Assignment: China - End of an Era

inter woven with every activity is the common thread of Mao Zedong thought you during President Richard Nixon's visit in 1972 American journalists had gotten a tantalizing glimpse of China but after Nixon's departure the power struggle between moderates like premier Joanne Lai and radical ideologues led by Chairman Mao's wife Jiang Cheng who became known as the Gang of Four intensified u.s. reporters were again stuck on the outside forced to watch China from Hong Kong Steve Bell was ABC's Hong Kong correspondent from 1972 to 74 all you could do when you were a so-called China watcher in Hong Kong was to get these very broken up TV broadcasts from what was then Canton TV Bruce Dunning was then a correspondent in Asia for CBS the images were terrible they were black and white and in terrible condition but usually that was all the picture we had out of China it was like a Ouija board you were always searching for a reality and there were a lot of conflicting signals in those years only one North American news organization was allowed to station a correspondent in Beijing Canada's leading paper the Toronto Globe and Mail from 1971 to 75 its reporter was Englishman John Burns when I was the male correspondence I was also de facto the New York Times correspondent because having no correspondent there was a syndication agreement and so from the get-go from the moment I landed in China I was if there was something about the goings-on in mainland China in the New York Times that was going to appear under my byline although based in the Chinese capital Byrnes two struggled to put the pieces of the China puzzle together if the story is a 2,500 piece jigsaw you will only have at best probably a few hundred pieces of that jigsaw meanwhile in the spring of 1973 the u.s. opened a liaison office in Beijing soon after came invitations for the three American TV networks to send crews to China Irv Dresden was a producer for CBS news it was filmed in two months during the summer of 1973 that is the longest day any American observer has been permitted in this city that was once dominated by foreigners this is the first time they have let American television journalists come to China except to cover Nixon's visit they let each of the network's in to make a documentary one documentary in 1972 at the time of the Nixon visit Dresden who had studied Chinese at Harvard had produced a controversial documentary called misunderstanding China narrated by Charles Kuralt no tickee no Washee one from column a and one from column B and a fortune cookie you'll be hungry an hour later is about as much as we know about the Chinese my original title from misunderstanding China was the Yellow Peril and other things we think we know about China cooler heads prevailed and it became misunderstanding China which which worked perfectly because into into each commercial break during the broadcast the announcer would say misunderstanding China will continue after this message which was certainly true the film was an exploration of popular American attitudes and stereotypes of China the history of our attitudes toward China and that's what we're going to talk about during the rest of this broadcast this is a funny story and a dismaying one and not a trivial story either as you will see the history of attitudes has a lot to do with the history of events but we think about something naturally influences what we do about it it was a frightening idea for Americans the Yellow Peril had merged with the red peril the point here is not history the point is how fast our thinking change the GIS battled the new elements with everything they have now in the wake of the Nixon visit American attitudes shaped by the media were shifting again if you ever want to see the influence of the media just look at American China relations between 72 and 73 I think the 70 to Nixon trip was pure television and it had an enormous impact on Americans in a way it went from being mindless hordes coming over snow-capped mountains in Korea killing Americans with no fear of death to almost a warm cuddly picture of Chinese civilians and the Chinese people in general it was a huge shift yet the gulf between Americans and Chinese remained enormous as Dresden and his team discovered while shooting their documentary a look at the city of Shanghai in 1973 we were the curiosities in China I mean here are these Americans these there just weren't foreigners they were Americans with their camera crew and one of these Americans had hair down to his shoulders we would go out on the street and we'd be surrounded we would be surrounded the equipment would be surrounded people would just press in on us they wanted to get a look at us we literally couldn't move CBS reports Shanghai after two months in China Dresden's documentary on Shanghai offered a more nuanced picture of China than most Americans had seen all parents everywhere have hopes and dreams for their children what hopes and dreams do you have for your son what we did Charlie we do have hopes for him I wish you could become because I myself worked in the field of literature and art so it might influence him as the CBS team left ABC news correspondents Ted