ and that the demonstrators were mostly young people.7 Jacquet-Francillon’s Peking assignment lasted a month less than Gee’s. In mid-1959, when the government was praising the early achievements of the Great Leap Forward and the new commune system, the AFP correspondent signalled the early stages of the disastrous three-year famine. There was a draconian rationing system in place in Peking, he wrote, and most of the city’s restaurants were closed because of a lack of food.8

Official propaganda during the Great Leap Forward was at odds with everyday reality. ‘The vegetables are green, the cucumbers are plump, the yield is abundant.’ Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, February 1959. (IISH Collection, Amsterdam)

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Both Gee and Francillon resigned from their news agencies, arguing that their professional integrity was being compromised by their employers’ desire to appease the PRC government. Francillon angrily told a friend he thought that AFP, in concurring with his withdrawal, had ‘implicitly agreed with the Chinese charges against his good faith as a journalist’.9 Reuters’ general manager, Sir Christopher Chancellor, later revealed that he had acquiesced to Chinese demands for Gee’s withdrawal because of ‘the importance of maintaining Reuters’ representation in Peking’ and ‘our £20,000 a year contract with Hsinhua [Xinhua]’.10 (The Chinese subscribed to the Reuters commercial service.) Gee’s replacement, Eastern bloc veteran Ronald Farquhar, thought his employer was weak-kneed. ‘Reuters didn’t gain any face with the Chinese by pulling Jack out without demur as soon as they were asked to.’11 When Frederick Nossal was summoned to the Information Department some seven months after his arrival, he assumed it was to discuss his application to go to Tianjin to collect the car he was importing from Hong Kong. ‘Yes,’ said the redoubtable Mrs Chen, ‘that will be perfectly all right’. But then she added, almost casually according to Nossal: ‘Of course, you know that we are not prepared to extend your present visa. Is it worth your while having the car in Peking for only one month?’12 Having been permitted to bring his wife Audrey and four young children to Peking barely a month earlier, Nossal had assumed that his current visa would be extended, despite the occasional official reprimands for his reports. The Globe and Mail’s head office announced that, rather than replacing its correspondent, it had decided to close its Peking bureau. It was not reopened until 1964. The experiences of the early correspondents set the pattern for the whole of the Mao era: verbal rebukes, pressures on the home organization and the non-renewal of residence permits, though not normally formal expulsion which may have threatened the presence of Xinhua representatives overseas. AFP correspondent Jean Vincent’s experience was an exception but not unusual in the heightened tensions of the Cultural Revolution. In April 1968, Vincent applied for an exit/re-entry visa to take two months’ leave outside China. On 6 May, the day before his scheduled departure, he was summoned to the Information Department, read a long statement declaring that certain of his despatches had been ‘slanderous and lying’, and informed that he was being expelled from China and must leave within three days.13 The day following his departure he was denounced in the People’s Daily for ‘malicious slander and fabricated accusations against state leaders’.14 Three months later, just a day after Vincent’s replacement arrived in Peking, the second AFP correspondent, René Flipo, was given an exit visa (after applying for an exit/re-entry visa) and told he had to leave China within forty-eight hours. ‘As there was now another AFP man in Peking, the Xinhua guy in Paris was safe,’ Flipo rationalized.15 From the early 1970s, a new era for Western journalism in the PRC seemed to be under way as more correspondents were admitted to China, paralleling the expansion

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of the nation’s diplomatic relations. But there were conflicting official messages, just as there were for the new cohorts of diplomats and students. By late 1973, the positive images of Nixon’s 1972 visit and an apparent new openness to the West were giving way to attacks on ‘foreign bourgeois influences’ as the radicals, including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, gained the ascendancy. In January 1974 the government officially launched its ‘criticize Lin Biao, criticize Confucius’ campaign, which brought renewed tensions with foreigners. A number of minor incidents led the Globe and Mail’s John Burns to suggest that ‘China is returning to the more militant attitudes characteristic of the Cultural Revolution’.16 The arrival of the first three Australian correspondents—Paul Raffaele of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the Sydney Morning Herald’s Margaret Jones and the Australian Associated Press’s Lachlan Shaw—coincided with the mounting tensions. New to China reporting, they did not hold back in their despatches on the anti-Confucius campaign or on China’s actions against South Vietnam over the Paracel (Spratly) Islands in mid-January 1974. Jones, who later commented that reporters ‘would be ill-advised to write anything for six months’ after their arrival, produced a stream of articles published under headlines such as ‘It’s war on Confucius’ and ‘Tension grows over Peking’s new hard line’.17 The Chinese were unimpressed. As well as criticizing the correspondents personally, they took the unusual step of complaining officially about their reports: both to Ambassador Stephen FitzGerald in Peking and, through the Chinese ambassador in Canberra, to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs.18 Tensions were exacerbated by the widely publicized controversy over Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Chung-kuo (China). The left-wing director had been invited to China in 1972 to make a documentary about the country, only to fall foul of Jiang Qing and the Ministry of Culture, which in January 1974 denounced the film as ‘reactionary’ and ‘anti-China’.19 Officials made their disapproval of the film widely known, both to diplomats in Peking and through their embassies abroad, putting strong but largely unsuccessful pressure on foreign governments to prevent its screening. The ABC, an independent though government-funded corporation, initially wavered on whether to screen the film, cancelling the showing of excerpts on its current affairs programme This Day Tonight. ABC Chairman Professor Richard  Downing stated that the decision had ‘nothing whatever to do with the government’ but admitted that it had everything to do with Paul Raffaele. ‘We had great difficulty in getting an ABC representative into China. We will have to decide whether it is worthwhile jeopardising ABC relations with China.’20 Faced with mounting public pressure to show the documentary, Downing and the other ABC commissioners viewed it on 7 June and announced that the screening would go ahead.21

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In Peking, Australian Ambassador Stephen FitzGerald had already invited the three Australian correspondents and five Information Department officials to a restaurant dinner to try to resolve their differences. Following the ABC’s decision, the Information Department told FitzGerald that it would ‘not be convenient’ for two of the officials (the most senior ones) to attend. The ambassador decided to go ahead with the evening in the effort to prevent tensions escalating, but the remaining three officials failed to turn up. When FitzGerald protested at the outright snub, Ma Yuzhen responded: ‘At this time we cannot sit down with Australian journalists.’22 The incident was duly reported by the correspondents, with Paul Raffaele making a strongly worded broadcast that defied FitzGerald’s stated wish to play down the incident for the sake of the Australian government’s overall relationship with China.23 The ongoing state of cold war, as Margaret Jones described it, had virtually immobilized the three correspondents. In mid-June she reported: ‘Since January all requests by [the] correspondents to travel have been refused and repeated requests that the correspondents be allowed to visit institutions to see aspects of Chinese life have also been turned down.’24 Eventually, though, things changed. ‘Suddenly, in their mysterious way, they decided that perhaps the punishment had gone on long enough so they relented, and they let us go on a trip, and it was the first time in six months I had been outside Peking or indeed almost outside my apartment.’25 As David Bonavia commented, there were times when Peking’s correspondents had ‘doubts about the worthwhileness of the whole exercise’.26 ‘Many is the time that I have thought there was really no virtue in having a correspondent in Beijing at all,’ Australian Yvonne Preston wrote of the mid-1970s.27 Her German colleague, Die Welt correspondent Gerd Ruge, thought that for ‘general facts and statistics’ a correspondent was actually better off in Hong Kong, ‘but for the mood of the country and how it works, it’s much better here.’28 In Peking, though, it was not just a question of lacking facts and statistics, but of what correspondents were able to write about with the facts they did have, as well as their knowledge of the mood of the country, without suffering the fate of de facto expulsion. Despite the severe limitations, Peking’s small group of correspondents had a distinctive role in writing about China during the Mao era. Some found themselves in the right place at the right time with the opportunity to produce ‘the first draft of history’ on international headline-grabbing events: the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, the ping-pong diplomacy of 1971, Nixon’s 1972 visit (though they faced competition from the large accompanying press entourage), and the tumultuous events of 1976. Like Nigel Wade’s scoop on the arrest of the Gang of Four, the ‘big stories’ brought recognition from the journalistic profession. Globe and Mail correspondent David Oancia received the 1966 Canadian National Newspaper Award (foreign

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reporting category) for his despatches, featured in newspapers internationally, on the early activities of the Red Guards. Norman Webster received the same award in 1971 for his articles on the ground-breaking visit of the United States table tennis team that helped pave the way for Nixon’s visit the following year.

The AFP’s Jean Vincent reported on the written and physical attacks on the ‘four olds’ (customs, cultures, habits, and ideas) during the Cultural Revolution. The large poster attacks the ‘old’ Beijing ribao (Peking Daily), February 1967. (Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images)

Apart from providing on-the-spot coverage of the big stories and assessing developments using their ‘eyes and ears’ and the limited amount of available information, Peking correspondents had a distinctive niche in writing what Hong Kong–based reporters called, not without a note of sarcasm, ‘sights, sounds and smells’ journalism. The PRC’s isolation and other planet quality meant there was a ready market even for travel style reports. Some, like many a correspondent’s early contributions on crossing the border into China and the plane or train trip to Peking, would have been more appropriate for a personal travel diary or letter home if written about most countries. Later there were stories on kindergartens, Peking’s underground tunnels, factory and commune visits, and everyday life in the capital. Trips outside Peking, carefully supervised though they always were, introduced readers to places that some would have difficulty locating on a map, including Inner Mongolia, the Communists’ former revolutionary capital at Yan’an, and the industrial cities of Shenyang and Harbin. Whether writing the first draft of history, everyday news stories or ‘sights, sounds and smells’ journalism, sometimes an individual correspondent stood out,

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particularly when the Western media began carrying more features on China from the early seventies. John Burns, the Globe and Mail’s sixth correspondent in Peking, was already showing signs of the attributes that would make him one of the leading foreign correspondents of his era. Twenty-six when he arrived in Peking in mid-1971, the British-born graduate of Canada’s McGill University had no previous foreign reporting experience and had studied Chinese for just six months. He missed out on the ping-pong diplomacy which occurred shortly before his arrival, as well as on the dramatic political events of 1976 that began not long after his departure. But his four years in Peking included the ‘Lin Biao mystery’, the visit by Richard Nixon (whose chopsticks he purloined at the end of a banquet in the Great Hall of the People) and several by Henry Kissinger, and the anti-Confucius campaign. With Sino-American relations high on the reporters’ agenda, Burns established close relations with David Bruce and later with George H. W. Bush, who thought the Canadian correspondent was ‘very able and perhaps the best and fairest journalist in town’.29 Burns socialized regularly with Bruce and became a tennis partner and cycling companion for Bush, whose personal diary included entries such as ‘played some doubles with John Burns’ and ‘Bar [Barbara] and I cycled down with John Burns to the Great Square for some picture taking’. 30 When the Bushes’ son George W. visited his parents in the summer of 1975, the pair ‘came to know each other as two young men about town in Peking’, as Burns expressed it many years later.31 Burns’s forte, though, was revealing something of China beyond its foreign relations and domestic politics. When Time magazine commented that newsmen in Hong Kong tended ‘to file more knowing reports on politicking within China’s hierarchy and that they dismissed the Peking corps’ output as mainly sights, sounds and smells’, it also quoted Burns’s view that there was ‘a wide market for atmospheric human-interest tales’. Indeed, in Time’s opinion Burns was ‘one of the most enterprising and energetic’ of the correspondents in Peking at a time when ‘even some of the most resourceful reporters, like David Bonavia of the London Times and Ulrich  Grudinski of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, lean toward dry accounts based on official pronouncements’. 32 Burns was not only a keen observer of everyday life around him but actively created his own stories. He took up running late at night, discovering the all-night cycle-repair shops and eating spots frequented by shift workers in the capital. He  competed (without having registered) in the annual seven-mile round-the-city foot-race, attracting attention as the only foreigner—and a 6’2” curly-haired one at that. Although he finished 1,165th out of 1,500 contestants, it made a good story. His articles on trips outside Peking were informative and personalized, like a poignant portrait of one of the few remaining White Russians, now fallen on hard times, in an article about how Harbin had once been a virtual Russian enclave in northeast China.

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The Canadian Globe and Mail was an ideal vehicle for Burns because of its longstanding interest in China, though his reputation also stemmed from the publication of his articles in syndicated newspapers including the New York Times. With growing American media and public interest in China but still no resident US correspondents there, Burns began looking like a de facto NYT correspondent. Impressed with his journalism, the newspaper’s managing editor, Abe Rosenthal, offered Burns a foreign correspondent position which he took up after leaving Peking in mid-1975. Burns was a difficult act to follow, but his replacement in Peking, 34-year-old Ross Munro, was not lacking in self-confidence as he set about proving his own credentials as a foreign correspondent. (Although he had been with the Globe and Mail for eight years, this was his first assignment outside North America.) Munro’s reports on the tumultuous political events of 1976 were interspersed with articles such as ‘Hints of Unease and Indiscipline Appear in China’.33 In official eyes, he reportedly became one of the more troublesome of the correspondents.34 Over the course of his two-year Peking sojourn, Munro was also busy collecting material for his coup de grace. It did not come until October 1977, just over a year after Mao’s death. In a series of articles on human rights in China—or rather the lack of human rights—Munro examined the extreme control exercised by the danwei (work unit) over people’s everyday lives, which included not being allowed to choose one’s own job or to travel without official permission. He also wrote about the lack of a written code of law, executions for political beliefs, and continued discrimination against people because of their bad class background.35 The articles, featured in the New York Times and several other newspapers as well as the Globe and Mail, received wide international coverage. So too did Munro’s predictable de facto expulsion—the familiar non-renewal of a residence permit—for what the Chinese authorities called ‘obvious reasons’.36 The publication of the articles, though, had been well-timed. They had the magical Peking dateline, but the correspondent’s residence permit was due to expire only three weeks before his scheduled date of departure from China. Although Munro might have burnt his bridges as a China reporter, his reputation as a bold foreign correspondent was assured. (His next assignment was as Time’s bureau chief in Bangkok.) Commenting on his de facto expulsion, he told Time there was ‘a very serious question about whether reporters in China can write professionally, accurately and fully about this country’:37 a  fact that had been patently obvious to Western correspondents in Peking ever since the 1950s. At best, Mao’s China had presented an intriguing challenge to correspondents’ professional skills. At worst, they experienced a range of frustrations that held strong memories for many years. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s first Peking correspondent, Paul Raffaele, recalled ‘a Kafkaesque twenty months living and working in a shadowy communist world where we correspondents were allowed almost no

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contact with locals and were regarded, with exquisite politeness, by our Foreign Ministry minders as a peculiar variety of Western spy’.38 David Chipp, though, had more positive memories of his Peking assignment and the novelty of having been the first non-communist Western correspondent allowed to live in the PRC. Fifty years later, the ebullient raconteur was still regaling people with the tale of how he had stepped backwards when attending an official reception, only to find himself treading on Chairman Mao’s toe. ‘I didn’t write about it at the time,’ he told me. ‘I wanted to be seen as a serious journalist.’ In a changing ideological climate, some of Chipp’s former adversaries even became close friends. Before leaving China in 1958, he had invited the Information Department’s Chen Xiuxia (Mrs Chen) and her husband Chen Hui to visit him in Britain. ‘I never really thought it would happen, but over forty years later they stayed with me here in London.’

Part V ‘Foreign experts’

12 Helping China?

In July 1964, Colin and Alyce Mackerras were interviewed in London. Colin had just completed a master’s thesis at Cambridge on relations between Tang China and the Uighur empire; Alyce was working in the university library. A friend told them there were opportunities to teach English in China and, within a week of expressing an interest, the young Australian couple was invited to the Chinese diplomatic mission. ‘You do realise, don’t you, Mr Mackerras, that England is a capitalist country and China is a socialist country?’ ‘Yes, I knew that.’ ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ ‘No, that’s all right . . . By the way, I feel I should mention two things. Firstly, my wife is expecting a baby.’ ‘We have hospitals.’ ‘The second thing is that we are both practising Catholics.’ ‘There are churches.’

Six weeks later, Colin and Alyce arrived at Peking Airport, to be ‘greeted with flowers and great courtesy’ by representatives of the English Department of the Foreign Languages Institute, where they subsequently spent two years as foreign experts.1 Waiguo zhuanjia, translated as ‘foreign expert’ and sometimes as ‘foreign specialist’, was—and continues to be—the formal designation for foreigners employed by the PRC government. The waiguo zhuanjia of the Mao era were far from the first to go to China. Foreign experts/specialists and more broadly ‘advisers’ had a chequered history in China, especially from the second half of the nineteenth century when the country embarked on its self-strengthening programme which aimed to modernize China by adopting ‘Western learning for practical use’ while retaining ‘Chinese knowledge as the essence’.2 In his book To Change China, eminent historian Jonathan Spence argued that the Western military and economic advisers, educators, doctors and engineers who went to China invariably approached the country from a ‘standpoint of superiority’ and wanted to change China along Western lines. ‘Even if some

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Chinese welcomed them warmly, there were always more who met them with indifference, deception, or hostility.’3 China’s new communist government quickly made clear its intentions to deal with Westerners on its own terms and to serve its own national interests. This included using limited foreign expertise when it was considered really necessary, although in practice its usefulness would sometimes be undermined by current political agendas. In both periods when Western experts were recruited to work under Mao, the mid1960s and from the early 1970s, politics ruled over professionalism in the ongoing tensions between ‘redness’ and ‘expertise’ in education and publishing. Australian Neale Hunter, who taught English at the Shanghai Foreign Languages Institute in 1965–67, wrote: ‘The latest group of foreigners in China was invited to teach languages and techniques. The Chinese, whether they know it or not, have learnt far less than they could have from these people.’4 As a community, the foreign experts fitted somewhere between the diplomatic/ correspondent communities and the long-term residents. Like Western diplomats and correspondents, they usually spent around two years in China. But they were a much more disparate group, going to the PRC through individual arrangements with the Chinese authorities, not as representatives of Western governments or media organizations—or even on official exchanges like most students. Like the longtermers, they worked in Chinese institutions, a few even in the same department or section, in an environment where foreigners were a tiny minority. They had the same formal conditions, though they were specifically recruited as foreign experts while the long-termers found themselves in this category largely by default. Unlike the long-term residents, though, they were always conscious that they were in China for only a few years. Initially it was not Westerners but Russians, around 10,000 during the 1950s, who dominated the foreign expert scene as China adopted the Soviet model in everything from agriculture and industry to education and culture. The Russian experts, who usually spent around a year in the PRC, were officially exalted as China’s ‘elder brothers’, to be emulated and heartily praised. The Chinese media featured their activities in great detail as the government faced an uphill battle to persuade the Chinese people, in historian Wang Gungwu’s words, ‘to show a degree of friendship to their Soviet comrades that they had never shown to any foreigners before’.5 It was a difficult task at a time when the population was being told that, with the overthrow of imperialism, the Chinese people were finally the ‘masters of China’. The limited need for native speaker expertise in English and other Western languages during this period was met by resident ‘foreign comrades’ and a few people sent, specifically for this purpose, by Western communist parties. In the early 1960s, a seismic change occurred in the PRC’s foreign language requirements. As the Sino-Soviet rift widened following the sudden withdrawal of

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Soviet experts in mid-1960, English replaced Russian as China’s first foreign language, while French also assumed growing importance as the PRC tried to increase its political influence in Africa. When Zhou Enlai visited newly independent Algeria and a number of other, mostly French-speaking, African countries in 1963, he was shocked by the poor standard of his interpreters. Following his return to the PRC, he oversaw the general expansion of foreign language teaching which included the establishment of new tertiary institutes. In Peking, they included the Second Foreign Languages Institute, with the existing institute becoming the First Foreign Languages Institute, and institutes for diplomacy and broadcasting.6 New institutes were also set up in Shanghai and major provincial capitals. With virtually all Western communist parties taking the side of the Soviet Union in its split with China, though, the source of additional native speakers of Western languages had dried up. It was in this environment that the government decided to recruit some foreign experts from the West. Chinese diplomatic missions in London and Paris (after the establishment of relations with France in January 1964) made the availability of positions known through friendship associations and individual ‘friends of China’, as well as the occasional progressive Chinese scholar working in a British or French university. By early 1965, even the scholarly journal China Quarterly was reporting that the Chinese government was recruiting English-language teachers, usually on two-year contracts, and estimated that around fifteen had already gone to China from Britain.7 The recruitment programme was interrupted by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution when classes gave way to revolutionary activism. When it resumed in the early 1970s, friendship associations again played a role in passing on information, as did Chinese embassies in countries that now included Canada, Australia and most West European nations. Potential foreign experts were usually interviewed, often within a few weeks of expressing an interest and in a somewhat perfunctory manner. In Paris, Marianne Bastid was asked a few general questions and then told: ‘OK, you can go—within two or three weeks.’ When she asked about her teaching duties and what she should take with her, the response was ‘I don’t know’.8 The criteria for appointment seemed minimal: little more than being a native speaker of the language (although even this was waived in the case of some, particularly Scandinavians). While many were university graduates, high school education was deemed adequate, particularly where a spouse was concerned. And although political enthusiasm was welcome, it was not a criterion for acceptance as Frenchman Maurice Ciantar discovered: ‘All we ask of you is that you’re not an enemy of the Chinese people and that you do your work well.’9 Unlike diplomats and correspondents, many foreign experts did not go to China because of the job they would be doing there but because the job was a way to live in the PRC for a few years. For some, the attraction was political. They included longtime socialists, some of whom had turned to China after becoming disenchanted with

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the Soviet Union following Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin and the invasion of Hungary in 1956. They became active members of friendship associations like the Britain-China Friendship Association (BCFA) and, after internal ructions following the Sino-Soviet split, the new Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU). Thirty-three-year-old journalist Eric Gordon and his wife Marie had first met at a Young Communist League meeting in London. Eric worked on a range of provincial and London newspapers, with the aim of eventually becoming a journalist on the CPGB’s Daily Worker, but during the early 1960s he and Marie were increasingly attracted to China. Soon after being made redundant at the Daily Herald, Eric was approached at a SACU meeting about the possibility of working in the PRC. ‘It had a fervent, evangelical ring about it that appealed to both of us.’ The couple thought that China might also offer the opportunity to protect their 8-year-old son Kim from the ‘worst excesses of Western culture’.10 Twenty-one-year-old Sophia (Sofka) Knight went to China soon after graduating from Bristol University, where she had studied French. Sofka was the daughter of well-known socialist and writer Frida Knight, a friend of PRC enthusiast Joseph Needham. Frida would exert a strong, though not always welcome, influence over her young daughter’s sojourn in China. Not only did she edit Sofka’s letters for publication, guiding some of their content through her questions about life in the PRC; she also wrote media articles based on her daughter’s experience and spent six weeks travelling with her in China during the early part of the Cultural Revolution.11 A few socialists went to China through connections with one of the long-term residents and were at least partially integrated into their community. Having fallen out with the British communist party during the Sino-Soviet dispute, ‘anti-revisionists’ Muriel and Peter Seltman thought that a few years in the PRC would give them ‘the opportunity to learn valuable political lessons’ as well as to ‘make some small contribution to building socialism and opposing imperialism’.12 For Americans, defying their government’s ban on travel to the PRC was a particularly dramatic political act. David and Nancy Milton, who arrived in Peking in 1964 with their blended family of three sons, saw themselves as ‘heirs to a thirty-year-old tradition’ of American involvement in the Chinese revolution that had started with Anna Louise Strong and George Hatem and continued with McCarthy era victims Frank Coe and Sol Adler.13 A second category of foreign experts more closely paralleled the Western scholars and university teachers of pre-revolutionary days. Like Colin and Alyce Mackerras, they were graduates of Chinese language and studies programmes. With the exception of a short-lived French student exchange scheme, there were few opportunities in the 1960s to study or do research in China, and the foreign expert route presented a tantalizing opportunity to gain first-hand experience of the country. This category was not completely distinguishable from the first. Most were generally sympathetic towards new China, while a few—like Australians Neale and Deidre Hunter—were

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known as being politically radical. Following the pattern of the Mackerrases and the Hunters, a number went to China as young married couples. They included 23-yearold Oxford postgraduate student Bill Jenner and his wife Delia, only 19 years old, and SOAS graduate Andrew Watson and his wife Maggie. Some were single, including Cambridge graduates Diana Lainson and Endymion Wilkinson. Among them were some of the future top China scholars of their generation. There were also some future China specialists among the French foreign experts, although language students and graduates had the opportunity to study in China from 1964 on their government’s student exchange scheme. Marianne Bastid had recently completed a history degree and studied Chinese for two years. Keen to go to China, she took the foreign expert opportunity that became available a few months before the establishment of the student exchange. Jean-Pierre Dieny, another future prominent French sinologist, also initially went down the foreign expert path. Both changed their status after their first year in China when two places for research students became available on the exchange programme. Not everyone was politically motivated or a Chinese language graduate. Some were peripatetic teachers with experience in international schools; a few of the first group of French teachers had worked in Algeria before its independence in 1962. Others simply took advantage of the opportunity for a paid adventure overseas, with the PRC providing return fares to China, a two-year contract, free accommodation and a reasonable salary. Most of the foreign experts were in their twenties or thirties, but there were a few exceptions. Fifty-year-old Frenchman Maurice Ciantar had had a varied career as a government press officer, journalist and the author of three novels before applying to go to China in 1965. He had a number of reasons for his interest, he wrote: to find out what was behind the Great Wall that he had read about as a schoolboy, to have an adventure, and ‘to see the people who had inherited one of the most prestigious civilizations’.14 As a published author, Ciantar also intended to make the most of his China experience. He planned to keep a detailed journal and post it back to a friend in France, a few pages at a time, in the form of letters. The second wave of foreign experts from the early 1970s had some slightly different features. The political category was more varied, including both those who had come under the spell of European Maoism in the late 1960s and those more generally drawn to the PRC as it tentatively began opening to the West. Some, like French Maoist Claudie Broyelle and Australia-China Friendship Society member Susan Day, had already paid a short visit to China as members of a women’s, student or other delegation, and were keen to spend longer there. The beginning of student exchanges in 1973 also meant there was less interest from Chinese language graduates, although the teaching or polishing route did offer opportunities for couples and families as well as providing a more comfortable lifestyle. In the seventies, there were also a few

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government exchanges that usually recruited experienced teachers or academics like Edoarda Masi, a prominent Italian intellectual who had studied in China in the late 1950s, and Australian historian Bruce Kent and his wife Ann, a specialist on contemporary China. Memories of foreign expert days in Peking, where the majority of foreign experts worked, still conjure up images of the Youyi Binguan (Friendship Hotel or Hostel). The sprawling self-contained complex, located around ten kilometres from downtown Peking, was commonly known as the Youyi or, even for some years after the Soviet advisers left in 1960, by its Russian translation Druzhba. Along with the two diplomatic quarters, the Youyi had the largest concentration of Westerners in Peking until students started arriving in the mid-1970s. While a few long-term residents lived there, mostly when they were ill or elderly, the ‘golden ghetto’ (as some of them referred to it disparagingly) was very much the heart of the foreign expert community.

A tiny part of the ‘golden ghetto’, originally built for Soviet experts. (Courtesy of Victor Ochoa)

Westerners were not the only foreigners at the Youyi. In the words of Neale Hunter, its residents ranged from ‘wild-eyed Columbian revolutionaries whose every second word is guerilla’ to ‘Arab nationalists, Afghan aristocrats, Japanese baseballers, Chilean spinsters’.15 There was not always a clear distinction between those recruited specifically to fill China’s need for foreign language expertise and those who became foreign experts largely by default: would-be revolutionaries and political exiles who could go home only if the political situation changed in their country. When Maurice Ciantar arrived in mid-1965, almost six hundred foreigners lived at the Youyi; even then it

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seemed half-empty compared with its heyday as the focus of the Soviet bloc presence in the mid to late 1950s. Many had families with them, including a Pakistani couple with nine children. By the time Ciantar left in mid-1968, only around 150 remained. The foreigners themselves were outnumbered by some 1,500 Chinese staff who included administrators, drivers, shop attendants, cleaners, cooks, and waiters, as well as personnel based at the Foreign Experts Bureau which was located in the complex. The Youyi was perhaps the most striking example of the ‘privileged segregation’ experienced by Westerners in Mao’s China. It provided a standard of living that Eric Gordon had not anticipated when he arrived in February 1965 with Marie and Kim. Instead of the ‘crowded dormitory’ that he claims he expected, the family found itself in Youyi 9641 (building 9, entrance 6, floor 4, flat 1) which had a comfortable sitting room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a small kitchen which they decided to convert into a bedroom for Kim as they intended eating in the restaurant. As for the Youyi itself: It had two very big restaurants, one for Western food, another for African and Asian dishes. There were shops galore—tailor, grocer, butcher, chemist, postoffice, shoe-repairer, bank, laundry, photographer, hairdresser, even a secondhand shop—as well as a large cinema, dance-hall, club room for billiards, cards and ping-pong, a roof garden for drinks and summer dances, and in the spacious grounds an open-air swimming pool, gymnasium, tennis courts . . .16

Despite the creature comforts, the Youyi was not one big happy family but rather, in Diana Lainson’s words, ‘a hotbed of gossip, discontent, and exclusiveness’.17 In his book Mille Jours à Pekin, which he described as a chronicle of 1,000 days at the Youyi, Maurice Ciantar wrote of ‘cet hôtel de l’inimitié plus que de l’amitié’ [this hotel of enmity rather than friendship]. Week by week, sometimes day by day, Ciantar chronicled life in the segregated compound. With ‘more than sixty nationalities living in forced cohabitation’, there were racial and sexual tensions in addition to political ones.18 When a young Pakistani castigated a Sudanese for showing too much of an interest in his sister, the pair finished up brawling on the terrace, overturning tables and ripping each other’s clothes.19 Arab activists distributed not just anti-Israeli but blatantly anti-Semitic publications, upsetting not only Jewish residents. In Shanghai, the few foreign experts—never more than thirty or forty in total— initially lived at the seventeen-storey Shanghai Mansions, formerly called Broadway Mansions and home to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China during the Civil War. Married couples were usually allocated at least two rooms, while single people had a single room with bathroom. ‘My room is a very large, light, bed-cum-sittingroom, bigger than any of the rooms at home,’ Sofka Knight wrote to her mother soon after her arrival in September 1965.20 Six months later, the Chinese made a special

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residence, a sort of mini Friendship Hotel, available to the foreign experts. It was quite luxurious, Sofka wrote, with self-contained flats, balconies overlooking the spacious gardens, and a modern clubroom.21 Only a few foreign experts worked outside Peking or Shanghai. When the first group of twelve French teachers arrived in Peking in 1964, they were told that some were being sent to Nanjing and Xi’an. ‘We protested—we wanted to stay together. In the end four went to Nanjing; the rest stayed in Peking,’ Marianne Bastid recalled. Jacques and Therese Marsouin refused outright to go to Xi’an, arguing they had been told in Paris that they would be teaching in Peking. Some later recruits went to other major cities including Tianjin, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Harbin. They usually lived in hotels, sometimes the only one open to foreigners in the city, and occasionally in their institute’s guesthouse. The foreign experts’ entitlements were set out in a lengthy State Bureau of Foreign Experts document.22 They received free accommodation, free medical treatment and one-month’s paid travel over summer. Salaries for teachers and polishers were clustered around the low to mid level of a fifteen-point scale, depending on qualifications and experience. Eric Gordon, an experienced journalist, was paid 500 yuan a month (approximately US$200 at the official exchange rate) and Marie was three levels lower at 380 yuan, the same as Sofka Knight in Shanghai. The Mackerrases each received 460 yuan. The official rationale for paying foreigners up to seven or eight times more than their Chinese colleagues was ‘to encourage people to work in China and to take account of what they earned in their own countries’.23 Although the salaries were still less than average teachers’ or editors’ incomes in the West, they were tax-free and the general cost of living in China was low. Recognizing this, the government allowed foreign experts to remit overseas up to 50 per cent of a single person’s salary, or 30 per cent of a couple’s salary, even though the renminbi was not officially convertible. Superior living conditions and high salaries were only part of the panoply of privilege. While the local population travelled to work on crowded buses or by bicycle, foreign experts were driven there by car or coach. There was even transport to take them home for lunch. In Peking there was also a twice daily coach from the Youyi to the centre of town. If one missed the coach or it was at an inconvenient time, there were discounted taxi rates. The preferential treatment came hand in hand with segregation, particularly at the Youyi, where security guards checked that Chinese people had authority to enter the compound. According to Eric Gordon, some quite enjoyed the isolated splendour. They seemed to spend most of their free time in the club or swimming pool, or drinking and gossiping; they left the hotel in the evenings and weekends only to hunt for curios, have an exotic meal at a restaurant or drop in at their embassies for a filmshow or a chat with diplomats . . . For all that they attempted to see of Peking they might as well have stayed at home.24

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Others found the atmosphere claustrophobic. Eric loathed what he described as ‘the goldfish-bowl life . . . By design or accident, the Youyi soon seemed part of the bigger scheme of things that came between Chinese and foreigners’.25 Those with a strong interest in China, whether political or academic—or a combination of the two—had not come to the PRC to live an isolated expatriate-style existence. A few even attempted to break away completely from the golden ghetto, putting pressure on the Foreign Experts Bureau to live in housing attached to their place of work, like some of the long-term residents. Less than two weeks after she and Bill arrived in August 1963, Delia Jenner wrote to her parents: ‘We still dislike this hostel, but we have applied to move and hope we will be able to some day.’26 It was not until sixteen months later, already two-thirds of the way through their stay in China, that she was able to write: ‘I must tell you our good news—we are escaping from the hated Friendship Hostel at last and going to a Radio Station hostel, affiliated to my place. Of course, it’s still luxurious by Chinese standards, but not nearly so extreme as the other place.’27 Even while they were still living at the Youyi, the couple tried to reject what Delia later described as the ‘systematic cosseting’.28 Instead of being driven to work, she and Bill cycled to and from the Broadcasting Institute and the Foreign Languages Press. Rather than returning to the Youyi in the middle of the day, they got permission to eat lunch with their Chinese colleagues. Mealtimes, though, were not really conducive to social interaction, as Eric Gordon also discovered. His colleagues at the Foreign Languages Press ‘ate their food at an astonishing speed and were back in their offices within fifteen minutes where they sat at their desks and read or spent the rest of the lunch-break stretched out asleep on their desks, with a book or two as a pillow’.29 On Sunday, their only full free day, the more adventurous wandered or cycled around the city, at least within the twenty kilometre limit. The few who could read Chinese viewed the latest offerings at the New China Bookstore and rifled through the city’s second-hand bookshops; music researcher Colin Mackerras shopped for recordings of Chinese opera until they disappeared early in the Cultural Revolution. The annual summer vacation trip provided the opportunity to see more of China, though normally as part of a group and accompanied by several officials. Just occasionally a Chinese speaker was able to travel independently, as when Bill and Delia Jenner arranged a stopover at Changsha, with a side trip to Mao Zedong’s birthplace of Shaoshan, on the way back from Hong Kong with Bill’s visiting parents. Most of the foreign experts worked as language teachers, a few as polishers. Several taught at the First Foreign Languages Institute, which continued to be the premier tertiary institution for preparing future diplomats and others working on China’s relations with foreign countries. In August 1964, long-term resident David Crook wrote to a friend: ‘Our own English department, which for fourteen years or so

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jogged along with four of us foreign teachers (among dozens of Chinese ones) now suddenly has eleven.’30 Others were assigned to the newly established Second Foreign Languages Institute, the Peking Language Institute (established in 1962 mainly, but not only, to teach foreign students), and other specialized institutes in Peking like those for broadcasting and diplomacy, while a handful taught further afield. In its effort to produce effective speakers of foreign languages, the government’s new language teaching policy promoted the ‘direct method’ rather than the traditional ‘grammar and translation method’, with instruction solely in the target language and grammar being learnt inductively. Although foreign textbooks were available using the direct method, their ideologically unsuitable contents needed revision to reflect communist politics and morality. A first-year text used at the Foreign Languages Institute, for example, demonstrated the use of ‘have/has been’ with examples including: Why is your jacket covered with mud? I’ve been helping to push a cart. Why has he made such progress? He’s been studying Chairman Mao’s works very carefully. Why is he sweating all over? He’s been helping the cooks move the cabbages.31

Beyond the basic textbooks, teaching materials were selected and approved by a committee that included a Party official. Then, as Colin Mackerras commented: Before each text was taught, the teachers of the grade would meet. We discussed the text, the points to be emphasized in class and the approach to be used. The individual teacher had, of course, some choice in how he dealt with the text in class, but he was supposed to teach more or less along the lines laid by his group.32

And if an individual teacher thought of deviating from the group norm? ‘Party members occasionally sat in on my class and it was no secret why they were there.’33 One of the most contentious issues was the use of authentic materials: books, magazines, newspapers, etc. published in the country or countries of the target language. This would normally seem uncontroversial but, in post-revolutionary China, most publications from Britain, France and other Western countries—let alone the United States—were seen as reflecting the bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist world. Before the early to mid-1960s, relatively liberal years culturally by later standards, some Western materials were still used, though they were increasingly restricted to selections from acceptable writers like Dickens (whose images of Victorian poverty some Chinese assumed were representative of contemporary British society), Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw.

