Lazy Man In China

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Lazy Man in China HELENE CHUNG MARTIN

Pandanus Online Publications, found at the Pandanus Books web site, presents additional material relating to this book. www.pandanusbooks.com.au

USSR/Russia

Xinjiang

Qinghai

Tibet

Nepal

India

Yunnan Kunming

Burma

Laos

Heilongjiang

Mongolia

Jilin Inner Mongolia

Gobi Desert

Liaoning Shenyang

Beijing

Korea

Datong Wutaishan

Tianjin

Hebei Taiyuan

Ningxia

Yanan

Xian

Shanxi

Shandong

i v er Yellow R

Gansu

Jiangsu

Henan

Shaanxi

East China Sea

Nanjing

Sichuan

Anhui

Suzhou Qinshan Hangzhou

Hubei

Chengdu er Riv e z t g Yan

Shanghai Ningbo Zhoushan

Zhejiang Changsha

Hunan Guilin

Pearl River

Nanning

Fujian Fuzhou

Guizhou Guangxi

Jiangxi Quanzhou

Li River Guangdong Guangzhou (Canton) Shenzhen Zhongshan Hong Kong Taishan Macao

Vi e t n a m

Hainan

Xiamen (Amoy)

Taipeh

Taiwan

Lazy Man in China

Lazy Man in China Helene Chung Martin

PANDANUS BOOKS Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Cover: Garden, Suzhou © Helene Chung Martin 2004 This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. All photographs courtesy of Helene Chung Martin and John Martin except where noted. Typeset in Weiss 11.5pt on 14pt and printed by Pirion, Canberra National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Chung Martin, Helene, 1945– . Lazy Man in China. ISBN 1 74076 128 6. 1. Martin, John, 1933–1993. 2. Journalists — Australia — Biography. 3. China — Description and travel. 4. China — Social conditions — 1976–. 5. China — Social life and customs — 1976– , I. Title. 070.92 Editorial inquiries: please contact Pandanus Books 02 6125 3269 www.pandanusbooks.com.au Published by Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Pandanus Books are distributed by UNIREPS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 Telephone 02 9664 0999 Fax 02 9664 5420 Publisher’s Editor: Duncan Beard Index compiled by Suzanne Ridley, Australian Writers Services and Helene Chung Martin Production: Ian Templeman, Duncan Beard, Emily Brissenden, Maria Foster

ix

Acknowledgements More people assisted me than the size of this volume may suggest. From my initial reaction to John’s letters in the mid1990s, the project ballooned: it assumed different forms and proportions for which many individuals and organisations provided material that has now been shed. I am grateful to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for appointing me Peking correspondent and the Monash Asia Institute for an honorary research fellowship. For critical assessment of partial or complete drafts of the manuscript, I am indebted to Professor Richard Freadman, director of biography and autobiography at La Trobe University; Dr Elaine Barry, former associate professor of English at Monash University; John Crone, former manager North Asia, Radio Australia; Kerry Cardell, Bruce Healey and Ranald McCowan, former lecturers in humanities at the Gordon Institute of Technology/ Deakin University; journalist Ilze Neboiss; Andrew Perry, former lecturer in politics at Monash University; librarian Diana Logan; Mark Hopkins, former Voice of America Beijing correspondent; China consultant Dr Daniel Tretiak; and Di Websdale-Morrissey, teacher of creative writing, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University. I was assisted by Australian Broadcasting Corporation document archives, especially Guy Tranter; Baillieu Library, The University of Melbourne; Sir Louis Matheson Library, Monash University, especially associate librarian Chooi Hon Ho and Chinese studies librarian Dennis Kishere; Special Broadcasting Service; State Archives of Tasmania, especially Margaret Glover; and State Library of Victoria, especially the telephone reference service.

x

Others who helped include Sue Ahearn, Emma Barling, Carmel Bird, Dr Eugene Chang, Barry Clarke, Keith Dalton, Dr Jean Dawson, Sam Gerovich, Dr Ian Guthrie, Emma Hegarty, Lucy Hobgood-Brown, Jane Hutcheon, Foong Ling Kong, David Irvine, Professor Bruce Jacobs, Professor Daniel Kane, Martin Kerr, Bogdan Kipling, Professor John McKay, Dr Anne McLaren, Helen Richardson, Alan Robison, Lorry Ryan, Sue Slamen, John Tulloh, Professor Marika Vicziany, Warren Wilton, Dr Ian Wolfe and Juliet Yee. My particular thanks to all those who corresponded with John and so made this book possible.

