This, in broad outline, was the stuff of my analytical work during our last years in Hong Kong. There was little certainty in our judgments and a lot of debate and argument at each stage of the process. The knowledge that the Chinese were just as confused as we were lent scant comfort.
Turmoil in Hong Kong
The Cultural Revolution finally spread to Hong Kong during the summer of 1967, bringing with it labor unrest, serious riots, and mass demonstrations. Leftist agents sought to sow terror by putting lethal explosives into ordinary items, even toys. Our upscale neighborhood was not spared. One morning we awoke to find a bomb squad outside our window, in full armor, gingerly inspecting a suspicious object in the middle of Old Peak Road. It was Sheila’s handbag, left there by a cat burglar, who had shinnied up the pipes outside our bathroom and taken the purse without disturbing our sleep.
In a June 1967 letter home, I described what was going on, as follows:
The situation now is quite favorable to our side. The communists are essentially weak, and have been forced to try to save face by showing what strength they have through a series of token strikes, each of which affects the ordinary citizen whose support they seek much more than the “imperialists” they are trying to protest against. They have threatened food, water, electricity, and gas supplies, and stopped ferry and transport services, not in any case long enough to cause lasting disruption, but just long enough to make everyone cross. It’s a stupid performance, which reflects clearly the lack of direction across the border. I was taught to respect the organizational ability of the communists (and still do as a sensible hedge to all bets), but thus far it’s the other tiger that turns out to be paper.
The local government, for its part, despite a few tactical blunders, has performed far better than any longtime observers of its pukka bumblings in the past would ever have dared hope. The younger officials, many of whom are in responsible jobs because their bosses are on leave, have risen to the occasion and delighted everyone by fighting the communists with their own weapons, propaganda campaigns, poster wars, etc., all with good effect. The governor turns out under his sun helmet and ostrich feathers to be a sound and unflappable man. At bottom, it has been the cops who held the key, managing through good training and self-control to deny to the communists the martyr and the emotional issue they were looking for. . . .
Across the border the Cultural Revolution has ground to a halt with the basic issue becoming not whether Mao can impress his antediluvian ideology on the Chinese people, but whether the government in Peking can extend its influence in the provinces sufficiently to restore order and maintain economic production. I think they probably can, but at a cost of almost everything the old man has sought to achieve. When they finish up––God knows when that will be––they will probably be back roughly where they started, with much of the old Party apparatus intact and society galloping towards Russian-style revisionism even faster than before.
In the meantime, the Chinese appear to have lost the respect they had for what once was a pretty effective government. Some of the legendary discipline is gone––streets are dirty, people are beginning to steal things in a minor way, mass calisthenics are skipped, and once automatic response to mass appeals to rush out and do things like kill sparrows is no longer taken for granted. Organizations are fighting in the streets and in the communes for political power in battles so confused that even local residents don’t know which side is which. The only answer is tough army sanctions, which I suspect are soon to be imposed. The net result of such sanctions, however, to judge by the happenings of February and March when the army cracked down briefly, will be “Fascist atrocities” that make Hong Kong look like a teddy bear’s picnic. And where will it leave the “great Red Sun in our Hearts,” Chairman Mao? In charge of a garrison state as far removed from communist Nirvana as any you can find.
A Difference of Opinion
Throughout the chaotic months of 1967, the People’s Liberation Army, led by Mao’s chief lieutenant Lin Biao, stayed on the sidelines making half-hearted, localized attempts to referee the violence but avoiding decisive action in most cities. By August, public order in the cities, and with it the fate of the People’s Republic, seemed to be sliding away. Consul General Rice asked me to do a detailed analysis and make a judgment about the survival of the regime. The result became notorious in the analytical community in Hong Kong and Washington as the “bifurcated airgram.”
After a week of writing and rewriting, I sent Ed Rice a detailed draft arguing that the situation had deteriorated alarmingly, but that the point of no return had yet to be reached. Mao still had the option of calling in the PLA to quell the violence and form the basis for a new structure. The consul general disagreed, believing that the deterioration of order was irrevocable. He asked me to go back, review my data, and come up with a new draft. I did, but with the same conclusion.
Famous for his fairness, Rice decided to send in my analysis without edit and append his own dissent as a cover page. I was relieved and delighted. This approach would guarantee a wide readership. Rice’s comment argued, on the basis of his long experience in China, that the regime had entered a “descending spiral,” a tailspin from which it could not pull out. The deputy consul general, Allen Whiting, a noted China academic on loan to the government, agreed with Rice and added a short statement to this effect at the bottom of the cover page.
Order Restored
After the message was sent off, I departed with the whole family on two months of home leave, our first since 1965. Having always flown to Asia, transiting from one almost identical airport to another, we were determined to return home on the surface of the earth and get a sense of the real size of our planet. It took five weeks just to reach New York, via boat from Japan to the Soviet Union, trans-Siberian Railway across Russia (with Soviet expert and Hong Kong colleague Kurt Kamman as our guide), and the final leg from Europe aboard the SS United States from England.
While we were in America acquainting our three tigers with their grandparents, Chairman Mao called on the People’s Liberation Army to restore order throughout China. The violent stage of the Cultural Revolution came to an end that summer of 1967. Military men, all party members to begin with, took over the key positions in the provincial governments and party committees and ran the country for more than a decade. The Red Guards and their contemporaries were sent down to factories and farms, most of them far from home, where they were to spend the next ten years. The political tensions of the Cultural Revolution would last until Mao’s death in 1976 and his wife’s arrest immediately thereafter, but the killing and chaos were over.
We returned to Hong Kong months after the PLA crackdown, time enough to spare superiors the sheepish discomfort of “I told you so” encounters. We spent our final months in Garden Road reporting the militarization of the Chinese government, the rustication of the Red Guards, the suppression of the fighting factions, and the return to a nervous, inconclusive calm.
Heading Home
We prepared to leave the Crown Colony after almost five years, assigned to an additional year of language training in Taiwan to prepare me to be the U.S. interpreter at the Warsaw talks, our sole formal point of contact with the Beijing regime. On the eve of our departure these long-standing orders were changed in favor of a job on the Mainland China desk at the State Department in Washington. I was relieved. The Cultural Revolution had