Koppel and Steve Bell arrived for a 10-week stay what we proposed was that we would we would try to find sort of different categories of people so we had the military category we had the student category we had the worker-peasant category which of course is how the the Chinese themselves during the Cultural Revolution everybody was a worker-peasant soldier peasants you know whatever the hell it was they were it was always this hyphenated kind of person interwoven with every activity is the common thread of multi-tonal thought like Dresden CBS crew Kapil and Belle found themselves tightly controlled it wasn't bad but we were we were very carefully watched at all times they had pre-selected the the people that we would be allowed to talk to and interview although the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had subsided relentless ideological indoctrination still dominated Chinese life every one of the students in 1973 spoke pure mouths speak without any effort whatsoever it really was the way they had to talk to each other the most sort of shattering image was of the relationship between the day they let us go into an English class at the University the relationship between the students and the professor the professor was a woman I would guesstimate in her late 30s early 40s and she was clip terrified the first year does it make it more difficult for you as a teacher to know that if you make mistakes your students will severely criticize you sometimes I our felt not shaved and would blush and I felt that I have I have lost my faith at a very beginning but gradually I found that the students criticized me only for the sake of help you and then we came back about a month or six weeks later and they were all out participating in the cotton harvest and there was the teacher and I stopped Orosco you know isn't this what I mean don't you feel a little bit awkward doing this you're an academic you're an intellectual do you really feel you have a good identification now with the lower-middle peasants I think I'm doing my best to learn from the workers and a peasant she was scared out of her mind 32 years later Steve Bell went back to China and found three of the students he and Kapil had interviewed in 1973 as well as the teacher she told me that she came from a prominent pre-revolutionary family that had been accused of burgeois ideas during the Cultural Revolution and she was extremely fearful as a teacher and she said we would wake up every morning and I would look out the window to see if there were posters criticising me and I was scared to death everything you said you had to otherwise you'll be criticized and and the consequences would be very serious not only yourself the former students said we were so naive we we had no idea what was really going on a lot of political pressure I mean what do you think of all the textbooks rotations I then did an interview with all of them together and she retold that story and they were they were completely flabbergasted and when the interview ended the young woman who had been a student who was sitting right next to her put her hand on the teachers knee and said we are so sorry we didn't know we are so sorry the first thing I did was turn to make sure the cameraman was still rolling because that was that was the moment the most enlightening moment that I've ever had in China the ABC documentary aired in December 1973 but the program infuriated the radicals in the Chinese leadership Koppel and Bell's interpreter lead on paid the price I remember some of the music we used was a bit ominous and there were pictures of Mao with this ominous music as we tried to put the Cultural Revolution into perspective and that was heavily criticized by the Gang of Four and that's what led our interpreter lead on to be sent to the re-education camp it was more than a year before lead on was freed in that year the power struggle within the leadership intensified as the only reporter for a North American news organization in Beijing the Toronto Globe and Mail's John Burns got the occasional glimpse you could go to the airport example for heads of state arrivals and the Politburo would turn out it was an important head of state and they were slightly curious figures like Haile Selassie the Emperor of Ethiopia I recall who you might think would be enough on the a list of visiting heads of state but was very important to China because he was a bridge to Africa and the whole Politburo would be there but it was visibly divided then there were two groups there was the gang of four the four John King and l-3 then there was the other group most of them much more venerated in history of the communist party older men and between them there would be somebody commuting physically on the airport apron and the person committing between the two is Jo and my you didn't have to be a sign all gist 250 years standing to understand what was going on there Henry Bradsher was then the Hong Kong correspondent for the now-defunct Washington star I by that time was writing it very hard and saying that there was definitely a new split within the government there was contention in the government there was disagreement there was a fight going on and I wrote