Helene Chung Martin

Contents

Acknowledgements Author’s Note Chinese Names

ix xiii xv

OLD PEKING, NEW BEIJING

1

ADVENTURES OF A LAZY MAN IN CHINA

9

Token Australian and Token Man

10

Shanghai Adventurer

29

More Ill-formed Impressions

43

Having a Hate Hitachi Day — You have to be cut out for it

54

RETURN OF THE LAZY MAN

73

Not Rushed with Commissions

74

Waiting for the Beautiful Ballerina

85

Catching Up with the Work Load

96

Not So White Christmas

107

PEKING VIA BABYLON OR SODOM

113

xii

… OR SOMEWHERE

123

YOUR TINY HAND IS FROZEN

135

MING TING YUAN

147

Bastardy in the People’s Republic

148

Lazy Man Down Under

160

OLD COMMUNISM, NEW CAPITALISM

169

All This is New but …

170

The Pooch is Not for Poaching

179

New Tang Capital

189

SKY HIGH FOR SHANGHAI

199

Endnotes

211

Correspondents

216

Index

219

xiii

Author’s Note

T

his book is based on letters written from China to family, friends and colleagues by my late partner, John Martin. I was fresh out of school and in my first year at university when John caught my eye. Tall and handsome in his Harris tweed jacket, corduroys and brown suede shoes, he was a ‘mature age’ student who seemed so sophisticated compared with the other, duffle-coated undergraduates in Hobart, 1963. However, outside lectures and tutorials on Chaucer, Shakespeare and the English novel, we saw little of each other. He was married and we moved in different circles: he with the sober intellectuals of the Literary Society and I with the extroverted theatrical mob of the Old Nick Company, cavorting about on stage. Only in our history Honours class in 1967 did we become more familiar with each other. And at a black tie dinner at the end of the year, we danced our first dance. That Christmas John sent me a card satirising the driest part of our course — on the Industrial Revolution — run by Professor Gordon Rimmer, a specialist in British working class housing in Leeds. The card showed an artist’s image of the Star of David below a cluster of houses receding into the Holy City. Inside, John had inscribed: ‘Working Class Cottages in Bethlehem’! That was our last contact. While he began teaching history at the Gordon Institute of Technology in Geelong, I stayed in Hobart working on my Master’s thesis, fell into ABC radio, and then freelanced abroad before returning to Australia. I was in Hobart as a television reporter on This Day Tonight when suddenly assigned to interview John. It was

xiv

John venturing to Shanghai

1976. He had been divorced for three years and the Gordon Institute was being restructured into Deakin University. That interview sparked a life-long love — a love that would survive the adventure of my posting to China. In Beijing in the 1980s I knew John was tapping out letters — his ‘illformed impressions’ — but I didn’t read them. I read his radio and newspaper stories but not his letters. It never occurred to me and there wasn’t time. I was too busy churning out my own ill-formed impressions. Now, of course, I wish I had. His observations would have added another dimension — colour, imagery, humour and insight — to my straightjacketed news and current affairs reports. On the other hand, what passes in a private letter — or across the dining table — may not pass the scrutiny of a news editor. When I wrote about my experience as a correspondent in Shouting from China, John laboured over it too, trying to improve and enliven my style. At one stage he said, ‘This part is very flat. What was the man wearing?’ ‘I can’t remember,’ I replied. ‘Then put him in a crumpled Mao suit.’ ‘But he may not have been!’ ‘Of course he was. They all were.’ And now I realise what John meant when he commented on the finished work: ‘Well it’s not what I would have written. But it’s not my book.’ Lazy Man in China is John’s book. It begins with his abhorrence at the idea of going there, reveals his fascination with the place, and ends with his being absorbed — indeed transformed — by it.

xv

Chinese Names I was appointed Australian Broadcasting Commission (later Corporation) ‘Peking representative’ and arrived in China in June 1983. In the last week of my posting (in July 1986), the ABC switched from ‘Peking’ to ‘Beijing’. In his letters John varies from the traditional romanisation based on Wade-Giles to the current Pinyin: Traditional Amoy Canton Chin dynasty (221–206 BC) Ching dynasty (Manchu 1644–1911) Nanking Peking Tientsin Toisan county Other Pronunciation ‘q’ like ‘ch’

‘x’ like ‘sh’ Deng Xiaoping Hu Qili Hu Yaobang Jianguo Hotel Jiang Zemin Zhao Ziyang Zhejiang

Pinyin Xiamen (Shar-men) Guangzhou (Gwong-jo) Qin (Chin) Qing (Ching) Nanjing Beijing Tianjin Taishan (Tye-shun) Qi Jia Yuan or Qijiayuan (Chee-jar-yu-arn) compound Xian (Shee-arn), Guangxi (Gwong-shee) Derng Shiow-ping Hoo Chee-lee Hoo Yow (as in how) — bung Jen-gwor Jiung Dzer-min Jow (as in how) Dzee-yung Jer-jiung

OLD PEKING, NEW BEIJING

Sunday, 2 June 2002: I land in the heavy smog that engulfs Beijing. Full thirteen years have flown by since I left during martial law on the eve of the Tiananmen massacre. The airport gleams high-tech. Plenty of trolleys and no charge. At customs a continuously rolling screen warns against the corruption threatening China: THE FRONTIER INSPECTORS REFUSE ALL KINDS OF PRESENTS … PASSENGERS SHOULD REPORT ANY WHO ACCEPT BRIBES. Dior, Chanel, Lancôme: all the brand names tussle for trade. As I descend on the escalator, I disappear beneath a provocative advertisement of a woman with legs outstretched. So this is the new liberated city. Outside in the humid heat of over 30°C taxis are ticking over — a passenger’s air-conditioned paradise compared with the 1980s when taxis were scarce. On the broad tree-lined

