Reporting on China has long been one of the most challenging and crucial of journalistic assignments.
Former CNN Beijing bureau chief Chief Mike Chinoy’s new book, Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic, tells the story of how American journalists have covered China – from the civil war of the 1940s to the present-day – in their own words.
Chinoy has assembled a remarkable collection of personal accounts from eminent journalists who recount the challenges of covering a complex and secretive society and offer insight into eight decades of tumultuous political, economic, and social change.
The book excerpt that Asia Times is republishing today with the author’s kind permission recalls the work of the “China watchers” who, frozen out of the mainland in the 1950s and 60s, were forced to cover China from the then-British colony of Hong Kong. More than a few of them sardonically referred to their daily reporting and research work – similar to the Kremlinology of the same period – as “tea leaf reading.”
In the wake of China’s expulsion of nearly two dozen US correspondents at the start of the Covid epidemic and growing tension in Sino-American relations, there are fewer American reporters based in the country now than at any time in decades. Mike Chinoy’s account of the Hong Kong China watchers’ experience thus has special relevance for readers today. – Editors
For American correspondents in the 1950s and early 1960s, Hong Kong was as close as was possible to get to the People’s Republic. Below, several of them explain what that meant.
Bernard Kalb covered Asia from 1956 to 1970.
Bernard Kalb, New York Times, CBS News
Chasing China was the obsession that we reporters had. How do we get information about China? We read everything we could. We put the mosaic of pieces together and tried to extract some narrative about what was happening, but this was bits-and-pieces journalism.
Stanley Karnow, who had served in the US army in the mountains between India and China during the Second World War, was based in Hong Kong for the Washington Post.
Stanley Karnow, Time
It’s very peculiar. Here you are sitting in Hong Kong, covering this vast place. It was like sitting in Bermuda covering the United States.
In the 1960s, Richard Solomon was a young China scholar. He eventually became assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs during the George H W Bush administration.
Richard Solomon, State Department
Hong Kong was a hodgepodge of foreign service people from many governments, a journalist community and academics. Even though we had our different institutional affiliations, we were basically doing the same thing – trying to figure out what was going on in China. We were sharing our information with the journalists and others, all trying to peer over the bamboo curtain.
Robert Elegant had started with Newsweek and eventually moved to the Los Angeles Times.
Robert Elegant, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times
Scholars, diplomats, spooks of various sorts and so on. Everybody knew who everybody was. We did share. We would kick things around and ideas would come out, subjects would come out.
Barred from the country they were covering, the China watchers looked for other sources of information.
Henry Bradsher, who had previously been based in Moscow and New Delhi for the Associated Press, arrived in Hong Kong for the now-defunct Washington Star.
Henry Bradsher, Washington Star
There were two primary tools. One was Xinhua, the New China News Agency. Second was transcripts of Chinese radio broadcasts, which were jointly done by the BBC and the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Services (FBIS). A serious job of China watching required going through that material every day, not only seeing what was being said, but what was not being said. Having spent that time in Moscow, I had learned some of the skills of Kremlin-watching, when you are reading Pravda, Izvestia—what you have to look for, what was being said differently today from the way it was said three months earlier. I brought those principles to Hong Kong. I had a messenger bring me up every day this pile of stuff. I would wade through it.
Robert Elegant, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times
We had a big house full of men with radio sets, scribbling handwritten Chinese from the local broadcasts. I’d walk into my office in the morning, and I’d find a stack of handwritten Chinese. It was painstaking work, intense examination of sources. Sometimes we missed them, sometimes we got them.
Robert Keatley, who had previously worked as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in San Francisco, New York, and London, was assigned to Hong Kong in 1964.
Robert Keatley, Wall Street Journal
Reading the People’s Daily could drive you crazy because you had to try to figure where’s the phrase that means something.
John Roderick had been an Associated Press correspondent in China in the late 1940s. When the Communist victory forced him, along with other American journalists, to leave the country, he joined the ranks of the China-Watchers.
John Roderick, Associated Press
The reports coming out of Peking were stuffed with sort of a verbiage and gobbledygook. But if you read it carefully, between the lines, you discovered something important was happening in China. Some man was mentioned in third place instead of second place. He’d been demoted, or executed, or whatever. It was that sort of thing. It was a kind of detective work.
Many of the reporters came to rely on Father Laszlo Ladány, a tall, bespectacled Jesuit priest from Hungary who had lived in Beijing and Shanghai from 1936 to 1949, and then moved to Hong Kong. The China News Analysis, which Ladány published from 1953 to 1982, became a crucial resource.
Ladány’s great skill was his uncanny ability to look beyond what the official Chinese press – national and provincial newspapers and radio stations – was saying and decipher what they actually meant.
Robert Elegant, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times
Father Ladány was a great, great China watcher. He had an instinctive feeling [about China] and put together what was happening. We relied on that. He used to say, “You have to understand if they say ‘a bumper harvest’ that means they almost met their target. If they said, ‘it was a satisfactory harvest,’ it means they only got halfway to their target.’”
Another key source was the continuing flow of refugees from China, mostly from Guangdong or other southern provinces. Ted Koppel was ABC’s Hong Kong correspondent in the late 1960s.
Ted Koppel, ABC News
The most accurate information that they were getting out of China tended to come from the waves of refugees who came out. And of course, that began in the late forties and went on into the fifties and sixties.
The daily routine for reporters was like trying to assemble pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Jerrold Schecter arrived in Hong Kong in 1960 for Time.
Jerrold Schecter, Time
You’d read in. Then you’d go to the Consulate, talk to your buddies there. Talk to foreign diplomats. Then you’d try to get a peg [for a story]. A couple of refugees who’d come over—you could send someone from the office who spoke Chinese to interview them and put all that together.
There were often sharp differences of opinion among the journalists and the diplomats about what was happening.
Richard Solomon, State Department
The US Consulate had differing views about what was going on. And some officials were feeding the press their particular perspectives. Someone like Stanley Karnow would publish an article in the Washington Post making one point or interpretation. It would be read by senior State Department officials who would then say, “Hey, what’s going on?” or “We hadn’t seen this particular point of view.” The press became a vehicle for this internal debate within the government about what was in fact happening in China.
Stanley Karnow, Washington Post
One time Jim Lilley [a longtime CIA China expert who later became US ambassador to China during the Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989] called me on the telephone. He says, “Listen, I’ve got a story for you.” He’s obviously trying to plant something with me. This is the attitude of the CIA guys. I’m working for the Washington Post.
The president of the United States is going to pick up the Washington Post and read it at breakfast. If he sends it back through channels, it’s like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea. If he leaks it to a reporter, the president is going to read it at breakfast the next morning.
Thrown together, the correspondents, diplomats and spooks lived and breathed China.
Robert Elegant, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times
We had a little group who were known to my wife as “Little Boys Club.” We met every month – people from various consulates, various news organizations and various intelligence organizations. You kicked things around, and you compared notes, and you put it together.
Stanley Karnow, Washington Post
The wives knew each other. The kids knew each other. You know you went to the beach with everybody, dinners with everybody. We were all a part of the family, the China-watching family. My wife would go crazy – “can’t you guys talk about something else besides China?”
Mike Chinoy is a non-resident senior fellow of the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California. He spent 24 years as a foreign correspondent for CNN, serving as the network’s first Beijing bureau chief and as senior Asia correspondent.
Before joining CNN, Chinoy worked for CBS News and NBC News. He won Emmy, Dupont and Peabody awards for his coverage of China. Assignment China, his fifth book, will be published next month and is available now for pre-0rder.