that day-to-day a newspaper report with normalization talks between the US and China deadlocked over the issue of American support for Taiwan Henry Kissinger in particular was upset with articles reporting discord within the Chinese leadership Kissinger on a couple of occasions tried to keep my editors from publishing some of my articles he'd call up the editor of the Washington star and saying honey you don't really publish this this isn't right Kissinger was you know didn't want anybody looking like his policy was maybe wrong that or was a misunderstanding what was really happening in China in Beijing - there was anger at branches reporting after I'd written writing these articles very hard in the spring of 74 a couple of non-american journalists in Beijing know visited Beijing a BBC man and I forget who the other one represented in the foreign ministry and Beijing were told that they everything's fine here you know unity peaceful and the Hong Kong journalists are a despicable bunch and Bradsher is the most despicable of them all you know he's seeing he's seeing things that aren't there sent down the word branches most despicable of them all and he will never be allowed to visit China again that was the direct message I got from two different two different channels John Burns repeatedly got the message directly from angry Chinese officials I got used to telephone calls three four in the morning from a distant and very chilly voice saying you will be in the Foreign Minister 3 a.m. 4 a.m. and I would drive down through utterly deserted streets and park my Volkswagen Beetle in the compound the farmers should compound to go to an empty room empty safer portion and Mao sometimes wait for several hours alone one wooden chair and in would come the reproving officers of the state very often from the information department of the Foreign Ministry which was very closely around lighted with Chinese security and the address shouted at me by somebody in a mass suit the shrill voice was almost always the same you have insulted the leadership with the People's Republic of China you have abused hospitality of the people of the People's Republic of China and these are most grave matters do you have anything to say Richard Bernstein who'd studied Chinese at Harvard was then writing about China for Time magazine from New York we understood that there was a power struggle which the Chinese propaganda machine vigorously denied all those years and denounced all this Western reporting that talked about divisions in the leadership and stuff like that when in fact there was an absolute vicious power struggle going on bernard cal had been a longtime Asia correspondent for CBS I think altogether you'd have to say there was a sophisticated skepticism on the part of the media about how to report China Joseph Louisville became the New York Times Hong Kong correspondent in 1973 expecting to go to China I sort of figured China would be open because Nixon had gone and after the election China would open right but it didn't so that's how I wound up in Hong Kong I wasn't trying to watch stuck in the British colony Lavelle relied heavily on sources at the US consulate Raymond Burkhardt served at the consulate in the mid 70s we had a Chinese employee named Vincent Lowe who was famous because he and and some of his colleagues who were in the China watching business could look at a photograph and could tell you immediately or look at a list of from people who were named its name to the central committee and they would tell you oh well this guy served in the third field army with him so that's so of course he's there you know and the location of those two people in the photographs reflects the fact that they were together in 1928 and who not you know and and they were right you know this is stuff this stuff tended to attend it to to bear out in terms of who was up and down and how people related to each other Vinson and I would meet about twice a week for lunch in the Clipper lounge of the Mandarin Hotel I'd have to walk two blocks to the Clipper lounge and walk two blocks back to my office it was quite enjoyable because I liked his I liked him I liked his mind I liked the game I had expected to hate China watching and it turned out I didn't because there were little mysteries you could get into like whatever happened to Lindy ow there was only one place in Hong Kong where foreigners including journalists could occasionally interact with Chinese officials a social event run by Percy Chen a well-connected pro-beijing lawyer there were also these these odd gatherings that were organized by a guy named Percy Chun called the Marco Polo Club which had a lot of sort of PRC types resident in Hong Kong people from the Bank of China the new China news agency Xinhua many of them were Intel in fact intelligence officers or and and and that was the way the foreigners and the Chinese interacted in Hong Kong in Beijing John Burns struggled to make his own connections with ordinary Chinese the tale most often told about covering China at that point during the Cultural Revolution was how restricted we were but I discovered the bicycle I could go out in the evening and cycle either down the Houghton's the old