2

Lazy Man in China

airport road I recall the banner I saw in 1989 declaring: DOWN WITH LI PENG, then the despised prime minister. The banner has gone. Instead, a new tollway. Nearby snuggle the suburban oases marketed to expatriate families as ‘Dragon Villas’, ‘Dynasty Garden’ or ‘Beijing Riviera’ — villas and apartments set in sculptured gardens with amenities from swimming pool and gym to supermarket and school. Closer to the city, cranes and cladding everywhere testify to Beijing’s building boom. Then, via a bewildering mass of interweaving concrete flyovers, overpasses and underpasses, I’m alongside the Motorola and Hewlett Packard Towers and soon cruising down the former bicycle path of the ten-lane avenue that leads to the familiar comfort of the Jianguo Hotel. In 1983 the relatively small foreign community was divided into pre-Jianguo and post-Jianguo categories. As the new Australian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent, I was fortunate to fall in the latter. It spared me the hardships that prevailed for Westerners before China’s first joint venture hotel. Not that I craved luxuries. No. But I couldn’t buy basic items such as plastic wrap, pantyhose or Kleenex tissues. The opening of the Jianguo with its bakery at least offered an edible loaf of bread. A pianist is still at the keyboard while guests gossip at tables in the carpeted lobby. Compared with the dozen or more cavernous high-rise five-star hotels now available, the Jianguo is intimate. I picture the room John and I had at the end of my posting in 1986. The bed faced east, and as we were dressing for a farewell dinner, John photographed me at the mirror tying on his gift of a necklace of colourful wooden clowns by a Melbourne craftsman. Room 275 on the second floor overlooked Changan Boulevard with its millions of cyclists, battered buses and heavy grey-green military trucks. Near the Jianguo in the late eighties a swarthy member of the Turkish Uighur minority would sidle up, ostensibly

Old Peking, New Beijing

selling bananas, and offer, ‘Change money?’ A few of the dominant Han Chinese began peddling cheap clothes. While the illegal money changers have gone, clothes dealers have multiplied and now thrive in the Silk Market lane which swarms with tourists. To reach our former home at Qi Jia Yuan diplomatic compound, I have to pass not just the Silk Market but Starbucks, McDonald’s and the BMW showroom. I dodge bulging buses, streams of taxis, the ubiquitous cyclists and unpredictable newly-licensed motorists. Then, standing between the trees where amplifiers used to be set, I gaze up at our twelfth floor apartment on the right-hand side of the building. And I remember how each morning we were wakened by what John called ‘a shrill female voice urging us to pursue the four modernizations or maintain our disdain of the gang of four.’ Nowadays the voice would be urging Beijingers to learn English for the 2008 Olympics. And it would have to compete with traffic and touts. In the furore of free enterprise running from the Jianguo to the Friendship Store, it’s possible to bargain over any brand of fake watch and impossible to avoid hustlers with pirated disks of the latest films. The Friendship Store — once the principal place offering Beijing’s limited goods to foreigners — is filled with more merchandise than before and the underemployed assistants are willing to serve. I’m after a plain black kimono for my mother — preferably in cotton. ‘Sorry, only silk. See, Chinese dragons on the back.’ But I can buy the unadorned silk T-shirts I like as winter vests.

3

ABC apartment in the 1980s

4

‘Sweet pork’

Lazy Man in China

I drift over to another counter. ‘For men,’ says a girl, shooing me away. I know, I think to myself. This is where I’d buy something for John. On my stroll back to the Jianguo I meet a pet poodle. The previous canines I’ve seen in China were caged for consumption at the Canton market. I once saw a large dog, skinned and slaughtered, hanging from a noose over the butcher’s block. On another occasion, when guest of honour in my ancestral county, Taishan, I was served the local delicacy of dog casserole. I screwed up my eyes to avoid the sight of bones but was pleasantly surprised. It tasted like sweet pork. ‘What a beautiful white coat you have,’ I purr. The poodle, trimmed meticulously, sniffs me and approves. In the early eighties Chinese aspired to the four things that go round: a bicycle, a watch, a fan and a sewing machine. By the mid-eighties their goal was the four big things: a cassette recorder, a television, a refrigerator and a washing machine. Now the emerging middle class have the four luxuries: their own apartment, a car, private education for their children — at home or abroad — and holidays throughout China or overseas. Increasing numbers also parade a pet pooch. Concubines too are back as a status symbol — the more mistresses, the more wealthy. Senior leader Jiang Zemin — known for breaking into O Sole Mio in public — is rumoured to favour a glamorous opera star. Monday, 3 June 2002: I lunch at a Shanghainese restaurant serving eight treasures tea. The attendant, decked out in a


red, black and gold costume, makes an elaborate ceremony of every drop he pours — through the longest, thinnest spout I’ve ever seen. My guest is a slim stylish Chinese whose smooth demeanour masks the trauma of his past. ‘I was twelve at the time,’ he reminisces, flashing back to when his father was hauled by Red Guards to parade in a dunce’s cap through jeering crowds in a provincial capital. ‘That makes you grow up very fast.’ ‘Were you a Red Guard?’ ‘I would have been but my father was a “capitalist roader”. Not a worker, peasant or soldier.’ Then, after a sip of tea, ‘We couldn’t have met like this when you lived here.’ ‘Now, so much has changed. Beijing’s almost unrecognisable from when I was last here. I haven’t been back since leaving for Hong Kong on the Friday, June the 2nd.’ ‘So you were there at the time. You saw everything. We didn’t see anything.’ Beijing censored the massacre: the scenes shown elsewhere were withheld in China. ‘I’m not political,’ my companion hastens to add. ‘I’m not political’ is almost a mantra as Beijingers concentrate on their families and making money. They increasingly live normal lives: unlike before, they make their own decisions, find their own jobs, dress as they please and travel where they like. They’re free so long as they don’t challenge the system. Tuesday, 4 June 2002: Tiananmen Square, on the anniversary of the massacre. The jubilation and hope turned to tragedy of 1989 has been replaced by sterility. No reminder of the tens of thousands of peaceful students who defied martial law to demonstrate for freedom and democracy, free speech and an end to corruption. No carnival atmosphere of tents under fluttering red banners. No young idealists rushing up at the sight of my notebook.