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As the political heat intensified in 1964–65, materials produced in the PRC increasingly became the norm. At the newly established Second Foreign Languages Institute, which was politically rigorous from the start, Diana Lainson’s teaching texts included: ‘International Labour Day in Peking’ ‘The sweet potato patch’ ‘The childhood of Lei Feng’ (a communist model youth) ‘Ministers with pick and shovel’ (senior officials symbolically helping with the construction of the Ming Tombs Reservoir)

There was also some material about, but not from, Western countries, like an article entitled ‘The United Kingdom’ produced at the Peking Language Institute. Britain used to be the foremost imperialist power in the world, and she is still trying to hang on to her position as a colonial power; but since the end of World War I, she has been reduced to the position of junior partner of U.S. imperialism . . . The United Kingdom is a bourgeois democracy—in other words a bourgeois dictatorship dressed up as a democracy. In an attempt to make the disguise convincing, the British ruling class has set up an elaborate political structure.34

‘I occasionally felt unable to teach texts, or parts of texts, about the outside world,’ Colin Mackerras admitted. ‘My Chinese colleagues did not force me to do so, though they undoubtedly thought my attitude narrow and uncompromising.’ While Chinese teachers would accept corrections on matters of straight fact, ‘it was useless to argue’ on matters of interpretation, unless their view was supported by a more progressive foreigner. 35 At Peking University, Marianne Bastid was criticized by two teachers to whom she was teaching French literature (she was not given direct access to the students) when she used the word ‘Formosa’, arguing that she had to call the island ‘Taiwan’. Her protests that ‘Formosa’, originally used by the Portuguese and meaning ‘beautiful island’, was currently used in French were to no avail.36 Even more problematic than texts produced in the PRC was the fact that they had usually been translated from Chinese, rather than written in the target language. Some articles had already appeared in the Peking Review, its French equivalent Pékin Information, or another foreign language publication. At the Foreign Languages Institute there was an unending debate, according to Nancy Milton, over the use of translated materials. The progressive American thought that, even if this practice was anathema to linguists and language teachers, it was ‘irreproachably logical’ to the Chinese. ‘They saw Peking Review not only as a source of correct political statements, but as a model for phrasing such statements in foreign languages.’37 This text was characteristic.

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Premier Chou En-lai began by pointing out that holding aloft the glorious banner of Mao Tse-tung’s thinking and adhering to the general line of socialist construction, that is, going all out, aiming high, and achieving greater, faster, better and more economical results in building socialism, the various nationalities of our country, under the brilliant leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, have won one great victory after another since the First Session of the Second National People’s Congress in unfolding the three great revolutionary movements of class struggle, the struggle for production and scientific experiment on a national scale and carrying on a tit-for-tat struggle internationally against imperialism, reaction and modern revisionism. Peking Review, 1 January 1965.

Others were far from convinced by the Chinese logic. Following her return to the United Kingdom, Diana Lary (née Lainson) published an article entitled ‘Teaching English in China’ in the China Quarterly. The politicization of Chinese education, she argued, was having a particularly adverse effect on the teaching of foreign languages. ‘Fundamentally, the intention is to teach students how to speak Chinese in foreign languages using Chinese expressions, Chinese concepts and Chinese vocabulary. The results of this method of teaching English are disheartening.’38 Lary concluded that ‘the foreign teacher is faced with teaching a bastardised version of his own language. There is no getting round this problem.’ In a somewhat wearysounding footnote, she stated: ‘While in China I made all the criticisms mentioned in this article to the authorities at the school [Second Foreign Languages Institute] where I was teaching. Criticism from foreign teachers is asked for, but when given is seldom heeded.’39 ‘The authorities’ at her institute were, of course, at the mercy of larger political forces and, like other PRC officials, had to bend with the wind. The new wave of foreign experts who began arriving in China in the early 1970s, following the reopening of universities and language institutes, faced a basic contradiction. On the one hand, China was tentatively re-emerging on the international scene, with a growing demand for people with foreign language skills: diplomats, interpreters, and officials to deal with the increasing number of cultural, sporting and other exchanges. On the other hand, the revamped educational system, proclaimed as a ‘revolution in education’, focused even more on redness than expertise. The new worker, peasant, soldier students, recruited into the universities without examinations, spent lengthy periods ‘participating in labour’ so that they would not become alienated from ‘the masses’. Despite the expanding contact with Western countries, the use of teaching materials from the West was still highly controversial. Australian teacher Rachel Faggetter

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summarized the ongoing debate in the English Department at the Peking Language Institute as late as 1975–76: Should overseas materials, with their capitalist and often racist and sexist biases be used? Should they be laundered for Chinese consumption? Should they be used to give students a realistic idea of the country whose language they were studying?

Once again, as Rachel commented, ‘it was better to be “red” than “expert” . . . We were bedevilled if not defeated by the straitjacket of political orthodoxy.’40 And the only English-language texts she was able to use continued to be translations from Chinese. While most foreign experts worked as language teachers, a few were recruited to polish foreign language texts, compensating for the people formerly sent by Western communist parties. At the Foreign Languages Press, Eric Gordon polished translations of plays about the Civil War, ‘with strong heavy-jawed Red Army heroes and moustachioed Kuomintang villains’, as well as pamphlets and novels, mostly about either the Civil War or the anti-Japanese war. A professional journalist, Eric had been ‘appalled at the jargonised, constipated language’ of the PRC’s English-language publications that he read in London. ‘I had naturally thought that the whole point of employing me as an “English expert” would be to make them more readable.’ To his annoyance, he discovered that he was allowed to do only what he called ‘light touch’ editing. ‘I found it irritating not to be allowed to rewrite in the interests of fluency— one could alter words and phrases but not change the structure.’41 Although Eric basically agreed with the political content of the materials, he admitted that he became frustrated with his work. ‘There was a set quota for a specific number of books and pamphlets to be published, and as long as they came off the production line no one seemed to care whether they were readable or well laidout.’ When he discussed his concerns with Chinese colleagues, a few agreed but they did not want to take matters any further. Unlike some other foreign experts, Eric eventually appreciated the bureaucratic constraints under which Chinese people were working. ‘After all, my remonstrance involved criticizing material that was already published in Chinese, and therefore approved by authority.’42 Experienced writer Maurice Ciantar worked as a polisher for Pékin Information. Like teachers who could not bring themselves to use some texts about the outside world, Ciantar refused outright to polish an early 1968 article on a Chinese expedition to Qomolangma (Mount Everest) which he described as an example of ‘disgusting and offensive chauvinism’.43 The article claimed that ‘during the last century and more, a number of imperialist countries, motivated by ulterior ambitions, sent many “explorers” to survey the area. Their aim was plunder’. In contrast, the Chinese expedition had ‘the lofty determination to plant the great red banner of Mao Zedong

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Thought on the world’s highest peak.’44 When Ciantar’s Chinese colleagues expressed surprise at his attitude, he said he had not come to China ‘to serve up rubbish’.45 The Frenchman’s outburst was probably more the culmination of eighteen months’ frustration with the increasingly belligerent Cultural Revolution discourse than an isolated response to an article that was only a little more strident than usual. With language teachers in particularly short supply, even those who arrived with Chinese language skills were rarely employed as translators—or even as polishers. Oxford Chinese graduate Bill Jenner was an exception, though he was disappointed by his initial assignment to the Peking Review to polish articles which, he later wrote, ‘made few demands on me, and there was no scope for making them less boring’.46 After a few months Bill was transferred to the Foreign Languages Press, where he further developed the skills that were to make him a leading translator of Chinese literature. His most unexpected and ultimately memorable assignment was to translate ‘what purported to be the memoirs of Pu Yi’, the last emperor of China.47 The Foreign Languages Press wanted to publish an English translation as quickly as possible after the Chinese version in the hope of pre-empting an unauthorized translation abroad. Bill worked from the Chinese-language proofs and the English translation came out in two parts in 1964 and 1965, only to be banned, along with the Chinese version, for the best part of a decade during the Cultural Revolution. More than twenty years later, in 1987, Bill wrote the introduction to a new onevolume edition of Pu Yi’s memoirs, this time published by Oxford University Press in agreement with the Foreign Languages Press. The occasion was the release of Bernardo Bertolucci’s spectacular biopic The Last Emperor, filmed partially in the Forbidden City and featuring the tortuous life of the Chinese emperor-turned-prisoner-turned-gardener. In his introduction, Bill described the translation’s convoluted history and commented, somewhat tongue-in-cheek: ‘The translator should no doubt be gratified that his work has been so profitable to others.’48 The Last Emperor, based largely on Pu Yi’s autobiography, cost US$23 million to make and took US$44 million at the Box Office. It won nine Academy Awards. Some foreign experts, particularly those at the First Foreign Languages Institute and the Foreign Languages Press, found themselves working alongside one or more of the long-term residents. ‘We had quite a bit of contact with the Crooks in those days, but were a bit suspicious of them as 100 percenters,’ Colin Mackerras recalled. ‘I’ve changed my mind a bit about this since that time and came to like them more in the 1980s.’49 Those who regarded themselves as socialists were sometimes drawn to the Crooks and other long-termers as more experienced interpreters of MarxistLeninist-Maoist ideology. According to Eric Gordon, they ‘acted as a kind of public relations group among the temporary experts’, encouraging them to participate in a political study group that met at the Friendship Hotel.50 Even for committed Marxists like Eric and Marie, though, the attraction of the sessions wore thin. ‘We soon tired of

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the “discussions”, which were more like undiluted hymns of praise to Mao and China, and we stopped going.’ 51 More were drawn to the less politically ardent of the long-termers, particularly Gladys Yang at the Foreign Languages Press. Gladys and her husband Xianyi played an almost de facto parental role to young foreign experts in the 1960s. Bill and Delia Jenner were particularly close to the Yangs, becoming lifelong friends. ‘Her flat became my second home as a raw, young translator in Peking,’ Bill wrote in his moving obituary of Gladys after her death in 1999. ‘She looked after many of us newly arrived teachers and translators from abroad, and offered visitors respite from official hospitality. Because she treated colleagues as people rather than embodiments of ideology they liked her better than they did most Maoist foreigners.’52 As Bill indicated, the Yangs’ foreign experts circle extended well beyond the Foreign Languages Press. After the Jenners left China, Gladys’s regular letters were full of news of their former acquaintances. ‘We see Colin and Alyce every ten days or so,’ she wrote of the Mackerrases.53 More than forty years later, Colin recalled: ‘Gladys was different from the others. She was not 100 per cent in support of the regime, unlike people such as the Crooks  .  .  . We came to regard them both as very good friends.’ For those having problems coping with life PRC-style, the Yangs’ flat offered a homely refuge. In another letter, Gladys told Bill and Delia that one of their former fellow experts had ‘gone to pieces and is a sodden mass of misery’, admitting that ‘it becomes tiring having to scold or comfort him all the time’.54 Although Gladys could privately be critical of aspects of the communist regime, she became defensive if a foreign expert published a negative report on China rather than keeping his or her views within the group. When she read Diana Lary’s article criticizing Chinese teaching materials, she wrote to Bill and Delia: ‘It wasn’t vicious, but a pity she wrote it for the China Quarterly. And she generalized too much from No. 2 Institute, which was one of the worst. People say it’s improving now.’55 In a later letter, Gladys intimated that her own relatively moderate response was not matched by some other long-termers. ‘Of course most of the Sunshiners here now speak of her as a fiend incarnate.’56

13 Personal and political dynamics

Recruited by the PRC government and working in its institutions, foreign experts potentially had closer relations with Chinese people than did Western diplomats or correspondents. They also lacked the political taint of formal links with an imperialist government or the capitalist media, coming to China as individuals and sometimes taking on the ‘friend of China’ mantle. Yet they, too, found themselves marginalized. A foreign expert’s primary Chinese contact was his or her ‘minder’: the person who, as Italian Edoarda Masi saw it, was responsible ‘for the guest’s safety, his physical and psychic well-being, his words and his thoughts, his morality, his felicity—in a word, his life’.1 (The term ‘minder’ or ‘minder/interpreter’, regularly used by Englishspeaking Westerners, was not a direct translation of lianluoren or lianxiren, value-free terms used by the Chinese and meaning ‘liaison person’ and ‘contact person’.) Masi may have been exaggerating a little, but the minder provided the vital link between an individual Westerner and his or her surrounding world in an environment where one could do very little on one’s own initiative, particularly if one did not speak Chinese. Looking back on her relationship with her own minder, Masi wrote: ‘Chen had been, first and foremost, my control, and she knows that I know it, and for this reason it has been impossible that there not be some diffidence between us, and a hostility born of our uneasiness in the roles imposed on us.’2 In contrast to her somewhat tenuous relationship with her minder, Edoarda Masi wrote of a ‘kind of near-friendship which binds us to the people we work with’.3 Western teachers and polishers, always a small minority in their department or section, had contact with their immediate Chinese colleagues on a daily basis and participated in discussions about teaching materials and translated texts. They also shared the pressures to conform to the latest educational or publishing policies and practices, although Chinese colleagues were usually inhibited from admitting any disquiet they might feel to a foreigner—and even to each other during periods of extreme political tension. Some also met other Chinese people working in their institutions. ‘I think they were given special permission to deal with us, but this did not prevent our getting very friendly with them,’ Colin Mackerras recalled of a group of talented young

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scholars at the Foreign Languages Institute.4 One female lecturer, Zhang Hanzhi, stood out in Colin’s, and especially Alyce’s, memories of those days. When Alyce visited the hospital for check-ups during her pregnancy, she was accompanied by Zhang, herself the mother of a 1-year-old, and the women became quite friendly. Unknown to the Mackerrases at the time, Zhang had been teaching English to no less than Mao Zedong whom she met through her adoptive father Zhang Shizhao, a prominent scholar who had known Mao since the 1920s. The striking young woman was destined to become a well-known public figure in China. Transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1971, Zhang served as a member of the first PRC delegation to the United Nations and the following year interpreted for Zhou Enlai during President Nixon’s visit to China. In 1973 the 38-year-old caused a stir in official circles when she divorced her husband, a Peking University professor, and married Vice Foreign Minister (later Foreign Minister) Qiao Guanhua, twenty-two years her senior. In order to be with Qiao, Zhang knocked back the opportunity to become the PRC’s first female ambassador. Her autobiography, Stride Through the Thick Red Gate, was a bestseller in China following its publication in 2002.5 Despite the outward indications of friendship, the people with whom foreign experts associated were still among those select Chinese who were not just licensed for contact but conscious of the limitations. ‘Everyone was very well aware of the rules for dealing with foreigners,’ translator Bill Jenner later commented on his own colleagues. ‘Conversations with us, except on safe subjects, were guarded. You knew that they had to be reported.’6 Foreign experts teaching language had one distinct advantage: their daily contact with students. ‘Every teacher is closer to his students than to any other Chinese,’ Diana Lainson wrote, ‘though it is not until after one has taught them every day for several weeks that they really begin to thaw out’.7 Diana found her students ‘great fun to teach, and they treated me warmly and kindly. We got on well together.’8 Like others, she benefited from the close teacher-student relationship that continued to characterize Chinese education. It was not unusual for Chinese teachers to participate in group activities or to go on excursions with their students, and foreigners were occasionally able to do the same. Being a couple always helped. ‘Last Friday my thirteen students took us both to the zoo for the afternoon,’ Delia Jenner wrote to her parents. ‘The seven boys gathered round Bill, and the six girls around me.’9 Chinese students still had to be careful in their contacts outside class, even over a decade later as the PRC was emerging on the international scene. In her book A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, published after she left China, former Peking University student Ting-xing Ye wrote about visiting her British teacher with some of her fellow students. A few days later she and two other women students were called to the office of the English Department head, who questioned them about the social evening at

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Some of Colin and Alyce Mackerras’s friendly students at the First Foreign Languages Institute, pictured with the Australians’ baby son Stephen. (Courtesy of Mackerras family)

the Youyi. ‘What kind of questions had Michael asked us? Which topic was he most interested in? What answers did we give?’10 The young women were told that visits to their teacher’s residence were ‘improper and must cease’, even though male students had been present. Department Head Han’s words were alarming but didn’t surprise me . . . Under the revolutionary doctrine we had been taught that most foreigners were enemies of communism constantly trying to undermine us. Since foreigners lacked ‘socialist morality’, women should remain aloof and distant to show our dignity.11

The incident reflected the strict gender boundaries in relations between Chinese and foreigners that included even colleagues. Male foreign experts, unlike some foreign visitors, were usually well aware of the constraints: no hand on an arm or shoulder, no  overfamiliarity, certainly no flirtatious comments. Even when more foreign experts arrived in China in the 1970s, a personal relationship between a foreign expert and a Chinese person seemed out of the question. A handful of Westerners had been able to form friendships with, and even marry, Chinese women in the 1950s, though not without facing a number of obstacles, but the Cultural Revolution put an end to fraternization. Nowadays it seems extraordinary that a romance and wish to get married could become an international issue involving discussions between a foreign prime minister and a Chinese premier. But that is what happened in the case of Australian Susan Day. In April 1975, the 23-year-old Melbourne University arts graduate arrived

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in the western city of Xi’an to teach English at the Foreign Languages Institute. Susan had already been on an Australia-China Friendship Society tour of China and wanted to learn more about the country and its people, as she recalled almost forty years later: ‘I wasn’t a member of the Communist Party, nor did I see myself as a Maoist. But I felt that I could quite happily live in China.’12 One of the security guards in the institute’s foreign experts compound was a young man named Song Xianyi, the son of a Long March veteran. Like his Chinese colleagues, Song had regular daily contact with his foreign charges, both helping and keeping an eye on them. Although his education had been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, the 20-year-old taught himself English, was surprisingly well read in both Chinese and foreign literature, and enjoyed chatting with the foreign teachers. Susan was impressed with the young man. I was attracted to his intellect, his stories about China, his humour and spontaneity, his songs and poetry—he used to recite ancient Chinese poetry and Korean poems to me and sing Italian, Russian and Chinese songs. I don’t think he was wooing me, but I was entranced, and we developed a bond.13

In the cocoon-like environment of the small foreign experts compound, the bond developed into something more, even though Song was well aware that his official licence for contact with the foreign teachers did not extend to having a personal relationship. Swiss foreign expert and friend Philippe Judas, who had arrived in Xi’an around the same time as Susan, was a willing accomplice, letting the pair meet in his room in order to avoid suspicion. For around six months, they managed to keep their romance secret, at least from the institute authorities. But when the relationship came into the open in early 1976—and the couple said they wanted to get married—Song was promptly despatched to the northern part of the province without even being allowed to say goodbye. Dismayed by what had happened, Susan sought assistance from the Australian embassy in Peking, which made representations to the Chinese government on her behalf. Then, when Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser paid an official visit to China in June, the ‘Susan Day case’ was put on the agenda for his talks with Hua  Guofeng, the new premier. A few days later at Peking railway station, Fraser was being farewelled by Chinese officials and some Australian residents, including students, when Susan astounded everyone by walking over to Hua and handing him a personal letter. Her bold act presented a striking contrast to the seemingly quiet, unassuming young woman I had recently met, but it was an early indication of her determination to get approval for the marriage. Six weeks later the Chinese responded formally to the Australian representations. The answer was a firm ‘no’. The officially cited reason was that Song was ‘the son of a serving member of the armed forces and that Chinese regulations forbid

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marriage between children of armed forces personnel and foreigners’. 14 Australian Ambassador Stephen FitzGerald thought that this formula enabled the government ‘to avoid saying marriage with foreigners is discouraged or forbidden for all Chinese’. (Song’s father had, in fact, already retired.) The Foreign Ministry asked the embassy to inform the young Australian and to ‘undertake the task of “comforting” her and assisting her to understand and accept this decision’.15 Rather than telephoning Susan or writing to her, FitzGerald sent Cultural Counsellor Jocelyn Chey to Xi’an to convey the bad news in person: one of those empathetic acts of embassies that rarely get into the public arena. Far from accepting the decision, Susan made a fresh appeal to the Australian prime minister and dismissed Chinese claims that Song, who had been pressured into renouncing the relationship, did not want to see her again, let alone marry her. It was not simply wishful thinking. Even in the highly controlled society of the time, there were cracks in what often seemed, from the outside, a monolithic system. Letters were occasionally passed backward and forward through friends. The pair met secretly on more than one occasion when Song was able to return briefly to Xi’an, where his family lived. But Susan’s efforts to secure permission for the marriage had stalled. The Australian then put into action a plan that had been forming in her mind since the official rejection. If the problem was her ‘foreign national’ status, she would apply for Chinese citizenship. After all, a few other foreign residents had become citizens. First she told her parents and the Australian embassy; then in November she wrote directly to Premier Hua Guofeng. The ten-page letter was an impressive exercise in Chinese Communist discourse, replete with references to Marxism-LeninismMao Zedong Thought, the long struggles of the Chinese people, and quotations from Mao himself. But the basic message was clear. My dearest personal wish is to marry Sung Hsien-yi [Song Xianyi], a worker at the Sian Foreign Languages Institute. I love him very much, as much as any woman could love her husband. Our love has led me to make a serious decision which will affect the rest of my life: I would like to become a citizen of the People’s Republic of China . . . The happiness I have gained from our love is immense and I know that my future happiness depends on Sung Hsien-yi and I being able to always live together as husband and wife. This is not a dream. It is not youthful romanticism . . . Knowing all this, I hope and trust you can appreciate my earnestness in putting forward this application for citizenship.16

As the weeks passed, the lack of a response to the heartfelt missive became more and more worrying. With her two-year contract due to expire in April, Susan feared that she would have to leave China and that would be that. But in late February there was a dramatic turn of events that prolonged her stay, though not in the way that she or anyone else would have wanted. Walking near the Foreign Languages Institute one evening, Susan and a Chinese student were attacked by a Chinese man with what

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was described as a sharp-edged weapon. The Australian suffered a fractured skull, an injury that was diagnosed as serious but not life-threatening, though estimated to require up to a month in hospital. According to the Chinese authorities, it had been a random attack by a deranged young man. When diplomat Sam Gerovich arrived in Xi’an a few days later, he found Susan in good spirits ‘though as always preoccupied with her quest to marry Sung’.17 The Chinese were highly embarrassed by what had happened, expressed their strong sympathy, and facilitated a speedy visit from Susan’s parents in Australia. They agreed that the injured woman needed plenty of time to convalesce, as well as to grow her hair which had been shaved off for an operation, and extended her contract. Susan resumed teaching three months after the attack, not in Xi’an but over 900 kilometres away in Shanghai from where she continued her campaign. As China’s political situation began stabilizing after the dramas of 1976, with Deng Xiaoping being restored to some of his former positions in mid-1977, Susan became hopeful that her ongoing efforts to garner support would pay off. Chris Snow, the son of American ‘friend of China’ Edgar Snow and a former schoolmate of her Xi’an colleague Philippe Judas, offered some grounds for optimism after talking with Chinese officials, and the Australian government again raised the issue at senior levels. In mid-October a visiting Australian press delegation passed on a letter from Susan to Deng during a meeting with Vice-Premier Li Xiannian. Shortly afterwards, Lois Snow (Edgar Snow’s widow) made personal representations on Susan’s behalf, having invited the determined young woman to come to Peking as her guest. On 24 October, more than one and a half years after the couple had been separated by the authorities, Susan and the Australian embassy were informed that the matter had been ‘reconsidered’ and that permission would be granted for the marriage.18 The lengthy saga had its Hollywood ending at a simple marriage registration ceremony in Shanghai, where Susan, Xianyi, and several Chinese officials sat around a large table, covered with a white tablecloth and two vases of plastic flowers, in front of portraits of the late Chairman Mao and Premier Hua Guofeng. Also at the ceremony were Susan’s parents and her eldest brother and his wife, all of whom had travelled from Australia, as well as two former colleagues and her interpreter from Xi’an. Afterwards, the group celebrated with dumplings at Shanghai’s famous Yuyuan Garden. Following their marriage, the couple lived in the foreign experts building at Shanghai Teachers’ University. Susan enjoyed teaching and had already made friends among the foreign expert community, but her young husband was without a job and living in an unfamiliar city where he didn’t speak the local dialect. Although the Australian had earlier maintained that the couple would live in China following their marriage, Xianyi was keen to study overseas and his new father-in-law offered to sponsor him.19 Then, when Susan became pregnant and was warned that her blood type was very rare in China, moving to Australia seemed the best option all round.

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Susan and Xianyi at their marriage registration ceremony in Shanghai, 26 December 1977. (Courtesy of Day family)

The Chinese authorities, no doubt pleased to see the back of the troublesome pair, granted Song a passport and an exit permit to leave the country, and the couple relocated to Melbourne, Susan’s home town. But the marriage that had been discussed at the highest governmental levels lasted only a few years, a casualty of the personal and cultural strains that would undermine many such marriages in the early post-Mao era. Although personal relationships could be intense in China, even in cases where both parties were foreigners, politics was a more pervasive factor in many people’s everyday lives. The broad recruitment of Western teachers and polishers created a politically diverse community in which conversations invariably turned to presentday China and people’s attitudes towards it. Australian Neale Hunter thought that, because of the foreign experts’ ‘semi-isolation’ from Chinese society, their energies are turned in on themselves, and all kinds of cliques and petty rivalries develop. They classify each other into watertight compartments, the ‘progressives’ among them classifying the liberals as ‘reactionary’, and the ‘reactionaries’ calling the left-wingers ‘opportunists’, ‘careerists’, ‘sunshiners’, or ‘300 percenters’. The various attitudes harden, until the left wing deliberately takes up the Maoist line and agrees with the Chinese that yes, the workers in capitalist countries love Chairman Mao and are ready to rise up and liberate themselves, while the right wing becomes ever more critical of China and things Chinese, and deliberately tries to challenge and to taunt.20

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Soon after her arrival in Shanghai in 1965, Sofka Knight wrote to her mother: ‘There are quite violent quarrels all the time between the anti-Chinese and those who see China in a more realistic light.’21 Later she complained that she was ‘feeling alienated’ from some of the small group of foreign experts. ‘I started off on the wrong foot by sticking up for the Chinese when people were being critical; so I got the reputation of being 100 per cent pro-Chinese. Of course there are things I don’t like about China, but I see no reason why that should obscure what I do like.’22 As the Cultural Revolution got under way in mid-1966, politics became even more centre stage. The more radical foreign experts were keen to participate: people like David and Nancy Milton at the Foreign Languages Institute in Peking and Eric Gordon at the Foreign Languages Press. Along with the long-term residents, though, they were initially excluded from what was obviously a tumultuous development. For the Miltons, ‘the atmosphere of the Institute, in which we had come to feel so much at home, was suddenly strange’.23 At the press, Eric Gordon was depressed at being ‘given the cold shoulder’ by Chinese colleagues who had previously been friendly.24 While some wanted to become involved, most tried to keep their heads down and focus on their work—if there was any work to do. Despite the institutional factionfighting, the polishers still went to their offices. Foreign language magazines including China Reconstructs and China Pictorial continued to be published, albeit sometimes tardily, extolling the latest successes in the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. At  the Foreign Languages Press, though, the translation and polishing of Chinese novels and plays ground to a virtual halt as most writers came under suspicion. Language teachers were even more affected, essentially finding themselves without a job when classes ceased in May or June. ‘We were not dismissed, we still had free lodging, but we were told we didn’t need to go to class,’ Colin Mackerras recalled of the Foreign Languages Institute.25 In mid-June, Gladys Yang wrote: ‘The foreign teachers appear to be the most demoralized, as they have nothing to do except sit in Druzhba [Youyi] and speculate.’26 The Youyi, though, was itself soon caught up in the political struggles engulfing virtually all institutions, as rebels among the 1,500 strong Chinese staff attempted to take over the hotel and the Foreign Experts Bureau. When foreigners were finally given permission to participate in the Cultural Revolution in January 1967, some experts joined the Bethune-Yan’an Regiment which allied itself with the Youyi’s rebels. David Milton, who had been a union organizer in the United States, was one of the five members of the original broadly based committee. During the subsequent faction-fighting, though, he and his fellow committee members lost out when the organization was taken over by a handful of radical long-termers. With accusations and counter-accusations flying around in the increasingly poisonous atmosphere, Eric and Marie Gordon wrote a sixteen-sheet dazibao that accused the radicals, whom

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he now denounced as ‘sunshiners’, of ‘rumour-mongering, tale-telling, [and] sniffing out unorthodox views among the foreigners’.27 At the end of a dramatic summer, Gladys Yang commented that the atmosphere at the Youyi continued to be very tense because of ‘political differences and bad blood between the Bethune-Yenan foreigners and others’.28 As well as having to cope with the internecine politics, the Youyi’s residents had become increasingly frustrated with the decline in the hotel’s services as Chinese staff spent more and more time at political meetings and noisy rallies. By late 1967, Maurice Ciantar was so exasperated that he wrote personally to Premier Zhou Enlai. ‘Eminent Comrade Premier, I have the honour and regret to bring to your esteemed attention the living conditions of the foreign workers residing at the Revolutionary Friendship Hotel.’ Ciantar told the premier that the food and service in the restaurants had deteriorated over the past seventeen months; the club no longer served alcohol or coffee; bathrooms and windows were never cleaned; and it was taking up to twenty-seven days to get clothes washed, dry-cleaned or mended. Ciantar concluded his lengthy missive by requesting the premier to authorize an investigation so that the Hotel de l’Inimitié could once again become the Hotel de l’Amitié.29 He does not record receiving a reply. The other main, and very worrying, concern had been the growing number of incidents involving foreigners as the Cultural Revolution became decidedly xenophobic during 1967: from the vociferous demonstrations against a French diplomat in February to the detention of Reuters correspondent Anthony Grey in July and the attack on the British diplomatic mission in August. Foreign experts leaving China on the expiry of their contracts also had to brave the gauntlet of PRC customs. When New Zealander Lenore Taylor took her luggage to Peking railway station in September, two intimidating customs officers checked each item individually before confiscating every brochure, newsletter and item of official material.30 It was in this atmosphere that Eric and Marie Gordon made arrangements to leave China, together with 11-year-old Kim. The family’s plans were to travel by train to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and then by ship to the United Kingdom. On his return home Eric intended to write a book based on his notes (especially on the Cultural Revolution) and the Red Guard materials he had collected. Knowing that the family’s baggage would be thoroughly searched by customs, he decided to conceal most of the materials in a tape recorder and record player that were sent off in seven crates of advance luggage. ‘All that was left were my notes. For a reason I shall never be able to fathom, we decided to take our notes with us in our trunks—hidden behind pictures of Mao.’31 When customs officers at Peking railway station checked the family’s trunks two days before their planned departure, they took the backs off three framed Mao portraits—and out fell around 130 typed sheets of paper. The notes were confiscated

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and Eric was depressed that the products of his two years’ work ‘were all gone’, but he did not expect any further repercussions. On the evening of 5 November, the family was duly farewelled at the station by Chinese colleagues and some of their friends from the Youyi. Barely an hour after the train left Peking, officials knocked on the door of their four-berth compartment, asked Eric to go with them to another compartment and, when they arrived at Baoding around another hour later, escorted him off the train. He was driven back to the capital, where he found himself deposited in a room in a large building that turned out to be the Xinqiao Hotel. Unknown to Eric, Marie and Kim had also been removed from the train and taken to a different room at the Xinqiao. It was three months before the family was reunited, only for room 421 to become their de facto prison for a further twenty months. Outside their window, the Gordons could see a microcosm of the Peking street scene: the myriad of cyclists, the loaded fruit and vegetable carts, and even occasionally a couple of long-term residents coming to the hotel for dinner. During the family’s detention, the handful of Western correspondents continued to meet in the Xinqiao’s tiny bar. Globe and Mail correspondent Colin McCullough recalled that the hotel’s fourth floor was out of bounds. ‘The Chinese never said this, and the elevator operator would let you off at that floor if you asked. But two soldiers would be waiting in the corridor to take you courteously but firmly back to the waiting elevator.’32 At least the Gordons were now together as a family. Eric and Marie established a daily routine for Kim, keeping him busy with school lessons from 9:15 a.m. to 12 noon and from 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., each with a short break. Their total published teaching material was a school atlas, a concise Oxford dictionary, Wuthering Heights and Oliver Twist. In the evening and on Sunday, Kim’s ‘day off ’, the three invented games and told every story they could remember—and made up others—to try to ward off the boredom of their confinement. Initially buoyed by a reasonable variety of Western-style food, they became depressed when, after around seven months, their diet was reduced to little more than rice, boiled cabbage and a bit of fatty pork. ‘No milk, no sugar, no fruit, no coffee, no butter, no sweetened food of any kind,’ Eric wrote.33 The monotony of daily life was broken only by regular interrogations which themselves became highly ritualized. Eric’s chief interrogator was a man he called ‘Closed Eyes’, one of the officials who had taken him off the train at Baoding. ‘You must see that you have been collecting intelligence on a large scale,’ he told Eric, urging him to confess that he was a spy. Under pressure, Eric wrote a number of lengthy statements, eventually admitting that he could ‘objectively be classed as a spy’ because he had collected secret information ‘with the intention of publicising it and thus putting it into the hands of China’s enemies’.34 But this did not satisfy officialdom.