alleyways of the city or out into the countryside to a village it was also accessible to somebody who in those days in my case was a runner and I started running early in the morning at late at night and I learned an extraordinary amount of things because there would be others at knives Chinese and everywhere in the world is a great fraternity amongst runners and you could team up with somebody and run for an hour and learn a lot about the town about the city but about the society as well because there's this basic sense of trust sometimes Burns daily runs through the capital provided chilling insights I can remember running early one morning it wasn't the only time past the State Security ministries offices headquarters and hearing volleys of gunfire and I was sure I was listening to executions six o'clock in the morning just a volley sometimes followed by a single pistol shot when now himself died and we began to learn the truth of course it turned out to be exactly that that they were executing people in August 1974 Richard Nixon had been forced to resign because of the Watergate scandal Gerald Ford became president Ford retained Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State and in November kissinger flew to Beijing rebuffed in all previous China visa requests Joseph Lella veld managed to switch places with the New York Times State Department correspondent when kissinger's plane refueled in Tokyo when he got to Tokyo we'd arranged for Bernie Grossman it was the State Department correspondent to get off the plane and I got on the plane as the Bose State Department correspondent to the New York Times and that we'd out maneuvered them they couldn't do anything about it without stopping Kissinger because was Kissinger his plane and and the Americans that agreed to it so they had my passport and I went in with the whole bunch but with Joe and I suffer from cancer Kissinger made only a courtesy call on Joe at the hospital and the two sides still at odds over us support for Taiwan American hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough did not materialize Joe and Lai did not appear he was visited in the hospital where he had a very Shoei bandage around his head as if he just had brain surgery or something and thong shopping appeared out of nowhere and and took his place that the Great Hall of the people on the first night that was pretty dramatic and dumb to whom Joe and I had given day-to-day responsibility for foreign affairs was blunt and tough he criticized Kissinger for pursuing they taught with the Soviet Union and failing to deliver on promises to break relations with Taiwan the only concrete result of the Kissinger trip was an invitation for President Ford to visit the following year in the spring of 1975 Orville Schell a young Harvard trained psychologist got on a trip to China with a group of 20 American left-wing activists shell though was writing for The New Yorker Joe and lie at that point was trying to kind of affect some put some real muscle tissue on the us-china relation so he asked a friend of mine to organize a youth work delegation and I went as a youth worker but in fact I was writing for The New Yorker shel hadn't told the Chinese he was a writer when they found out there was trouble when they learned I was writing for The New Yorker this created an immense amount of static and at one point we're not we were working at the model agricultural Brigade and she promised they became so exercised about the fact that I was a writer that I remember there was a reason but it wasn't a very profound reason they told me that I wasn't feeling well and then I would be spending a few days in my cave we all lived in caves in China Sheila's hills and it was pretty disconcerting but it was my first intimation of what it was it was like there could be like in China to run afoul of the man and to be you know in this very mysterious way for crimes you're not quite sure what they are you've come did you were ostracized and then finally a few days later they decided well they'd have to let me out she'll was part of a new generation of China reporters that emerged in the mid-1970s most of them were based in Hong Kong Fox Butterfield who'd also studied Chinese at Harvard took over the New York Times Hong Kong Bureau from a frustrated Joseph lovey bailed at first I was filled with trepidation I mean I was almost scared the first few months when I was ready in these stories like this is going to blow up in my face and I'm going to be completely wrong because we are speculating based on you know a few people's understanding of what's going on and we're hypothesizing and we're not able to go there we're not able to see it we're not able to touch it we're not able to do what reporters normally do Richard Bernstein moved to the British colony for time a young couple both also educated at Harvard Jay and Linda Matthews arrived as well she was working for the newly established Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal he for the Washington Post following in the footsteps of the post veteran Asia correspondent Stanley Carnot a goal Matthews had had since college by the time I was 19 years old sitting in Cambridge Massachusetts beginning