In 1964 and most of 1965, the China we were watching was quiet on the surface. I wrote learned dispatches, called “airgrams,” sent by diplomatic pouch to Washington each week on some aspect of the domestic political scene, from party politics to population control. I learned the traditional tools of the China-Watching trade and the names and histories of the leadership.
The Politics of Night Soil
Culture was an important part of my portfolio. One of my reports covered the Festival of Peking Opera on Revolutionary Themes, which took place in Peking during the summer of 1964. In June, Madame Mao, under wraps for decades, made her first public speech at this event. “Do you eat?” Madame Mao asked her audience of theater professionals and officials from the Ministry of Culture, as reported in the People’s Daily. “That food came from the farmers! So serve the farmers in your plays and operas.”
One work that drew rave notices in the People’s Daily was a one act opera called The Bucket. Here’s how it went:
The curtain opens. A bucket sits center stage, nothing else. It contains night soil, the contents of the family chamber pots and privy, a valuable commodity in rural China.
Enter stage left the virtuous wife (cymbals, squealing strings, and woodwinds), who sings a fervent aria describing her plans to spread the contents of the bucket on the communal fields to increase production for the benefit of the revolution. Cheers.
Enter stage right the husband (Chinese Communist theater conventions, like our TV sitcoms, usually portray the male in the buffoon or bourgeois villain role). His aria describes the advantages of dumping the bucket on the family private plot to improve vegetable yields and their personal earnings. Boos, hisses.
The husband and wife sing a competitive duet, each grasping their side of the bucket. A tug of war ensues (drums, cymbals, gongs, flutes).
Enter center stage rear the mother-in-law, who casts the deciding vote in favor of fertilizing the communal fields. Curtain, applause.
Though the allocation of human fertilizer was a real issue in the Chinese countryside, I found this grungy debate in classical opera form ridiculous, even hilarious, a view shared by Seymour Topping, the New York Times Hong Kong bureau chief, who wrote it up after I briefed him. So did a number of Chinese officials, we later learned. This turned out to be a big mistake, probably the biggest of their lives. For Madame Mao’s revolutionary operas, plays, films, and ballets––works like The Red Detachment of Women, White-Haired Girl, and Red Lantern––would be the only sanctioned entertainment for years to come. She had convinced Mao that this was a vital way to purify the thoughts of the Chinese people.
The festival turned out to be a harbinger of big trouble, of which we had no inkling then.
A Collegial Rumor Mill
China Watching was intensely and competitively collegial. Visiting diplomats whose governments had embassies in Beijing became treasured sources and friends. Journalists with special knowledge and good contacts as well as scholars with relevant research projects were courted for what they knew. No passing traveler to or from China had to worry about where his next meal was coming from. It did not matter who or what you were, whether government official, newsman, or trader, if you had some knowledge or connection to offer, you were welcome at the table, literally. At regular lunches, organized by my colleagues and me, we chewed over different lines of analysis and traded bits of intelligence.
Members of the group included people who went on to earn big reputations in journalism, government, and academe. The chief of the Mainland Section, FSO John Holdridge, the convener of the club, went on to play a key role in the opening to China as Henry Kissinger ’s aide on the National Security Council Staff and later became U.S. ambassador to Singapore and Indonesia. Other prominent members of the group included Stanley Karnow of the Washington Post; Harvard University’s Ezra Vogel, Richard Solomon, then a professor at Columbia and later a key staff member of the National Security Council; legal scholars like Jerry Cohen from the Harvard Law School and Stanley Lubman from Berkeley; and Michigan professor Michel Oksenberg, who later served with me at the National Security Council.
Other China hands from the American Consulate General included William Gleysteen, later ambassador to Korea, and Burton Levin, who became ambassador to Burma and, later, the Asia Society’s man in Hong Kong. Although he kept his distance from government officials, we all revered Father Laszlo LaDany, an indefatigable Hungarian Jesuit with decades of experience, as the high priest of Hong Kong’s China analysts.
Rumor was a staple of the community. China’s public information system was clamped tight, but its word of mouth grapevine was one of the world’s busiest and most efficient. We all listened hard for real news in the buzzing clouds of gossip. To test the speed of the system, I once told a visiting diplomat that the reason the mayor of Shanghai had not been seen for more than a month (true) was due to liver cancer (false). One week later a Norwegian journalist, just in from Beijing, whispered in my ear that the mayor of Shanghai had—guess what?—liver cancer. Beijing residents reported that juicy items would travel from one end of the capital to another within a day.
Motley Mighty Visitors
We sang for our supper to touring media moguls like Katharine Graham and Osborn Elliott, and megapundits like Joseph Alsop, who passed regularly through Hong Kong on the way to Vietnam, where the war was heating up. Joe had strong, often wrong, views on everything, including what was happening in China. I discovered that the only way to change his thinking was to reverse the normal procedure and interview him. I would ask him questions and add my own data to his answers, which often showed up in the stuff of his articles. The relationships we formed with such figures turned out to be important during later assignments in Washington.
Visiting congressmen, also on their way to and from Vietnam, were a plague. They came to shop, hundreds of them each year, and had little real interest in China per se, though we briefed them all. One exception was the tyrannical Armed Services Committee chairman, Mendel Rivers, who was deathly afraid he would be kidnapped in Hong Kong and spirited across the border into Red China. We assured him and his staff that this was totally unlikely, but to no avail. He demanded special security measures.
As his “control officer,” the official assigned to meet, greet, and manage each congressional delegation, I was also responsible for Rivers’s peace of mind. The British authorities would have laughed me away if I had approached them for a special police detail. The manager of the Hilton Hotel, an inventive Australian, solved the problem by stationing all the uniformed Pinkerton guards in the hotel, twenty in all, on Rivers’s floor for the first two hours of his stay. When the elevator door opened upon his arrival, a long line of tall Chinese from Shantung province (where the British traditionally recruited their police) in full uniform with side arms holstered, snapped to attention. Rivers’s shoulders sagged in relief.
Tales from Prisoners of War
Returning American Korean War defectors provided unique sources of insight and information about life in China during my time in Hong Kong. Three of these, William White, Morris Wills, and Clarence Adams, left the People’s Republic in 1965 and 1966. Originally, twenty-one POWs refused repatriation at the end of the Korean War and settled in China. All but five had gone back to the United States. These men were among those who had adjusted best to life in China, married, had families, and taken jobs. We were interested in what they could tell us about their lives and treatment.
As they left China, I met each of the defectors and their families on the Chinese side of the border at Lowu, the modest farming village that has since become part of the huge economic zone at Shenzhen. Consular ritual required that I ask some pro forma questions to determine whether any of the POWs had taken actions that might have lost them their citizenship. After making sure that I got the right answers, I walked