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Virtually the only break that Eric had outside room 421, apart from an occasional visit to the guards’ room opposite, was in May 1969 when he spent eight days at the Capital Hospital (renamed the anti-Revisionism Hospital) having a malignant duckegg-sized tumour removed from behind his right ear. Before the operation commenced, he heard the surgeons performing the obligatory recitations from Mao’s little red book. The following day he was quizzed on whether he had read Lin Biao’s speech at the recent 9th Party Congress, quoting Mao’s policy of ‘leniency towards those who confess their crimes’. As Eric saw it, they were ‘characteristically missing no chance to try and extract a confession from a captive “class enemy”, still groggy from an operation’.35 Eric’s hospital sojourn did, though, have more than one positive outcome. To Marie and Kim’s delight, he managed to squirrel away eight oranges, halfa-dozen boiled eggs, a pile of sugar and some biscuits. ‘It was almost like Christmas at home again.’36 The final meetings with Closed Eyes came in early October, twenty-three months after the family had been deposited at the Xinqiao and at a time when the extreme measures against foreigners were beginning to ease. Eric began to sense that their detention might finally be coming to an end, though not before the official ritual had been completed. ‘It’s a principle of our law that there must be a confession,’ Closed Eyes told Eric. ‘A fundamental principle.’ Eric duly produced another statement, this time amounting to 1,400 words and labelled ‘Confession’, fulfilling the requirement that he admit he ‘possessed political information and slandered Chairman Mao’.37 Two days later, Eric and Marie were informed that they were being ‘treated with leniency’ and had been sentenced to deportation. This time the family’s journey to Guangzhou was by plane, followed by the usual train trip to the Hong Kong border and escorted all the way by three security guards—and Closed Eyes. At the border, the official who had been Eric’s principal adversary for almost two years read a statement: ‘You have committed great crimes in China and now you will be deported. You are not allowed to come back to China. And we must warn you that if you say anything against China you must take the consequences.’38 Eric eventually wrote his book, but not the one he had originally intended. Apart from chapters on the family’s first two years in China and developments at Foreign Languages Press during the early part of the Cultural Revolution, Freedom Is a Word focused on the family’s long confinement and how they coped with the pressures and boredom. The psychologically painful experience, though, had not changed Eric’s political convictions. At the end of the book, he concluded that ‘despite the pessimism and despair that often swamped me in the Room, I still find that my basic beliefs in the aims and ideals of communism remain intact.’39 It had taken time for news of the Gordon family’s detention back in November 1967 to filter through in Peking. Friends assumed they had left China, but their relatives became anxious when they did not turn up in Britain or at least communicate

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with them as usual. It was only after Eric’s brother, Jeffrey, wrote to the Foreign Office almost three months after the family’s scheduled departure from China—and the government could find no evidence of their arrival in Hong Kong—that the diplomatic mission in Peking became aware that another three British nationals were under detention. Its requests to the Foreign Ministry for information were predictably ignored. Having farewelled the Gordons, their friends at the Youyi were alarmed to find out that they were, in fact, still somewhere in China. By then, most of the remaining foreign experts were arranging their departure. Maurice Ciantar left in June 1968, though not without his own nerve-wracking encounter with customs officers when they discovered a postcard sent to the Frenchman with the address ‘Republic of China’ (i.e., Taiwan) instead of ‘People’s Republic of China’.40 Americans David and Nancy Milton were among the last to leave. They had already sent their teenage sons back to the United States and in late 1968 began making their own departure plans. In their book The Wind Will Not Subside, they mentioned that they finally left in November 1969 but skimmed over the fact that it had taken them almost a year to get exit permits, only stating that the Chinese eventually apologized for treating the couple ‘discourteously’.41 Of all the foreign experts, they had been two of the most closely associated with the long-termer activists, including their fellow American Sidney Rittenberg and Foreign Languages Institute colleague David Crook, both of whom were now in prison. When the government began recruiting a new cohort of foreign experts from the early 1970s, it was almost as though the severe treatment of Westerners just a few years earlier—indeed the excesses of the Cultural Revolution as a whole—had never happened. This partly reflected the general swing in attitudes towards the PRC that accompanied China’s admission to the United Nations in 1971 and US President Nixon’s visit in 1972.42 Also, with the Western world undergoing its own social revolution, images of a communal society in which individual interests were sacrificed to the common good, and even the current culture of asceticism which extended to clothing and hairstyles, had a certain appeal to those who were disenchanted with the West’s individualistic, materialistic culture. The new wave of foreign experts included participants in the European new left, most notably the Mao-inspired ‘68 generation. In his book The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s, Richard Wolin argued that the less information people possessed concerning the People’s Republic, the more ‘leeway they had to project their own utopian hopes and dreams’.43 Those hopes and dreams were sometimes only reinforced by a short carefully guided tour of China that was designed to impress the foreigner. After visiting the PRC with a women’s delegation in 1971, Frenchwoman Claudie Broyelle wrote a book entitled Women’s Liberation in China, extolling the non-sexualization of women and the subordination of personal relationships to revolutionary commitment. Broyelle’s more

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prolonged experience in China between 1972 and 1975 prompted China: A Second Look which she co-authored with two other foreign experts: her husband Jacques and Evelyne Tschirhart.44 Comparing this scathing indictment of Mao’s China with Broyelle’s earlier volume, prominent American political scientist Richard Baum described the Frenchwoman, who attributed her earlier views to naivety and gullibility, as making ‘perhaps the most striking about-face’ of all the Mao enthusiasts.45 Italian Edoarda Masi’s response was very different. Having already spent a year studying in China in 1957–58, she had a clearer idea of what to expect when she arrived at the Shanghai Foreign Languages Institute in mid-1976 to teach Italian literature. In the intervening years she had gained a PhD in Chinese literature, taught at a number of universities, written about and translated Chinese literature, and become a prominent Maoist intellectual. Following her China sojourn, Masi wrote a book that was published in English as China Winter.46 Unlike Broyelle, Masi’s second look at the PRC did not shake her political convictions. For the long-time Maoist, the downfall of Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and three other radicals, greeted with general public enthusiasm as marking the end of the repressive Cultural Revolution decade, signalled ‘the end of a great revolution’.47 Whether they lived in Mao’s China in the mid-1960s or were part of the expanded overall Western presence of the mid-1970s, the foreign experts’ semi-isolated lifestyle, Chinese bureaucratese and internal divisiveness all took their toll. For a few, the frustrations became overwhelming, to the point of prompting them to cut short their PRC sojourn. Jacques and Therese Marsouin, who arrived in China with the first group of French teachers in 1964, decided they had had enough after one year and left even before taking advantage of the free summer vacation trip. Their book Nous Avons Enseigné en Chine Populaire [We taught in the PRC] was published the following year and presented a lengthy catalogue of complaints, including their dismay at the politicized teaching materials, only exacerbated by clashes with a radical French colleague, and the brick wall they encountered when they made complaints. Admitting that their decision to go to China had been influenced by the public enthusiasm surrounding the establishment of Sino-French diplomatic relations, they now attempted to demystify China for their readers.48 Even as the PRC tentatively began reopening to the West in the 1970s, some found it difficult to maintain the ‘patience and sense of humour’ that Australia’s first ambassador, Stephen FitzGerald, thought were essential to living in China during those years. Within six months of arriving in Peking with his wife and two young children, British drama scholar David George ‘went on strike’ at the Foreign Languages Institute. George claimed that a string of events, mostly involving the negative attitudes of Chinese officials, had left him feeling ‘totally frustrated and isolated’. He was

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not alone in his frustration, the Briton maintained. ‘Every foreign language teacher in China seems to go through an emotional sequence leading from exhilaration through frowning doubt to determined goodwill, redfaced frustration, and finally open revolt, passive acceptance, or opportunistic self-interest.’49 George’s own open revolt did not last long. A month after he went on strike, he and his family were granted exit permits to leave China. Of all the foreign experts who spent a few years in China during the Mao era, though, none were more disaffected than political idealists Muriel and Peter Seltman. While they shared their foreign colleagues’ frustration with everyday life in China, this was a minor issue compared with their extreme political disillusionment. Having pinned their hopes on Mao’s China, they discovered a nation which Muriel described as ‘the travesty of socialism . . . and the travesty of Marxism that was used to justify it’.50 Mao, she claimed, was ‘little more than a peasant nationalist who dressed up his writing in Marxist terminology’.51 Critical of the mounting Mao-worship in the early months of the Cultural Revolution, the couple found themselves cold-shouldered by long-term residents with whom they had previously spent much of their time. In September 1966 they told the authorities they would like to leave China ‘and go back and make revolution in our own country’: a face-saving formula all round.52 Almost fifty years later, the Morning Star (successor to the British communist party’s Daily Worker) aptly described Muriel’s political autobiography What’s Left, What’s Right as a ‘voyage of disillusion in search for political purity’.53 Most foreign experts, though, served out their contracts. Even Maurice Ciantar, who filled his journal with complaints about the stifling atmosphere at the Youyi, the politicized ‘rubbish’ he was required to polish and the pettiness of officials, stayed for close on three years. Perhaps he had already chosen the title of his thick tome Mille Jours à Pékin, which was published following his return to Paris. The Frenchman also wrote three articles that appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review soon after he left China, provoking an angry retort from Hong Kong’s pro-PRC Dagongbao.54 In  writing about foreigners’ lives, the newspaper claimed, Ciantar had not ‘quite succeeded in cloaking his real intention—to slander the fair name of New China, to malign the Great Cultural Revolution, and to insult Chairman Mao, revered alike by the people of China and the world’.55 For those with a scholarly interest in China, the foreign expert sojourn was often an early phase of a lifelong involvement with the country. But these were also the people who felt most keenly their marginalization from Chinese society. ‘Two years of living alongside but not in China were enough,’ Emeritus Professor W. J. F. (Bill) Jenner recalled more than forty-five years after his mid-1960s sojourn. ‘Looking back, those two years turned out to have taught me a little about daily life in the offices of one of the capital’s work units and about the look of the few places I was allowed

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to see, but not much else.’56 Despite the PRC’s gradual opening in the mid-1970s, Edoarda Masi was caught in the same bind—for all her Maoist beliefs. ‘Why is it that to be in China is to think and to talk continually about the Chinese, and not with the Chinese?’57

Part VI Students

14 Studying, Maoist style

In 1998, some four decades after her student sojourn in China, Edoarda Masi recalled the experience in an article for a book in honour of Slovak sinologist Marian Galik, who had also studied in Peking in the late 1950s. Today numerous young people from many countries go to China to study. A year or two studying in China is a great experience . . . But it is not the extraordinary adventure that such sojourns were for Europeans in the first thirty years of the People’s Republic.1

During the Mao era, only a tiny proportion of Chinese language students in the West had the opportunity to study in China, putting them at a disadvantage compared with their fellow students learning French, Japanese or even Russian. The last pre-revolutionary generation of Western students and scholars in China—people like Göran Malmqvist, a future professor of sinology at the University of Stockholm, and David Hawkes, who became professor of Chinese at Oxford—left within a year or two of the Communists’ victory. Students seeking practical Chinese (Mandarin) language experience mostly went to Taiwan. In 1963 the Americans established the InterUniversity Program for Chinese Language Studies, commonly known as the Stanford Centre, which became a major centre for Chinese language study. The closest that research students and scholars normally got to the PRC was Hong Kong, where the Universities Service Centre, set up in 1963 with CIA funding, became a major focus for Western research on contemporary China. Just a few Western students managed to have the real China experience. Before the 1970s, the student route to Mao’s China was largely confined to those who could demonstrate their political friendliness, either by having communist party links in their own country (at least until the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s) or through friendship associations which often processed scholarships awarded by the Chinese government. In 1957 the Centro Cina in Italy selected three Chinese language graduates (Edoarda Masi, Renata Pisu and Filippo Coccia) to study in Peking, though not before an internal debate on whether the scholarships should be awarded to young workers rather than to young scholars. The following year the France-China Friendship Association

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sponsored Chinese language graduates Jacques Pimpaneau and Michel Cartier, and in 1959 Per-Olow Leijon was awarded a scholarship through the Swedish association. ‘My father was the sports journalist for the Swedish communist newspaper Ny Dag and my whole family was definitely left-wing,’ he told me. ‘But my mother cried when I got the scholarship because I was going so far away. I’d just come out of the army and was only 21.’2 Personal connections with the PRC occasionally provided a more direct link to China. Martin Bernal, who was part way through his Chinese degree at Cambridge, studied at Peking University in 1959–60, almost fifteen years before the first group of British students inaugurated the formal British Council exchange. ‘The reason I was able to go to China was that my father, J. D. Bernal, had just become president of the World Peace Council,’ Martin explained.3 One of the so-called ‘red scientists’, J. D. Bernal was an active Marxist and had been an early member of the British communist party. He had already visited the PRC in 1954 and did so again during Martin’s sojourn. The rarity of studying in China and its perceived implications was not lost on other Cambridge students. ‘The only student of Chinese at Cambridge who had actually been to China was regarded as a dangerous and misguided Red,’ journalist and author David Bonavia later commented.4 Political connections also enabled a handful of Western China scholars to go to the PRC for a year or so, provoking the envy of some of their fellow academics. John Chinnery, a lecturer at SOAS in London (and later professor of Chinese at the University of Edinburgh) spent the 1957–58 academic year in China, accompanied by his wife Helga and their three young children. Chinnery attended lectures on Chinese literature at Peking University, while Helga taught at the Foreign Languages Institute, where the family lived. The 33-year-old sinologist, who was active in the Britain-China Friendship Association and later a leading light in the Scotland-China Association, became well known as one of the PRC’s ‘foreign friends’ who were granted visas to visit China when it was out of bounds to most Western scholars. Without political connections, getting permission to study in China was highly unusual, though it did not deter Sven and Cecilia Lindqvist, a Swedish couple in their late twenties. Already seasoned travellers, they had taken Chinese evening classes in Stockholm with prominent Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren and, according to Cecilia, decided they ‘had to go to China’. We applied for visas and tried to persuade the officials at the Chinese embassy in Stockholm that we should be allowed to enter a university in China to study modern Chinese. They were at first totally negative. Their first questions were: ‘Who is sending you? Which organization? Which political party?’ We explained that we were going privately, on our own; we had saved enough money to be able to stay at least a year and would pay everything ourselves. We had no contact with

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any organization or political party. The cultural counsellor was absolutely clear: no private students were allowed to enter a Chinese university.5

Undeterred, the couple obtained letters of recommendation from prominent scholars including Karlgren, received a royal grant, and after a year’s wait finally received permission in 1961 to study Chinese in Peking. Official student exchanges, which eventually became the main route to China, were few and far between before the 1970s, partly because so few Western countries had diplomatic relations with the PRC. The British government toyed with the idea of negotiating an exchange in the late 1950s but did not think there would be much demand because the few universities teaching Chinese focused on classical studies.6 For the French, though, cultural relations were a high priority and they negotiated a student exchange soon after they recognized the PRC in January 1964. The first group of twenty students arrived in Peking in September and, together with twelve language teachers recruited directly by the Chinese government a few months earlier, formed a substantial part of what Ambassador Lucien Paye described as ‘one of the largest foreign communities in Peking’.7 The French exchange was halted by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in mid-1966. The first cohort had just finished their two academic years in China, but the second group, who arrived in September 1965, found their studies cut short. ‘I’d originally intended spending my second year studying history, but we were told we had to leave China by 8 July,’ René Flipo recollected.8 Despite his disappointment, Flipo’s year in Peking stood him in good stead. Barely a year later, he was back in China reporting on the Cultural Revolution for AFP. When Paye’s successor, Étienne Manac’h, suggested that the student exchange be revived during a visit to Peking University in January 1972, he was told that the reopened university was still involved in the ‘work of reorganization’.9 Within a year, though, the PRC was embarking on negotiations for a comprehensive programme of exchanges in the wake of its tentative emergence on the international scene and its own need for foreign language expertise. PRC policy was ahead of practical preparations. When the first students arrived at the Peking Language Institute in late 1973, they discovered a campus that was still being renovated after the ravages and neglect of the Cultural Revolution, as Finnish student Marja Kaikkonen recalled: ‘Only two buildings were ready—one for females and one for males.’10 Western students continued to arrive in Peking and, by February 1974, there were more than one hundred: thirty French students, twenty Canadians, over ten Britons, Germans and Italians, and fewer numbers from other Western European countries, Australia and New Zealand. American students would have to wait until the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States in 1979. Like Western diplomats and journalists, the students were always a minority in the broader group. In the early years they were vastly outnumbered by students from

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the Soviet bloc. René Goldman, who was studying in Peking on the Polish student exchange, counted a total of only fifteen Western students in the capital in 1958, compared with over two hundred Soviet and East European students, plus thirty from Vietnam and lesser numbers of Arabs, Indonesians and Indians.11 With the Sino-Soviet rift of the early 1960s and the gradual withdrawal of Soviet bloc students, Western students were still a minority as China embarked on an era of solidarity with several African, Arab and Southeast Asian countries (as well as maintaining good relations with North Korea, Albania and Romania). Even in early 1974, the more than one hundred Westerners doing Chinese language courses in Peking were greatly outnumbered by non-Western students. Swedish student Sven Lindqvist’s description of what he called the ‘grim living conditions’ at Peking University, where he and Cecilia arrived in early 1961, became familiar to Westerners studying in China throughout the Mao era—and for a while beyond. ‘The students are lodged in huge barrack-like blocks, two by two in bare concrete rooms (about 12 ft by 9 ft) . . . You wash in concrete troughs by the latrine at the end of the corridor.’12 The concrete-floored rooms, facing onto long dimly lit corridors, were located in a three-storey building right on the edge of campus, close to the university’s south gate. The showers (with side partitions but no doors) had hot water for an hour or two at a time, ranging across the period from once a day to two or three times a week and usually from around 5 p.m., which coincided with dinner in the canteen.

‘You wash in concrete troughs by the latrine.’ Little had changed fifteen years later in 1976. (In author’s collection)

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Peking University (often known as Beida) was home to virtually all Western Chinese language students in the 1950s and early 1960s. China’s most prestigious university, it had moved in 1952 from its central city location to the former Americanrun Yanjing campus. By the time the first group of French exchange students arrived in 1964, the nearby Peking Language Institute was the major destination for foreign students studying Chinese. The institute had opened in 1962, primarily to cater for the influx of African and Asian students. With more foreign than Chinese students, it was something of a halfway house to China. The facilities at the language institute were marginally better than those at Beida: the same concrete-floored rooms and corridors but a little more lighting and hot water most evenings in individual shower cubicles, at least once the renovations were completed. The boiler to fill one’s thermos flask was located in the dormitory building, whereas at Beida one had to ‘stomp off through the snow to the canteen’, to use British student Frances Wood’s words.13 But as Edoarda Masi commented, studying in China was an adventure; one could hardly expect Western living standards in a still poor, developing country in which many Chinese families lived in a single room. The conditions came as a shock, though, to the occasional visiting diplomat, journalist or delegation. The acting head of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs was visibly shaken by his visit to the language institute, even as late as 1976: ‘Quite frankly [we] were shocked at the standard of accommodation.’14 He asked the embassy to assist students ‘with a few comforts where possible’: a request that translated into a bottle of imported spirits for each student from the embassy commissariat. (One cheeky young man said he would prefer a jar of peanut butter.) Despite the tough living conditions, foreign students were still privileged compared with their Chinese counterparts. They usually shared a room with only one other student, while Chinese students lived six or eight to a room, with two-tiered bunks along the walls. The hot water in the foreigners’ blocks might be limited and unpredictable, but Chinese students had to make do with cold water and the local bathhouse. The prospect of sharing a room with a bourgeois capitalist Westerner, if it became allowed, might be somewhat daunting to a Chinese student, but there were some material benefits. The second feature of student life, which many found even more challenging than the physical conditions, was institutional living Chinese style. ‘It’s rather like the army—without the weapons training,’ Isabel Hilton wrote in an early report to the British Council.15 Adjustment was not always easy for young people coming from the liberalized student lifestyles of the West, particularly after the social revolution of the 1960s. ‘We were adults, but we were treated like children,’ Marja Kaikkonen commented. Unlike most students having their first sojourn in China during the post-Mao era, during the 1960s and 1970s many were already doing postgraduate research or had been working for a few years since graduation. In the early years of

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the exchanges there was also a considerable backlog. When the French scheme was revived in 1973, Christian Lamouroux was the youngest of the thirty students: ‘I was 23, but most were around 27 to 30.’16 The students’ day was punctuated by bells and loudspeaker broadcasts relayed across the campus. They were woken at 6 a.m. by a rousing rendition of The East Is Red, followed by the daily political broadcast (‘the news’) and the morning exercise music. At 7 came the breakfast bell, followed by bells to start and finish class, punctuated by more exercise music at 10, the bell for lunch—and so on for the rest of the day. Wristwatches were still a relative luxury for Chinese students even in the early 1970s and there was a need for reminders, even though they ‘made us feel like Pavlovian dogs’, in the words of one British student.17 At 10 p.m., dormitory front doors and the high entrance gate were usually locked. Class attendance (four hours each morning, six days a week for language students in the 1970s) was compulsory. According to the regulations, set out in the little printed Handbook for Foreign Students in China, absence from class had to be covered by a medical certificate from the institute’s medical clinic. Frequent ganmao (flu) and la duzi (diarrhoea) took a regular toll of Western and Chinese students alike. Students were not permitted to stay away from the institute overnight without special permission. Initially obedient in their novel surroundings, students soon began testing the rules. Three months after arriving in Peking, Briton Rose Heatley reported: ‘The rules can be quietly ignored, for example morning exercise before breakfast, and lights out.’ Even the bells and loudspeaker broadcasts could be dealt with effectively. ‘The arrival of the Italian girls was marked by the sabotaging of the bell, at least on our particular floor.’ 18 What students were directly experiencing, but did not always appreciate at the time, was the PRC’s administrative and more specifically educational culture. A sense of responsibility for young people, whether Chinese or foreign, went hand in hand with a high degree of control over their everyday lives. As Australian Sally Borthwick commented: ‘We found over-protection and restriction to be two sides of the same coin.’ The university’s or the language institute’s foreign students office (liuban) oversaw all aspects of students’ everyday lives: from accommodation and courses to requests to be absent and, eventually, applications for exit permits. ‘In retrospect the office did a lot for us,’ Sally wrote. At the time, though, ‘there were frequent ripples in our relationship, deriving I think partly from uncertainty as to whether their primary task was to minister to our needs or to keep us in line.’19 In the eyes of many students, liuban officials could be difficult and inflexible. According to René Goldman, ‘they were unable to understand the problems we faced, the habits, values and feelings of young people of such diverse backgrounds’. As a result, the relationship ‘was tense and characterized by mistrust and repeated

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frictions’.20 Per-Olow Leijon had vivid memories of his conflicts with the liuban even fifty years later. One confrontation had led to a shouting match after his application to travel to Datong for three days during a holiday break was rejected with flimsy excuses about the weather. ‘Afterwards the officials had a number of meetings to try to work out how they should deal with foreign students, to prevent this sort of confrontation occurring.’ In the 1970s, the institute official with overall responsibility for English speakers, who were the largest Western group, was a small, sprightly man named Bi Jiwan, better known to students as Bi Laoshi (Teacher Bi). A graduate of the Foreign Languages Institute, Bi was 35 years old when the first students arrived in late 1973; over the next few years he aged visibly under the weight of his responsibilities. The bustling official seemed to be everywhere, receiving students when they complained formally about the restrictions imposed on their everyday lives, reprimanding them individually if they skipped classes or spent time away from the institute, and attempting to prevent them from wandering off on escorted trips outside Peking. Some students nicknamed him ‘Frank’ because of his tendency to start every second sentence with ‘If I could say very frankly’, before admonishing his target or targets. ‘Bi was basically in an impossible position,’ one former student rationalized some forty years later. ‘On the one hand he had to deal with these rebellious, unruly, freewheeling foreign students—on the other he had the weight of the Chinese Communist Party which he had to impose on us.’21 For all of their minor infractions, Western students proved less of a headache for the authorities than did students from African countries. The official discourse of ‘Sino-African friendship’ was tested to the limit after students from countries including Somalia, Cameroon and Zanzibar arrived from 1959. The students, overwhelmingly male, came to China when the PRC government, like its Soviet counterpart, offered scholarships in the bid to extend political influence in their countries. Not all had apparently realized that they would be expected to learn Chinese before embarking on technical, medical or other university studies, a task that could keep them in China for six or seven years. Right from the start, the students were unhappy with their lot. The austere lifestyle, alleged racial antipathy, not being allowed to make Chinese friends and especially to go out with Chinese girls, all made for friction with the authorities. In March 1962, an altercation at the Peace Hotel in Peking, provoked by an argument between a counter attendant and a Zanzibari student, developed into an ugly brawl with the student and two other Zanzibaris allegedly being beaten up. The incident brought student grievances to a head and, despite Chinese and embassy efforts to calm the situation, ninety-six African students (including the eighteen Zanzibaris) left China. Only twenty-two remained, according to Ghanaian student Emmanuel John Hevi.22

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The problems recurred when foreign students were readmitted to China from the early 1970s following the disruption of the Cultural Revolution. In December 1972, three frustrated Zambian students went on a rampage: smashing windows, ripping up copies of Chairman Mao’s works, and physically assaulting teachers and policemen who tried to calm them down. The students’ reported goal of getting themselves expelled from China proved successful.23 Compared with these episodes, Western students, who normally spent only a year or two in China and had usually already studied Chinese in their own countries, were comparatively easy to ‘manage’. Even with some prior knowledge of the language, studying in China could be a frustrating, albeit novel, experience. Students had no complaints, unlike foreign experts, about the lack of authentic language materials. The problem was that the richness of Chinese had been officially reduced, at least in its published form, to a virtual equivalent of Orwellian ‘newspeak’. Writing of his classes in the early 1960s, Sven Lindqvist stated: ‘The course is so arranged that political and linguistic progress should go hand in hand. Only a completely orthodox vocabulary is provided, and any attempt to use these words to express a deviationist thought is resisted.’24 Sitting around a large table or at desks lined up in rows, students repeated sentences after the teacher, or read out loud individually, the Chinese equivalents of what the country’s foreign language students were learning in English, French or another language. ‘Since liberation, the life of the labouring people has been improving every day.’ ‘We study Chinese in order to strengthen the friendship between _____ [country’s name] and the people of China.’ ‘We do physical training as soon as we get up in the morning.’

By the 1970s, the mimeographed teaching materials had been standardized into a series of textbooks published by the language institute. Students with limited Chinese background worked their way through the two-volume Hanyu keben (Chinese textbook), developing their skills through sentences, like those above, which encapsulated each new grammatical point. Those who arrived in China with a good knowledge of Chinese, often a degree in the subject, went straight to the Hanyu duben (Chinese reader), which included some of Mao Zedong’s seminal articles. ‘Where do correct ideas come from?’ he had asked in 1963. ‘Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice and from it alone.’25 Mao’s 1942 ‘Talks at the Yan’an forum on literature and art’ were essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Communists’ policies towards culture. ‘In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines . . . Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.’26

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Learning the language of the current political campaign. ‘Wage the struggle against the rightdeviationist wind of reversing verdicts to the end.’ Hunan renmin chubanshe, April 1976. (Stefan R. Landsberger, IISH Collection, Amsterdam)

While it was the Chinese Textbook or the Chinese Reader that stuck in many former students’ minds, more advanced Chinese learners also had the opportunity to keep up-to-date with the latest political campaign in their newspaper reading class: whether the puzzling ‘pi-Lin pi-Kong’ (criticize Lin Biao criticize Confucius) campaign that assailed the 1973–74 students or the campaign against ‘the right-deviationist wind of reversing verdicts’ (targeting the initially unnamed Deng Xiaoping) of early 1976. It was a discourse that few would have much use for in the post-Mao era. The main diversion from attending classes, preparing a Chinese language text for the next day and writing the occasional essay (with appropriate Mao quotes underlined) was ‘physical culture’, the topic of Mao Zedong’s very first published article and officially regarded as an essential aspect of people’s everyday lives. Even those who skipped the early morning exercise routine could sometimes be seen on the basketball court or playing table tennis. Regardless of their prowess, foreign students were cajoled into competing in the institute’s annual sports day in the oft-cited spirit of ‘friendship first, competition second’, only to discover that their Chinese opponents were intensely competitive. Most events were familiar from school sports days in the West, though not the hand grenade throwing competition (replicas only). ‘But what about the social life?’ would-be students asked those back from their China sojourn. In the 1990s, returnees regaled students about to go to China with details of the latest bars and clubs; in the Mao era they simply said ‘there really isn’t any’. The lack of the usual urban social venues—the bars, cafes and entertainment

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that language students could enjoy in Tokyo, Paris or Rome—was felt more keenly by students than by diplomats, journalists and even foreign experts. It is difficult now to comprehend that the neon-lit, virtually all-night Chinese capital, like Shanghai and other cities, was a few decades ago dark and empty after around eight at night, with only a few shadowy figures riding bicycles or walking along dimly lit streets. Even on the language institute campus, there was nowhere for students to get together apart from their tiny rooms—or hang around outside in warmer weather. In her final report to the British Council in October 1974, Joanna Seymour wrote: ‘The students tried for a long time to get some kind of common room arranged where they could meet together in the winter.’ Her assessment of the reasons for the authorities’ refusal was probably accurate: ‘I think it was feared that some kind of international student body might be formed or that such decadent practices as western dancing might take place.’27 Virtually the only social outing, apart from an officially organized ‘cultural performance’ or a trip to the diplomatic quarter, around one and a half hours away by bicycle or three buses, was a visit to a local restaurant. The word ‘restaurant’ was a bit of a misnomer for the places usually frequented by students: whether the dumpling shop at Wudaokou, down the street from the language institute, or the Long March near Beida. In the dimly lit rooms, chicken bones were discarded on the table or thrown onto the concrete floor, and the next diner stood behind one’s chair waiting for it to be vacated. Going further afield to better-known restaurants, students often had to argue to be allowed to eat in the same crowded section as ‘the masses’, not segregated and paying two or three times more in one of the separate rooms frequented by Party officials and foreign diplomats. Every now and again most had a hankering for Western food beyond what was on offer in the foreign students’ canteen: mainly a variety of meatballs. A visit to the Western restaurant at the Xinqiao Hotel, home to the early Western correspondents, was a major attraction for those who could afford it. (Some exchange students had their 100/120 yuan a month Chinese government scholarship subsidized by their home government.) The Moscow Restaurant at the Peking Exhibition Centre, built in 1954 as a monument to Sino-Soviet friendship, became a popular venue for the odd birthday celebration: Russian salads, chicken Kiev and beef stroganoff. The main reason for applying to visit Tianjin was not to see the dilapidated colonial style architecture but to have a meal at the former Austrian-owned Qishilin (Kiesslings). Upstairs there was fish mornay, beef ragout and ice cream with chocolate sauce, rare treats after an institutional diet; downstairs one could buy coffee sweets and real coffee beans. Some French students, dissatisfied with the local offerings, had cheese sent in the post by relatives. The Icelanders feasted on salted fish from home which, combined with the local baijiu (white spirit, up to 60 per cent proof), tided them over from

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the end of classes at Saturday lunchtime until Sunday night. Italian students cooked spaghetti in their rooms on small electric rings that were strictly forbidden and often fused the electricity. At Christmas, presents arrived from caring parents, though some didn’t quite make it in time: a Christmas cake that Australian students scraped the mould off (‘it was fine inside’) and a box of chocolates that had only one corner eaten away when it was collected from the post office. Whether studying Chinese at Beida or the language institute, students were keen to move on to their chosen area of specialization as soon as their language level was considered adequate, ranging from a few weeks to a full year or more. In the early years, a few had some success in following their personal academic interests. Some remained at Beida to take courses in Chinese history or literature, while Per-Olow Leijon moved to the Fine Arts Institute to study art history. Cecilia Lindqvist relied on personal contacts and initiative to study Chinese music, even while she was still learning the rudiments of the language. In Moscow, en route to Peking, she visited a famous Soviet professor of music, armed with a letter of introduction from the director of the Museum of Music in Stockholm, where she had played the lute in a small Renaissance group. He, in turn, wrote a letter of introduction to the research institute in Peking that specialized in the guqin (sevenstringed Chinese lute). I went to the Institute—not knowing that I wasn’t supposed to do so—with my letter of recommendation and said I would like to find a teacher and learn how to play the guqin. The proper way would have been to ask the Office for Foreign Students at Beida, they would have forwarded my request to the Ministry of Culture, and six months later they would have said ‘no, it’s not allowed’.