to read The Washington Post for the first time I knew I wanted to be the Washington Post reporter in China and one of the great attractions was that the the post reporter in China then in Hong Kong was Stanley Carnot who was by far the best of all the course ones there I thought he was just amazing great reporter great writer so he was sort of my ideal Frank Ching who'd been born in Hong Kong and had been editing China stories in New York for the New York Times moved back in 1974 and in late 1975 I arrived to freelance for CBS having studied Chinese at Yale and visited the country with a left-wing American student group in 1973 Robert elegant who'd been following China since the 1950s still lived in Hong Kong like Henry Bradsher elegance reporting had long angered the Chinese authorities and both men remained on Beijing's blacklist like Joseph Lally Velde it took help from Henry Kissinger for elegant to finally get to China I didn't get in China till 75 but kissinger took me because Kissinger said did he last joke give me a visa I said Henry didn't give me of AZ's have you get on the list next time I go to China the Chinese said he can't come and Kissinger said you're not gonna tell me who's coming in my press party no elegant no Kissinger so we went in a few weeks later President Gerald Ford arrived Rahm Nessun was for its press secretary it was a difficult time for China because Mao Zedong who was the revolutionary hero and really founder of Communist China was very old and was sick and you know other other leaders were were moving up to to fill in the vacuum the pomp and pageantry was the same but in contrast to Nixon's 1972 visit for trip was characterized by bad feelings and diplomatic missteps compounded by the president's own inexperience in foreign affairs Tom Brokaw was then NBC's White House correspondent foreign policy and especially China was not exactly what you would call Gerald Ford's strongest suit so he was kind of being led around by Henry Kissinger and after about 24 hours in China we all began to complain because it was kind of one photo-op half for another we couldn't tell what was being done there was a lot of unhappiness about that we were just being paraded around and we didn't know what the president was doing and we weren't getting very good briefings they were very very routine there were very tight restrictions and the Chinese kept total control I got arrested because we had at least enough freedom to go wandering off but we clearly wander it off into an area he didn't want us to wander to and so some of the local citizens came around and before I knew it I was surrounded and we couldn't move and then a couple of cops came by and they took us back to the station and we had to wait there for a couple of hours well they made the requisite phone calls and then we the Americans were not sure if Ford would see Chairman Mao the Chinese would never tell you what the schedule for the next day was who Ford was going to get to talk to and especially whether he was going to get to meet Mao Zedong suddenly on the president's second morning in Beijing came a summons a messenger comes to where the president his party were staying and he says okay you're meeting mount say to him at 11 o'clock this morning and you can only bring five people with you and so we went to this meeting and I was one of the five the Chairman could no longer control the symptoms of Parkinson's disease his speech was slurred his assistants struggled not only to translate but simply to make sense of his rambling Mao was very old and had been sick was sick and it's not what he sounded like to me was something like this drug and then the translator would translate this into beautiful English sentences later reporters heard that the rambling two-hour conversation and ended with a Ford Focus Henry Kissinger said to Mao this meeting is demonstrated in me mr. chairman that your time has not yet up that you will continue to live and lead your people for a long time and Mao as I remember invoke God's saying I think my god is getting ready to call me home and Henry said no no it's not time for you to go Ford leaned in at that point said mr. chairman you do whatever you want to do Henry's always trying to tell other people what he's talking about dying everybody was trying to get him out of there the traveling press corps for the Ford trip had one unusual member Gary Trudeau creator of the wildly popular satirical comic strip doonesbury we had all different kinds of people who would travel I don't recall another cartoonist but you know we had columnist sand and so forth and as I say Gary Trudeau his comics are always focused on you know current events let's say and so it doesn't surprise me that he would have gone on this trip mouthed female interpreters who had so impressed Ron Nessen became the inspiration for honey one of the most famous characters in the Doonesbury strip despite us efforts to put a positive spin on the trip Ford's visit ended with no breakthrough the two sides unable to agree on how to move forward the main essence of the trip was to convey to the Chinese side that President Ford was not going to complete the normalization process until after his re-election