5

6

Tiananmen Square, May 1989

Watching events unfold

Lazy Man in China

‘Please, write your name on my T-shirt!’ ‘Tell our story to the world!’ Vast and virtually empty stretch the flagstones. From three or four tourist buses passengers alight to view the Great Helmsman in the Mao Mausoleum. The Monument to the People’s Heroes in the centre of the square, headquarters of protestors and press in 1989, is cordoned off. Few people meander in the heat and anyone brave or foolish enough to hold a banner here — be they democracy advocates, Tibetan monks, Catholic priests or members of Falun Gong — risks prison. From Tiananmen Square I wander round the corner into Wangfujing Avenue — the shopping Mecca of Beijing. This was where John and I vainly traipsed from one camera store to another to try and have a lens repaired. We’d been away in Fujian Province where the anti-tourist bureaucracy got to us. There, after the evening’s obligatory banquet, we found ourselves walking along the footpath arguing senselessly. John lost his temper and threw his camera with its long lens onto the ground. That put a stop to our argument and put the kybosh on both lens and flash. They


had to be repaired in Hong Kong. Afterwards, whenever we came across the gap in our Fujian photos, we laughed. On this hot Tuesday afternoon Wangfujing overflows with Beijingers in their thousands. Waving revolutionary red flags, they’re barracking for China in the World Cup — televised live from South Korea on a giant screen. China has made it for the first time: China versus Costa Rica. Fans have spilled out of offices, shops and factories to sit, squat or stand in the mall to cheer and agonise over their team. While I mingle with the Wangfujing crowd, not far away at the Workers’ Stadium — which I associate with the mass execution campaign launched soon after my arrival in 1983 — ABC correspondent Eric Campbell and his crew are filming a similar crowd. The scene is repeated throughout the People’s Republic: masses of Chinese are taking time out to watch the soccer on huge screens. An historic match which strengthens the sense of nationalism sweeping the country. China will lose the game but with no loss of face. I’m like the locals: my purpose isn’t political. It’s personal — a journey of remembrance and discovery. I’m back to see

7

The crowd watching China vs Costa Rica, June 2002 China vs Costa Rica, June 2002 (final score: China 0, Costa Rica 2)

8

Lazy Man in China

some of the changes that have transformed Beijing since John and I lived here, when it was still known as Peking. Then, most Chinese who had to deal with foreigners — usually only senior cadres or servants — found the experience either exotic or distasteful. As John put it: ‘Just as in Australia some people are fond of dogs whereas others can’t bear to have them around.’ When I wrote Shouting from China, I was so ‘objective’ — so keen to present a balanced ‘reporter’s view’ — I didn’t mention my private life and that John was living there with me. Some time after he died in September 1993, I read the letters he wrote from Beijing to family and friends. He made me laugh. I’d not seen China with his clarity and wit. His missives also reminded me how, in the rush of adrenalin that drove me in those difficult but exhilarating years, I let my work jeopardise my relationship with John.

ADVENTURES OF A LAZY MAN IN CHINA

January–July 1984

I will continue these adventures of a lazy man when I return to Melbourne. John in Hobart to Helene in Canberra (2/1/83)

Token Australian and Token Man ‘I

no more want to live in China than in Afghanistan!’ was John’s response to my posting to Peking. It was 1983, during the Cold War and the protracted Soviet war in Afghanistan. Long before the 2001 Washingtonled war against terrorism and the bombing of the Taliban in Afghanistan for harbouring the billionaire caveman — elusive Osama bin Laden. But the thought of living in China so repelled John that he compared it with Afghanistan. We’d discussed my application for the position of ABC Tokyo correspondent and John joined me for a weekend in Canberra when I was on an intensive Japanese language course. He welcomed the prospect of Japan. One of the more satisfying aspects of his work in the Education Department, Melbourne, was assisting educational exchange between Victoria and Japan. He’d formed a favourable opinion of the Japanese and their advanced country. But China? Given the globe, John would choose Europe. He’d leap at London or, better still, Brussels, the ABC’s Continental post — so close to Paris. But Europe wasn’t on the cards. China was. Another problem was a mooted restructure of the Victorian Education Department: that didn’t bode well for him were he abroad. But there was no time to discuss things. The ABC wanted me packed up and off to Peking.

Adventures of A Lazy Man in China

What choice did he have? What choice did I have? Over the years the ABC had rejected every application I’d ever made for a position in Australia or overseas. I was rejected as a trainee in 1969. ‘You’re as good as some of the best boys!’ The mainland executive, Murray Gordon, interviewing me in Hobart, seemed surprised. ‘But of course, you have to understand that, all things being equal, if we have to make a choice between a boy and a girl, we’d have to give preference to the boy because you’re going to go and get married and all the training would be wasted.’ I nodded in agreement. Since then, I’d not once waltzed through Aunty’s front door: only slipped in through the back. By 1983 I was a reporter in Melbourne on the nightly television program, Nationwide (a precursor of 7.30 Report). I’d not long been rejected for Japan when my executive producer, Damien Ryan, popped his head into my cubby-hole office. ‘They want to send you to Peking. Slap in an application! Quick!’ In its fifty years of existence the national broadcaster had not once posted a woman abroad. Freelance females who were overseas on their own steam, radio pioneers such as English-born Patricia Penn in Hong Kong and Australian Diane Willman under fire in Beirut, were familiar voices on the ABC. I too had broadcast for the ABC as a young freelancer in Singapore, Hong Kong, London and Cairo between 1970 and ’73. Now, in 1983, it seemed the boys in Sydney were willing to break the rules, dispatch a girl into the field and see how she tackled the game. They were dangling the Peking post. I would be the first girl stamped ‘overseas’. How could I say ‘No’? ‘Oh well, if you’re really set on going, all right then, I’ll join you,’ John reluctantly agreed. ‘I’ll apply for leave.’