Cecilia recalled that the people at the Guqin Research Institute were initially wary of the fact that she had ‘come in from nowhere, with long blond hair, green eyes and totally foreign’.28 But eventually she was admitted to the institute, where she had lessons every day for almost two years. Graduate students were keen to do research, just as they had done in China before the Communist revolution. In 1965, Per-Olow Leijon returned to the Fine Arts Institute in Peking, where he was allocated a professor to supervise his research. In the same year, Marianne Bastid obtained one of the two available French research student places and was delighted when prominent Beida historian Shao Xunzheng became her adviser. As well as borrowing books from the library for her, Professor Shao loaned Marianne some from his own collection. ‘He thought I should study Chinese education before 1911 and suggested the topic of Zhang Jian. He lent me Zhang’s diary. I’d meet Professor Shao every week. He enjoyed it because at that time he was asking me to work on topics he couldn’t publish on himself.’29

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With the expansion of student exchanges in the 1970s, everything became more standardized. It soon became clear that programmes of study for Western exchange students would essentially be lecture-based courses in history, literature, philosophy or linguistics. Beida was the usual destination for those wanting to study Chinese history and sometimes philosophy or literature. Western students were initially taught in a separate class, as Canadian Timothy Brook and German René Wagner found in their Chinese history courses (with a choice of ancient or modern) in 1974–75. Describing the modern history course, they stated that, of the eighty-five reference articles they were given, sixty-seven were written by Mao, five by Lenin, and thirteen were CCP press publications or documents. One of the lecturers explained why Mao’s works formed such a large part of the teaching material. ‘The study of revolutionary history in contemporary China makes clear that the victory of the Revolution is a victory of Marxism-Leninism and the Thought of Mao Tse-tung. Therefore, the works of Mao are the basic and most appropriate teaching material for this course.’ 30

Two years later, my own modern history class at Beida had both foreign and Chinese students: the last of the ‘worker, peasant, soldier’ students who were recruited into the universities when they reopened following the Cultural Revolution. (The national examination system was restored for the September 1977 intake.) The Chinese students lined up outside the building and marched into class well before the bell rang at 7.30 a.m.; they were usually all seated when the foreign students arrived in dribs and drabs. With the ‘revolution in education’ denouncing book learning in full swing, the lecturer occasionally held up a slim volume and suggested we might like to look through it, at the same time quoting Mao’s 1964 statement: ‘We shouldn’t read too many books. We should read Marxist books, but not too many of them either.’31 Shanghai’s most prestigious university, Fudan, was the main destination for those studying Chinese literature. Briton Isabel Hilton and Australian Sally Borthwick were among the first small group of Western students, around fifteen in all, to go there in September 1974. The course, in Isabel’s words, ‘reflected the dominant post-Cultural Revolution values in giving pride of place to Revolutionary Opera’.32 The ‘eight model theatrical works’ (five operas, two ballets and one symphony) were essentially the culture of the period, widely featured in magazines in addition to live performance, radio and film. The students also had a weekly two-hour literary theory class, focusing on Marx and Mao on aesthetic theory. There was more of the ideological same at Liaoning University in Shenyang, though the main course was philosophy (primarily Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought). Living in the north-eastern industrial city was not for the faint-hearted, with winter temperatures down to –20°C or lower and little in the way of historical or cultural interest. The dozen or so foreign students lived and studied in the same building in their ‘foreign compound’, separated from the rest of the university by a

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high picket fence. Some students tried to resist going there because of what they had heard, but were usually informed by the Ministry of Education (via their embassies) that there was no alternative. For one Australian, Peking seemed like the ‘hub of civilization’, some five hundred miles and a mass of red tape away.33 It was Nankai University in Tianjin, though, that gained a reputation as the least desirable student destination, not because of its distance from Peking (only about sixty miles) but on account of the uncompromising attitudes of teachers and especially the foreign students office. Tensions boiled over in November 1975 when the latest cohort of linguistics students said they wanted to express their views on course content, only to be told: ‘The teacher speaks, the students listen.’ The frustrated students showed their displeasure by walking out en masse and going to Peking to ‘cool off ’. Studying at university, whether in the familiar environment of Peking or outside the capital, was a rather different experience from the halfway house of the language institute. Instead of being part of a substantial Western—and even a national—community, foreign students found themselves a tiny minority among thousands of Chinese students. Even at Beida, there were only about fifty foreign students in a total student population of around 10,000 in 1976. Wandering or cycling around the spacious campus away from the foreign student dormitories and the teaching buildings prompted curious glances and the occasional query as to where one wanted to go. In other cities, foreign students were a tiny minority not only on campus but even more so outside its walls. In Shanghai, which had once had a large expatriate community, there were only forty or so foreign residents in 1975 according to Sally Borthwick. ‘We were few enough to be readily identifiable; entering one shop for the first time, I was greeted “You’d be one of Fudan’s foreign students”.’34 In Shenyang and Tianjin, the handful of foreign students not only heard cries of ‘waiguoren, waiguoren’ (‘foreigner, foreigner’) whenever they went outside the campus, but were followed by crowds of curious people: something that did not immediately cease at the end of the Mao era. ‘We could stop an entire thoroughfare or paralyze a department store,’ British student Charis Dunn recalled of Tianjin. ‘On one venture out, I had what seemed an audience of a thousand when buying buttons.’35 When some students complained to the university, the city authorities issued an official directive telling people not to stare at foreigners, but it made little difference.

15 Breaking down the barriers?

Sally Borthwick described the student experience in China in the mid-1970s as one of ‘isolation and integration’. This dichotomy reflected the marginalization of students from Chinese society and their ongoing efforts to break down the barriers, not just for personal or political reasons but because of their raison d’être for being in the PRC. In Sally’s words, the restrictions ‘vitiated the purpose of our stay, the study of China and the Chinese language’.1 Integration was an ideal: much sought but rarely realized. Underpinning the students’ marginalization was the preferential treatment, albeit in diluted form, that was officially prescribed for all foreigners—even when they tried to reject it. This was symbolized in the provision of a separate dining hall or section for foreigners. (At the language institute there were, in fact, two dining sections for foreigners: one for Muslims and one for ‘others’.) The foreign and Chinese sections differed in the amount of space available—Chinese students sometimes had to eat standing up or squatting—as well as in the quality of the food and its cost: a differential of up to 4:1. Foreign students were officially deterred from eating in the Chinese section. Foreigners are not used to eating the sort of food that Chinese people eat. We are concerned about your health. You might get stomach problems. If foreigners eat in the Chinese section, it will be too crowded.

A few of the more determined students persisted but most retreated before long to their own section, maybe even appreciating the official efforts being made ‘to protect foreign students from the hardships of Chinese life’. Morag Deans recalled the outcome of a ‘big campaign’ to eat with the Chinese students at Beida. ‘The food was appalling and the Chinese students mostly grabbed their little boxes and rushed off to the sushe (dormitory). Maybe a few strong-minded foreign students kept going. The Chinese students must have thought we were crazy to choose to eat there.’2 At the same time, some Chinese students regarded the foreigners’ preferential treatment as a continuation of the old ‘imperialist privileges’ that the government frequently stressed had been eradicated. Da Chen, who arrived at the language institute direct from rural Fujian, cited a conversation with a fellow student.

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‘Where are they going?’ I asked, seeing all the colourful foreigners branching into another hall. ‘The foreigners’ canteen.’ ‘We’re not allowed there?’ . . . ‘We, the Chinese, eat on this side, and they, their side. We can’t cross the line, but they can come on our side. You got that?’ ‘I see. No dogs or Chinese allowed over there.’ I referred to an old colonial door sign.’ ‘Exactly, we’re second-rate citizens here in our own country.’ . . . ‘You seem pretty angry with those foreigners,’ I said. ‘It’s not the foreigners I’m mad at. It’s our spineless government that allows this policy of segregation to exist.’3

For students coming from the provinces, it could well be the first time they had ever seen a foreigner. Da Chen’s new friend explained the foreign students to him. ‘The pasty white men with squinting eyes are Brits, and those are Frenchmen, drinking, and their women, skinny and beautiful . . . And the Africans are the friendliest bunch; they gather under the trees smoking, drinking, and just hanging out.’4 Only a few had the opportunity to meet foreign students—and vice versa. ‘Yesterday evening my official “Chinese friend” came,’ Renata Pisu wrote in her 1958 diary. ‘All the foreigners are assigned a “Chinese friend”.’ Renata was initially reluctant to take advantage of the opportunity but, after the foreign students’ office insisted, she agreed on the condition that the person help her to read some texts in classical Chinese. When the ‘friend’ arrived, though, she told Renata that she could not read classical Chinese and instead they would study the works of Chairman Mao. ‘I told her I’d already read Mao’s works and I went to the office to ask for another Chinese friend.’5 The Chinese friend had a dual role: to provide the current official line on any topic, whether the economic situation, the position of women or people’s everyday lives, and to keep officials informed about the foreigner. When Renata’s fellow student Jacques Pimpaneau discovered that his Chinese friend had left a notebook behind in his room, he couldn’t resist looking inside it. What he discovered was a detailed report on his own ‘reactionary and bourgeois ideology’.6 Swedish student Per-Olow Leijon, who would maintain his leftist views fifty years later, openly fell out with his official Chinese friend over what he considered his simplistic denunciations of Western capitalist society. ‘He kept telling me how bad life was in Western countries. I couldn’t stop myself disagreeing quite vehemently.’7 Following the establishment of official exchanges, not just students but the organizers of exchange programmes agitated for the provision of Chinese roommates. It was

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a contentious issue for the authorities, even though it was essentially an extension of the ‘official friend’ concept. Beida English language student Ting-xing Ye recalled of the mid-1970s: ‘One of us was to be chosen to move into Alina’s room with her, as required by the Chinese pei-zhu—keeping company—system, a euphemism for watching and reporting.’ Ye hoped she would be a candidate, but admitted that she should have known better; the student chosen was someone who had been a peasant all her life. ‘The “unhealthy bourgeois style of life” of a foreign student was tempting,’ she explained, ‘so only a student with impeccable political credentials could resist it.’ 8 There was always a degree of artificiality in the relationship, just as there was for other Westerners who formed friendships with licensed contacts. For a Chinese student, the price for enjoying better living conditions was constant pressure to behave as a model communist citizen. On the other side, foreign students knew full well—unless they were totally naive—that roommates attended regular meetings to report on them. Even an overnight absence soon became known to the authorities. Despite some wariness on each side, this was the closest that almost any Westerner came to Chinese life. At one level, it was the personal encounter with China that students sought. ‘You can’t share a room with two people for nearly a year without getting to know them well; their movements and expressions become as familiar to you as your own,’ Sally Borthwick recalled of her room-mates in Shanghai.9 At another level, the usual personal tensions that can develop between people living cheek by jowl were exacerbated by differences not just of ideology (at least in some cases) but also of culture. It could be disconcerting to have a roommate rifling through your possessions or reminding you that it was time to get up or go to bed. Michael Kahn-Ackermann, a German postgraduate student in his late twenties, had two different room-mates during his two years at Beida: Lao Li and Xiao Du. For Michael, ‘accidental co-residence led to warm and respectful friendship on both occasions’, even though there were ‘taboos that could not be spoken of, limits that had to be observed. Criticism of Chairman Mao was impossible’. Xiao Du, a 35-yearold cadre and his favourite room-mate, was understanding when Michael returned to their room in a bad mood one evening after a row with his girlfriend. ‘You are unhappy because you’re impatient. You should give Jeanne more time.’ Michael was taken aback at the directness of the remark: ‘It signalled that Xiao Du had accepted me as a friend.’10 I also had two room-mates, one at the language institute and one at Beida, who had very different personalities and ways of coping with the strange experience of living with someone from the bourgeois capitalist world. Both were ‘worker, peasant, soldier’ students and both were 23 years old. My first roommate, Lin Mei, was from Harbin and studied English. ‘Huxiang bangzhu (mutual help),’ she said gaily when we met, using a much-used Chinese expression I had already become familiar with in my daily classes.11

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Lin Mei introduced me to the intricacies of everyday Chinese life. She showed me how to mop our concrete floor when we got up soon after the 6 a.m. bell, making it clear that the thin rug I bought was ‘inconvenient’. She told me I must be sure to wash my feet in the enamel basin with which we were each provided before I went to bed, and reminded me that I must always lock the small wardrobe that held our few clothes. My own help to Mei included assisting both her and some of her friends with their English language homework, sometimes before breakfast, in the ‘educational revolution’ spirit that everyone should progress equally. On a cold dark winter morning, this was indeed a test of ‘international friendship’. My second roommate, Wang Ping, had grown up in Peking but, like around sixteen million young urban Chinese, had been sent ‘down to the countryside’ to be (re)educated by the peasants. Now she was at Beida as a ‘peasant’ to study modern Chinese history. We were in the same class but the idea of mutual help with our studies did not really work out in practice. Ping was very, very busy, not with her studies but with the political turmoil that surrounded Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four. Our classes were frequently cancelled and, while foreign students had to find other ways to occupy themselves, Ping attended meetings, wrote dazibao, and went to lengthy rallies. Every now and again she came back to our room looking exhausted and grabbed a few hours’ sleep.

Spartan but superior. Sharing a room with a foreign student had some advantages. (In author’s collection)

Conversations with both Mei and Ping ranged mostly around everyday matters: from the sartorial (I was ridiculed when I bought a man’s cotton jacket, with its four convenient pockets, instead of a woman’s jacket with side pockets) to the ever-present health issues. There were frequent colds and diarrhoea, as well as the preoccupation

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of female students with their periods which, with their generally low energy levels, were major events each month. Neither Mei nor Ping showed much curiosity about life in the outside world. Perhaps they had been told not to ask questions of their bourgeois capitalist roommate, or perhaps their own world was so enclosed that anything outside it seemed virtually incomprehensible. And entering their world, even superficially, made some Western students reluctant to be too curious. ‘I never cross-questioned them about marriage or money or boyfriends, preferring to keep friendship separate from social investigation,’ Sally Borthwick commented.12 With or without a Chinese roommate, ‘international friendship’ had its geographical limits: the walls around the campus. ‘We’ve made efforts but haven’t yet been able to entice either teachers or students to eat with us in a local restaurant,’ Rose Heatley reported almost three months after the arrival of the first group of British students.13 It did not take newcomers long to realize that Chinese were not permitted to venture outside the campus with a foreigner unless it was on an organized excursion or official approval had been granted. An ostensibly spontaneous suggestion that a couple of students accompany a foreign student to buy some basic necessities was anything but spontaneous. The occasional invitation to visit a teacher’s home, even if he or she lived on campus, was the outcome of a lengthy official process. ‘Entertaining foreign guests was not permitted at that time,’ Peking University literature scholar Yue Daiyun recalled of the mid-1970s. Keen to give a farewell party for her first group of foreign students, she first had to submit a written application to her departmental vice-chairman. Then, having been told that her house would be inspected to determine whether it was ‘adequate to receive visitors’, she spent a hectic day washing walls and arranging books neatly, only to be refused permission until she had personally cleaned up the garbage area near the house. ‘At last the authorities consented, even offering to reimburse me for the cost of entertaining.’14 It was only many years later, too, that one could learn something of the problems faced by Chinese students in their relations with Westerners. In 1990, well-known Chinese writer Liang Xiaosheng published a memoir entitled Life in Shanghai and Beijing. After spending six years living and working in the Great Northern Wilderness of Heilongjiang province, in 1974 the 25-year-old was selected to study Chinese literature at Fudan University. The memory of his encounter with the handful of foreign students, who lived in a separate section in the same building, was one of the book’s major themes. If a Chinese student had too much contact with a foreign student, he or she would be called in by the ‘Foreign Student Administration Office’ to have a ‘talk’. This ‘talk’ would include a criticism and a warning. ‘Too much contact’ was judged relative to having no contact at all. At the time, I was considered an example of a student who was ‘only interested in professional studies, but not politics’

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and was therefore under the constant watch of some of my schoolmates. A little carelessness on my part would cause someone to send a report against me to the office. So I avoided having any contact with the foreign students in order to stay out of trouble.15

Liang was particularly wary of a Swedish student he called Mike Shen, well known in later years as leading Cultural Revolution scholar Michael Schoenhals. Mike not only attempted to involve Liang and his friend Little Mo in his efforts to break down the foreign students’ segregated eating arrangements but to engage them in discussion about Chinese history and literature. All he wanted was to initiate friendship with two Chinese students and to understand the Chinese people. But during that period, a foreigner was dreaming if he thought that he could really understand the Chinese people. Any Chinese who would reveal what was in his mind frankly to a foreigner would be thrown into jail or considered insane. Neither Little Mo nor I was willing to go to jail, and nothing was wrong with our minds.16

While some friendships, or near friendships, developed between Western students and their Chinese roommates, a personal relationship with a member of the opposite sex was officially out of bounds. ‘The authorities made it quite clear that we were not allowed to go out with Chinese girls,’ Per-Olow Leijon commented on the late 1950s. When French student Jacques Pimpaneau arrived in Peking during the same period, he told Renata Pisu that he intended getting a Chinese girlfriend. Renata wrote in her diary: ‘I told him it was impossible. Eventually he settled for the half-Chinese daughter of a German teacher at the University.’17 Any unlicensed contact between a foreign student and a Chinese of the opposite sex was usually quickly nipped in the bud. But as more Western students arrived in China in the 1970s, there was certain inevitability about someone contriving to overstep the boundaries, just as foreign expert Susan Day did in Xi’an. In late 1975, French student Odile Pierquin moved to Fudan University in Shanghai after spending a year at the language institute. For Odile, like former POW Morris Wills at Beida, playing sport seemed a good way to meet Chinese students, and as a keen sportswoman she became involved in team athletics. Three of her fellow athletes, two male and one female, started visiting her room to chat. Odile’s two Chinese roommates, her official friends, protested about the visitors but this did not put off one of the young men, Tian Li. Odile recalled: ‘The University administration began to say that Tian Li and I were having a relationship. Finally, we decided to say yes, it was true, and that we wanted to get married.’18 Far from granting permission, the authorities detained Tian  Li in a room on campus. When the guard left the door open one day, he escaped and hid with friends in Shanghai, then later in Peking. Meanwhile Odile requested the French embassy for assistance in her quest to marry the young Chinese man, and

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its approaches to the PRC government paralleled the concurrent case of Australian foreign expert Susan Day. When Deng Xiaoping re-emerged on the political scene during 1977, Odile—like Susan—became more hopeful and wrote to him personally. In late September, the couple were finally given permission to marry, a few weeks before Susan and Song Xianyi.19 Outside the campus, students were keen to meet local people and practise their Chinese. They rode their bicycles with the crowds, caught local buses, went shopping for Chinese jackets and long underwear, watched families enjoying themselves in the parks on Sundays, and ate in local restaurants. Conversations with Chinese people, though, were usually short and fairly predictable, just as they were for diplomats and the few Chinese-speaking correspondents and foreign experts. Even if a person was initially willing to talk to a foreigner, he or she was usually soon stymied, as British student Joanna Seymour discovered. Should you sit next to a Chinese in a restaurant he will probably immediately be moved with his unfinished meal to another, crowded table. If you do manage to strike up a conversation and you are able to talk to each other for a while, there is every likelihood of your companion’s being prevented from leaving when you do . . . On one occasion at the main railway station in the company of a couple of other foreign students I met a fellow Chinese student from the institute. As we started talking a policeman immediately appeared and asked the Chinese boy what he was doing.20

Going shopping. The department store near the Peking Language Institute, 1975. (In author’s collection)

Like it or not, the best opportunities for speaking Chinese outside the campus were during the officially organized kaimen banxue (open door schooling) experience.

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A basic feature of the educational system after the universities reopened in the early 1970s, ‘open door schooling’ was part of Mao’s plan to break down what he saw as one of the major continuing contradictions in Chinese society: the contradiction between mental and manual labour. Instead of spending all their time in the classroom, students and teachers worked for substantial periods with the masses, usually in a factory or on a rural commune. Although kaimen banxue was somewhat diluted for foreign students, no more than a week or two each semester, many regarded it as the highlight of their China sojourn. It was one of the few advantages that the mid-1970s students had over their successors; the policy was abandoned early in the post-Mao era along with other aspects of the revolution in education. The first cohort of students set the pattern for the remainder of the Mao era. Having helped with the 1974 wheat harvest outside Peking, Isabel Hilton and some of her fellow students in Shanghai spent ten days the following summer at a vegetablegrowing commune just outside the city. The highlight was living in a peasant family’s house: whitewashed walls, black tiled roof and hard packed earth floor. Drinking water came from two deep wells, while everything from rice to clothes was washed in the stream flowing past the door. The mainstay of Isabel’s ‘family’ was the grandmother, a lively widow of fifty who had been given time off from her job at the commune’s soy sauce factory to look after her unusual guests. ‘Granny was a superb cook and would produce a succession of regional specialties from her small kitchen.’ For Isabel, the ten days at the commune were ‘possibly the most exciting experience of the year’.21 Although working in a cotton factory in Shanghai was less memorable for the Fudan students, it was revealing in the way that foreigners were officially compartmentalized. Towards the end of their factory stint, Isabel and the other students were asked to tidy up the spinning shop: ‘bags were stowed away, trolleys lined up in neat rows, machines cleaned and floors swept.’ When the students asked why they were doing this, they were told that a group of foreign guests would be looking around the factory that afternoon. ‘Sure enough, a rather sheepish group of foreigners found themselves being shown around the workshop they had helped tidy that morning.’22 My own two factory stints were in Peking: one with foreign classmates from the language institute and one with both foreign and Chinese fellow students from Beida. At the No. 2 Machine Tool Factory, we helped (or hindered) the assembly of drilling and boring machines; at the February 7th Locomotive Works (the name commemorated a famous 1923 railway strike) we cleaned small railway parts. Each student was allocated a shifu (master) to demonstrate what we were expected to do and to check our progress in adapting to factory routine. At neither factory, though, did we usually work all day. A morning or afternoon was often taken up with a lengthy lecture on the history of the particular factory or on changes in the situation of Chinese workers ‘since liberation’, complete with an elderly retired worker or two reciting the spiel they had probably delivered many times before.

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The author with her Peking University room-mate Wang Ping at the February 7th Locomotive Works. (In author’s collection)

Our fellow workers had no doubt been given detailed instructions beforehand on how to behave with their foreign charges, just as they were before a foreign delegation arrived on a guided tour of the factory. But it was difficult for them to keep up appearances for hours on end and we saw at least a little of what lay behind the images of robot-like workers featured in magazines like China Pictorial. With no unemployment but plenty of underemployment, there was not always enough work to go around. In both factories, a few male and female workers were invariably gathered around the urn at the end of the workshop where they drank hot water, chatted and sometimes flirted. At the compulsory after-work political study sessions, the young men blew smoke rings, checked their watches, and leapt to their feet when the bell rang for the end of the session. Despite the comparatively relaxed atmosphere, one could sense the pervasive role played by the danwei (work unit) in people’s everyday lives: from accommodation to health care and even procreation. Each morning a doctor came through the workshop inquiring whether anyone had any medical problems. Talking to a group of women at the machine tool factory, I asked about a small cupboard fixed to the wall. It turned out to be the ‘contraceptive cupboard’, the responsibility of the middle-aged female worker in charge of family planning for the workshop. She was the one who handed out pills and condoms to married workers, as well as ensuring that they adhered to the factory’s birth roster. On the wall of our workshop a poster proclaimed: ‘Family planning is good.’ At the time, Chinese couples were being urged to have no more than two children. In 1979, the poster was no doubt replaced by one promoting China’s unpopular one-child policy.

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Apart from ‘open door schooling’, the main opportunity for prolonged conversations outside the campus tended to come in confrontational situations, sometimes when taking a photo that was not thought to reflect positively on new China. The first cohort of 1970s students encountered particular suspicion during the political campaign against Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni and his ‘reactionary’ film Chung-kuo. In April 1974, Alistair Campbell and Isabel Hilton were wandering through an old style neighbourhood close to the language institute. When Isabel took a photo of a group of women mixing cement, she was accosted by a local official and accused of deliberately coming to a backward part of Peking to take an ‘anti-Chinese photograph’. The usual crowd began to gather and the two students were led into a courtyard office, probably that of the local street committee, where they were interrogated by one person after another—after another. ‘It was clear that we were not going to get out of there until everyone had denounced us,’ Isabel later wrote, as each person made his or her contribution to the anti-Antonioni campaign.23 After around two hours, two policemen arrived on the scene, listened to the accusations, asked for the film (which Isabel handed over), and drove the students back to the language institute. When a British diplomat reported the incident to the Foreign Office, he concluded that the students had clearly been shaken by the episode, ‘but agreed that it had provided them with first class language practice’.24 Although some students were more persistent than others in seeking Chinese contact, overall they were thrown back on their own community more than young people studying in almost any other country. During the early years, opportunities even for friendships with students from the Western world were very limited. Renata Pisu was delighted when, following the departure of the two other Italian students, she met the two new French students and then British student Martin Bernal. ‘At least there are some other representatives of capitalism,’ she noted in her diary.25 Going further afield, the handful of Westerners mixed with the less politically ardent of the East Europeans, rather like the few Western correspondents in China at the time. Renata’s friends included a few Poles and Yugoslavs whom she described as ‘retrobates—almost like capitalists’.26 Polish student René Goldman recalled that he and his roommate Stasiek socialized with the Italians and the few other Westerners ‘more than we did with fellow students from the Bloc’.27 Through their friends, Renata and others encountered the complex dynamics of the Eastern bloc student community which, in Goldman’s words, was ‘ridden by national dissensions’.28 One conscientious East German later recalled a Polish student putting him in his place after he asked why the Poles were so often absent from class: ‘We do not need German guards to tell us what to do.’29 According to Goldman: ‘We [the Polish students] got along well with the Hungarians, fairly well with Czechs

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and Slovaks and Bulgarians, but not at all with the East Germans.’30 The arrival in 1957 of students from the Soviet Union introduced another dimension. It was barely a year since Soviet forces had crushed the Hungarian revolution and the Russian students kept largely to themselves. When larger numbers of Western students began arriving in the 1970s, nationality became a major feature of group identity. ‘A kind of de facto segregation along national lines was in force,’ Sally Borthwick wrote of the first group of arrivals. ‘I ate and roomed with Australians, to my bitter disappointment’.31 While the national group initially provided a sense of security in the alien environment, it was reinforced by the authorities who referred to ‘the French students’, ‘the Canadian students’, ‘the British students’ and so on. Soon after the arrival of each group, the foreign students office asked for the name of its ‘leader’ (sometimes a contentious issue among the students) to be used as a channel for communication from and to the office. It did not take long, though, for personal friendships and love affairs to cut across national boundaries. The new wave of students were products not just of the socio-political turmoil of the late sixties but of the sexual revolution, and the institute authorities did not try to enforce on foreigners their oddly worded dictum that ‘illegitimate relations between men and women do not exist and are not allowed in China’.32 Even in the late 1950s, Per-Olow Leijon had found that ‘the Chinese didn’t really care what we did, so long as it wasn’t with a Chinese’. A room of one’s own was a precious commodity. Some Chinese roommates who lived in the same city went home on Saturday afternoon after classes, not returning until Sunday evening. But with eagle-eyed security staff and entrance doors locked at 10 p.m., any student in the opposite sex’s building at the language institute (or at Beida in the 1970s) usually had to wait until there were plenty of people milling around the following morning to leave. The occasional single-sex dalliance was actually much easier, at least logistically. ‘I can confess now,’ one French student commented some forty years later. ‘I had an affair over the 1974–75 winter with a dishy Yemeni student with curly hair. He lightened up my long and boring weekend evenings when my Chinese roommate was back home. It was a short and sweet romance.’33 (Homosexuality was illegal in the PRC until 1997 and removed from the Ministry of Health’s list of mental illnesses only in 2001.) The reasonable gender balance among Western students was not matched by those from Africa and the Arab world, and young Western women sometimes found themselves under greater sexual pressure than they did at home. A major problem was the common perception, only exacerbated by the sexual revolution, that Western women were ‘permissive’. In her lively memoir Hand-grenade Practice in Peking, British student Frances Wood recalled an encounter at the language institute. I had been asked out the night before by a friendly francophone African and the evening had not ended well .  .  . he had announced that he had ‘besoins

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physiologiques’. I’d escaped but lost one of my gym-shoes as I fled. Though it was not my normal practice to fulfil anyone’s physiological needs after a couple of hours’ acquaintance over dinner, I felt guilty about my lack of co-operation because Africans had a truly awful time in China.34

The truly awful time went beyond general dissatisfaction with living in China to the perpetual problem of personal relationships. Not being permitted to have Chinese girlfriends weighed heavily. Writing of the early 1960s, Ghanaian student Emmanuel  Hevi maintained that the ‘taboo’ on forming friendships with Chinese girls did not discourage the students but only spurred them on, with resulting friction and bitterness on both sides. ‘Such girl friends as we were able to make were packed off to prison or to the commune farms for hard labour almost as fast as we made them.’35 It was not only a question of official attitudes. In attempting to pursue relationships, the Africans encountered hostility from Chinese male students. This was to become a major source of conflict, partly responsible for the eruption of fighting on university campuses in Tianjin and Nanjing in the late 1970s. Chinese female students, too, expressed their disapproval of any Western woman who became friendly with an African student. When a Tanzanian visited my British neighbour’s room at the language institute, her roommate complained to my roommate Lin Mei: ‘I don’t like him coming to our room. I’m afraid of black men.’ The Western student community had its own political, as well as its sexual, dynamics. While some welcomed the opportunity to go to China in the way that language students were keen to go to France or Japan, for others the motivation was at least partly political, not just among leftist students in the early years but also in the 1970s after official exchanges were established. Many of the Europeans, including the French who had the greatest number of Western students, had been politicized by the intellectual ferment and Maoist student movement of the late 1960s. Looking back on the first group of 1970s French students, Christian Lamouroux recalled that they had virtually all been involved in the French student movement, identifying themselves at that time as Maoists. ‘I was only eighteen at that time and had a slight involvement, but most of the students were older and strongly influenced by the movement.’ By the time they arrived in China in the mid-1970s, the students’ political views reflected the subsequent fracturing of the intellectual left in France, as elsewhere in Western Europe. Francoise Derre, who arrived in Peking in 1975, recounted the dynamics within her group. A majority of the French students were hoping to ‘learn from the Chinese revolutionary experience’: the Maoists to learn from its accomplishments, the non-Maoist leftists and Trotskyites to criticize the experience from a truly revolutionary point of view and learn from its mistakes. The non-orthodox Maoists

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Foreigners under Mao started to question the reality of what they had believed in after a couple of months, the Marxist Leninists kept seeing what they wanted to believe and found all sorts of ready-made excuses when confronted with different truths.36

The Canadians, with the second highest number of Western students, also became well known for their divisiveness. Karen Minden recalled that, for the first cohort in 1973, the arguments started even before they got to China. When we first arrived in Hong Kong, it became evident that there was a small group of Canadian students who were highly motivated by their desire to be part of the Chinese Revolution. Most of us were more interested in studying Chinese language, culture and politics. Once we arrived in China, the jiji fenzi (activist group) as we called them participated in a secret Marxist study group, and reported to the Chinese cadres—much to their amusement, as I learned years later—on the bourgeois behaviour of the other Canadian students.37

It was no accident that several of the activists were from McGill University where Professor Paul Lin, chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, exerted a strong influence both academically and, at least in the first year, in the selection process. (Half of the first group of students were selected by individual universities, not through national competition.) A Canadian-born Chinese, Lin had moved to the PRC with his family after the Communist victory and worked there as a translator and broadcaster until 1964. Following his return to Canada, he became known as ‘Mr China’ for his contacts with the People’s Republic. On a visit to Peking a year before the start of the student exchange, he was described by a British diplomat as ‘an unrepentant spokesman for China [who] is clearly in pretty good odour here’, staying at the Peking Hotel (reserved for senior visitors), having a car permanently at his disposal, and being entertained by senior Chinese leaders.38 Jan Wong, another Chinese Canadian and a McGill student, was a self-confessed ‘stark, raving, Maoist’, not just during her first student sojourn in Peking (arranged through political connections) in 1972–73, but when she went back to the PRC on the Canadian student exchange in late 1974.39 Her political righteousness included ‘snitching’ on a female history student, who was subsequently expelled from Beida, after she asked the Canadian to help her go to the United States. Two decades later, Wong looked back at her early political enthusiasm in her widely read book Red China Blues, which traced her gradual disillusionment with the country she had once considered ‘utopia’. And in 2005 she paid a special visit to China to seek out and apologize to Yin Luoyi, the student she had betrayed some three decades earlier.40 While some students maintained their enthusiasm for Maoism—or at least their youthful political idealism—during their China sojourn, for others the experience of actually living under Mao proved a severe test. German Michael Kahn-Ackermann explored his personal disillusionment in his book China: Within the Outer Gate, a soul-searching memoir of his two years at Beida in the mid-seventies.

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Like many others whose political convictions were formed in the twists and turns of the intellectual movement of the 1960s, my image of China was inspired by the expectation of finding there a piece of our own future society. Without being a fanatic ‘Maoist’, I tended to view all the less enticing aspects of Chinese socialism as ‘foreign’ to the Chinese system, ‘residues of the old society’. I was certainly prepared to admit that Chinese socialism had its faults. And yet everything was so different from how I had imagined it. I was not shocked by the poverty and backwardness, which is what our Chinese guides always feared, but rather by the steady stream of lies emanating from the calm and smiling faces of the cadres .  .  . I was far less incensed by the monstrous bureaucracy that burdens the country than by the brutal ways in which human contact between Chinese and ourselves was prevented . . . I was not horrified by the uniformity of dress, but by the uniformity of verbal and political rituals.41

Whatever an individual’s political views, living in Mao’s China was undoubtedly one of the tougher, if also one of the more intriguing, international student experiences. The students’ everyday lives were probably most closely comparable with those of foreign students in the Soviet Union where living conditions were also Spartan, the winters even colder than Peking, and the ideological environment allencompassing. But despite the heightened sense of Cold War hostility and warnings from their governments about likely KGB attention, Western students still made friends with Russian students and occasionally with other people. Some had Russian girlfriends or boyfriends, as British exchange student and future Peking diplomat George Walden wrote about candidly when describing his life at Moscow University in the early 1960s.42 Individual reactions to the China student sojourn varied. Per-Olow Leijon looked back on his three years in Peking, immediately following army service, as ‘one of the best periods of my life. I didn’t have any worries, everything was organized for me.’ The sentiment was shared by fellow Swede Cecilia Lindqvist but not by her husband Sven, whom she thought ‘never really got into China’.43 Most others, while not being so enthusiastic, proved ‘resilient’, as an embassy officer described the first group of British students. Although Isabel Hilton compared living at the language institute with being in an army camp, she thought that ‘once one has adjusted to institutional living, it is a way of life which makes few demands’.44 Some students, though, found it all too much. In April 1974, less than three months after the last of the new cohort of Western students arrived in Peking, the British embassy reported that ‘several students had already dropped out from other Western groups’.45 Others just managed to ‘stick it out’ for the rest of the academic year. Assessing the morale of the British students six months after their arrival, an embassy officer reported that, with spring on its way, ‘one or two students who looked like becoming casualties would probably pick up and hang on until the end of the year’.46

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Although the material and psychological conditions affected some students more than others, there was a myriad of reasons why some left before the end of the academic year or, in the case of two-year exchanges, did not continue for a second year. (Of the first cohort of twenty Canadian students, only twelve stayed on, as did only twenty of the thirty French students.)47 Some opted out when they were not able to study, far less do research on, their chosen subject. Sometimes an undisclosed medical problem erupted in China, with the resulting drama of hospitalization. While a love affair might cast a rosy glow over the experience, a broken romance could be the final straw. And for those who did stay on, the draw of ‘home’ sometimes became too strong after a few months as one of a handful of foreigners in a city like Shenyang. In the words of one Australian student: After fourteen months in China I’d just had enough. The cold, the isolation, the endless attempts at brainwashing got under my skin. These were the ‘push’ factors. On the ‘pull’ side, I had an Australian summer on the beach to look forward to—and getting back to my old University and a very sweet girl. What kind of a choice was that?48

There is little doubt that Taiwan offered foreign students, including a whole generation of Americans, better opportunities for Chinese language experience and academic research, as well as a far more normal life. Like students in China before the revolution, they could live with a Chinese family or rent an apartment, have a regular social life, maybe a Chinese girlfriend or boyfriend. While physically cut off from mainland China, they were surrounded by the customs, festivals and artefacts of more than two thousand years of Chinese civilization that were largely being suppressed in new China. What the PRC did offer, of course, was the experience of actually being in the country that one was studying and that was currently accessible to so few Westerners. For anyone with an academic or personal interest in contemporary Chinese politics, it was the place to be. And even the less enthusiastic would probably agree with Edoarda Masi that their sojourn was indeed an ‘extraordinary adventure’, at least in hindsight. Some thirty-five years after their respective experiences in the mid-1970s, a former American student in Taipei and a Canadian student in Peking were discussing whose university had had the better basketball team. The Canadian concluded the exchange: ‘Maybe we couldn’t beat you guys at basketball, but we were in China!’