which he was hoping would take place in 1976 this of course was a big disappointment for the Chinese because they had been led to believe by President Nixon that he intended to complete the normalization process within his two terms of course he wasn't able to finish his second term and that's why when President Ford came in so that the Ford visit to China was a tense one a month later on January 8th 1976 Joe and Lai died his passing triggered an outpouring of national grief compounded by fear that the resurgent radicals around John King would seize power although under attack dong Xiao Peng was allowed to deliver the eulogy I was just starting out as a China watcher and the death of Joe and Lai was really the first big story that I'd been involved with at all by this time it was possible to watch Canton TV in the cable & wireless building in downtown Hong Kong you didn't have to go out to the border and set up a TV and antenna and an antenna the way journalists had been doing in the previous decade and so every night at 7:00 o'clock and the days after Joe and Lai died we would go down to the sixth floor of the cable & wireless building and we would watch these extraordinary scenes of public mourning and the funeral trying to figure out what was going on but once the funeral was over now appointed not dung Xiao ping but hua Guo Fung the colorless politically reliable former party secretary of Hunan Province to succeed Joe and Lai as premier and the power struggle continued a month later Richard Nixon returned to China at mouths personal invitation it was a signal of Chinese impatience with Kissinger and Ford for not moving faster to establish full relations it was less than two years after Nixon had resigned in disgrace because of the Watergate scandal Gerald checked her covered Nixon's trip for Time magazine it was bizarre and some aspects in that he had his own we met in Beijing and he enters a royal welcome and then we would we flew around it was as if he were back in back in the White House and Kissinger was still working for him I mean it was clearly a Chinese effort to show that they wanted to normalize that they respected him he was a friend of China and forget about Watergate let's get on with the really important things some members of the press agreed with the Chinese this is what he should be remembered for he's not he's remembered for Watergate he should be remembered for China it changed the world within days of Nixon's departure the radicals escalated their campaign against dong wall posters appeared on university campuses denouncing him by name for taking the capitalist road with political tension growing on the weekend of the Ching Ming festival in early April when the Chinese honor their dead huge crowds gathered in Tiananmen Square they laid wreaths to commemorate Joe and Lai but their action was also a clear although indirect protest against John Chiang and the radicals I remember thinking this is amazing that people would even be able to demonstrate I mean it was a don't forget it was a very indirect criticism of the gang for because Joe and Lai was still officially a revered person and it was one of those rare situated was he's probably the only case of somebody that actually was able to fall afoul of the Gang of Four and to some extent of Mao but his prestige was so enormous that they they had to live with him and they had to live with with reverence for him good evening tens of thousands of Chinese went on a violent rampage today and rioted in peak Kings main gentleman square not since the Cultural Revolution ten years ago has there been such civil disorder in the Chinese capital the radicals correctly saw the popular gathering as a threat on April 5th they sent in police to remove the wreaths and disperse the crowds this was an enormous ly difficult story to cover I was sitting in Hongkong trying to call Beijing it took hours for calls to go through to get through to foreign embassies and the other small number of foreigners who were in Beijing most of whom were reluctant to talk the best information really came from a tiny number of foreign journalists who were based in the Chinese capital AFP the French news agency had a Bureau Reuters had a bureau and they had reporters in the Chinese capital but there was no footage so this was basically a radio story not a TV story we have an eyewitness report from Reuters correspondent Peter Griffiths and Peking and a Washington report from Bernard Cao a long time China hand u.s. specialists on China are stunned by the demonstrations they're using words such as surprising extraordinary unprecedented there's been a major political shake-up in China the next day dong Xiao ping was removed from his positions it was the second time he'd been purged in less than a decade later in the spring Chairman Mao made what turned out to be his last public appearances greeting the leaders of New Zealand and then Singapore it was clear Mao would not live much longer the reporters intensified preparations to cover his death the stories were that Mao was dying and we everyone was sort of on on edge waiting for that waiting to hear that that was happening we had a pretty strong inkling that Mao was failing and so