11

12

Lazy Man in China

So, after my careful preparations for the Land of the Rising Sun, as a fourth-generation Tasmanian Chinese, I was suddenly thrown — woefully ill-prepared — into the Middle Kingdom of my ancestors. Some six months later, at the end of January 1984, I flew down to Hong Kong to initiate John to the Dragon Throne. As he wrote to my sister and brother-in-law in London: [Macau]1 Dear Lehene & David Wo Wo and I have just had a most peaceful and enjoyable two days here after rushing around banks and travel agents in H.K. We have a lovely hotel here and the prawns in chilli sauce at the Pousada de Sao Tiago are a must when you come. Off to Beijing tomorrow. Love John Next week we were at Beijing’s special airport, reserved for VIPs, and shivering in a group of Chinese and Australian officials, padded and ear-muffed against the biting winds from the Gobi Desert. We were there to greet an elated Bob Hawke, Australia’s Prime Minister, as he stepped down the red carpeted stairs from his prime ministerial flying kangaroo. He was swept off in a shining black Hongqi or Red Flag limousine, the first of a cavalcade of 30 vehicles on their way to the state guest house, Diaoyutai, in the west of the city. Eight kilometres of Changan Boulevard — the Avenue of Eternal Peace — were decorated in his honour with Chinese and Australian flags. Outside the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square — where in the 1960s millions of hysterical Red Guards shouted and waved their little Red Books in adoration of Chairman Mao — Hawke, in his navy blue wool coat, was grey with cold. With his wife Hazel, in black hat and fur stole,


he walked the red carpet, officially welcomed by urbane Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang. The band of the People’s Liberation Army — the conductor’s baton topped by a red star — struck up its military rendition of Advance Australia Fair. Then boomed the Chinese national anthem, March of the Volunteers: ‘Arise, all ye who refuse to be slaves!’ John, trying to type for the first time, shared his impressions with his professional development colleagues in Melbourne.2 8-122 Qi Jia Yuan, Peking, Peoples Republic of China. Fraternal greetings to the Committee of the Professional Development Workers soldiers and peasants Commissars. As you can see your comrade is learning new skills in order to contribute to the four modernizations [in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defence] — though [typists] effie and ann shouldn’t feel threatened just yet. The afore mentioned 4 M’s are coming along none too rapidlly.i went to the Sichuan dining room at the Peking Hotel t’other night. The waitresses,busy bowing to one anoth in imitation of some alarmed Japanese guests, said we couldn’t (???0?) have a table. When we observed that others were dining, including Russian hegemenonists, we were advised that the chef had suddenly decided to have a sleep. It was six thirty.

13

Hazel and Bob Hawke

14

Lazy Man in China

I arrived in Peking on Chinese NewYear’s eve after an uneventful CAAC [Civil Aviation Administration of China] flight from Hong Kong. We were in the flat ten minutes when Steve Alomes from Deakin University (whom I know only passing well ) rang to say he was in Peking for one night as part of an eight day swoop through China. Round he came with girlfriend. As we sat chatting about acquaintances in Hobart, Peking began to welcome the Year of the Rat.Now from the twelfth floor the huge dimly lit flat — ironed city could be seen stretching away for miles on three sides. At midnight on every street and in every yard people lit fire-crackers. There were no big Moomba style sky rockets. Simply a great din made by millions of back yard bangers. It looked like a vast pan of boiling cooking fat crackling and spluttering away in the dark. Whilst Stephen and friend only stayed an hour the crackers continued day and night for a week. The day our P.M. arrived here he was greeted at the great Hall of the People by a well drilled squad of littlies. I’m sorry he didn’t see the poor little buggers standing on concrete in below freezing temperature before his car hove into view. The great coated honour guard stayed inside, emerged to be inspected then goose stepped inside again. Last night I attended the New Year lantern festival. It was the first time it had been permitted since the Cultural Revolution. The event was held in the cold and dark on a stretch of ground the size of a hockey pitch. The lanterns-mainly red and gold-were clustered about ten yards depth around the perimeter. Walking amongst them, with the blackness of the night just beyond, was like striding through frozen fire. I have since read a version of the origin of the festival which says the lamps were first lit to persuade the


15

emperor that the city was on fire. In addition to the lamps there were gorgeous dragons, and costume plays enacted on wagons. We left after an hour lest an ear froze solid and so be snapped off by a passer-by. The purpose of this letter is to thank you all the farewells — for your card and gift. The latter alas consumed. I’m sorry not to be going on the 1ong march [to Hawthorn Teachers Centre], though by now the top cadres at Treasury Pl. may have had a change of heart [about selling Glenbervie Teachers Centre, Toorak]. always yours, John Although there’s no trace of John’s first letters from China, not long after I showed him the rudiments of typing and he sent that ‘Fraternal greetings’ to his colleagues, he began slipping a sheet of carbon paper under his aerogram. His copies aren’t always complete — sometimes the beginning or the end is missing — and he copied far from all letters. However, there was a large enough manila folder to keep me absorbed and often amused after he died. I laughed and I cried. I could hear John’s voice so clearly. I asked friends and relatives if they’d kept any letters. Many naturally repeat events already told to others, though the retelling may vary and be enhanced. That’s why I collate some letters or integrate a phrase or paragraph or so from one letter into another. Back in February 1984, while Hawke in his sheepskin coat toured the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, two