Part VII The Western community(ies)

16 Across divides

When Edoarda Masi returned to China as a foreign expert in early 1976, she took a keen interest in relations between the different groups of Westerners. ‘The students, who are the most sinicized of all, snub the experts, the experts snub the embassy people, and all of them admit themselves to be miles apart from long-term residents, people who spend their lives here.’1 Masi’s generalization was a neat one. If students snubbed foreign experts, it was because they thought they led mostly ‘foreign language’ lives, often centred on the Friendship Hotel. If experts snubbed embassy people, it was because they were trying to assert an identity that was distinct from their governments. If students, experts and embassy people were all miles apart from the long-term residents, it was because they found it difficult to comprehend how their fellow nationals could commit themselves to Communist China at the expense of their original home countries. But national and political identities sometimes cut across group identity, just as they divided some individual communities. This can be seen most clearly by looking at relations between the diplomatic-correspondent communities, which represented Western governments and media, and the others who were based in Chinese institutions. To diplomats and correspondents, the students, foreign experts and long-term residents were all ‘out there’ in a sombre grey Maoist world—whether in Peking, Shanghai or occasionally a provincial city. Equally, to those ‘out there’, diplomats and correspondents lived in a world that seemed far removed from their own. In the relationship between students and foreign experts, on the one hand, and the diplomatic-correspondent communities on the other, national affinities were sometimes challenged by political ones. Swede Sven Lindqvist was not the only student or foreign expert to face the question ‘why do you want to go to your embassy?’, as Chinese officials attempted to cultivate them as ‘friends of the Chinese people’ and frowned on contact with their country’s official representatives in the PRC. According to Lindqvist, ‘the Chinese used various means to intimidate a student and prevent him from keeping in touch with his embassy’.2 With the influx of students on formal exchanges, officials were more likely to shrug their shoulders and assume that an

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embassy visit was for official purposes, just as it was in the case of PRC students overseas. For Western embassies, students—and the occasional foreign expert on an official exchange—were not only their nationals but an important part of their governments’ developing bilateral relations with China. Once students arrived in Peking, they became the human face of cultural exchange, to be displayed to distinguished official visitors. British Prime Minister Edward Heath’s planned, but subsequently cancelled, China visit in early 1974 included a trip to the language institute to meet the first group of British students. When Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser visited Peking in mid-1976, his government’s exchange students were invited not only to a reception at the embassy but to a banquet in the Great Hall of the People. Western governments and their embassies were keen to ensure the smooth operation of exchange schemes in the face of the difficulties they knew their students faced. ‘By our standards living conditions are depressingly low,’ the Australian embassy reported at the start of the programme, warning that students would have ‘to be capable of withstanding real cultural shock in relative isolation’. Its statement ‘we will do what we can’ characterized the attitude of most embassies and led to much closer relations with students on exchange programmes than existed in most countries.3 The French set the tone in the mid-1960s when Ambassador Lucien Paye took a personal interest in his government’s student exchange programme. The first two cohorts of students, who arrived before the Cultural Revolution put a halt to the exchange, were treated as a welcome addition to the small French community. René Flipo remembered having ‘close contacts with the embassy: receptions, cinema shows, invitations to dinner parties, friendship with some of the staff.’4 Marianne Bastid recalled, in particular, the ‘parties and picnics, French wine and cigarettes’.5 The embassy was also of practical assistance, allowing students to send confidential correspondence through the diplomatic bag. When the new wave of exchanges got under way in 1973, students were often the largest component of a country’s nationals in China outside its embassy. The British extended their long-established policy of pastoral care for embassy staff to the new arrivals from the UK. One of their most welcome contributions was the Friday minibus downtown for an evening at the Bell, the embassy pub, and a ride home again. For 10 yuan, students became members of the embassy’s social club, which gave them access not just to the Bell but to the library, swimming pool and other facilities. The embassy also organized excursions, arranged for students to be hosted at Christmas by individual families, and even allowed them to use an empty apartment over the summer vacation. From the start, the students were virtually unanimous in their appreciation. In  reports to the British Council, the first group interspersed descriptions of their tough living conditions and tedious classes with fulsome praise for the embassy.

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Between two worlds. British students outside the foreign students’ residential buildings at the Peking Language Institute before going to their embassy on Christmas Day, 1974. (Courtesy of Michael Rank)

‘When insanity threatens, the Embassy rushes to the rescue with soothing hot baths, so things could be much worse,’ Isabel Hilton wrote.6 Rose Heatley described some of the assistance. ‘Information sheets handed out by the embassy have been of great help in enabling us to find our feet, as has the personal concern of individuals at the Embassy; we have particularly appreciated being invited for meals and the occasional weekend by Embassy families.’7 For their part, diplomats were impressed with the students’ ‘resilience’.8 Only an occasional glitch threatened to disturb the cosy relationship. Soon after the first group of students arrived in Peking, the Security Department of the Foreign Office informed diplomat Michael Morgan that one of their number was an active member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.9 This was common knowledge among the students. ‘Everyone knew he belonged to the communist party; he never tried to hide it,’ a Cambridge contemporary later commented. The oddity was that Tom (a pseudonym as he would prefer not to be named even four decades later) was a member of a political party that was now fiercely pro-Soviet and anti-Chinese at a time when it was Maoism, equally fiercely opposed to ‘Soviet revisionism’, that appealed to many students. In the ensuing months, Morgan became somewhat suspicious of Tom’s behaviour. ‘He was such an obvious collector of information, forever asking questions and openly noting the answers,’ he reported to the Foreign Office.10 While the diplomat

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thought that the young man may merely have been trying to earn merit with his Party, he concluded that he was a security problem because he was known to have contacts with the Soviet embassy.11 His planned route back to the United Kingdom was via Warsaw, East Berlin and Leningrad. Morgan warned the Foreign Office that, if such students were selected in future, the embassy would have to treat the student body as a whole ‘on a very much more formal and less friendly basis’ than it had done during the first year when it ‘allowed all the students a pretty free run of embassy facilities’.12 While the British Council officially opposed vetoing exchange students on political grounds, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (which was represented on the selection board) told Morgan it believed there would be no problem in the future. ‘FCO and Council members of the Board in recent years have been able to fudge successfully our purely political reservations by steering interviews with politically inappropriate candidates in a direction which exposes their unsuitability on other grounds.’13 As this was the first year of the PRC exchange, they were presumably referring to Russian language students selected to go to the Soviet Union. Tom, it seemed, had slipped through the net. Not all embassies were as solicitous towards their students as the British, but most took their role fairly seriously. And sometimes an embassy officer went beyond the call of duty in fulfilling his or her responsibility for looking after the students. ‘The couple generously run a kind of open house which, especially during the vacation periods, becomes a student encampment,’ Edoarda Masi wrote of the Italian cultural attaché and his wife.14 Other individual diplomats, including the odd ambassador, invited students to stay with them if they became ill, while non-diplomatic staff were often the most hospitable. French secretary Solange Brand recalled of the mid1960s: ‘I remember the students well. Some came to my apartment quite often for a hot bath.’15 The student-embassy traffic was understandably mostly one-way, with many more students venturing into the diplomatic world than the other way round, apart from a cultural attaché’s occasional visit or, very rarely, a junior diplomat doing language training (though normally living in an embassy apartment). A few diplomatic wives also breached the divide when, in 1975, a handful received permission to attend classes at the Peking Language Institute. I was surprised to discover that the students in one of my classes included Gay FitzGerald, the Australian ambassador’s wife, as well as the wives of American, Japanese and Iranian diplomats. The women also joined us for a few days of ‘open door schooling’, grinding bearings at the Peking No. 2 Machine Tool Factory. They took it all in their stride, working on the factory floor in denim overalls, facing the unappealing vats of food in the dreary canteen, and confronting the workshop’s open plan squat toilets where they sometimes had to queue while female workers took the opportunity for a prolonged chat. Tales of their experiences no doubt livened up many a dinner party but they had

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Gay FitzGerald relaxes after lunch with fellow workers at the No. 2 Machine Tool Factory. The woman second from the right was in charge of family planning for the workshop. (In author’s collection)

also done their bit for cultural relations: far less the stereotyped diplomatic wives of Lawrence Durrell’s (in)famous observations in Esprit de Corps than the resourceful women portrayed in Katie Hickman’s Daughters of Britannia. While nationality could be a strong binder in the alien environment, politics sometimes intruded into the relationship. Some of the first group of Canadian students fell out with their embassy even before they arrived in China in November 1973. Gathered together in Hong Kong, they were briefed by officers from the Peking embassy and the Hong Kong consulate on the conditions they would face in China. In  the words of Cultural Counsellor Brian Evans, ‘some of the students who had toured China before found the briefing too pessimistic, and took it as reflecting the official Canadian view toward China’. In retrospect, he said, the briefing ‘was instrumental in setting the tone of Embassy-student relations’.16 The Canadian experience was an extreme case of how political differences within some student groups influenced attitudes to embassy contact. Although one’s fellow nationals and a modicum of comfort could exert a strong pull, students arriving in China with Maoist views sometimes regarded contact with their embassy as compromising their ideological beliefs. ‘Those of us who “fraternized” with the embassy staff were criticized by the political activist group who shunned any contact with the imperialist enemy,’ Karen Minden recalled.17 Some, not just Canadians, also argued that spending time at their embassy only distracted them from their ‘Chinese’ life. Even a Christmas invitation could be a contentious issue, as Rose Heatley reported not long after the British students’ arrival.

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‘Some “hard-line” students are of the view that we are not in China to celebrate Christmas or mix with the diplomatic community in Peking. I feel that this is a false criticism because the option of living a totally Chinese existence does not exist.’18 Foreign experts, too, were divided on the question of embassy contact, though it was not such an issue because the great majority were in China independently rather than on official exchanges. ‘Alyce and I certainly never refused invitations from any embassy,’ Australian Colin Mackerras recalled of the mid-1960s.19 The couple saw quite a lot of young diplomat David Wilson at the British mission and, along with Britons Diana Lainson and Endymion Wilkinson, spent their first Christmas in Peking at his courtyard house downtown. Bill and Delia Jenner, though, stayed away from Wilson and others at the British diplomatic mission. In Bill’s words: ‘We were invited, but it would have undermined our limited contacts with Chinese.’20 Some residents at the Friendship Hotel were annoyed when Wilson drove up, hardly inconspicuous in his red Triumph Spitfire, to see one of the foreign experts. One recalled: ‘Some of the people living at the Youyi were in political trouble with their own governments and couldn’t return home—they didn’t want diplomats around the place.’21 For both students and foreign experts, contact with the small community of Western correspondents had the same ambivalence as relations with the diplomatic community. Some were happy to enjoy their hospitality and to chat about their everyday lives. Correspondents, always on the lookout for a story, wrote occasional articles about the students, particularly their open door schooling experiences. Other students, though, put the capitalist press in the same category as imperialist governments and refused to have anything to do with them, to the point of exerting pressure on their fellow students. ‘I remember my fear of being considered a counterrevolutionary because on a single occasion I had met with a Reuters correspondent on a purely friendly basis,’ Edoarda Masi recalled of her contact with the first Western correspondent, David Chipp.22 Even in the 1970s, students could be suspicious if one of their number spent much time with a journalist. ‘What was she doing here?’ a fellow student asked after he saw Australian correspondent Yvonne Preston, whom I had invited to sample a student lunch in the Beida canteen. Being the object of a correspondent’s attention was sometimes unwelcome regardless of one’s politics. In November 1973, Globe and Mail correspondent John Burns wrote a short piece about the arrival of the first group of Canadian students. ‘It is not expected that the students will have much more success in integrating into Chinese society than diplomats who frequently lament the difficulty of establishing contact with ordinary Chinese.’23 Annoyed by the article, eighteen of the twenty students signed a letter to Burns alleging, somewhat unrealistically, that life in Peking ‘promises to integrate us into Chinese society in a way in which in our experience is not possible for foreign students in Canadian universities’.24 A face-to-face confrontation with Burns only increased tensions.

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Most of the students were incensed when, five months later, Burns wrote two large feature articles about them. The first, which appeared on the Globe and Mail’s front page, was headlined ‘Canadian students in China fascinated and frustrated’. Burns claimed that five months’ experience at the Peking Language Institute had put students in a ‘somewhat frustrated and fractious mood’. There were differences with institute officials over their academic programme, campus regulations and, above all, ‘the infrequency and superficiality of contact with ordinary people’.25 The second full-page article focused on the students themselves. Headlined ‘Politics divides Canadians at Peking language school’, it asserted: ‘Canadian students at the PLI might have borne the frustrations of life at the language institute more easily if they had not been divided among themselves almost as soon as they arrived’. Spelling out the political differences, Burns ridiculed the ‘radicals’, several of whom he said had studied at McGill University (his own alma mater), for criticizing not just the bourgeois behaviour of some Canadians but also of French and other students. The Chinese were unimpressed with the students’ denunciations of their own government, he claimed.26 While the radicals bore the brunt of Burns’s sarcasm, other students were annoyed by what he had written about the institute and the inflexibility of its officials, only too conscious that they had to deal with them on a daily basis. Sixteen students submerged their differences to sign a letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail. Their language was characteristic of the stilted rhetoric they had been reading and hearing since their arrival in Peking, no doubt aware that the authorities were keeping abreast of the dispute. In response to some dissatisfaction, the administration is attempting to re-evaluate the original program . . . Concrete suggestions made by the Canadian students in a letter to the administration have been made in a similar manner by other national groups. Both discussion and decision-making are carried on somewhat differently to what we are accustomed in Canada, but as we understand the Chinese more and they us, their position could certainly not be considered inflexible.27

For the Canadian government, it was an unfortunate episode in the first year of the student exchange. Cultural Counsellor Brian Evans acknowledged that Burns’s articles were ‘accurate in fact, if not in tone’, but was concerned that they had become ‘the foundation upon which all popular knowledge of the scheme’ was based.28 Although radically inclined students and foreign experts were sometimes described by others as the ‘300 percenters’ or of trying to be ‘holier than Mao’, their suspicion of diplomats and correspondents was understandable in the Cold War political climate. As one British diplomat expressed it: ‘Yes, we looked after the students, but we also wanted to get information from them on what was happening.’29 René Flipo recalled of his 1965–66 student sojourn: ‘The French Embassy staff, including the ambassador,

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were certainly keen on monitoring the Chinese political scene through us, although they did it so discreetly that we were not aware of it.’30 So far as diplomatic missions were concerned, there was nothing unusual about obtaining information from people with better access than they had to everyday China. Their contacts had ranged from Catholic and Protestant missionaries—the only Westerners living outside the treaty ports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—to visiting scholars and students during the Nationalist era’s decline, a few of whom were subsequently arrested as imperialist spies during the Korean War. As in earlier periods, diplomatic missions not only established informal contacts but specifically cultivated informants, not always of their own nationality. Compared with later years, during the 1950s there were few students who were not politically committed to the Chinese side. Even so, young British diplomat Emrys Davies befriended some of the students at Peking University, including Polish exchange student René Goldman. From 1956 to 1958, according to the diplomatic mission, Goldman ‘maintained contact with this embassy despite rather difficult circumstances. He was an outspoken critic of communism in general and Chinese communism in particular, and proved to be an interesting source of information.’31 The Beida student witnessed first-hand the intellectual ferment of the 1957 Hundred Flowers Campaign and then the Anti-Rightist Movement when many of the university’s staff and students were denounced. Goldman returned to Poland in early 1959 but eventually succeeded in migrating to Canada, where he had relatives. More than fifty years after studying at Beida, the emeritus professor of Chinese history at the University of British Columbia recalled his friendship with Emrys Davies in Peking. Like some others who talked with diplomats, though, he did not really see himself as a provider of information: ‘I was delighted to learn from you that the British considered me as one of their informants. As far as I was hitherto aware I was only an informant for Dr. Flato at the Polish Embassy.’32 As the Cultural Revolution got under way in mid-1966, some of the French students at Beida were an important source on the early developments, including rallies in support of the dismissal of its president, Lu Ping. A few research students continued to provide information after those on the undergraduate exchange left in July.33 As late as mid-1967, a Norwegian passed on details of the latest dazibao on campus to his embassy’s first secretary Stein Seeberg, who in turn shared the information with the British. ‘This source should be strictly safeguarded,’ China-watcher Leonard Appleyard warned the Foreign Office.34 First-hand information on the political struggles inside other Chinese institutions during 1966–67 came from a few of the foreign experts. Maurice Ciantar was a regular dinner guest of a French diplomat, discussing the latest developments at both the Foreign Languages Press and the Friendship Hotel. Another foreign

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expert, Lenore Taylor, described by the British only as ‘our New Zealand friend’, also became a regular informant. The New Zealander kept diplomats Ray Whitney and Leonard Appleyard abreast of the latest developments at the Foreign Languages Press, including its takeover by rebels in February 1967, as well as the ongoing factional fighting at the Friendship Hotel.35 She also gave them copies of the texts of the dazibao written by the four American residents and Chen Yi’s statement in response to the demands, documents that Whitney analyzed and forwarded to London. But on 20 September he advised the Foreign Office: ‘I regret this will be the last offering from this particular source as she is today leaving China at the expiry of her contract.’36 A few of the foreign experts living outside Peking also helped diplomats fill in the jigsaw puzzle on what was happening across China. They were welcome lunch and dinner guests, even house guests, during their occasional visits to the capital. After Andrew and Maggie Watson, who were teaching English in Xi’an, had lunch with Leonard Appleyard at the British diplomatic mission in February 1967, the diplomat sent a two-page report to the Foreign Office detailing their observations over recent months.37 Andrew, who became an academic specialist on contemporary China, was an astute observer of early Cultural Revolution politics, including relations between student and worker groups. A few months after his and Maggie’s lunch with Appleyard, he published a series of five articles on the Cultural Revolution in Xi’an in the influential Far Eastern Economic Review.38 There were many more Western students and foreign experts in China during the dramatic political events of 1976—from Zhou Enlai’s death and the campaign against Deng Xiaoping to Mao’s demise and the arrest of the Gang of Four. As had happened throughout the Mao era, Beida was a major focus of political attention. ‘Being at the university [Beida instead of the language institute] raised our status in the diplomatic community, especially with the new poster campaign under way,’ British student Frances Wood recalled of early 1976.39 Before going to the Australian embassy for dinner, where she found herself seated next to the ambassador, she copied down the new posters denouncing the ‘No. 1 capitalist roader in the Party, Deng Xiaoping’. When the ‘Gang of Four’ were arrested in October, foreign students at Beida were one of the main sources of the early reports, having heard the rumours from their Chinese room-mates. There were frequent phone calls from students’ embassies and Western correspondents, all initially answered by the dormitory doorkeeper, who shouted the student’s name up the stairs. It was little wonder that the Chinese authorities assumed student contact with an embassy was usually for official purposes. For the long-term residents, unlike students and foreign experts on two-year contracts, any sense of sharing a national identity with diplomats or correspondents was completely subordinated to their political allegiances. The long-termers were firmly in the Chinese Communist camp, not just because of their own political beliefs but

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because of continual official pressure to demonstrate their opposition to the imperialists. This included speaking out against the behaviour of their home governments, which laid some of them open to accusations of traitorous behaviour in periods of extreme confrontation like the Korean War. During the Cultural Revolution, the vocal demonstrators against a number of diplomatic missions sometimes included a few long-termers. ‘I spotted Mrs Epstein née Fairfax-Cholmeley,’ British Chargé d’Affaires Donald Hopson reported to the Foreign Office on 7 June 1967 after foreign experts (mostly Arabs and Africans) joined a rowdy crowd of Red Guards outside the mission.40 The British woman was reportedly among those who forced their way into the diplomatic compound, threw flowerpots through the windows, entered the building, and destroyed a portrait of the Queen. Americans Joan Hinton and Sid Engst also attended the demonstration but were less proactive. ‘We were sort of watching everything,’ Joan recalled. ‘We were thinking how chicken we were because we never threw flowerpots and weren’t all that “revolutionary”.’41 Not surprisingly, the long-termers had virtually no contact with their embassy, where there was one, nor with their fellow nationals who worked in them. The only time they usually entered a diplomatic mission was to register the birth of a baby or to renew a passport. David Crook wrote about registering Carl, his first son, in August 1949. Crossing the street and entering the vast old embassy compound—for which expedition I shed my Chinese uniform and wore tweeds—was like entering the lion’s den . . . Nevertheless I was treated courteously by a young man who entered Carl’s name in a ledger and later sent us his birth-certificate testifying that our son was a British subject.42

Crook ventured into the lion’s den again in 1951 and 1953, following the births of Michael and Paul. Despite the rarity of contact, embassies were well aware of the presence in China of the people whom Humphrey Trevelyan called ‘the twilight brigade’. They reported any visits, even those of the occasional passport renewer. ‘The opportunity for meeting non-official UK citizens in this country is extremely rare,’ the diplomatic mission wrote in May 1969. ‘I therefore thought you might be interested to hear of one who briefly swam into view yesterday.’ The visitor was Pat Adler, whose British passport was about to expire. ‘Mrs Adler was not very communicative,’ the diplomat reported. ‘We were unable to establish her views on the present situation in China.’43 Joshua Horn was only a little more forthcoming when he called at the diplomatic mission before his family’s return to Britain in mid-1969 to have his signature witnessed on a National Health Service document. The officer who met him informed the Foreign Office that they had only a ‘short general conversation . . . the circumstances of his visit did not permit me to question him as fully as I would have wished’. But

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while Horn was fairly guarded about personal details and his family’s life in China, he said enough for the officer to write a three-page memorandum about Horn’s work as a surgeon and Chinese medical practices. The diplomatic mission concluded that further information on Horn’s experiences would be of great interest to the British government but surmised, no doubt accurately, that he ‘could well resent anything which smacked of an official debriefing’ after his return to the United Kingdom.44 As well as having as little as possible to do with their embassies, the long-termers normally avoided contact with representatives of the capitalist media. In the early 1960s, Israel Epstein did see a bit of the AFP’s Jacques Marcuse, whom he had first met in Hankou in 1938 while working for United Press. But even the Globe and Mail’s resourceful correspondent John Burns had to base a 1972 article entitled ‘Tiny colony of Americans in China lives quietly’ mainly on snippets he picked up from other foreigners, admitting that ‘with rare exceptions they keep to themselves and avoid foreign journalists’.45 Burns’s successor, Ross Munro, managed to score an interview with former POW James Veneris before he made his first visit back to the United States in 1976. Probably the most revealing thing that Veneris said, though, was that he was nostalgic for an American hamburger smothered with onions, mustard and tomato ketchup. 46 While the long-term residents rarely had contact with representatives of their home governments or the Western media, some of their relatives had no such reservations when their siblings were detained during the Cultural Revolution. They had regular communication with the British Foreign Office, urging it to intercede with the Chinese authorities. The greatest pressure came from the sisters of Gladys Yang and Elsie Fairfax Cholmeley, and the sister-in-law of David Crook. As well as writing to the Foreign Office, they lobbied MPs to ask questions in parliament and sought publicity for their relatives’ plight. But it was usually more a matter of family support than approval of their politics. After British diplomat Roger Garside met Isabel Crook’s sister Julia Baker during a visit to London, he wrote: ‘She told me candidly, if jokingly, that the detention of her brother-in-law and now possibly her sister by the Chinese authorities might be no bad thing if it succeeded in knocking some of the political nonsense out of their heads.’47 Diplomat Humphrey Trevelyan may have thought the long-termers were ‘pathetic and maladjusted’ but, so long as they retained their British citizenship, they were entitled to official protection. As well as making the usual approaches to the Chinese Foreign Ministry for information on their nationals’ detention and health, together with futile efforts to gain consular access, the diplomatic mission and the Foreign Office maintained close contact with their relatives in Britain. Official interest in the detainees was not, though, on a par with that towards other imprisoned nationals. In early 1971 the diplomatic mission wrote to the Foreign Office: ‘We, of course, still have a responsibility for seeking information about Mrs Epstein and Mrs Yang and

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Messrs Shapiro and Crook, even though privately we may acknowledge that they fall into a different category than other British subjects previously detained here.’48 Following Gladys Yang’s eventual release in 1972, her sister Hilda Brown asked for British government assistance in obtaining a visa to travel to China. The Foreign Office duly requested the British embassy to take up the matter with the Foreign Ministry. For newly appointed ambassador John Addis, enough was enough, at least when he was wearing his official hat. Addis retorted that it would be inappropriate ‘to intervene officially with the Chinese’, virtually reprimanding Richard Evans, the head of the Far Eastern Department and a future ambassador to China. There is surely no case for treating her [Yang] as a specially privileged person . . . At times during the 1950s and 1960s, on political issues she openly sympathized with the Chinese Government against the British Government. She has now been released and has elected to return to her former employment under the Chinese Government . . . I hope therefore that you will not ask us again to intervene on behalf of Gladys Yang unless there is some new development in regard to her circumstances which would require whatever measure of intervention would be appropriate to any other British subject.49

In contrast to his official persona, Addis presented his more human side in a letter to his sister Robina after Gladys made a formal visit to the embassy soon after she was freed. Another visitor from the past was Gladys Yang, whose release from detention you must have read about. I remember vividly my dinners in their little house in Nanking, which had no sanitation. She is silver-haired now but still as thin as before—she is tall—and with the same gentle, accepting smile. I thought there was a hint of trouble in the eyes but she is wonderfully relaxed and I believe really content to be at her work again and reunited with Hsien-yi [Xianyi] . . . Her composure and courage are remarkable. She was five years in detention, most of the time in solitary confinement.50

In a different environment, the two old Oxonians might have had a friendly dinner, shared their hopes for China’s future and had a lively political discussion, just as they had done in Nanking before the arrival of the Communists. But too much had happened over those twenty-five years. John Addis, entranced by China and its culture during his first sojourn, had become a senior representative of a government whose relationship with the PRC had been difficult despite its early granting of diplomatic recognition. Gladys Yang had stayed on in China after the Communists’ victory, raised a family with her Chinese husband Xianyi, and worked within the new system. Even though Gladys was not as politically ardent as some of her fellow longterm residents, she still had no option but publicly to toe the official line.

17 After Mao

By the twenty-first century, China was a different world and the Mao era a curious memory for the Westerners who had lived there—or even continued to live there. It  was difficult to explain to a new arrival in Beijing, as the capital was known in English from the late 1970s, how the global city once seemed like ‘the end of the world’, how one could not travel more than twenty kilometres from the centre without special permission, how a proposed marriage between a young Western woman and a Chinese man was discussed at the highest governmental levels, or how one could live in the PRC for several years without really having a personal conversation with a Chinese person. Things did not change overnight. The old restrictive world, not just for foreigners, gradually crumbled as China’s new leader Deng Xiaoping retreated from the extreme social controls of the Mao era, while the ‘open door’ policy and the shift towards a market economy created their own momentum for social change. Even if the government still made some efforts to manage foreigners, it became increasingly difficult in the new economic and social environment. The tight restrictions on entry to—and travel within—China were eased, with the country becoming a major tourist destination and its economic re-engagement with the West prompting the emergence of a new business-oriented community after a gap of more than thirty years. The diplomatic, correspondent, foreign expert and student communities, all very small even at the end of the Mao era, increased exponentially. Americans residents, previously a minority of Westerners, became the largest group: some 71,000 according to the 2010 decennial national census.1 Although restrictions on where foreign residents could live continued for several years, the regulations often trailed behind practice—like much of what was happening in the market economy. One of the greatest, and for some most welcome, changes was that of contacts with Chinese people. The strict barriers to making friends, which had so frustrated many Western residents, began breaking down within a few years of Mao’s death. Then, in 1983, the government issued formal regulations for marriages between Chinese and foreign nationals. By the end of the century the number of ‘foreign related marriages’ had reached over 20,000 a year (this figure did not include marriages between

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PRC Chinese and ‘overseas Chinese’ or residents of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao). China had joined the world of ‘international marriage’ with both its opportunities and its challenges.2 Much easier access to China, travel all over the country, choosing one’s own accommodation, having Chinese friends and relationships: it was all vastly different from the Mao era. But while the closed communist society with its segregation of Westerners was largely a thing of the past, China still had an authoritarian government, was still intensely nationalistic, and continued to draw a clear line between foreigners and Chinese. Foreign correspondents, in particular, continued to face obstacles, even though their access to information, places and people had changed beyond recognition. When the Guardian’s Jonathan Watt left China in June 2012 after a nine-year sojourn, he wrote: I have been detained five times, turned back six times at roadblocks (including during several efforts to visit Tibetan areas) and physically manhandled on a couple of occasions. Members of state security have sometimes followed interviewees and invited my assistants ‘out for tea’, to question them on who I was meeting and where I planned to visit. I have seen how coverage is influenced by a lack of access, intimidation of sources and official harassment.3

In September 2014, almost exactly forty years after the Chinese government had unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Australian Broadcasting Corporation not to screen Antonioni’s Chung-kuo, it again put strong pressure on the corporation. This time it tried to prevent, equally unsuccessfully, the screening of a report from the ABC’s Beijing correspondent, Stephen McDonell, on the tensions in Xinjiang, having already attempted to intimidate him and his cameraman during their visit there.4 More broadly, Westerners shared with earlier generations the experience of living in a country that, as both the Communists and their Nationalist predecessors frequently reiterated, had been subjected to imperialist aggression by the West. Although China was becoming increasingly powerful vis-à-vis the West, the ‘century of humiliation’ discourse continued to be espoused as a unifying national narrative. When the National Museum of China reopened to great fanfare in March 2011 following a four-year renovation, some Westerners felt uneasy as they viewed the large modern history section which focused almost exclusively on the West’s (and later Japan’s) ‘imperialist aggression against China’—and its eventual ‘overthrow’ by the glorious Chinese Communist Party. While Westerners returning to Peking for the first time since the Mao years had no problem recognizing the huge museum flanking the east side of Tiananmen Square, they could be confused by the new grandiose architecture, high-rise shopping plazas and apartment blocks that now overwhelmed the places which were once part of their lives. Anyone who had taught at the First Foreign Languages Institute in the 1960s was in for a particular shock. Its eastern and western campuses, once divided by what

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David and Nancy Milton described as ‘a narrow road lined with locust trees’, were on opposite sides of the frenetic six to eight lane 3rd Ring Road.5 The nearby Youyi (Friendship Hotel), occasionally loved but often hated by foreign experts, was widely advertised as ‘the largest garden hotel in Asia’, used mostly for international conferences and tour groups. Downtown, the Xinqiao Hotel, both home and office for the early correspondents and a prison for the Gordon family, had been modernized and rebranded as the Novotel Xinqiao, a medium-priced four-star option in a city that boasted almost fifty five-star hotels by the second decade of the twenty-first century. The focus of the diplomatic world was shifting towards the new Third Embassy District, further north-east between the 3rd and 4th Ring Roads, as many embassies outgrew their original premises. In contrast to the early bland uniform buildings, the new individually designed embassies were striking examples of contemporary embassy architecture. In 2008, President George W. Bush opened the new US embassy compound, described as representing ‘the best of 21st century American architecture woven into the Chinese earth and symbolically combining eastern and western traditions’.6 Catering for up to 1,000 people working for twenty-six different federal agencies, the massive compound was a far cry from the modest two-storey building where his father, George H. W., had presided over a liaison office staff of less than thirty Americans. Both Peking University (Beida), home to the first Western students, and the Peking Language Institute had been transformed in the drive to modernize. At Beida, the rundown Chinese-American style buildings from Yanjing University days were restored to their former glory, while those of the 1950s onwards mostly gave way to contemporary steel, concrete and glass structures. Buildings 25 and 26, home to foreign students from the late 1950s, somehow survived until 2012 (though no longer housing foreigners) when they were replaced by modern teaching buildings. The language institute, renamed the Beijing Language and Culture University, was modernized almost beyond recognition to cater for the ever-expanding numbers of foreign students and their rising expectations. For those who could afford it, there were air-conditioned private rooms with TV, internet access, and even en suite shower rooms. At nearby Wudaokou, glitzy stores, bars and clubs replaced the few dingy buildings and handful of concrete-floored restaurants, with the area becoming a magnet for students at universities in the area. The 10 p.m. curfew was well and truly a thing of the past. For some of the subjects of this book, living under Mao had been a one-off China experience. For others it was part of a lengthy association with the country, extending into the post-Mao period with its opportunities and personal contacts that were unimaginable in earlier years. Britain’s presence in the PRC across the whole of the Mao era had given its diplomats considerable experience of China, and every British ambassador appointed during the following thirty years had had one, or in the early

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cases two, postings to Peking before 1976. French diplomats who returned to China as ambassadors included Claude Chayet, who had opened the French embassy as chargé d’affaires in 1964, and Charles Malo, right-hand man to Étienne Manac’h throughout his six-year sojourn. The new era also saw the re-emergence of some of the licensed contacts of earlier years, most notably Ying Ruocheng (Stephen Ying). Both Ying and his wife Wu Shiliang had been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, but by the early 1980s Ying was an active participant in the PRC’s expanding cultural relations with the West. This included spending time with playwright Arthur Miller in the United  States and playing the lead role in his Death of a Salesman in Beijing. When Reuters correspondent Vergil Berger was invited to British Ambassador Alan Donald’s residence for Christmas lunch in 1988, Ying was the only other non-family member there. (Wu Shiliang had died the previous year.) Times had changed. The ostensible need for surreptitious meetings was over and, in any case, Ying had become part of the political establishment when he was appointed a vice-minister for culture in 1986.