the New York Times said we needed the New York Times had a tradition of writing what we called advance obits obituaries and for Mao they wanted they were really gonna do the whole thing so they took four full pages of the New York Times it was going to be the longest obituary they had ever written and they said we'd like you to do it and I said well it'll take me some time and they said well just do it in your spare time and I said there's no way I can do that I want to go back and read everything I can find and talk to everybody and so they finally gave me a week four full pages of the New York Times with no ads is long it isn't practically a book length piece but I worked day and night on that a second strong earthquake today hit densely populated northeast China apparently causing widespread damage like the first one less than 24 hours before the second one was centered about 100 miles southeast of Peking near the city of Chanin was felt strongly in the nearby port of tents in in late July a huge earthquake devastated the city of Tong Shan in northeast China quarter of a million people died this was a massive natural disaster but it was virtually impossible to cover none of the very few foreign journalists in Beijing were allowed to get anywhere close to Tong Shan very little information dribbled out we were reduced to making phone calls to foreigners in Beijing there was a Canadian student that I had met and become friendly with and I would call and got some updates about what conditions in Beijing were like because people there too were out sleeping on the streets and a few photos came out but that was about it we would go every day to the train station in Hong Kong and meet the trains coming across the border from the mainland and asked visiting foreigners did anybody have a home movie camera did anybody take any pictures but nobody did when I remember was hua Guang rejecting offers of aid I think my blankets and things like that and I remember being very shocked by that because by then we had a pretty clear sense that it was an immense tragedy and that China was very very poor and that there were tens of thousands of people out on the streets and they rejected aid on the ground the sort of ideological grounds that China was self-sufficient traditionally in China natural disasters have heralded the end of a dynasty on September 9th less than 2 months after the Tong Shan earthquake Mao Zedong died good-evening Mao Zedong the man who for 27 years ruled more than 1/5 of the world's population is dead the 82 year old chairman of the Chinese Communist Party died today at 10 minutes after midnight Peking time it was a huge story in 1976 I take over the Today Show Today Show's a little different than than it was now in terms of what we put on the air and you know it was early September I got a call at 2:00 in the morning that Mao has died and we just blew out the Today Show the announcement came from Beijing that he had died and you know we started filing radio material because everything had to be with file footage for TV because nobody could get into China and so it was it was like doing crossword puzzles in the dark we didn't know where this was going you were trying to do the best with informed speculation that you could but it was you know throwing snowballs at the moon by sheer coincidence Time magazine's Gerald Schechter was in China he was covering a visit by James Schlesinger President Ford's former defense secretary we're in Tibet and we will had our oxygen to suck on it and we're late at night it's September now towards the time we're getting ready to go back and we're told the Chairman Mao has died and they're sending a plane to bring you back to Beijing and the former defense secretary slushing is going to be the official American representative at the funeral and will the members of the party will go to pay their respects with him we got into Beijing and as we drove through the city there were no cars in the streets but people were in the streets wailing and it was tremendous open expression of emotion and it was if you know the head of the family had died there was this tremendous feeling of being bereft and of not knowing what would happen next at the funeral hua Guo Fung gave the memorial speech in front of a million people in Tiananmen Square he announced that mouthes body would be preserved and placed in a mausoleum CCTV put up a signal for hours and hours of material on the the funeral and they just put this up and anyone who wanted it could take it down and that's where we got the images and everything else we had to do telephone calls to Beijing if we could get through to somebody the wire services Xinhua it was scraping whatever we could together but Schechter was there the only American correspondent in the receiving line at the funeral we were inserted into the line mourners line and we all met Madame Mao to pay our respects in that and the the other three members and I looked at them and I was very moved by the fact that that they they seemed self-contented that that this is what they this was the moment they were waiting for and I went back and I wrote a file about this to New York and I said just that in the file that they could