John chuffed by steam train to Inner Mongolia

16

Back-firing cart

Lazy Man in China

labourers warmed themselves by fire on the back of their donkey cart. The first snow of the season fell, blanketing Beijing, on the Saturday John saw me off to cover Hawke in Shanghai. On the airport road a thrillseeking pedestrian took to roller-skates. Peking’s ice had yet to melt in the Year of the Rat. In our apartment, no 2 on the twelfth floor, we took refuge under our doona. Dear Mother,3 … Helene and I have been laid up for a week with the most awful flu. I did not think I would die — merely that dying would indicate an improvement in the condition. … Apart from the flu I have been enjoying China. We see much that is charming. On the way to the airport there are elderly shepherds, each with his little flock of twenty sheep or goats huddled around him. At the garden of the Temple of Heaven we saw little children flying kites in the shapes of big birds. I have been to a couple of dinner parties at the apartments of other journalists and to a reception at the Australian Embassy for Mr. & Mrs. Hawke. One night we went with the reporters, travelling with the Hawkes, to a restaurant specialising in the famous Peking Duck. There are two or three places which specialise in this dish. The duck is especially rared and then it is baked. It is bred for its lovely crisp skin. It is served at the table in pieces with small pancakes,


shallots (something like spring onions) and a special plum sauce. You wrap the duck pieces in the pancake with the shallots then dip it in the sauce and eat it. It’s delicious. The only fault I could find was that the scallions did not agree with me. We had the visiting journalists back to the apartment afterwards for drinks. Helene followed the prime minister’s party down to the huge city of Shanghai — population twelve million — can you imagine it? This city is apparently the place for shopping and for the latest clothes … Helene brought me back a beautiful mahogany paper knife. I’m looking forward to going myself next time. Our apartment is high above a long wide avenue lined with sycamores and pine trees. It is all very regimented and resembles pictures of Moscow from whence I suppose it was copied. There are amplifiers set in the trees at intervals. Each morning we are wakened by a shrill female voice urging us to pursue the four modernizations or maintain our disdain of the gang of four, or some other equally improving message. At first I found it exotic — now merely irritating. … Love, John Five weeks after his arrival, the shrill female voice from the amplifiers outside had a different message. Now, the awakening sound reminded John to prepare for a private minibus which pulled up at 8.10 a.m. outside building 8, Qi Jia Yuan, for him to clamber aboard for the ten-to-fifteen minute ride past the Workers’ Stadium to the Australian Embassy at Sanlitun. He was beginning the first of that portfolio of jobs about which he spoke so vaguely to colleagues in Melbourne.4 I’m working at the Australian Embassy, as assistant to the first secretary in charge of the aid programme.

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Australian Embassy in the 1980s

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That is all I am permitted to say about it which is a relief. I can say that everywhere in the Embassy the day is long and the labourers are few. It is good to discover though that everywhere one goes in Beijing — admittedly not far — the Embassy staff are very highly regarded, compared with the other missions. I haven’t been there long enough to change this. As I may have mentioned ‘foreigners’ — a word Chinese use a lot — are regarded like Midwich Cuckoos [strange people] and so are kept as far away from the Chinese people as possible. In practice this means there is a whole government department to look after us — to supply us with ‘ayis’ [literally aunties but actually cleaners], cooks, drivers and so on. It is not possible to do without such people without finding oneself in all sorts of ‘bovver’. One lives in a foreigners’ compound. With armed guards placed outside to check the identity cards of Chinese who work there and to keep a check on our movements. Foreigners have to remind themselves that this is not so much socialism as a Chinese preoccupation with secrecy. If a staff member works late a foreigner can authorise a driver to give him a lift home (and pay the driver overtime of course). The employer cannot drive him home as an employee’s address is a state secret. When one day I was out of town at the Fragrant Hills Hotel (designed by I. M. Pei of Collins Place fame and now falling to bits after only one year) I found I had forgotten my phone number. At the hotel desk my request for a phone book caused great embarrassment. All telephone numbers are state


secrets and there is no such thing as a directory. As I was Australian wanting an Australian number I was permitted to ring my Embassy and request my number from them. The clerk of course listened to my call to see that I did just that. All this breaks down at various points. It is a status symbol for a Chinese to be seen at the International Club (foreigners only) with a foreigner, and diplomats and journalists like to speak in hushed tones of Chinese contacts, but anyone can be pulled up with a jolt at any time. It has its funny side — sort of. An American woman told me today that her fifteen year old daughter is segregated at the school where she studies Chinese for fear of polluting the other juniors. An Italian journalist [Der Spiegel’s Tiziano Terzani] was expelled last week allegedly for smuggling antiques. He was doing no such thing. He did however speak good Chinese, wear Chinese clothes and insisted on sending his kids to Chinese schools. None of these practices is encouraged. Interestingly diplomats who have worked in freer countries prefer Beijing, finding it more interesting — more exotic. Certainly it is very difficult at a dinner party (which are numerous) to maintain a conversation about any topic but China. People are fascinated by it. People, i.e. Australians, Americans, Indians even East Europeans tend to largely shed national identities to don the mantle of collective foreigness. This is partly due to seeing so much of other foreigners at social meetings. Most Chinese who have to deal with us — usually only senior cadres or servants — find the experience either exotic or distasteful. Just as in Australia some people are fond of dogs whereas others can’t bear to have them around.