In the early post-Mao years, Ying Ruocheng became well known as an actor and cultural figure in both China and the West. On the cover of his autobiography he is portrayed in the role of Kublai Khan in the 1982 Italian-American TV series Marco Polo. (Courtesy of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers)

Only a few of the correspondents who worked under Mao had a further stint in the PRC. The Globe and Mail’s John Burns arrived back in China in 1984, this time as New  York Times bureau chief. Although almost 250 cities and towns were now officially open to foreigners, Burns still wanted to see the ‘unrehearsed China’

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and in mid-1986 he attempted to ride a motorbike over 1,000 miles from the city of Taiyuan, across Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces, to Sichuan. A little short of his destination, Burns was detained with his two companions (an American lawyer and a Chinese who had recently returned from the United States) and sent back to the capital. Ten days later, while waiting to board a plane to go on holiday, he was taken into custody, held in prison for six days on suspicion of espionage, and then expelled ‘for activities incompatible with his status as a journalist’.7 For the adventurous correspondent, this was just one more brush with authority in an incident-packed life. He went on to become the NYT’s longest serving foreign correspondent, working in danger zones including Bosnia-Herzegovenia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and winning two Pulitzer prizes for international reporting. Although David Chipp, the first resident Western correspondent in the PRC, did not have another assignment in China, he maintained a strong interest in the country as editor-in-chief of Britain’s Press Association. In June 2007, the 80-year-old was invited to Beijing to help celebrate ‘five decades of cooperation’ between Reuters and Xinhua, commemorating a commercial agreement that Chipp had helped negotiate. Xinhua head Tian Congming publicly welcomed Chipp, calling him a ‘pioneer’ and saying ‘his old friends in China have not forgotten him’.8 The celebrants conveniently ignored the four-year gap in Reuters’ Peking operations between 1967 and 1971, caused first by Anthony Grey’s two-year detention and then by a delay in reopening the Peking bureau. Like many of her Foreign Ministry colleagues, the correspondents’ bête noire up to the mid-sixties, ‘Mrs Chen’ (Chen Xiuxia), had had a tough time during the Cultural Revolution, when both she and her husband Chen Hui spent several years undergoing ‘ideological reform’ and doing heavy labour at May 7th cadre schools. After being allowed to return to Peking in 1972, she held positions in various government ministries and also spent two years in Washington when Chen Hui served on the board of the World Bank. When I met the elderly former official in 2010, she had just given a speech as vice-president of the China Society for People’s Friendship Studies, whose main role is to keep alive memories of the PRC’s ‘foreign friends’ through publications and commemorative functions. For some of the foreign experts, the Mao era sojourn was an early stage of a China-oriented career. Several of the young Chinese language graduates who took the foreign expert route to the PRC in the mid-sixties became distinguished China scholars and professors, including historians Colin Mackerras and Diana Lary (née  Lainson) and translator Bill Jenner. Delia Jenner, only 21 when she returned to Britain, embarked on a Chinese degree before doing postgraduate studies and (as Delia Davin) becoming a well-known sociologist. China’s ‘opening up’ gave them and others the opportunity to spend substantial periods doing research and renewing old acquaintances. Colin maintained close relations with the First Foreign Languages

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Emeritus Professor Colin Mackerras is honoured by old colleagues and friends on 14 June 2014 for his fifty years’ association with the First Foreign Languages Institute. From left: Alyce  Mackerras, Colin, 98-year-old long-term resident Isabel Crook, Michael Crook. (Courtesy of Mackerras family

Institute (renamed the Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1994) and, following his retirement, regularly spent a semester there teaching Australian Studies. Delia and Bill, who separated a few years after their return to Britain, individually resumed their close friendship with the Yangs—a friendship that lasted until Gladys’s death in 1999 and Xianyi’s a decade later. The early students, like the early foreign experts, were a novelty when they returned home, though career opportunities for China specialists were still mainly in the areas of university teaching and research, or working with Chinese collections in a few museums and libraries. Cambridge’s ‘Red’ student Martin Bernal became a Fellow of King’s College and later moved to the United States, spending the rest of his academic career at Cornell. Although Italian Renata Pisu spent most of her working life as a correspondent for La Stampa and later La Republica, she maintained a strong interest in China and wrote a number of books following her retirement. Marianne Bastid, who had switched from foreign expert to student status after her first year in the PRC, became not just a prominent historian of modern China but a leading figure in the French intellectual establishment. In April 2014, she received the Grand Cross of the Légion d’honneur, the highest level of the award and only the fifth woman to be so honoured. The greater number of students who had gone to China in the mid-1970s found themselves in a prime position to play a role in the West’s expanding business and

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cultural relations with the PRC, as well as growing interest in China in their own countries. A database of former students, set up in 2012, included business consultants and company directors, international lawyers and cultural go-betweens, ambassadors and art museum directors, newspaper journalists and broadcasters, professors and translators. On an associated Facebook group, some of the former students posted their 1970s photos and shared memories of those strange far-off days. The Chinese person who cropped up most in their discussions was the language institute’s ‘infamous Bi Laoshi’, as one student described him. During the post-Mao years Bi had been transformed from bustling bureaucrat to prominent specialist on cross-cultural communication. Featured on the Chinese Baidu Encyclopaedia website wearing a smart Western-style suit, shirt and tie, the benign scholar looked a world removed from the cotton-clad and hassled official of the 1970s. In contrast to the former temporary residents who sometimes spent further periods in China, most of the remaining long-termers lived on there for the rest of their lives. The post-Mao years were not easy for the true believers or even for someone like Sidney Shapiro who, in his own words, was an ‘almost-communist’. Decades earlier, they had made the decision to play a role in China’s socialist transformation and to take a political stand against their own countries in an era of Cold War hostility. They had had to come to terms with cataclysmic events including the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution, as well as with swings in the political pendulum as policies and senior figures were denounced as ‘rightist’ or ‘ultra-leftist’. But what was happening now was different. The China they knew was being turned upside down: from the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States, the former imperialist enemy, to the dismantling of the socialist economy and the march towards capitalism, including the open door policy and the influx of thousands of Westerners. If publicly most continued to support Party policy, privately there were often doubts and soul-searching. David Crook revealed his personal disillusionment with the new order in his autobiography, published online by his family after his death in 2000. ‘I gradually grew critical and disillusioned . . . With the policy of opening up went a weakening of socialist moral standards. With a certain raising of living standards, went a growing gap between rich and poor.’ The final straw for Crook, though, was not the action of an economic reformist or ‘open door’ government but the brutal suppression of the student movement on 3–4 June 1989. When the movement was suppressed in blood, when the massacre was denied and followed by a witch hunt in which the victims were blamed—that was the end of my decades of adulation. I had thought that People’s China was humanity’s guide to a better world. I still acknowledge her past achievements. But her record has been tragically tarnished.9

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Isabel continued to see things a little differently. ‘I disagreed with David on Tiananmen,’ she told me. ‘I thought it was a tragedy but it was not the end of my hopes for China and its future.’10 American Sidney Rittenberg was an exception to the general pattern of spending the rest of one’s life in China. Eventually released in November 1977 after almost ten years’ imprisonment, he decided before long that the Communist Party he had known was ‘dead and gone’.11 And instead of being welcomed back into the small long-termer community, he was still blamed for inveigling some of its members into politically dangerous territory a decade earlier. In 1980 Rittenberg resettled in the United States with his second wife Wang Yulin (Wei Lin had divorced him during his first imprisonment); they were eventually joined by their four adult children. The 58-year-old ‘maverick’, as David and Nancy Milton had described him, reinvented himself as a business consultant on China and a regular media spokesperson on the PRC. Anyone viewing The Revolutionary, an American documentary on his life released in 2012, could be forgiven for thinking that he was virtually the only Westerner who had been at Yan’an and stayed on in Mao’s China. Although those who remained in China were becoming remnants of a past era, superseded by a new generation of Western residents, they still had a role to play in the eyes of the Chinese government. Once portrayed as ideological allies opposed to Western imperialism, now they were seen as a bridge between China and the West, including their governments. Landmark anniversaries continued to be publicly celebrated: in the eighties alone they included George Hatem’s fifty years’ working in China, Israel Epstein’s seventieth birthday and Rewi Alley’s ninetieth. Although David Crook refused an official celebration for his eightieth birthday in 1990 because of his disgust over Tiananmen just a year earlier, his family continued to be featured regularly in the media, extending well beyond David’s death in 2000. ‘What do you think of all the attention you get?’ I asked Isabel in 2009 after reading yet another article about the 93-year-old, only to be taken aback by her frank response. ‘To be honest, I hate it—it interferes with my work. But it’s something I can’t really avoid.’ (Isabel was working on the final stages of her book Prosperity’s Predicament, based on her anthropological research in Sichuan back in 1940–41.) The long-termers were a ‘bridge’ not only for the Chinese. Once vilified in their former countries as ‘Commos’ or ‘Reds’, in the new era they symbolized the links their countries had ostensibly long enjoyed with the PRC. When George Hatem visited the United States in 1977, the University of North Carolina bestowed its Distinguished Service Award on its alumnus. Isabel Crook became the best-known Canadian after Norman Bethune to have lived under the Chinese Communists, regularly interviewed by visiting Canadians. Unlike some of the other long-term residents, Rewi  Alley had never been completely denigrated in his home country—New Zealand had few famous international figures—but now he was extolled as a personal symbol of

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historical links between the two nations. On the same day (2 December 1987) that CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang hosted Alley’s ninetieth birthday celebrations in Beijing, a documentary on his life was screened in New Zealand, narrated by no less than Prime Minister David Lange. The long-term residents were, though, an ageing generation and only a few lived into the twenty-first century. As they died, the collective memory of living in China throughout all or much of the Mao era died with them. Now it was their adult children, labelled the xifang ‘hong erdai’ (Western ‘red second generation’) by the Chinese, who preserved that memory. Some of those who had left China in the late 1960s or early 1970s, like Michael and Carl Crook, eventually returned. Others continued to live in the West but made regular visits, sometimes to see an ageing parent who still lived there. Even after so many years, the second generation maintain a group identity among the thousands of Westerners now living in China. ‘We call ourselves the wu hu si hai’ (literally ‘five lakes and four seas’ with the general meaning of ‘all over the world’), Michael told me. ‘We’re a fairly broad self-selective group—people who spent a large part of our formative years here. Some of us live in China, others like Carma Hinton and Fred Engst come and go.’12 With Chinese as their first language, their networks have continued to be rather broader than those of their parents, including the sons and daughters of some Latin American and Southeast Asian political exiles. In 2009 it was Abhilash Sarma, whose Malay communist father P. V. Sarma had sought exile in the PRC with his family in the late 1950s, who showed me photos of a wu hu si hai gathering on his computer and mentioned Jessica Horn’s visit. The group meet periodically, sharing the common bond of memories of a different era. ‘We sing the old revolutionary songs and even use the language of those days,’ British communist Michael Shapiro’s son Roger commented. ‘Some people think we’re being serious when they hear us speaking in Chinese about bourgeois tendencies and right deviationists and ultra-leftists. But it’s a kind of in-language that we share—it’s what we all grew up with.’13 Other Westerners who lived in China during the Mao era also come together every now and again. On a chilly Saturday afternoon in November 2010, they were part of a large group that gathered at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The occasion was a memorial meeting for translator Yang Xianyi, who had died a year earlier, but it was as much a commemoration for Gladys, who had predeceased him by a decade. The meeting was chaired by prominent author and former Beida student Dr Frances Wood, who had got to know the couple during her sojourn in Peking in the mid-1970s. Speakers harked back to when they had first met Gladys and Xianyi, some almost fifty years earlier. Emeritus Professors Bill Jenner and Delia Davin, who had become the couple’s lifelong friends, spoke fondly of their lives and work. Tributes were read from other foreign experts of the time, including

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Emeritus Professors Colin  Mackerras in Australia and Diana Lary (née Lainson) in Canada. At the reception afterwards, people shared their memories of an earlier era. Paul  Crook, whose parents had been regarded by the Yangs as ‘sunshiners’, talked with Gladys’s 93-year-old sister Hilda Brown, who had harangued the Foreign Office during Gladys’s imprisonment. I chatted with Elizabeth Wright, who had met the Yangs in the 1980s when she was working at the BBC, about John Addis and Edward Youde, her ambassadors in Peking during her earlier career as a young diplomat. It was an afternoon of memories, not just of the Yangs but of an era when politics was ‘in command’, dominating daily lives as well as both unifying and dividing the Westerners who lived under Mao.

Notes

Introduction: Living under Mao 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

For stylistic reasons, I normally use quotation marks only the first time I cite Western expressions such as ‘Red China’, ‘free world’ and ‘turncoats’, as well as PRC terms including ‘foreign comrades’, ‘foreign experts’, ‘new China’, ‘imperialist’, ‘bourgeois’ and ‘masses’. Mao, ‘On New Democracy’, January 1940, Selected Works, II, 354. On the pre-revolutionary lives of expatriates and settlers, see Bickers, Britain in China and Wood, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese. Memorandum of Conversation between Anastas Mikoyan and Zhou Enlai, 1 January 1949. Cold War International History Project, Bulletin No. 16, 138. Although Britain, the Netherlands and Norway recognized the PRC in 1950, the Chinese did not accept the establishment of diplomatic relations until 1954. The Chartered Bank and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank were forced to maintain representation in Shanghai throughout the Mao era because it suited the Chinese government. Masi, China Winter, 324. Robert Bickers and Julia Lovell also discuss the ‘national humiliation’ discourse in The Scramble for China and The Opium War respectively. Addis, Valedictory Despatch, 14 June 1974, in FCO21/1228, TNA. The main Foreign Office series used in the text are FO371 and FCO21. The files are all located in TNA. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 9. This point was made to me when I presented a seminar at the Modern History Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Croft, Red Carpet to China, 278. Masi, China Winter, 138.

Chapter 1 Into Mao’s China 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Crook, Interview, 29 May 2009. I am referencing only the first time an interview or communication with a particular person is quoted in a chapter. Shapiro, Interview, 30 May 2009. Trevelyan, Worlds Apart, 30. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 102. Tzouliadis, The Forsaken, 2–15. Ma Haide, ‘Fifty Years of Medicine’, 18. Cited in Porter, The People’s Doctor, 100.

248 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

Notes to pp. 14–24 Speech by Zhou Sufei, Soong Ching-ling Foundation, Beijing, 21 May 2010. Porter, The People’s Doctor, 140. Strong and Keyssar, Right in Her Soul, 249. Cold War International History Project, Bulletin No. 16, 153. Crook, ‘Victory Days’, 18. Lum, Peking 1950–1953, 50–51, 70–74. Dikötter cites some examples in The Tragedy of Liberation, 103–27. Brady, Friend of China, 168; Chapple, Rewi Alley of China, 183–84. For example, Ralph and Nancy Lapwood, Interview, 20 July 1979. Winter, Interview, 20 March 1979; see also Finkelstein and Hooper, ‘57 Years Inside China’. Epstein, My China Eye, 237. Horn, Away with All Pests, 26. Horn, Interview, 16 July 2009. Caute, The Fellow-Travellers, 369. Nielsen’s move to China is discussed in Johnson, A Great Restlessness, 23–37. The Australian Communist Party also sent cadres to the PRC for ideological training. They were kept largely isolated from the rest of the Western community. Pollitt to Crook, 28 June 1955, CP/IND/POLL/4/5. CPGB Archives. Others who became well-known in the long-term resident community included returnee Talitha Gerlach, former GI Gerald Tannebaum who stayed on in Shanghai, Frenchwoman Denise Lebreton and Americans Marcelia Vance Yeh and Ione Kramer who accompanied their Chinese husbands to the PRC, and veteran British communist journalist Rose Smith who arrived in 1962. Andrea Koppel, ‘Leftist Americans in China Grieve Shift to Capitalism’, CNN, 1 October 1996.

Chapter 2 Identities and roles 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

Adler, Interview, 25 May 2009. Dimond, Inside China Today, 53. Strong to Coe, no date, Anna Louise Strong Papers. Dimond, Inside China Today, 48. Strong to Coe, no date, Anna Louise Strong Papers. The official exchange rate ranged from 3.4 yuan to US$1 in the 1950s to 2.46 yuan to US$1 in 1970. Chen, Sounds of the River, 112. Yang to Bill and Delia Jenner (hereafter Jenners), 9 August 1967, GYL. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 11. Ibid. Marcuse, The Peking Papers, 24. Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom, Icarus Films. See Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive; also Passin, China’s Cultural Diplomacy. Xi, Zhongguo duiwai xuanchuan shi yanjiu, 55–58. Xuanchuan, which does not have the pejorative connotations that the word ‘propaganda’ has in the West, is now sometimes translated as ‘public relations’. The Times, 8 March 1955.

Notes to pp. 24–36 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

249

Lazarick, ‘China’s Smiling Face to the World’, MA dissertation. China Reconstructs, September 1953. China Reconstructs, October 1966. After the Peace Committee was disbanded in 1966, they came under the auspices of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC). Green, A Chronicle of Small Beer, 168. de Beauvoir, The Long March, 26. Strong and Keysser, Right in Her Soul, 319. Strong, Letters from China, No. 5, 12 January 1963. Porter, The People’s Doctor, 256. Horn, Away with All Pests, 183. Green, A Chronicle of Small Beer, 180. Shapiro, Interview, 20 May 2009. Yang to Jenners, 30 March 1967, 8 January 1968, GYL. Rittenberg and Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind, 253. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 10. Isabel Crook, Interview, 29 May 2009. For example, American Political Science Review, 61, 2, 1967: 541. Winnington, Breakfast with Mao, 209. Marcuse, The Peking Papers, 118. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 10. Cooper and Liu, Grace, 188–215. Ruth Earnshaw Lo, In the Eye of the Typhoon, 232. Yang to Jenners, 1 October 1966, GYL. For example, Maud Russell, Letters from Friends in China. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 12. Chou, Silage Choppers, 438–40. Tzouliadis, The Forsaken, 48–49, 63. Epstein, My China Eye, 28. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 11. Winter, Interview, 20 March 1979. Rittenberg, Communication, 15 January 2010. Brady, Friend of China, 78. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 11. Ibid. Winter, Interview, 20 March 1979; also Piso, La Via della Cina, 44. Porter, The People’s Doctor, 218. Crook, Interview, 25 May 2009. Horn, Interview, 16 July 2009. Ying, Black Country to Red China, 178. Winnington, Breakfast with Mao, 183. Yang Zhi, Communication, 8 November 2013. Yang Ying, Communication, 11 November 2013. Li, They Walked Together, 73. Ibid., 75.

250

Notes to pp. 37–46

Chapter 3 Interactions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Crook, Interview, 29 May 2009. Shapiro, Interview, 20 May 2009. On the activities of British communists in Mao’s China, see Buchanan, East Wind, chapters 4–6 passim. Green to Pollitt, 19 December 1955, CP/IND/POLL/4/55. CPGB Archives. Green, A Chronicle of Small Beer, 184. Milton and Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 101–2. Shapiro, My China, 181–82. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 276. Yang to Jenners, 20 February 1966, GYL. Ibid., 13 March 1966. Crook, Interview, 29 May 2009. Shapiro to Gallacher, 31 July 1963, CP/IND/GALL/01/06, CPGB Archives. Winnington, Breakfast with Mao, 192. Green, A Chronicle of Small Beer, 211–12. Rittenberg and Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind, 324; Epstein, My China Eye, 288. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 12. Yang to Jenners, 17 June 1966, GYL. Chou, Silage Choppers, 340. Chinese version of dazibao in www.cnhan.com/gb/content/2003–4/14/content_151462. html, translation in Peking to FCO, 9 February 1967, FCO21/8. Nielsen, ‘Notes on the Bethune-Yenan Regiment, October 1968’, MG27, Series III C30, vol. 2. Dorise Nielsen Papers. Yang to Jenners, 23 September 1966. GYL. Chou, Silage Choppers, 348–49. Full text in Peking to FCO, 9 February 1967, FCO21/8. Ibid. See also Rittenberg and Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind, and Epstein, My China Eye. For a political analysis, see Brady, ‘Red and Expert’, 110–37. Epstein, My China Eye, 290. Nielsen, ‘Notes on the Bethune-Yenan Regiment’. Milton and Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 231. Rittenberg and Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind, 383. Milton and Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 302. Ibid., 235. Yang, White Tiger, 235. Epstein, My China Eye, 302–3. Cooper and Liu, Grace, 316. William Liu, Communication, 20 August 2009. Cooper and Liu, Grace, 322. Winter, Interview, 9 March 1979. Chou, Silage Choppers, 372–73. Jessica Horn, Interview, 16 July 2009. Epstein, My China Eye, 311–12.

Notes to pp. 46–59

251

42. Li Hui, They Walked Together, 44. 43. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 12. 44. Comment by Zhou Enlai at reception held on 8 March 1973, cited in Milton and Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 371–72. 45. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 13. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., chapter 11. 49. Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation; Chang and Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story.

Chapter 4 Choosing China 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

For an oral history of the Korean War POWs, see Carlson, Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War. Daily Worker, 26 June 1955. Information based on Pasley, 22 Stayed. New York Times, 28 January 1954; Scholastic, 12 May 1954. Pasley, 22 Stayed, 207. Cunningham, No Mercy, No Leniency, 8. Adams, An American Dream, 56. Wills, Turncoat, 55. Condron, Interview Imperial War Museum, Reel 6. Hawkins, The Mike Wallace Interview, 23 June 1957 Condron, Interview Imperial War Museum, Reel 6. Adams, An American Dream, 66. Kinkead, Why They Collaborated, 17. Cunningham, No Mercy, No Leniency, 160. Adams, An American Dream, 63; New York Times, 11 July 1955. Cunningham, No Mercy, No Leniency,160. Statement in film They Chose China. Adams, An American Dream, 66. Daily Express, 15 October 1962. Wills, Turncoat, 62. NCNA, Kaesong, 24 September, 1953, in SCMP 657, 25 September 1953. Wills, Turncoat, 75. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 79. Adams, An American Dream, 73. Wills, Turncoat, 78, 81. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 82. Cameron, Mandarin Red, 322. Ibid., 323. Domenach, The Origins of the Great Leap Forward. Wills, Turncoat, 123. Ministry of Public Security to Shandong Provincial Public Security Bureau, 18 March 1959, 111–00289–01, MFA.

252 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Notes to pp. 59–70 Daily Express, 19 October 1962. Daily Express, 17 October 1962; Look, 22 February 1966, 90. Wills, Turncoat, 93. Ibid., 102. Leijon, Interview, 27 March 2008. Wills, Turncoat, 85. Winnington, Breakfast with Mao, 196. Adams, An American Dream, 101. Ibid., 99. Adams, An American Dream, 18. Ibid., 104. British Consulate-General, Shanghai, to British Embassy [sic] Peking, 13, 24 June, 15 October 1958. FO371/133455. Wills, Turncoat, 142. Ibid., 106. Daily Express, 16 October 1962. Ibid., 87. Peking to FO, 28 August 1959, FO 371/115161. Condron, Interview Imperial War Museum, reel 8. Daily Express, 16 October 1962. Winnington, Breakfast with Mao, 183. Payne, Eyewitness, 287–88. Rose Xiong was the daughter of reformist politician Xiong Xiling [Hsiung Hsi-ling] who had served briefly as premier in the government of China’s first president, Yuan Shikai.

Chapter 5 Disenchantment 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Adams, video footage in They Chose China. Wills, Turncoat, 72–73. Washington Post, 19 June 1955. NCNA, Peking, 18 June 1955, enc. in FO371/115182. Ibid. Daily Worker, 20 June 1955. NCNA, Peking, 1 July 1955, enc. In FO371/115162. Luo Ruiqing to Zhou Enlai, 2 September 1955, 111–00063–06, MFA. Ibid. Ibid. New York Times, 9 November 1955. FO to Peking, 13 January 1961, ADM/27482, TNA. Red Cross Workgroup to Ministry of Public Security, Red Cross, and Foreign Affairs Office of the State Council, 10 July 1963, 111–00488–01, MFA. Wills, Turncoat, 143. Red Cross Workgroup to Foreign Affairs Office of the State Council, 24 July 1963, 111–00488–01, MFA. Yang to Jenners, 10 September 1967, GYL. Wills, Turncoat, 154–55. Adams, An American Dream, 105.

Notes to pp. 70–84 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Ibid., 108. Yang to Jenners, 7 April 1966, GYL. Adams, An American Dream, 108. Ibid. New York Times, 11 July 1955; Chicago Daily Tribune, 13 July 1955; Newsweek 18 July 1955. Wills, Turncoat, 2. Look, 8 February 1966, 77–80, 82–83; 22 February 1966, 84–88, 92–94. Wills, Turncoat, 1. Ibid., 166. Look, 8 February 1966, 73. Adams, An American Dream, 110. Description on Amazon website. Daily Express, 12 October 1962. Adams, An American Dream, 128. Condron, Interview Imperial War Museum, Reel 9. Time, 2 June 1961. Adams, An American Dream, 138. Ibid. Leijon, Interview, 27 March 2008. Condron to Burchett, 6 February 1969, Wilfred Burchett Papers. Yang to Jenners, 5 June 1967, GYL. Yang to Jenners, 7 January 1968, GYL. Cited in Carlson, Remembered Prisoners, 200. Veneris, Interview with Chinese television in They Chose China. Ibid. Personal communication from friend of Adams in Jinan, 26 October 2012. Sendzikas, ‘Review: They Chose China’, 82–83. Intner, ‘They Chose China’, 1 November 2006. ‘In case you missed it: They chose China’, The China Beat, 16 January 2008.

Chapter 6 ‘The world within’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

253

Borthwick, ‘Isolation and Integration’, 37. Varè, Laughing Diplomat, 86. Trevelyan, Worlds Apart, 29. Nossal, Dateline—Peking, 29. See Hooper, China Stands Up, 70–72. Sergei, Hong Kong, to Canberra, 16 May 1975, A1838/324, NAA. Addis to Susan Addis, 15 November 1950, JAP 6/37. Manac’h, La Face Cachée du Monde, 11–12. Hurd, Memoirs, 105. Holdridge, Crossing the Divide, 123. Panikkar, In Two Chinas, 77. Cradock, Experiences of China, 22–23. Stevenson to Ewart, 28 September 1959, WSP. Janet Donald, ‘The Hole in the Wall’, DSWA Newsletter, April 1967, 20–21. Youde, Interview, 13 July 2007.

254 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Notes to pp. 84–94 Campbell, Colleagues and Friends, 39. Peking to FCO, 30 November 1973, FCO21/1015. Peking to Canberra, 25 October 1973, A1838/332 Part 3, NAA. Hurd, Memoirs, 105. Remy, La Chine, 168. Agremy wrote under the pen name of Pierre-Jean Remy. Rana, ‘A Young Indian Diplomat in China’, 450. Stevenson to Ewart, 11 February 1961, WSP. Chey, ‘Fangcaodi Primary School, Beijing’, 17–23. Manac’h, La Face Cachée du Monde, 12. Addis to Robina Addis, 26 August 1955, JAP 41/7. Addis to Robina Addis, 17 March 1956, JAP 41/7. Hickman, Daughters of Britannia, 90–91, 96–102. Trevelyan, Worlds Apart, 26–27. Ibid., 27. Addis to Robina Addis, 15 September 1955, JAP 41/7. Leijon, Interview, 27 March 2008. Brand, Interview, 27 March 2008. Scott, Peking Diary, 10. WORK 10/757, TNA. Bush, China Diary, 376. Ibid., 92. Sharp, Communication, 19 December 2007. Bruce, Window on the Forbidden City, 163. On the US marines issue, see ibid., especially 283–85, 462–66. Bush, China Diary, 189. Bruce, Window on the Forbidden City, 324. Bush, China Diary, 157. Cradock, Experiences of China, 35. Diplomatic Service Wives Association Newsletter, July 1966, 37. The Times, 6 December 1974. Platt, China Boys, 207. Bruce to Kissinger, 29 December 1973, in Bruce, Window on the Forbidden City, 398. Platt, China Boys, 214. O’Neill to FO, 30 November 1955, FO371/115169; O’Neill to FO, 22 May 1957, FO371/127403. Report enc. in Peking to FO, 24 July 1957, FO371/127403. Peter Henderson, ‘Post Liaison Visit—Peking’, 3 November 1976, A1838 3107/38/1/4 Part 1, NAA. McCullough, Stranger in China, 33. Walden, Lucky George, 117.

Chapter 7 Licensed contacts and beyond 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Trevelyan, Worlds Apart, 114–15. Stevenson to Ewart, 18 December 1960, WSP. Quoted in Edwards, True Brits, 135. Manac’h, La Chine, 189–90. Addis to Robin Addis, 23 December 1973, JAP 11/83.

Notes to pp. 94–104 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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Stein, Le Long Mai de Mao, 45. Wilson, BDOHP, 13. Wilson to FO, 13 March 1958, FO371/133386. Stevenson to Ewart, 7 November 1959, WSP. Yang, White Tiger, 210. Elliott to FO, 9 October 1957, FO371/127407. Ibid. Yang, White Tiger, 212. Ibid., 224. Youde to Davies, 11 May 1973, FCO 21/1089. Peters to FO, 22 June 1966, FO371/186980. Donald to FO, 24 August 1966, FO371/186981. Ibid. Donald to FO, 6 October 1966, FO371/186983. Ying and Conceison, Voices Carry, 52. Ibid., 201n15. Richard Evans, 14 May 1973, note on Youde to Davies, 11 May 1973, FCO 21/1089. Youde, Interview, 13 July 2007. Cradock to FO, 14 September 1966, FO371/187045. Remy, La Chine, 145. Curran to FCO, 17 December 1968, FCO21/514; Paye to Couve de Murville, 28 September 1966, Paris, AO, Chine 1956–67, Vol. 383, MAE. Chen to Addis, 5 May 1957, JAP 7/42. The letters are all in this folder. Addis to Robina Addis, 16 March 1956, JAP 11/41. Chen to Addis, 1 February 1958; 5 March 1958. Chen to Addis, 26 June 1957. Chen to Addis, 28 July 1957. Chen to Addis, 1 May 1958. Chen to Addis, 27 August 1959. Chen to Addis, 11 May 1959. Chen to Addis, 20 July 1959. Chen to Addis, 28 March 1960. Addis to Chief Clerk, FO, 27 October 1960, JAP 10/66. Peking to FCO, 19 September 1968, FCO21/38. Addis to Robina Addis, 1 May 1972, JAP 11/82. John Addis to Robina Addis, 8 April 1973, in ibid. Libération, 8 July 1983. Bastid, Interview, 1 April 2008. Remy, La Chine, 168. Ibid., 157. Wadler, Liaison, 38. Brand, Interview, 27 March 2008. Cited in Wadler, Liaison, 7. Wadler, Communication, 8 March 2008. People, 8 August 1988.

256

Notes to pp. 105–114

Chapter 8 Cold War diplomacy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Hong Kong to Canberra, 16 May 1975, A1838/324, NAA. Cradock, Experiences of China, 102. Garside, Coming Alive, 3. Weston, BDOHP, 11. Bruce, Window, 366. Bush, China Diary, 104, 210. John Addis, Valedictory Despatch, 14 June 1974, FCO21/1228. Addis, Interview, 4 September 1979. Mackerras, Western Images of China, 193–95. FitzGerald, Comrade Ambassador, 104. Rowland, Acting Secretary, to FitzGerald, Peking, 12 September 1975; FitzGerald to Rowland, 14 October 1975. A1838 3107/38/1/4. Pt. 1, ANA. Bush, China Diary, p. 75. Ibid., 147, note 7. Boyd, BDOHP, 11. Denson, 18 November 1971, FCO21/859. Bruce, Window on the Forbidden City, 158; FitzGerald, ‘Introduction’, ii. Manac’h, La Chine, 28 April 1971, 374. Sydney Morning Herald, 18 October 1974. Addis to Robina Addis, 24 September 1972, JAP 11/82; The Times, 22 September 1972. Bruce, Window, 169. Ibid., 173. ‘Schedule of Visit’, Nantes, Series B, File 126, MAE. Manac’h, Une Terre Traversée, 475. Ibid., 515. Lord, ‘Nixon Goes to China’. FitzGerald to Bruce, cited in Bruce, Window, 340. Peking to Canberra, 2 May 1976, A1209, 1976/364 Part 1, NAA. Chipp, Interview, 7 June 2008. Wilson to FO, 19 July 1958, FO371/133387. Wilson, BDOHP, 15. Paye to MAE, 2 February 1967, Paris, AO, Chine 1956–67, Vol. 390, MAE. Ibid. Renmin ribao, 2 February 1967; also Pékin Information, 13 February 1967. Brand, Interview, 27 March 2008. Paye to MAE, 10, 11 February 1967, Paris, AO, Chine 1956–67, Vol.390, MAE. On the overall confrontation, see Bickers and Yep, May Days in Hong Kong. Hopson to FCO, 16 May 1967, FCO21/33. Hopson to FCO, 22 May 1967, ibid. Hewitt to Hopson, 29 June 1967, ibid. Peking to FCO, 7 June 1967, ibid. Peking to FCO, 7, 9 June 1967, ibid. The Times, 23 August 1967. Cradock, Experiences of China, 34. de la Mere to Peking, 15 June 1967; Hopson to de la Mere,17 June 1967, FCO 21/33.

Notes to pp. 115–129

257

45. Hopson to FCO, 15 July 1967, FCO21/33; internal memoranda 27 July, 17 August 1967. FCO21/34. 46. Grey, Hostage in Peking, 99–108. 47. On the Foreign Ministry during the Cultural Revolution, see Liu, Chinese Ambassadors, 110–15. 48. Peking Review, 25 August 1967, 22. 49. Ibid., 62. 50. Hopson to FCO, 31 August 1967, FCO21/34. 51. Weston, ‘Peking Rap’. In Weston, Chasing the Hoopoe, 96–98. 52. Hopson to FCO, 31 August 1967, FCO21/34. 53. Cradock, Experiences of China, 66. 54. Enclosure in Hopson to FCO, 14 September 1967, FCO21/34. 55. Appleyard to FCO, 25 August 1967, FCO21/12. 56. Cradock to FCO, 7 September 1967. FCO21/34. 57. The Times, 23 August 1967. 58. Weston, Communication, 4 August 2015. 59. The Times, 1 January 1968. 60. On the conflicting views of Hopson and Hong Kong Governor Sir David Trench, see Yep, ‘The 1967 Riots in Hong Kong’. 61. Cradock, Experiences of China, 78. 62. Peking to FCO, 30 August 1967, FCO21/64. Mark, ‘Hostage Diplomacy’, provides a detailed diplomatic history of the events. 63. Cradock to FCO, 16 April 1968, FCO21/37. 64. Cradock to FCO, 12 August 1968, FCO 21/69; The Times, 13 August 1968. 65. The Times, 15 August 1968. 66. Walden, Lucky George, 130. 67. The Times, 28 May 1971. 68. The Times, 15 March 1972. 69. Independent, 17 August 1997. 70. Weston, Peking Rap.

Chapter 9 ‘Our life and hard times’ 1. 2. 3. 4.

Bonavia, Seeing Red, 26–27. FitzGerald, ‘Introduction’, ii. Bodde, Peking Diary, 120. French (Through the Looking Glass, 267–68) gives the inaccurate impression that Reuters and AFP were permitted to continue operating in the early years of the PRC and that Jacques Marcuse (AFP) was there continuously until the 1960s. 5. Chipp, Interview, 7 June 2008. 6. Huteau and Ullmann, AFP, 180. 7. Bonavia, quoted in English, ‘China Watching’, 238. 8. Rana, ‘A Young Indian Diplomat in China in the 1960s and 1970s’, 48. 9. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 November 1973. 10. Taylor, Reporter in Red China, 1. 11. Nossal, Dateline—Peking, 111. 12. Ibid., 65.

258 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Notes to pp. 129–142 Taylor, Reporter in Red China, 67. Webster, ‘China Takes Its Place’, Montreal Gazette, 4 October 2009. Nigel Wade, personal manuscript. Hannerz, Foreign News, 169. Mao Zedong, ‘A Talk to the Editorial Staff of the Shansi–Suiyuan Daily, April 2, 1948’. Selected Works, IV, 242. Taylor, Reporter in Red China, 4. Nossal, Dateline—Peking, 25. Taylor, Reporter in Red China, 8. Ibid., 9. Preston, ‘Resident correspondent in Beijing’, 2. Nossal, Dateline—Peking,148. Chen, Interview, 23 May 2010. Berger, Communication, 29 April 2009. Jacquet-Francillon, Chine à Huis Clos, 173. McCullough, Stranger in China, 115. Preston, ‘Resident Correspondent in Beijing’, 13. Jones, Interview with Hazel de Berg. Marcuse, Peking Papers, 8. Preston, ‘Resident Correspondent in Beijing’, 11. Flipo, Communication, 24 January 2011. Chipp, Interview, 7 June 2008; also Chipp, Mao’s Toe, 137–46. Marcuse, Peking Papers, 55. Whyte, Champagne and Meatballs, 77. Ibid. Winnington, Breakfast with Mao, 188–89. Berger, personal manuscript. Pringle, ‘Thirty Years of Watching’, New York Times, 6 January 2009. Leijonhufvud, ‘Reporter i undrens Kina’, Dagens Nyhter, 10 February 2008. Reuters report in New York Times, 29 July 1972. Teiwes, The End of the Maoist Era, 26–33. Griffiths, Communication, 29 December 2010; New York Times, 13 February 1976. Bassow, The Moscow Correspondents, 124. Bonavia, Seeing Red, 37–38.

