‘Dateline—Peking’

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. Without formal censorship, the onus was on individual correspondents to decide for themselves what self-censorship, if any, they should exercise in their reporting.

Cold War diplomacy

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, 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. 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.

After Mao

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.

Personal and political dynamics

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 present-day China and people’s attitudes towards it. 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.

Licensed contacts and beyond

Despite the restrictions, there was a small amount of ongoing personal contact, at least before the Cultural Revolution. 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. 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.

‘The world within’

To many other Western residents, the lives of embassy staff and their families seemed a world away from their own. 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.

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.

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.

Identities and roles

As representatives of the West in China, to use Isabel Crook’s words, the long-term 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. 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’. In the West, the long-termers’ most contentious activity was their support for the PRC against their own governments.

Breaking down the barriers?

‘Isolation and integration’ 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. 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.