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Another curious thing is that interest in China is so strong amongst expatriates that we devour as many books as we can obtain on the subject. Particularly those on its recent, mainly self-destructive political history. As these books are written from experience they reinforce the experiences and impressions of the expatriates until it is not always clear as to which experiences are one’s own and which taken from the literature.

Behind the crimson walls

One story John took, not from the expatriate literature, but from the official New China news agency (Xinhua), was that of a young worker who, after losing both his testicles in an industrial accident, regained his virility following the transplant of a single testicle, donated by his father. John saw this claim as a metaphor for the lessons Chinese leaders wished to teach their people. The medical researchers and surgeons who made the operation possible were intellectuals whom the Party was trying to rehabilitate after they were systematically criticised as bourgeois experts during the Cultural Revolution. They were shown achieving a feat for a member of the proletariat. Their success was achieved as the Four Modernisations had to be achieved — speedily and cheaply. This, John’s first attempt at radio was broadcast by Robyn Williams on the ABC’s Science Show in March 1984. At this time I was setting off with Joh and Flo, the Queensland Premier Bjelke-Petersen and his wife a senator. He had already been accorded


a meeting with Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang behind the crimson walls of the Communist Party compound, Zhongnanhai. In front of an ornamental screen, they nestled against the lace antimacassars of their armchairs, an interpreter behind each man. Now, as Peking’s temperature hovered around zero, the premier headed south in a CAAC Ilyushin destined for humid Canton. Our landing with a thud in thick fog caused Flo to flutter and think of God. ‘I thought we were going to end up in the carrots,’ said the famed maker of pumpkin scones. ‘Qantas would never have landed in weather like that,’ admonished her husband, a pilot. The king-size stalwarts accompanying the duo had already suffered five days of Oriental delicacies. ‘We’re dying for a hunk of meat we can tackle with a knife and fork.’ ‘I want a decent slab I can eat off my own plate.’ Alas, they had to content themselves with chopsticks, manipulating slivers of stir-fried beef from a common plate. This had to sustain them through the fare that followed. From wealthy Guangdong Province, westwards we went to neighbouring impoverished Guangxi. Here the Maosuited governor and top officials of the region’s 36 million population lined the tarmac, trying to woo the blustering anti-communist Queensland commander into a socialist sister-state relationship. ‘These Reds are different. Not disruptive like the Reds all going on strike back home,’ observed the National Party leader, comparing his hosts with supporters of his Labor Party opponents. At a time when most Chinese had as much chance of riding in a car (let alone owning one) as Westerners had of rocketing to the moon, Joh and Flo were each chauffeured in a separate Red Flag — China’s Rolls Royce. Hidden behind the customary lace curtains of his black limousine, the beef

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and peanut farmer-turned-politician resembled a foreign potentate with his queen in tow. They preceded a convoy of gleaming new red Japanese Hondas, each seating a single Aussie retainer, and a series of pale blue Chinese Shanghais — the dodgy brand then used by taxis — conveying members of the press. The fleet whished past peasants on pushbikes and ancient scenes of yoked workmen, bent forward as they struggled to haul back-breaking loads. A thunderous welcome broke out as they alighted at the guesthouse in the capital Nanning. ‘Huanying, huanying!’ (‘Welcome, welcome!’) chorused five hundred rouged and rehearsed children, all bedecked with the red scarves of communist Young Pioneers. They jumped up and down waving flowers and ribbons, beating drums and clashing cymbals. A large red banner proclaimed: WELCOME TO THE DELEGATION FROM QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA. So overcome was Joh in his pink shirt that he stepped in line and clapped to the tune of the Chinese cadres. Guangxi officials, intent on impressing Joh and his guffawing fellows, feasted them on sea slug, python soup, simmered mountain turtle, sautéed flying fox or fruit bat with wing, and civet cat. ‘Ganbei!’ (‘Bottoms Up!’) they raised toast after toast. Not with plain fiery white maotai but a special pallid green spirit fortified with raw snake gall. While I trailed the premier to an Australian aid project of eucalypts and pines — with more swirling ribbons and costumed kids — the aid section at the Australian Embassy was engaged in a whole range of projects: a citrus project in Hunan, a beef project in Yunnan, a dairy project in Jiangsu, and many more besides. Just as I left a joint venture pineapple plantation, John pulled up at Beijing airport to greet the latest Australian arrivals — men whose mission was agricultural aviation. As he told friends in Australia:5


I am working at the Australian Embassy and loving it — so far. I am working on the technical co-operation programme (really technical aid but we mustn’t call it anything so offensive). In some respects it is the most interesting and most demanding job I have had. We are a cosmopolitan lot. The First Secretary in charge, Judith Frohlich is a New Zealander. The secretary is Tanzanian and my colleague who runs the training programme is a Texan. I am both the token Australian and the token man. I am frequently required to attend banquets and drink innumerable toasts in maotai as part of my professional duties. Maotai is a drink that looks like gin but has a kick like a draught horse. Fortunately there is always plenty of excellent Beijing or Tsingtao beer to drown the flavour of the maotai. At one of these banquets one of the Embassy staff mentioned an incipient cold. The senior Chinese delegates recommended an ‘Infallible cure’. The suffer-er should return to his home and lie on his back with a hat on his feet. He must then drink maotai until he sees two hats. This week I have already been to two banquets. Tomorrow night I have another. (It’s not like this every week. Thank goodness.) The second of these hosted by the Chinese Forestry Department was at a Mongolian hot pot restaurant. There was a fellow there — a Chinese — who clearly didn’t get along to these things too often. He started badly with a joke (which I suspect the interpreter toned down a bit) about how you could always tell a Forestry Dept. executive by the quantity of quality wood panelling and fine furniture in his home. His superiors didn’t laugh much at this story.