Chapter 10 The web of relationships 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Hannerz, Foreign News, 157. Berger, Communication, 29 April 2009. Sharp, Communication, 19 December 2007. Taylor, Reporter in Red China, 5. Kellett-Long, Interview, 5 May 2009. McCullough, Stranger in China, 120. Chipp, Interview, 7 June 2008. Bonavia, Seeing Red, 148–52. Ibid., 149. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, 49.

Notes to pp. 142–153 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Bonavia, Communication, 1 April 2015. Griffiths, Communication, 1 December 2010. Preston, Communication, 15 December 2010. Bonavia, Seeing Red, 152. Peking to FCO, 10 October 1976, FCO34/326. Daily Telegraph, 12 October 1976. Daily Telegraph, 13 October 1976. Preston, ‘Resident Correspondent in Beijing’, 4. Griffiths, Communication, 1 December 2010. Wade, Communication, 1 December 2010. Wade, personal manuscript. Jones, Interview with Hazel de Berg. McCullough, Stranger in China, 162. Grey, Hostage in Peking, 53. Donald to FO, 15 August 1966, FO371/186981. Evans to Bollard, 12 July 1972, FCO 26/1192. Bruce, Window on the Forbidden City, 322. Preston, ‘Resident Correspondent in Beijing’, 5. See Fitzgerald, ‘Australia–China relations 1976’. Wade, Communication, 1 December 2010. Australian Financial Review, 23 June 1976. National Times, 5–10 July 1976. Grey, The Hostage Handbook, 12. Grey, Hostage in Peking, 99–132. Grey, The Hostage Handbook, 147. Ibid., 219. Ibid., 315. Grey, ‘Ming Ming, Me, and Cat-Strangler Chi’, in Frontlines, 133. Ibid., 134.

Chapter 11 ‘Dateline—Peking’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Nossal, Dateline—Peking, 182. Chen, Interview, 23 May 2010. Chipp, Interview, 7 June 2008. Nossal, Dateline—Peking, 68. Ibid. For example, Ogden Standard-Examiner, 22 July 1958. Renmin ribao, 24 July 1958. Huteau and Ullmann, AFP, 180. Peking to FO, 21 April 1959, FO371/141328. Read, The Power of News, 380. Farquhar to Mason, cited in ibid., 380. Nossal, Dateline—Peking, 169. AFP despatch in New York Times, 8 May 1968. Renmin ribao, 10 May 1968. Flipo, Communication, 11 January 2011.

259

260 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Notes to pp. 154–169 New York Times, 10 February 1974. Jones, Interview with Hazel de Berg; Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February 1974. Canberra Times, 26 February 1974. Renmin ribao, 30 January 1974. Sydney Morning Herald, 31 May 1974. Age, 8 June 1974. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 June 1974; Peking to Canberra, 12 June 1974, A1209 1974/6455, NAA. Canberra to Peking, 12 June 1974, ibid. Sydney Morning Herald, 13 June 1974. Margaret Jones, Interview with Hazel de Berg. Bonavia, Seeing Red, 127. Preston, ‘Resident Correspondent in Beijing’, 15. Cited by English, ‘China-Watching’, 236. Bush, China Diary, 156. Ibid., 227. Burns, Interview with C-SPAN, 2 February 2007. Time, 4 March 1974. New York Times, 26 July 1976. Time, 12 December 1977. New York Times, 11, 12, 13 October 1977. Time, 12 December 1977. Ibid. Quoted in Helene Chung, ‘China: The History of ABC Foreign Reporting’.

Chapter 12 Helping China? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Mackerras and Hunter, China Observed, 1. The oft-cited expression Zhongxue wei ti, Xixue wei yong. Spence, To Change China, 290, 292. Mackerras and Hunter, China Observed, 176. Wang, China and the World since 1949, 34. See also Shen, Sulian zhuanjia zai Zhongguo. For the sake of brevity, I am continuing to refer to the First Foreign Languages Institute as the ‘Foreign Languages Institute’. Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation, China Quarterly, 207. Bastid-Brugiere, Interview, 1 April 2008. Ciantar, Mille Jours à Pékin, i–ii. Gordon, Freedom Is a Word, 30. Sophia and Frida Knight, Papers. Seltman, What’s Left, What’s Right. 101. Milton and Milton, The Wind Will not Subside, 8. Ciantar, Mille Jours à Pékin, i. Mackerras and Hunter, China Observed, 172. Gordon, Freedom Is a Word, 35. Lainson, ‘Teaching English in Peking’. Ciantar, Mille Jours à Pékin, 13. Ibid., 142.

Notes to pp. 169–179

261

20. Knight, Window on Shanghai, 26. 21. Ibid., 168. 22. ‘Guowuyuan waiguo zhuanjia ju ji zhongyang youguan bumen guanyu waiguo zhuanjia wenti de wenjian’, 015-001-00457, 1 March 1964 and 21 December 1965. Beijing Municipal Archives. 23. Ibid. 24. Gordon Freedom Is a Word, 36. 25. Ibid., 35, 36. 26. Jenner, Letters from Peking, 7. 27. Ibid., 76. 28. Davin (formerly Jenner), ‘Swinging Sixties in China’, 74. 29. Gordon, Freedom Is a Word, 40. 30. Russell, Letters from Friends in China, 6. 31. Mackerras and Hunter, China Observed, 65. 32. Ibid., 62. 33. Ibid., 63. 34. Lary, ‘Teaching English in China’, 11. 35. Mackerras and Hunter, China Observed, 188. 36. Bastid-Brugierre, Interview, 1 April 2008. 37. Milton and Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 52. 38. Lary, ‘Teaching English in China’, 10. 39. Ibid., 1. 40. Faggetter, ‘Living the Revolution’, 50. 41. Gordon, Freedom Is a Word, 38, 53–54. 42. Ibid., 54. 43. Ciantar, Mille Jours à Pékin, 362. 44. Pékin Information, 26 January 1968. 45. Ciantar, Mille Jours à Pékin, 362. 46. Jenner, ‘Translating in Peking’, 88. 47. Ibid., 99. 48. Jenner, trans. and introduction, From Emperor to Citizen, xii. 49. Mackerras, Communication, 18 July 2008. 50. Gordon, Freedom Is a Word, 54. 51. Ibid., 55 52. Independent, 1 December 1999. 53. Yang to Jenners, 16 May 1966, GYL. 54. Ibid., 5 July 1966, GYL. 55. Ibid., 13 March 1966. 56. Ibid., 7 April 1966.

Chapter 13 Personal and political dynamics 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Masi, Peking Winter, 49. Ibid., 352. Ibid. Mackerras, Communication, 8 July 2008. The English translation officially used in China of Kuaguo houhou de da hong men.

262 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Notes to pp. ###–### Jenner, ‘Translating in Peking’, 87. Lary (née Lainson), ‘Teaching English in China’, 5. Lainson, ‘Teaching English in Peking’, 11. Jenner, Letters from Peking, 16. Ye, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, 344. Ibid., 344–45. Dirgham (née Day), Communication, 17 December 2013. Ibid. FitzGerald to Canberra, 7 August 1976, A1209, 1977/249 Part 1, NAA. Ibid. Day to Hua, 28 November 1976, enclosure in Little to Canberra, 29 December 1976, ibid. Gerovich to Canberra, 24 February 1977, ibid. Peking to Canberra, 24 October 1977, A1209, 1977/249 Part 2, NAA. Alan Day to Peacock, Minister for Foreign Affairs, 19 May 1978. A1838, 3107/38/8/6/1 Part 1, NAA. Mackerras and Hunter, China Observed, 173. Knight, Window on Shanghai, 50. Ibid., 114. Milton and Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 134. Gordon, Freedom Is a Word, 68. Mackerras, Oral history interview by Chi-yu Shih,14 August 2009. Yang to Jenners, 17 June 1966, GYL. Gordon, Freedom Is a Word, 101. Yang to Jenners, 10 September 1967, GYL. Ciantar, Mille Jours à Pékin, 301–3. Ibid., 236. Gordon, Freedom Is a Word, 103. McCullough, Stranger in China, 123. Gordon, Freedom Is a Word, 172. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 262. Ibid., 328. Ibid., 348. Ibid. Ciantar, Mille Jours à Pékin, 449–50. Milton and Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 371. See Mackerras, Western Images of China, 193–98. Wolin, The Wind from the East, 125. First published in French as Deuxième Retour de Chine. Richard Baum, China Watcher, 239. First published in Italian as Per Cina. Masi, Peking Winter, x. Marsouin and Marsouin, Nous Avons Enseigné en Chine Populaire, 8–9. Far Eastern Economic Review, 16 July 1976. Seltman, What’s Left, What’s Right, 199–200.

Notes to pp. 179–207 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

263

Ibid., 202. Ibid., 191. Morning Star, 30 June 2014. Far Eastern Economic Review, 8, 15, 22 August 1968. Dagongbao (Hong Kong), 26 September 1968. Jenner, ‘Translating in Peking’, 95. Masi, China Winter, 357.

Chapter 14 Studying, Maoist style 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Masi, ‘Beida 1957–1958’, 10. Leijon, Interview, 27 March 2008. Bernal, Communication, 6 April 2008. Bonavia, Seeing Red, 9. Lindqvist, Communication, 3 July 2008. Peking to FO, 16 April 1958, FO371/133465. Paye to MAE, 12 September 1964, AO, Chine 1956–67, vol. 383, MAE. Flipo, Communication, 23 January 2011. Manac’h, La Chine, 544. Kaikkonen, Interview, 9 August 2008. Goldman, ‘The Experience of Foreign Students in China’, 135. Lindqvist, China in Crisis, 23. Wood, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking, 119. Henderson, ‘Post Liaison Visit, Peking’, 3 November 1976, A1838 3107/38/1/4 Part 1, NAA. Hilton, Report to British Council, 19 January 1974, in FCO34/286. Lamouroux, Interview, 19 June 2009. Heatley, Report to British Council, 27 December 1973, in FCO34/286. Ibid. Borthwick, ‘Isolation and Integration’, 33. Goldman, ‘The Experience of Foreign Students in China’, 139. McComas (formerly Ian) Taylor, Communication, 27 July 2015. Hevi, An African Student in China, 92. The Times, 3 January 1973. Lindqvist, China in Crisis, 20. Chinese Reader, Part III, 74–82. Chinese Reader, Part IV, 1–13. Seymour, report to British Council, 14 October 1974, in FCO34/326. Lindqvist, Communication, 3 July 2008. Bastid-Brugierre, Interview, 1 April 2008. Brook and Wagner, ‘The Teaching of History to Foreign Students at Peking University’, 599. Schram, Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed, 210. Isabel Hilton, ‘China’. McComas Taylor, Communication, 27 July 2015. Borthwick, ‘Isolation and Integration’, 38. Charis Dunn, Communication, 18 August 2015.

264

Notes to pp. 208–221

Chapter 15 Breaking down the barriers? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Borthwick, ‘Isolation and Integration’, 32. Deans, Communication, 18 August 2015. Da Chen, Sounds of the River, 29. Ibid., 27. Pisu, La Via della Cina, 74. Ibid., 73–74. Leijon, Interview, 7 June 2008. Ye, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, 282–83. Borthwick, ‘Isolation and Integration’, 35. Kahn-Ackermann, China, 95. See ‘Portrait of a Chinese Room-mate’ in Hooper, Inside Peking, 18–35. Inside Peking was published only three years after the end of the Mao era and I use the same pseudonyms here for my two roommates. Borthwick, ‘Isolation and Integration’, 35. Heatley, report to British Council, 27 December 1973, in FCO34/286. Yue, To the Storm, 337–38. Liang, Life in Shanghai and Beijing, 53. Ibid., 68. Pisu, La Via della Cina, 72. Pierquin, ‘Recontre avec Odile Pierquin’, 1 March 2005. Ibid. Seymour, report to British Council, 14 October 1974, in FCO34/326. Hilton, ‘China’. Ibid. Hilton, ‘Struggling with Antonioni’. Morgan to FCO, 10 April 1974, FCO34/286. Pisu, La Via della Cina, 43. Ibid., 31. Goldman, Communication, 18 March 2011. Goldman, ‘The Experience of Foreign Students in China’, 139. Felber, ‘China and the Claim for Democracy’, 122. Goldman, Communication, 18 March 2011. Borthwick, ‘Isolation and Integration’, p. 32. Quoted in Seymour, report to British Council, 14 October 1974, in FCO34/326. Anon., Communication, 18 August 2015. Wood, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking, 188–89. Hevi, An African Student in China, 104–5. Francoise Derre, Communication, 19 August 2015. Minden, Communication, 10 October 2008. Morgan to FCO, 5 September 1972. FCO21/984. Wong, Red China Blues, 45. Wong, Chinese Whispers. Kahn-Ackermann, China, 10–11. Walden, Lucky George, 3–24. Lindqvist, Communication, 3 September 2008.

Notes to pp. 221–233

265

44. 45. 46. 47.

Hilton, Report to British Council, 19 January 1974, in FCO34/286. Morgan to FCO, 10 April 1974, FCO34/286. Ibid. Manac’h to MAE, 8 March 1974, 19 June 1974, Nantes, Series B, File 154, MAE; Evans, ‘The China-Canada Student Exchange’, 99. 48. McComas Taylor, Communication, 27 July 2015.

Chapter 16 Across divides 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Masi, China Winter, 138. Linquist, China in Crisis, 22. Peking to Canberra, 9 November 1973. A1838, 2107/38/8/4 Part 1, NAA. Flipo, Communication, 24 January 2011. Bastid-Brugierre, Interview, 1 April 2008. Hilton, 19 January 1974, in FCO34/286. Heatley, 27 December 1973, ibid. March, note on file, 6 May 1974, ibid. Morgan to FCO, 26 June 1974, ibid. Ibid. Morgan to FCO, 8 July 1974, ibid. Morgan to FCO, 26 June 1974, ibid. Hull to Morgan, Peking, 7 August 1974, ibid. Masi, China Winter, 268. Brand, Interview, 27 March 2008. Evans, ‘The China-Canada Student Exchange’, 95. Minden, Communication, 10 October 2008. Heatley, 27 December 1973, in FO34/286. Mackerras, Communication, 18 July 2008. Jenner, Interview, 14 April 1986. Anon, Communication, 10 December 2009. Masi, China Winter, 30. Globe and Mail, 22 November 1973. Globe and Mail, 25 April 1974. Ibid. Globe and Mail, 26 April 1974. Globe and Mail, 11 May 1974. Evans,’ The China-Canada Student Exchange’, 100. Anon, Communication, 10 November 2010. Flipo, Communication, 24 January 2011. Peking to British Embassy, Warsaw, 14 January 1959, FO371/143293. Goldman, Communication, 18 March 2011. Long-time communist Stanislaw Flato was a Polish army intelligence officer and later a diplomat. Stein, Le Long Mai de Mao, 168. Appleyard to FCO, 20, 24 May 1967, FCO21/11. Whitney to FCO, 21 February 1967, FCO21/9; 26 April 1967, FCO21/10; 13 June 1967, FCO21/11. Whitney to FCO, 20 September 1967, FCO 21/12.

266 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Notes to pp. 233–245 Appleyard to FCO, 1 March 1967, FCO21/9. Far Eastern Economic Review, 20, 27 April, 4, 11, 18 May 1967. Wood, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking, 121. Hopson to FCO, 7 June 1967, FCO21/33. Chou, Silage Choppers, 368. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 10. Allan to FCO, 24 May 1969, FCO21/502. Allan to FCO, 13 April 1969, ibid. New York Times, 17 March 1972. New York Times, 15 July 1976. Record of meeting on 30 April 1969, FCO21/497. Allan to FCO, 18 January 1971, FCO21/850. Addis to FCO, 22 July 1972, FCO21/1012. Addis to Robina Addis, 1 May 1972, JAP 82/11.

Chapter 17 After Mao 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

National Bureau of Statistics of China, 29 April 2011. Jeffreys and Wang, ‘The Rise of China-Foreign Marriage in Mainland China’, 355. Guardian, 19 June 2012. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 September 2014. Milton and Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 46. http://beijing.usembassy-china.org.cn/about-us.html. New York Times, 18, 21, 23 July 1986; Burns, ‘A Reporter’s Odyssey in Unseen China’, New York Times, 8 February 1987. Chipp, Interview, 7 June 2008. Crook, Hampstead Heath, chapter 17. Crook, Interview, 29 May 2009. Rittenberg and Bennett, The Man Who Stayed Behind, 438. Crook, Interview, 29 May 2009. Shapiro, Interview, 3 June 2009.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. A19 (Prisoner of War Intelligence), 54 AAP (Australian Associated Press), 154 ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 154–55, 238. See also Paul Raffaele Adams, Clarence, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 62–63, 65, 71, 75; return to United States, 70, 72, 73 Adams, Della, 70, 71, 73, 75 Adams, Howard, 52, 59, 69, 70, 74, 75 Adams, Louis, 70 Addis, Charles, 99 Addis, John, 4, 84, 86, 94, 95, 106, 107, 236, 246; as British ambassador, 100, 109, 120, 236; China career 81–82; letters from John Chen, 98–101 Addis, Robina, 86, 94, 101, 109, 236 Addis, Susan, 81 Adler, Dorothy, 21 Adler, Pat, 21, 22, 34, 234 Adler, Solomon (Sol), 12, 21, 26, 28, 29, 166 AFP (Agence France-Presse), 1, 103, 136; competition, 143; opens Peking bureau, 126; withdrawal of correspondent, 151–52, 153. See also Flipo, René; Jacquet-Francillon, Jacques; Locquin, Jacques; Marcuse, Jacques; Sablon, Jean Leclerc du; Ullman, Bernard; Vincent, Jean Africa, 81, 82, 83, 106, 145, 165, 198, 218 African-Americans, 52, 53 African students, 63, 70, 89, 151, 199, 201–2, 209, 218–19 Algeria, 101, 165, 167

Alley, Rewi, 17, 18, 22, 29, 31, 34, 41, 134, 244–45; citizenship, 33; Cultural Revolution and, 40, 41; friendship with George Hatem, 37; Rittenberg’s opinion of, 38; role, 25 American residents in China, 80; diplomats, 80, 82, 83, 89, 91, 107, 109–10, 228, 239; foreign comrades, 1, 11, 12–15, 17–18, 21, 23, 24–34, 37–38, 40, 41–47, 189, 233, 234, 235; foreign experts, 38, 41, 166, 173, 189; former presence, 11, 97; marines, 89; post-Mao era, 237, 239, 244; POW ‘turncoats’, 2, 24, 51–75. See also United States Amethyst, 82 Angremy, Jean-Pierre, 85, 98, 101 Anti-Rightist Movement, 5, 34, 96, 98, 105, 126, 135, 232 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 154, 217, 238 Appleyard, Leonard, 118, 121, 232, 233 Arab countries, 81, 106, 198, 218 Arab-Israeli War, 114 Arabs, 114, 168, 169, 198, 234 Australia: Department of Foreign Affairs, 84, 107, 147, 154, 199; embassy of, 84, 92, 105, 106, 145, 181–83, 226, 233; prime ministerial visits to China, 110, 111, 146–47; relations with China, 80, 109–11, 154–55, 158, 165, 226. See also FitzGerald, Stephen Australia-China Friendship Society, 167, 181 Australian residents in China: correspondents, 24, 126, 127, 128, 132, 134, 142,

278 145, 146–47, 154–55, 158–59, 230; diplomats, 81, 85, 88–89, 91–93, 106, 107; foreign experts, 163–64, 166–68, 174–75, 180–84, 230; students, 79, 197, 200, 205, 206–7, 218, 222, 226 Australian Financial Review, 147 Australian trade exhibition (1974), 109 Babaoshan, 11 Bai Qiu’en Daifu (Dr Norman Bethune), 29 Bai Xirong, 74, 75 Baker, Julia, 235 Bandung Conference, 126 Barnett, Joel, 109 Bassow, Whitman, 139 Bastid, Marianne, 101, 165, 167, 170, 173, 205, 226, 242 Batchelor, Claude, 55 Baudet, Philippe, 64 Baum, Richard, 190 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 33, 144, 150, 246 Beauvoir, Simone de, 25 Beidaihe, 37, 63, 74, 91 Beijing, 17, 23, 85, 155, 237, 238, 240, 241, 245. See also Peking Beijing Foreign Studies University. See Foreign Languages Institute (Peking) Beijing Language and Culture University. See Peking Language Institute Belhomme, Albert, 55 Bell, Otho, 65–66, 72 Berger, Vergil, 102, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 240 Berlin, 131, 141, 228 Bernal, J. D., 196 Bernal, Martin, 196, 217, 242 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 96, 176 Bethune, Norman, 14, 29, 244 Bethune-Yan’an Rebel Regiment, 42, 185, 186 Bhutto, Ali, 111 Bi Jiwan (Bi Laoshi), 201, 243 Blishen, Anthony, 114 Blofeld, John, 17 Bodde, Derk, 125 Bonavia, David, 91, 128, 141, 144, 146, 157, 196; and Kennedy Chem affair, 141–43;

Index on journalistic experience, 125, 127, 139, 155 Bonavia, Judy, 142, 143 Borthwick, Sally, 79, 200, 206, 207, 208, 210, 212, 218 Boursicot, Bernard, 101–4 Boyd, John, 108 Boyd, Julia, 80, 90 Brady, Anne-Marie, 4, 12, 17, 33 Brake, Ted, 20, 39, 141 Brand, Solange, 85, 87, 88, 113, 228 Bridge, Anne, 91 Britain: consulate in Shanghai, 113–14; diplomatic mission in Peking, 1, 4–6, 63, 67, 68, 80, 95, 98, 100, 109, 111–12, 114–18, 120, 142–43, 189, 199, 204, 206, 217, 220, 232–33, 239, 291; and Hong Kong, 110, 113–15, 119, 148–49, 150; Ministry of Works, 88; Press Association, 241; Red Guard attack on mission, 5, 115–21; relations with China, 3, 80, 82, 110. See also Foreign Office Britain-China Friendship Association, 166, 196 British residents in China: correspondents, 1, 125–38, 140–43, 144–47, 148–50, 152–53; diplomats, 1, 5, 80, 81–88, 90, 92, 94–101, 105–7, 109, 112–21; foreign comrades, 11, 18–20, 22–28. 30, 32–33, 35, 38–40, 43–44, 46, 48; foreign experts, 165–67, 169, 170–71, 173–77, 180, 185–89, 190–91; students, 196–97, 199–200, 207, 212, 214, 217, 218–19, 21, 226–28, 229–31. See also Condron, Andrew British Council, 196, 199, 204, 226, 228 Broadcasting Institute (Peking), 171 Broadway Mansions. See Shanghai Mansions Brook, Timothy, 206 Brown, Hilda, 36, 236, 246 Broyelle, Claudie, 167, 189, 190 Broyelle, Jacques, 190 Bruce, David, 82, 89, 90, 106, 107, 108, 109, 157; relations with Washington, 107–8, 146 Bryan, Derek, 107

Index Burchett, Wilfred, 24, 55, 56, 73 Burmese residents in China, 86 Burns, John, 154, 157–58, 230–31, 235, 240–41 Bush, Barbara, 89, 157 Bush, George H. W., 82, 90, 106, 157, 239; informal style, 88, 89; relations with Washington, 107–8 Bush, George W., 157, 239 business, Western, 1–2, 3, 109, 128, 237, 242–43 Butterfield & Swire, 2 Calamandrei, Franco, 125, 136 Callahan, William, 3 Cambodia, 109, 142; embassy of, 141, 143. See also Chem, Kennedy Cambridge University, 126, 163, 167, 196, 227, 242 Cameron, James, 58 Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, 5 Campbell, Alan, 84 Campbell, Alistair, 217 Canada, 246; embassy of, 81, 142, 165; prime ministerial visit to China, 110, 111; relations with China, 80, 81, 165 Canadian residents in China: correspondents, 80, 92, 126, 127, 134, 136, 145, 155–56, 157–58; diplomats, 142; foreign experts, 20, 41, 42; students, 197, 206, 218, 220, 222, 229, 230–31. See also Bethune, Norman; Crook, Isabel; Globe and Mail Canadian Tribune, 136 Capital Hospital (anti-Revisionism Hospital), 85, 188 Carlson, Lewis, 71 Cartier, Michel, 196 Caute, David, 20 CCP (Chinese Communist Party), 4, 5, 6, 18, 38, 40, 41, 43, 46, 56, 130, 174, 201, 206, 238; Westerners and, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 30, 39, 47, 244. See also Chinese government policies Centro Cina, 195 ‘century of national humiliation’, 3, 108, 238

279 Chancellor, Christopher, 153 Chandler, Betty, 13, 61 Chang, Jung, 4, 22, 48 Chang, Wilson, 97, 98, 99 Chayet, Claude, 240 Chem, Kennedy, 141–43 Chem Snguon, 141, 142 Chen, C. P. See John Chen Chen, Da, 208, 209 Chen, John, 97, 98–101 Chen Hui, 133, 159, 241 Chen Xiuxia (‘Mrs Chen’), 132–33, 151, 153, 159, 241 Chen Yi, 41, 42, 233 Chey, Jocelyn, 85–86, 182 Chey, Jonathan, 85 Chey, Stephen, 85 Chiang Kai-shek, 1, 13, 19 China Defence League, 19 China Pictorial, 26, 185, 216 China Quarterly, 165, 174, 177 China Reconstructs, 19, 26, 27, 34, 39, 44, 185 China Society for People’s Friendship Studies, 241 China Travel Service, 102 China Weekly Review, 21 China Welfare Institute, 29 Chinese diplomatic mission: London, 119, 133, 165; Paris, 165 Chinese government policies: admission of foreigners, 2, 3, 4; culture, 202; education, 4, 214; sino-foreign marriages, 62, 181–82, 183, 237–38; language teaching, 172; literature, 27; managing foreigners, 4, 5; media, 4, 6; student exchanges, 197 Chinese language, knowledge of: correspondents, 127–28; diplomats, 81–82, 106; foreign comrades, 34–35, 46; foreign experts, 166–67; POWs, 56, 58; students, 195–97, 202–3, 208, 271 Chinese Literature, 27 Chinnery, Helga, 196 Chinnery, John, 196 Chipp, David, 112, 126, 127, 129, 135, 141, 151, 230, 241; and Chen Xiuxia, 133, 159

280 Cholmeley, Elsie Fairfax, 12, 19, 25, 26, 32, 41, 44, 234; imprisonment, 43, 46, 235 Chongqing, 17, 18, 19, 21, 92, 128, 135 Chung-kuo (China), 154, 217, 238 Ciantar, Maurice, 165, 167, 168, 169, 175, 176, 189, 232; writings, 169, 186, 191 citizenship, 11, 30, 32–33, 34, 62, 182, 235 Civil War, 1, 125, 169, 175 Coccia, Filippo, 195 Coe, Frank, 12, 21, 26, 28, 29, 166 Coe, Kate, 21 Cold War, 1, 3, 19, 81, 93, 105, 106, 107, 243; environment in China, 22, 51, 52, 86, 108; impact on relationships, 3, 4, 11, 32, 140, 221, 231, 243. See also McCarthyism Columbia University, 16, 73, 133 Comintern, 16 Conceison, Claire, 97 Condron, Andrew, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 72; Daily Express articles, 71–72; relationships and marriage, 59, 60, 62, 63–64; return to Britain, 68, 73–74 Condron, Jacqueline, 63–64, 68, 70, 71, 73 Cordon, Richard, 51, 56, 68 Cornell University, 27, 242 correspondents, 2, 3, 6, 233, 237, 238; admission to China, 125–127; Anthony Grey case, 148–50; conflicts with officialdom, 138–39; controls on access, 130–35; living conditions, 128–130; profile, 127–28; relations with diplomats, 145–47; relations within own community, 140–45; reporting China, 151–159; using ‘eyes and ears’, 136–38 Cowart, William, 54, 66, 72, 73 CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain), 15, 16, 38, 39, 60, 166, 191, 196, 227 Cradock, Percy, 83, 90, 97, 105, 149; Cultural Revolution and, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119 Criticize Lin Biao Criticize Confucius Campaign ( pi-Lin pi-Kong), 154, 157, 203 Croft, Michael, 6 Crook, Carl, 47, 48, 234, 245 Crook, David, 11, 12, 23–24, 28, 38, 48, 58, 171–72, 176, 177, 234, 243; attitude to

Index integration, 32, 33; background,15–16; beliefs, 30, 48; contacts with West, 31; Cultural Revolution and, 40–41; imprisonment, 43, 46, 189, 235; post-Mao era, 243–44; Sino-Soviet split and, 39–40 Crook, Isabel, 11, 12, 17, 18, 21, 24, 28, 32, 38, 47, 48, 58, 90, 176, 177, 235, 244; attitude to integration, 32–33; background, 15–16; contacts with West, 31; detention 28, 244; knowledge of Chinese, 34; post-Mao era, 242, 244; Sino-Soviet split and, 39–40 Crook, Michael, 34, 35, 37, 47–48, 234, 242, 245 Crook, Paul, 47, 48, 220, 234, 246 Cuba, embassy of, 61 Cultural Revolution, 5, 37, 69, 83, 84, 85, 97, 100, 102, 109, 135, 154, 180, 189, 190, 213, 241; correspondents and, 130, 133–34, 137, 138, 155–56, 197, 202; diplomats and, 83, 85, 90, 91, 94, 98, 105–6, 111, 112–21, 240; foreign comrades and, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 33, 38, 40–47, 96, 234, 235, 243; foreign experts and, 66, 171, 176, 181, 185–89, 191, 232–33; POWs and, 70, 74; students and, 165, 197, 206, 226, 232. See also Red Guards Culture, Ministry of (China), 154, 205 Czechoslovakia, 62, 68, 217 Daily Express, 68, 71, 72 Daily Herald, 166 Daily News Release (Xinhua), 130 Daily Telegraph, 127, 130, 143, 144, 145, 147 Daily Worker, 53, 66, 125, 136, 141, 166, 191 danwei (work unit), 57, 158, 216 Darton, Patience, 20 Davies, Emrys, 232 Davies, Pat. See Adler, Pat Davin, Delia. See Jenner, Delia Day, Susan, 167, 180–84, 213, 214 dazibao (big character posters), 41–42, 43, 106, 138, 145, 149, 185, 211, 232, 233 Deans, Morag, 208 Deng Xiaoping, 110, 138, 183, 203, 214, 233, 237 Denmark, embassy of, 80, 120

Index Denson, John, 108, Derre, Francoise, 219 Dickenson, Edward, 55 Dieny, Jean–Pierre, 167 Die Welt, 128, 155 Dikötter, Frank, 4, 48 Dimond, E. Grey, 22 diplomatic community, 3, 6, 154, 237; bilateral relations, 108–111; China–watching, 105–7; comparison with Moscow, 83, 92, 93, 97, 105, 106; ‘imperialist’ targets, 111–21; leisure activities, 90–91; licensed contacts, 94–98; lifestyles, 83–89; profile, 80–83; social divisions, 87–88; tensions, 92–93; travel, 91–92; unlicensed contacts, 98–104 Diplomatic Services Bureau, 97 Dixie Mission, 14 Domenach, Jean-Luc, 58 Donald, Alan, 96, 146, 240 Donald, Janet, 84, 96 Douglas, Rufus, 57 Downing, Richard, 154 Down Under Club, 88, 147 DPA (Deutsche Presse Agentur), 126 Druzhba. See Friendship Hotel Dudu (Bertrand), 102–3, 104 Dunn, Charis, 207 Dunn, John, 55, 62 Durrell, Lawrence, 229 DWS (Diplomatic Wireless Service), 88 eastern bloc, 105, 140, 141, 146, 153; correspondents, 125, 140, 141; students, 57, 198, 217. See also Soviet bloc Edney, Eric, 20 Education, Ministry of (China), 207 Egypt, 128; embassy of, 142 English language, 19, 34–35, 69, 85, 96, 130, 164, 178, 190, 201, 237; Chinese speakers of, 95, 133, 135, 139; Chinese students of, 23, 45, 97, 179–80, 210–11; polishing of, 3, 4, 15, 26, 27–28, 38, 60, 125, 132, 141, 167, 170, 171, 175, 185; publications, 19, 24, 26, 34, 130, 185, 216; teaching of, 3, 15, 21, 28, 44, 45, 48, 58, 74, 130, 163, 164, 165, 171–72,

281 173–74, 175, 179, 181, 233; translating into, 27–28, 60, 132, 176, 185 Engst, Erwin (Sid), 15, 26, 34; Cultural Revolution and, 41; 234; visits to United States, 31–32 Engst, Fred, 47, 245 Epstein, Elsie. See Cholmeley, Elsie Fairfax Epstein, Israel, 12, 19, 24, 25, 29, 31, 39, 44, 134, 244; citizenship, 32; Cultural Revolution and, 40–41, 42; imprisonment, 43, 45–46; role, 26, 27, 39, 235 Evans, Brian, 229, 231 Evans, Richard, 97, 146, 236 Faggetter, Rachel, 174, 175 Fangcaodi primary school, 85 Fanshen, 15, 21 Far Eastern Economic Review, 191, 233 Farquhar, Ronald, 140, 153 Feng Zi. See Phoenix Fine Arts Institute (Peking), 205 Finland, 84; embassy of, 80, 117 Finnish residents in China, 86, 197 First Foreign Languages Institute. See Foreign Languages Institute (Peking) Fitt, Pamela. See Youde, Pamela FitzGerald, Gay, 91, 228, 229 FitzGerald, Stephen, 6, 107, 108, 190; and correspondents, 125, 147, 154–55; and Susan Day case, 182 Flato, Stanislaw, 232, 265n32 Flipo, René, 128, 135, 138, 142, 153, 197, 226 Foreign Affairs, Ministry of (China), 28, 179, 236, 241; correspondents and, 128, 130–31, 133, 135, 143, 149, 150, 159; Cultural Revolution, 114, 115, 149; diplomats and, 91, 94, 100–101, 107, 189, 235, 236; Information Department of, 130, 132, 133, 134, 150, 153, 155; POWs and, 68; records, 6, 59, 67; Susan Day case and, 182 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (UK). See Foreign Office foreign comrades, 2, 6, 11; CCP and, 4, 12, 14, 17, 18, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 47, 244; citizenship, 32–33; contacts with West, 30–32; Cultural Revolution and, 40–47;