hardly wait for the for the corpse to to be buried the next morning Schlesinger called me in the hotel and asked if I would come to his room and I got there and he said well the Chinese have complained bitterly about your copy in which you said that looked like the Gang of Four was trying to seize power and he said I told them that I have no control over Hugh even though you're a guest here in China and and basically he he made it clear that you know it was an embarrassment for him but it that's the American Way and you just go and you go write what you want and of course we discussed the fact that since the material had to be filed from the central telegraph office obviously somebody had taken a copy of my file and sent it to the powers that be and they responded very quickly with their with their annoyance to Schechter's intense annoyance however time didn't publish his analysis time didn't mention anything about the Gang of Four in the in the story and why I never found out but they they totally edited out the whole question of internal rivalry and I guess you know they made a thought it was unseemly to do that since such a historic figure had died time it missed a major scoop but the magazine did get some exclusive pictures taken by Leo Hong Sheng who had been born in Hong Kong to mainland parents but grown up in the u.s. Leo was then a freelance photographer he managed to get to Guangzhou for time he was very hard to get a visa but because I was born in Hong Kong so for Hong Kong people to come into China you just need the reentry permit which I have I remember very distinctly that instead of seeing people's face in sadness what I saw was unusual extraordinary I sense people kind of relief even these people were wearing the black armband commemorating you know you know moaning Mao's death I saw people doing tai chi and so on I see all the all the body languages was a sense of relief and yet it was rather uncertain future indeed behind the scenes the power struggle in the leadership was reaching a climax Jiang Cheng and the radicals sought to claim mouthes legacy as their own and schemed to seize total power but more moderate figures in the leadership enlisted the support of fogwell Fung and on October 6th effectively staged a coup the Chinese leadership has given its first indication that there indeed has been a purge of the country's radical faction photographs of Mao's widow Chong Jing and three other leading radicals reportedly under arrest have been withdrawn from public sale we could never have known how fragile the gang of fours situation was and that so quickly after Mao's death what it was just a month or so after Mao's death that that they would be under arrest that happened so suddenly I mean clearly these people had been wildly unpopular even though they'd had what amounted to almost absolute power and when Mao was gone their big backstage supporter was gone and that was their fall was precipitous the campaign have been conducted mostly by wall posters and demonstrations as Bruce Dunning reports Shanghai they stronghold of radical Chinese communism appears to be turning against the four left-wing leaders in Chairman Mao's widow Chang Jing the toppling of the Gang of Four triggered an outpouring of public celebration unable to get into China American reporters had to rely on accounts and occasional home movies from travelers a Western visitor who took these pictures from a hotel window at the same time Zhang Qing and her followers were the targets of a venomous campaign of character assassination most notably in a series of prominently displayed cartoon like posters and the four were quickly airbrushed out of the official photos of mouths funeral after the overthrow of the Gang of Four there they were cut out of all the tapes at that time and and photographs and I remember looking and finding a sleeve still on a photograph like that kind of the person but they had left part of the sleeve there and they became non persons by the end of 1976 China had settled into an uneasy calm 1976 was the year of the Dragon and it had been an absolutely unbelievable year the death of Joe and Lai the Tiananmen riot the purging of dung Xiao ping the Tong Shan earthquake the death of Mao the ouster of the Gang of Four I think his reporters as the year came to an end we were just kind of shell-shocked and trying to take stock figure out what was going to come next Huang and I done in the winter ninja wouldn't Isis long to that area easy Yong Yong tae - DGT the Orion syndicate - she and waka mahi she would Yong Yong a suntan pilot by chanting sue what-ing now to here et al bundy honking the fatal shock me Oh Qaeda kumoi Santa

Channel: USC U.S.-China Institute

Views: 43,965

Keywords: usc, us, china, us-china, United States Of America (Country), USC Annenberg School For Communication And Journalism (Educational Institution), foreign affairs, international relations, relations, Mao Zedong (Military Commander), kissinger, Gerald Ford (US President), Deng Xiaoping (Politician), Zhou Enlai (Politician), abc, nbc, cbs, time magazine, new york times, washington post

Id: bLn4L36unLc

Length: 51min 43sec (3103 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 23 2015