282 departures, 46–48; disenchantment, 29, 39, 243–44; identity issues, 22, 24, 32, 34, 35; integration, 33–34; internal dynamics, 37–40; motivations, 13–21; post-Mao era, 243–45; preferential treatment, 22–24; profile, 12–13; relations with embassies, 234–35; roles, 25–29; second generation, 34–36; support for PRC policies, 24–25 foreign correspondents. See correspondents Foreign Correspondents’ Club: China, 169; Hong Kong, 129 foreign experts, 2, 3, 6, 190, 237; contacts with Chinese, 179–80; Cultural Revolution and, 185, 189; living conditions, 168–70; political differences, 184–85; preferential treatment, 170; reactions to experience, 189–92; recruitment of, 163–68; relations with embassies, 120; relations with foreign comrades, 176–77; segregation, 170–71; Soviet experts, 164–65; working roles, 171–76. See also Friendship Hotel Foreign Experts Bureau, 23, 41, 169, 170, 171, 185 Foreign Languages Institute (Peking): Cultural Revolution and, 43, 185; foreign comrades at, 28, 44; foreign experts at, 163, 165, 171–72, 173, 179, 180, 185, 189, 190, 196, 201; post-Mao era, 238, 241–42; POW (Andrew Condron) at, 58, 60, 63, 68, 71. See also Crook, David; Crook, Isabel Foreign Languages Press, 101; changing policies, 27; Cultural Revolution and, 41; foreign comrades at, 27, foreign experts at, 95, 171, 175, 176, 177; POWs at, 60, 69, 70 Foreign Office (Britain), 82, 92, 94, 98, 107, 108, 120, 146, 236, 246; correspondence, 68, 88, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 143, 217, 227–28, 232, 233–34, 235, 236; Cultural Revolution and, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 189, 228 foreign students office (liuban), 200–201, 207, 209

Index France, 3, 18, 80, 82, 102, 219; embassy of, 3, 87–88, 97–98, 110, 118, 213, 214, 231, 232, 240; Foreign Ministry of, 113; presidential visit to China, 110, 111; relations with China, 80, 110–11 France-China Friendship Association, 195–96 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 157 Fraser, Malcolm, 146–47, 181, 226 French, Paul, 125 French Communist Party, 20 French language, teaching of: 3, 28, 97, 101, 165, 167, 170, 190; polishing of, 173, 175 French residents in China: correspondents, 1, 126, 127, 128, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 142, 151–52, 153, 156, 197; diplomats, 82, 83, 85, 88, 94, 101–4, 108–9, 112–13; foreign experts, 165, 167, 170, 175–76, 232; students, 101, 166, 197, 204, 213–14, 217, 218–20, 222, 232, 242 Frey, Richard, 14, 32 Friends Ambulance Unit, 14 Friendship Hotel (youyi binguan), 11, 37, 168–69, 176, 191, 225, 230, 239; Cultural Revolution and, 41, 43, 185–86, 187, 189, 232, 233; facilities at, 23, 169; segregation at, 170–71 Friendship Store, 23, 35, 96, 129 Fudan University, 206, 207, 212, 213, 215 Galic, Marian, 195 Gallacher, William (Willie), 39 Gang of Four, 155, 211, 233 Garside, Roger, 105, 235 Garvey, Terence, 129 Gaster, Jack, 39 Gee, Jack, 151, 153 Geneva Conference, 126 George, David, 190–92 George, Richenda, 91 Gerlach, Talitha, 248n24 German language, teaching of, 44, 213 Germany, East, 39; students, 217–18 Germany, West, 80; correspondents, 126–27, 140, 145, 155; students, 197, 206, 210, 220

Index Gerovich, Sam, 183 Globe and Mail (Toronto), 126, 127, 153, 158, 231. See also Burns, John; McCullough, Colin; Munro, Ross; Nossal, Frederick; Oancia, David; Taylor, Charles; Webster, Norman Godefroy, Constant, 20 Godefroy, Judy. See Nielsen, Dorise Goldman, René, 198, 200, 217, 232 Gordon, Eric, 149, 166, 170, 175, 176, 185, 239; Cultural Revolution and, 185; detention, 186–89; and Friendship Hotel, 169, 170, 171–72 Gordon, Jeffrey, 189 Gordon, Kim, 166, 169, 186–88 Gordon, Marie, 166, 169, 170, 176, 185, 186–88 Great Hall of the People, 74, 108, 127, 135, 157, 226 Great Leap Forward, 5, 23, 59, 71, 105, 121, 152 Great Wall, 90, 91, 109, 167 Green, Nan, 20, 25, 26, 38, 39 Greene, Felix, 134 Grey, Anthony, 145, 241; house arrest and treatment, 115, 119, 148–50, 186 Griffiths, Peter, 128, 138–39, 145; and Kennedy Chem affair, 142, 143 Griggs, Lewis, 72, 73 Grudinski, Ulrich, 157 Guangming Daily, 105 Guangzhou, 30, 85, 92, 170, 186, 188 Guardian, The, 238 Halliday, Jon, 4, 48 Hankou, 29, 128, 135, 235 Hannerz, Ulf, 127, 130, 140 Han Suyin, 134 Hanyu duben (Chinese reader), 202–3 Hanyu keben (Chinese textbook), 202–3 Harbin, 156, 157, 170, 210 Harris, Richard, 120 Hatem, George (Ma Haide), 13–14, 16, 17, 22, 25, 29, 31, 166, 244; citizenship, 32; Cultural Revolution and, 25, 40, 41; friendship with Rewi Alley, 37; knowledge of Chinese, 34; relations with Sidney Rittenberg, 38

283 Hawkes, David, 195 Hawkins, David, 52, 53, 54, 62, 75 Health, Ministry of (China), 218 Heatley, Rose, 200, 212, 227, 229 Henan, 57, 58, 65, 66 Hevi, Emmanuel John, 200, 219 Hewitt, Joyce, 113 Hewitt, Peter, 113–14, 119 Hickman, Katie, 86, 229 Hilton, Isabel, 199, 206, 214–15, 217, 221, 227 Hinton, Bertha. See Sneck, Bertha Hinton, Carma, 15, 34, 41, 47, 245 Hinton, Joan, 12, 15, 21, 26, 32, 34; Cultural Revolution and, 41, 45, 234 Hinton, William (Bill), 15, 21, 31, 47 Hodes, Jane, 60 Hodes, William (Bill), 21, 60 Holdridge, John, 83 Hollingworth, Clare, 127 Hong Kong, 19, 63, 82, 95, 110, 145, 171, 238; Britain and, 102, 113, 114, 115, 119, 148–49, 150, 156, 186; correspondents in, 126, 129, 131, 134, 144, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157; diplomats’ visits to, 61, 84–85; foreign experts and, 186, 188, 189, 191; POWs and, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70–71; students and, 195, 220, 229 Hopson, Denise, 114, 120 Hopson, Donald, 113, 120, 149, 234; Cultural Revolution and, 114–19 Horn, David, 20, 46 Horn, Jessica, 20, 34–35, 45, 46, 245 Horn, Joshua, 20, 25–26, 31, 38, 46, 234–35 Horn, Miriam, 20, 38, 45, 46 Hsinhua News Bulletin, 130 Hua Guofeng, 147, 181, 182, 183 Huang Hua, 14 Hundred Flowers Campaign, 105, 135, 232 Hungarian students, 217 Hungary, 20, 166, 218 Hunter, Deidre, 166, 167 Hunter, Edward, 56 Hunter, Neale, 164, 166, 167, 168, 184 hunxue’er (‘mixed blood children’), 35–36 Hurd, Douglas, 83, 85

284 Imperial War Museum (London), 52, 74 imperialism, Chinese denunciations of, 4, 148, 173, 174 ‘imperialist spies’, 2, 5, 15, 17, 43, 45, 74, 232 In Memory of Norman Bethune, 14 incomes, 5, 23, 58, 60, 167, 170 Independent, The, 120 India, 66, 67; embassy of, 86, 106; relations with China, 81, 106 Indian residents in China: diplomats, 83, 85, 106, 128; students, 198 Indonesia, 107, 147; embassy of, 86; relations with China, 81 Indonesian residents in China: diplomats, 86; students, 198 industrial cooperatives, 17 Information Department. See under Ministry of Foreign Affairs Institute of World Economy, 26 International Brigade, 16 international friends. See foreign comrades IMF (International Monetary Fund), 21 International Peace Hospital, Yan’an, 14 Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Study. See Stanford Centre Iraq, 112, 241 Italian Communist Party, 125–26 Italian residents in China: correspondents, 125, 127; foreign experts, 3, 6, 168; students, 197, 200, 205, 217. See also Masi, Edoarda; Pisu, Renata Italy, 22, 195; embassy of, 6, 229; former legation, 22; relations with China, 80, 81 Jacquet-Francillon, Jacques, 126, 134, 152–53 Japan, 81, 106, 140, 142, 168, 219, 238 Japanese residents in China, 140, 146 Jardine Matheson, 2 Jenkins, Al, 110 Jenkins, Charles Robert, 66 Jenner, Delia, 31, 167, 171, 177, 179, 230, 241, 242, 245 Jenner, W. J. F. (Bill), 31, 167, 176, 177, 179, 191, 230, 241, 245

Index Jiang Qing, 6, 43, 109, 110, 111, 138, 143, 144, 154, 190 Jinan, 51; POWs in, 57, 58, 59, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75 Jones, Margaret, 128, 134, 145, 154, 155 Jordan, 112, 152 Judas, Philippe, 181, 183 Justice Ministry (France), 104 Kahn-Ackermann, Michael, 210, 220–21 Kaifeng, 18, 57, 58, 65 Kaikkonen, Marja, 197, 199 kaimen banxue (open door schooling), 214–17, 228–29 Karlgren, Bernhard, 196–97 Kellett-Long, Adam, 129, 131, 132, 140, 141 Kellett-Long, Mary, 129 Kent, Ann, 168 Kent, Bruce, 168 Keyssar, Helene, 25 Khmer Rouge, 141, 142 Kiernan, Ben, 142 Kiesslings (Kiessling & Bader), 91, 204 Kinkead, Eugene, 54 Kissinger, Henry: relations with US liaison office, 107, 108, 109, 146; visits to China, 106, 107, 135, 157 Knight, Frida, 166 Knight, Sophia (Sofka), 166, 169, 170, 185 Komaroff, Nicholas, 101–2 Korea, North, 1, 24, 39, 51, 52, 66, 24, 66, 198; POW camps in, 52–55 Korea, South, 66 Korean War, 5, 17, 24, 30, 51, 52–53, 74–75, 106, 232, 234; Armistice agreement, 54, 66, 72; Battle of Chosin Reservoir, 52. See also POW ‘turncoats’ Kramer, Ione, 248n24 Lainson, Diana, 167, 169, 177, 230, 241, 246; language teaching, 173, 174, 179 Lamouroux, Christian, 200, 219 Lane Crawford (Hong Kong), 84 Lange, David, 245 language teaching. See English; French; German Laos, 25, 100, 114

Index La Republica, 242 Lary, Diana. See Lainson, Diana La Stampa, 242 Last Emperor, The, 96, 176 Latin America, 3 Lazarick, Leonard, 24 Lebanon, 112, 152 Lebreton, Denise, 248n24 Leeds, University of, 128 Leijon, Per-Olow, 60, 73, 87, 196, 201, 205, 209, 213, 218, 221 Leijonhufvud, Göran, 128, 137 Le Monde, 129 Lenin, 44, 112, 206 Li, Olga, 44 Liang Xiaosheng, 212–13 Liao Hongying, 107 Liaoning University, 206–7. See also Shenyang Libération, 101 licensed contacts, 95–98, 102, 179, 210, 240 Lifton, Robert, 56 Lin, Paul, 220 Lin Biao, 17, 136, 188 Lindqvist, Cecilia, 196, 205, 221 Lindqvist, Sven, 196, 198, 202, 221, 225 Lin Mei, 209–10, 219, 264n11 Lin Shixiao, 66 Liu, Grace, 18, 24, 30, 32, 33, 44–45, 46–47 Liu, William, 44, 46 Liu, Y. H., 97, 98 liuban. See foreign students office Liu Fuzhi, 24 Liulichang, 90 Liu Linfeng (Lin), 62–63, 70, 73, 75 Li Xiannian, 183 Lo, Ruth Earnshaw, 30 Locquin, Jacques, 126 London: Chinese diplomatic mission in, 119, 133, 165; Foreign Office in, 96, 98, 118, 119 London Philharmonic, 109 London School of Economics, 16 Look, 69, 71 L’Unità, 126,136 Luo Ruiqing, 67 Lu Ping, 232

285 M. Butterfly, 101, 104 Mackerras, Alyce, 163, 166, 167, 170, 177, 179, 180, 230, 242 Mackerras, Colin, 107, 163, 166, 167, 170, 171, 185, 230; contact with Chinese people, 178–79, 180; contact with ‘foreign comrades’, 176, 177; language teaching, 172–73, and post-Mao era, 241–42, 246 MacLehose, Murray, 115 Magnuson, Warren G., 109 Ma Haide. See George Hatem Malmqvist, Göran, 195 Malo, Charles, 240 Manac’h, Étienne, 82, 83, 86, 94, 197, 240; hosting Pompidou, 110; meeting with Zhou Enlai, 108–9 Mao Zedong, 1, 132, 171, 175–76, 179, 183; death, 111, 143, 233; Western residents’ comments on, 42–43, 105; writings, 14, 27, 38, 45, 202, 203, 209; Yan’an, 13, 14, 15 Marcuse, Jacques, 24, 12, 29, 131, 134, 135, 235 marriages, sino-foreign, 14, 15, 18–19, 62–64, 74, 181–84, 213–14, 237–38 Marsouin, Jacques, 170, 190 Marsouin, Therese, 170, 190 Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought, 4, 182, 206 Masi, Edoarda, 6, 222, 230; as foreign expert, 168, 178, 190, 225; as student, 195; comments on Western community, 3, 192, 199, 222, 225, 228 May 7th cadre schools, 102, 241 Ma Yuzhen, 134, 155 McCarthyism, 12, 18, 19, 21, 30, 51, 56, 65, 107, 166 McCullough, Colin, 92, 134, 141, 145, 187 McDonell, Stephen, 238 McGill University, 220, 231 Melbourne, 129, 180, 184 Melbourne Herald, 126 Memphis, 61, 73, 75 Middle East, 83 Miller, Arthur, 240

286 Milton, David, 166, 239; Cultural Revolution and, 42, 43, 185, 189; opinion of Sidney Rittenberg, 38, 244 Milton, Nancy Dall, 166, 173, 239; Cultural Revolution and, 42, 185, 189; opinion of Sidney Rittenberg, 38, 244 Minden, Karen, 220, 229 Ming Tombs, 90–91, 173 missionaries, 1, 2, 16, 19, 23, 34, 97, 133 Mitterrand, François, 104 Mongolia, 26, 103, 104, 137, 156 Morgan, Michael, 227–28 Morning Star, 191 Moscow, 15, 68, 112, 128, 131, 140, 141, 146, 205; comparisons with Peking, 81, 83, 92, 93, 97, 105, 106, 139 Moscow University, 221 Moskin, J. Robert, 71 Moulier, Fernand, 126 Muldoon, Robert, 111 Müller, Hans, 14, 22, 32, 37 Munro, Ross, 158, 235 Nanjing, 82, 92, 98, 151, 170, 219, 236; as Nationalist capital, 19, 43, 80, 95, 99 Nankai University, 44, 207 Nationalists, 8, 14, 17, 80, 107, 135, 238; Communists’ victory against, 1, 13, 16, 17, 29 National Times, The, 147 Needham, Joseph, 166 Netherlands, The: embassy of, 83; relations with China, 3, 80 New York, 16, 25, 56, 73, 75, 107 New York Times, 68, 126, 158, 240 New Zealand, 17, 25, 31, 134, 186, 197, 233, 244, 245; Communist Party of, 20, 39, 233; relations with China, 111 New Zealand residents in China, 186, 197. See also Alley, Rewi Nielsen, Annelise Risbjerg (Lady Hopson), 120, 121 Nielsen, Dorise, 20, 41, 42 Nixon, President Richard: visit to China, 46, 81, 106, 107, 111, 154, 156, 179, 189; journalists and, 134, 155, 157 Norway: diplomatic mission of, 80, 247n5

Index Norwegian residents in China, 86, 118, 232 Nossal, Audrey, 153 Nossal, Frederick, 80, 126, 129, 130, 133, 140, 151, 153 Novotel Xinqiao Hotel. See Xinqiao Hotel Ny Dag, 196 Oancia, David, 146, 155–56 open door policy, 237, 243 open door schooling. See kaimen banxue Oxford University, 19, 133, 167, 176, 195, 236; Press, 176 Pakistan, 81, 85, 111 Pakistini residents in China, 85, 169 Panikkar, K. M. (Sardar), 83 Panmunjom, 56 Paracel (Spratly) Islands, 154 Paris: Chinese diplomatic mission in, 165; Chinese students in, 112; comparison with Peking, 83; Xinhua correspondent in, 153. See also Boursicot, Bernard Pasley, Virginia, 52 Pate, Arlie, 62 Paye, Lucien, 82, 197, 226 Payne, Robert, 64 Peace Committee, 22, 25, 29, 37, 249n19 Peking, 1, 3, 79, 83; driving in, 86–87, 91; February 7th Locomotive Works, 215, 216; Forbidden City, 138, 176; Imperial Palace, 94, 110, 128, 129; Nan Chizi, 102, 129, 148; National Museum of China, 238; New China Bookstore, 171; No. 2 Machine Tool Factory, 215–16, 228, 229; old legation quarter, 17, 80, 83, 84, 86, 87; Peace Hotel, 201; postMao era, 238–39; preferred by foreign residents, 59–60, 69, 71, 74, 170, 207; Qincheng Prison, 45; restaurants, 37, 90, 129, 152, 169, 186, 204, 214; restrictions on movement, 5, 90; shopping, 90; Telegraph Office, 128; Wudaokou, 204, 239. See also Babaoshan; Summer Palace; Tiananmen Square; Xinqiao Hotel Peking Language Institute, 172, 173, 175, 197, 207, 210, 217, 218, 227, 233, 239,

Index 243; Chinese roommates, 210; language courses, 202–3; diplomats’ wives at, 228; living conditions, 198–201, 204, 208–9, 221; media articles about, 231; relations with authorities, 200–202; social life, 203–4. See also foreign students office; students Peking opera, 101, 103 Peking Rap, 116, 117, 121 Peking Review, 26, 27, 173, 174, 176 Peking Union Medical College, 85 Peking University (Beida), 28, 34, 45, 63, 138, 141, 143, 179, 204, 218, 220, 239, 245; Chinese roommates, 210–12, 216; courses, 196, 206; foreign experts at, 173, 179; living conditions, 198–99; political campaigns at, 138, 143, 232, 233; restrictions on contacts, 208–9, 212; Western students at, 58, 60, 73, 143, 196, 197, 199, 205, 206, 207, 210, 215, 216, 220, 232 Pékin Information, 173, 175 Peng Zhen, 96–97 People, 104 People’s China, 26 People’s Daily (Renmin ribao), 45, 105, 106, 113, 140, 152, 153 Peters, Theo, 96 Philadelphia Orchestra, 109 Phnom Penh, 141, 142, 143 Phoenix, 18, 23 Pierquin, Odile, 213–14 pi-Lin pi-Kong. See Criticize Lin Biao Criticize Confucius Campaign. ping-pong diplomacy, 155, 156, 157 Pisu, Renata, 195, 209, 213, 217, 242 Platt, Nicholas, 91 Poland, 68, 127, 132; embassy of, 141, 232 Polish residents in China, 198, 217–18, 228 political exiles, 3, 60, 168, 245 Pollitt, Harry, 38 Pompidou, Georges: visit to China, 110, 111, 134–35 Porter, Edgar A., 14 POW ‘turncoats’, 2, 5, 12, 24; clashes with authorities, 59; disenchantment and leaving China, 65–70; employment, 57,

287 58–59, 60–61; experiences back home, 70, 72–74; living conditions, 58–60; motivations, 51–56; personal relationships, 61–64; studies, 46, 57–58, 60, 69; telling their stories, 71–72; They Chose China, 51, 75; those who remained, 74–75; thought reform, 56–57 Powell, John, 21, 31 Powell, Sylvia, 21, 31 Pravda, 141 preferential treatment, 5, 22–23, 41, 45, 58, 59–60, 169–170, 199, 208–9 Preston, Yvonne, 132, 134, 135, 145, 155, 230; and Australian prime minister’s visit, 146–47; and Kennedy Chem affair, 142–43 Pringle, Jim, 137 privileged segregation, 5, 41, 169, 170, 208–9. See also preferential treatment privileges. See preferential treatment Public Security, Ministry of (China), 59, 67, 95 Public Security Bureau (Peking), 67, 68, 97 Pu Yi, 176 Qantas, 84, 109 Qiao Guanhua, 67, 100, 179 Qi Mingcong (‘Mr Chi’), 133, 134, 142, 149, 150 Qinghua University, 17, 96, 97 Qingming festival, 138 Qishilin. See Kiesslings radicals: Chinese, 6, 42, 138, 143, 144, 154, 185; Western, 21, 42, 167, 185, 190, 231 Radio Peking, 24, 42, 125 Raffaele, Paul, 154–55, 158 Red Cross: British, 67; Chinese, 57, 59, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74; Indian, 67 Red Detachment of Women, The, 111 Red Flag, 105, 106, Red Guards, 41, 45, 106, 120, 136, 137, 156, 186; attacks on diplomatic missions, 5, 112–18, 119, 234; attacks on Western culture, 33; correspondents’ encounters with, 138, 149 ‘redness’ versus ‘expertise’, 4, 164, 174

288 Red Star Commune, 26 Regard, Maria Teresa, 126, 136 relations between different groups, 61, 225–36 Ren Bishi, 15 Renmin University, 57, 58, 60, 69 Return to Peking, 150 Reuters, 1, 134, 138, 153, 230, 241; Anthony Grey case, 148–50; competition, 143, 145; opens Peking bureau, 126; and self–censorship, 151; translator, 131, 138; withdrawal of correspondent, 151–52. See also Berger, Vergil; Chipp, David; Farquhar, Ronald; Gee, Jack; Grey, Anthony; Griffiths, Peter; Kellett-Long, Adam; Pringle, Jim; Rogers, David; Sharp, Jonathan; ‘Tsiang, Mr’ Revolutionary, The, 244 Revolutionary Opera, 206 Richard, Eliane, 112–13 Richard, Robert, 112–13 Rickett, Adele, 97 Rickett, Allyn , 45, 97 ‘rightists’, 34, 99, 135, 243. See also AntiRightist Movement Rittenberg, Sidney, 14–15, 24, 25, 28, 29, 244; citizenship, 33; Cultural Revolution and, 40, 41, 42, 43; imprisonment, 46, 189; relations with other foreign comrades, 38, 244; work, 15, 27–28, Yan’an, 15–16, 19 Rogers, David, 143 Rosenthal, Abe, 158 Ruge, Gerd, 128, 155 Russell, Maud, 31 Russian language, 28, 63, 165, 228 Sablon, Jean Leclerc du, 137 SACU (Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding), 166 salaries. See incomes San Francisco, 72; film festival, 75 Sarma, Abhilash, 245 Sarma, P. V., 245 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 25 Saturday Review, 33

Index Scandinavian nations: diplomatic communities, 83, 115; relations with China, 3, 80. See also individual countries Scandinavian residents in China: correspondents, 127, 128; foreign experts, 165 Schein, Edgar, 56 Schoenhals, Michael, 213 Schuman, Julian, 21, 31 Scott, Richard, 88 Scott, Sybil, 88 Seaby, John, 117, 119 Second Foreign Languages Institute (Peking), 165, 172, 173, 174, 177, 179 Seeberg, Stein, 232 Seltman, Muriel, 166, 191 Seltman, Peter, 166, 191 Seymour, Joanna, 204, 214 Shandong, 57, 74, 134 Shanghai, 3, 23, 26, 29, 61, 80, 92, 129, 144, 204, 225; British consul in, 113–14, 119; foreign experts in, 169, 170, 183–84, 185; Foreign Languages Institute, 164, 165, 190; students in, 79, 206, 207, 210, 213, 214–15; Westerners in pre-revolutionary era, 2, 11, 13, 17, 18, 21, 31, 37, 98, 128. See also Fudan University Shanghai Mansions, 6, 169 Shanghai Teachers’ University, 183 Shao Xunzheng, 205 Shapiro, Michael, 20, 24–25, 27–28, 37, 38, 39, 42, 245; imprisonment, 43, 46 Shapiro, Roger, 245 Shapiro, Sidney, 11, 12, 13, 18, 23, 30, 37, 40, 43, 243; contact with United States, 30, 31; opinion of Sidney Rittenberg, 38; roles, 27, 29 Sharp, Jonathan, 88, 128, 140, 141, 143 Shaw, Lachlan, 154 Sheldon, Robert, 109 Shen, Mike. See Schoenhals, Michael Shenyang, 156; students in, 206, 207, 222 Shi Peipu, 101–104 Sichuan, 134, 241, 244 Silvermaster ring, 21 Sino-Indian War, 106

Index Sino-Japanese War, 1, 17, 19, 31, 97, 125, 128, 175 Sino-Soviet split, 26, 28, 106, 135, 151, 166, 195, 198; impact on foreign comrades, 37, 38, 39–40, 166, 243; impact on language teaching, 28, 164 Skinner, Lowell, 59, 69 Small, John, 142 Smedley, Agnes, 14 Smedley, Beryl, 82 Smith, Rose, 248n24 Sneck (Hinton), Bertha, 15, 34, 41 Snow, Chris, 183 Snow, Edgar, 14, 183 Snow, Lois, 183 SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), 82, 196, 245 Socialist Education Movement, 69 Song Meiling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek), 19 Song Qingling, 13, 17, 19, 29, 31, 44 Song Xianyi, 181–84, 214 Southeast Asia, 3, 102, 126, 198, 245 Soviet bloc, 3, 60, 62, 81, 86, 127, 135, 169, 198. See also eastern bloc Soviet residents in China: correspondents, 140, 221; experts, 3, 164, 165, 168; students, 60 Soviet Union, 12, 15, 19, 20, 21, 60, 62, 112, 164, 165, 166, 201, 228; comparisons with PRC, 12, 31, 32, 61, 66, 101, 102, 139, 151, 221; embassy of, 112, 228; KGB, 141, 221. See also Moscow; SinoSoviet split; Soviet bloc Spence, Jonathan, 163 Stanford Centre, 195 Stevenson, Winifred, 84, 85, 94, 95 Stewart, Michael, 120,150 Stockholm, 196, 205; University of, 195 Strong, Anna Louise, 15, 19–20, 22, 25, 29, 38, 166 Strong, Tracey B., 25 students, 2, 3, 151, 174; access to China, 195–98; Chinese roommates, 209–10; courses, 202–3, 205–7; leisure activities, 203–5, 214; living conditions, 198–200; outside the campus, 214–17; personal

289 relationships, 213–14, 218–19; political dynamics, 219–11; privileged segregation, 208–9, 212–13; reactions to experience, 221–22; relations with Chinese authorities, 200–202; relations with correspondents; 230–31; relations with embassies, 226–30, 232; restricted contacts, 212–14. See also African students; Fudan University; kaimen banxue; Liaoning University; Nankai University; Peking Language Institute; Peking University Sullivan, Larance, 53 Summer Palace, 28, 90 ‘sunshiners’, 39, 177, 184, 186, 246 Sun Yat-sen, 13 Sweden: embassy of, 80, 87, 142 Swedish residents in China: correspondents, 137; diplomats, 80, 87; students, 60, 196–97, 198, 209, 213 Swiss residents in China, 44, 61, 86, 181 Switzerland: embassy of, 44, 83; relations with China, 3, 80, 88 Sydney Morning Herald, 145, 154. See also Jones, Margaret; Preston, Yvonne Taiwan, 80, 22, 109, 146, 173, 189, 195, 222, 238 Taiyuan, 56–57, 67, 69, 92 Tannebaum, Gerald (Jerry), 29, 248n24 TASS, 125, 141 Taylor, Charles, 73, 128, 129, 130, 132 Taylor, Lenore, 186, 233 Teiwes, Professor Fred, 137 Tenneson, Richard, 67 Thatcher, Margaret, 110 They Chose China, 51, 75 This Day Tonight, 154 Thomkins, Ann, 41 thought reform, 56–57, 65 Tiananmen Square, 57, 138, 139, 143, 238, 243–44 Tian Congming, 241 Tianjin, 19, 63, 91, 92, 153, 170, 204; students in, 207, 219. See also Liu, Grace Tian Li, 213–14 Tibet, 25, 134, 136, 238

290 Time, 33, 73, 157, 158 Times, The, 109, 118, 120, 125, 128, 146, 157. See also Bonavia, David Tokyo, 84, 131, 142, 204 Towards Truth and Peace, 54 travel: correspondents, 132, 134, 147, 155, 240–41; diplomats, 90, 91, 92; foreign comrades, 15, 18, 19, 25, 47, 136; foreign experts, 156, 170, 171; restrictions on, 5, 56, 166, 170, 171, 186, 201, 237, 238; students, 201 Trevelyan, Humphrey, 11, 80, 86, 88, 94, 234, 235 Trudeau, Pierre, 110 Tschirhart, Evelyne, 190 ‘Tsiang, Mr’, 131, 132 Tzouliadis, Tim, 12, 66 Ullman, Bernard, 140 United Nations, 107, 121, 179, 189 United Press, 235 United States, 1, 4, 237, 242, 244; CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 82, 195; embassy of (1979), 239; FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 19, 21, 31, 72; HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), 72; liaison office (1973–78), 46, 74, 81, 82, 89–90, 91, 106, 107–8, 110, 146, 239; relations with China, 106, 197, 143; State Department, 107, 108; Supreme Court, 67, 68, 72; Treasury, 31; White House, 65, 108 Universities Service Centre, Hong Kong, 195 UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), 14, 15 US-China People’s Friendship Association, 31 Varè, Daniel, 80 Veneris, James, 51, 52, 69, 70, 74, 75, 235 Vienna Philharmonic, 109 Vietnam, 25, 56, 154, 198; National Liberation Front, 61; War, 61, 71, 72, 74, 89, 106 Vincent, Jean, 136, 138, 153, 156 Voice of America, 33, 59

Index Wade, Christine, 130, Wade, Nigel, 130, 143–45, 147, 155 Wagner, René, 206 waiguo zhuanjia. See foreign experts waijiao dalou, 84, 138 Walden, George, 92, 120, 221 Walder, Joyce, 101, 104 Wang, Shuibo, 51, 74–75 Wang Gungwu, 164 Wang Hongwen, 144 Wang Li, 42 Wang Ping, 211, 212, 216 Wang Shuihua, 59 Wang Yulin, 244 Warner, Gerald, 92 Warner, Mary, 92 Washington, 32, 46, 72, 89, 106, 107, 145, 241 Watson, Andrew, 167, 233 Watson, Maggie, 167, 233 Watt, Jonathan, 238 Webb, Harold, 62 Webster, Norman, 130, 156 Wei Lin, 15, 244 Weiss, Ruth, 13, 17, 32 Western culture, 2, 6, 33, 45, 83, 109, 133, 166 Weston, John, 106, 116, 118, 119, 121, 149; poem Peking Rap, 116, 117, 121 Weston, Sally, 116 White, William, 53, 60, 70 White, Xie Ping, 70 White Russians, 3, 61–62, 157 Whitlam, Gough, 107, 110 Whitney, Ray, 113–14, 233 Whyte, Bert, 136 Whyte, Monica, 136 Wilford, Michael, 90 Wilkinson, Endymion, 167, 230 Wills, Kaiyan, 63, 69, 70, 73 Wills, Morris, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58–59, 60, 65, 69, 213; relationships and marriage, 62, 63; return to United States, 69, 70, 71, 73; and thought reform, 56–57 Wilson, David, 94, 96, 112, 230 Wilson, Duncan, 95, 112

Index Wilson, Harold, 113 Winnington, Alan, 20, 24, 35, 38, 39, 125, 136, 141; criticism of other ‘foreign comrades’, 29, 39; and Korean War POWs, 51, 55, 56, 60, 64, 66 Winnington, Esther, 35, 39, 64 Winter, Robert (Bob), 17–18, 26–29, 33, 34, 38–39, 45, 60 Wolin, Richard, 189 women, 26; Chinese, 5, 11, 44, 51, 61, 62–64, 179–80, 189, 216, 217; Western, 12, 14, 15, 18, 32, 46, 51, 61, 62, 92, 115, 119, 209, 218–19, 229–31 Wong, Jan, 220 Wood, Frances, 199, 218–19, 233, 245 Wood, Shirley, 18 ‘worker, peasant, soldier’ students, 174, 206, 209 World Bank, 241 World Peace Council, 196 World War II, 52, 114, 120 Wright, Elizabeth, 246 Writers’ Federation, 102 Wu De, 138 Wuhan, 73, 75, 92, 170; POWs in, 58, 60, 62, 68; University, 57, 58, 62–63, 68; University of Technology, 63 wu hu si hai, 245 Wu Shiliang, 96, 97, 240 Xi’an, 26, 92, 170, 213, 233; Foreign Languages Institute, 181–83 xifang ‘hong erdai’ (Western ‘second red generation’), 245 Xinhua (New China News Agency), 24, 55, 125, 129, 130, 131, 132, 153, 241; correspondents in Europe, 3, 126, 153; correspondents in Hong Kong, 115, 149; foreign experts at, 15, 26, 125, 141, 149 Xinjiang, 104, 238 Xin Lihua, 74 Xinqiao Hotel, 63, 128–29, 149, 187–88, 204, 239 Xiong, Rose, 64, 252n54 Xi Shaoying, 24 Xue Ping, 149

291 Yale University, 18, 27 Yalu River, 55, 56 Yan’an, 25, 29, 92, 156, 202; foreigners at, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 29, 31, 37, 38, 244 Yang, Gladys, 23, 27, 35, 36, 61, 69, 74; contact with diplomats, 95–96; contact with the West, 31, 33; Cultural Revolution and, 41, 185–86; friendships, 38–39, 61, 70, 95, 177; imprisonment, 43–44, 46, 235, 236; marriage, 18, 19; post-Mao era, 242, 245–46 Yang Xianyi, 18, 19, 27, 36, 61, 177, 236, 242, 245, 246; contact with diplomats, 95–96; imprisonment, 43, 45 Yang Ye, 35, 36 Yang Ying, 35, 36 Yang Zhi, 36 Yangzi, 69, 92 Yanjing University, 199, 239 Yao Wenyuan, 144 Ye, Ting-xing, 179, 209 Yeh, Marcelia Vance, 248n24 Yin Luoyi, 220 Ying, Esther Cheo. See Winnington, Esther Ying, Julia. See Wu Shilian Ying, Stephen. See Ying Ruocheng Ying Da, 97 Ying Qianli, 96 Ying Ruocheng, 96–97, 240 Youde, Edward (Teddy), 81, 82, 96, 246 Youde, Pamela (née Fitt), 82, 84, 85, 88, 91, 97, 98 Young Communist League, 166 youyi binguan. See Friendship Hotel Yu, Andrew, 97–98 Yu, Antoine, 97–98 Yu, Odilon, 97 –98 Yue Daiyun, 212 Yugoslavia, embassy of, 142 Yugoslav residents in China: students, 62, 141, 217 Zhang Chunqiao, 144 Zhang Hanzhi, 179 Zhang Jian, 205 Zhang Shizhao, 179 Zhao Ziyang, 245

292 Zheng Wang, 3 Zhou Enlai, 2, 67, 82, 108, 109, 110, 111, 126, 138, 139, 165, 179; Cultural Revolution and, 43, 115, 186; death, 138, 139, 143, 233; and foreign comrades, 25, 29, 33, 165; and Yan’an, 13, 14 Zhou Sufei, 14, 34, 37

Index