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During the speeches on ‘friendship and co-operation’ (though frequently discussed both commodities are extremely rare) this character, with octopus arms, kept on hopping in to all the food and beer and wine and maotai in sight. Worse, he repeatedly poked me in the ribs and waved his hand over the table to indicate that I should do likewise. He’s probably in a gulag in [the remote north-eastern province of] Heilongjiang by now. Notwithstanding John’s use of hyperbole, he didn’t find China a place about which to be starry-eyed.6

Wintry trek up the Great Wall

It is a most interesting place to live in, but it is surely one of the most repressive societies on earth. The repression comes in the first instance from the top. It is there that the leaders work out in great detail the regulations governing every aspect of life. There is an official line on what to do and what to think about even the most personal matters (the wrong word, as nothing is personal in China). This statement too has to be modified as, like the Victorian A.L.P. [Australian Labor Party], there are at the top factions antagonistic to one another. The people never know which one will become dominant enough to crush the others and harshly punish its supporters, so they all keep their heads down. I’ll give you a simple illustration. The men in Peking almost always wear SunYat-sen suits (called Mao suits in the West). Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang has been trying to break them of the habit. He’s having little success because each one fears that if Deng Xiaoping were to


fall and there be a return to Maoism, pity help those caught in a western suit. When one of Helene’s staff was given money by the ABC to buy a new outfit, he bought another Sun Yat-sen uniform. Let others buy a western suit he said. ‘I don’t want to be criticised.’ The worst repression takes place at the local level (although punishment is ultimately dispensed at the top). It is the overenthusiastic cadres in the village, the factory, the apartment block and the street who really make life miserable for their fellows. You may have read in the ‘National Times’ of the abortions forced upon women, seven and eight months pregnant. I am confident it is all quite true. In the next apartment block a young girl was arrested when a fellow lift-operator reported her for having a relationship with an African (probably a flirtation). She faces fifteen years in jail. If the Chinese are repressed, they are certainly not slaves. The most repressed people are also the most idle. This is becoming less true in those rural areas that lie outside the big cities. There peasants are being allowed to grow extra on privately owned allotments and bring this surplus into markets. Old people also work. Last Sunday Helene and I made a big effort and rose early to follow Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Flo out to the Great Wall, about thirty miles north of here along a narrow winding road. Along the way we saw huge teams of workmen

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Long haul carriers

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Staying in touch

Lazy Man in China

building new roads and laying pipes. Barely a shovel moved. Smokos here can last for half a day and although Peking is dotted with construction cranes, I have never seen one move. Further out of town the scene was different. There were hundreds of donkey carts with two or three little beasts dragging huge loads. Once I saw an old man bent over at right angles, carrying a load of wood that should have been on a truck. It reminded me of the time I saw, in the middle of Peking, a huge wagon loaded with steel being pulled by five men attached to it by ropes. Admittedly these were probably convicts and the old man was either extremely poor or worked from habit. There is no compulsion to work and no coercion. The other day I was with Ros Ives, a friend of the Kameners, at the Peking Hotel. Ros wanted to buy some stamps at the post office there. There were twelve girls behind the counter and five foreigners — mainly hotel guests — waiting to be served. It was half an hour to go until closing time and the girls had no intention of seeing, let alone serving, anyone. It was so ridiculous that the foreigners came round to seeing the humour of it and treated it as just another exotic spectacle. Now I am supposed to be talking about us and Joh at the Great Wall. Joh wasn’t important enough for the People’s Armed Police (so called because they’re only used against the people) to clear the Wall of sight seers. The Queenslanders had to push their


way through family groups and soldiers and sailors out with their girl friends. Helene chatted to Flo while I tried to obtain an historic photo of Joh against the background of the Wall. We pursued J. & F. to the Ming Tombs, but as our driver had gone for a take-away at the Wall we left there late and lost our prey. Instead we were able to wander round and observe more Pekingese on an outing. It was a colourful scene made more so by the lack of individual costumes. Children — very small children that is — are dressed in bright colours. Adults are in some sort of uniform. This does not make for drabness rather for big blocks of colour. There were big patches of olive green and red for groups of soldiers — men and women of the P.L.A., electric blue sailors’ uniforms, navy blue and red for the police and the fascist style green, gold and red outfits of the Peoples Armed Police. Most young boys and girls wear the bright red scarves of the young pioneers communist youth. Everyone else wears blue or olive green so it all tones in. There were photographers at the Tombs with life-size cut-outs of characters from the Ming period. These had no heads. Instead they had spaces where a visitor could put his own. For a few fen one could put on the appropriate headress and be photographed as emperor, adviser, soldier or concubine. One could also

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Children are dressed in bright colours

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be photographed next to a vase of very sun faded plastic flowers with the Ming Tombs in the background. Life here for foreigners is unusual as you know. We live in separate compounds with our own ‘ayi’ — auntie, driver etc. All supplied by the Foreign Services Bureau. These do our bidding and keep an eye on us and see what visitors we have. All is reported at regular meetings. We are very fortunate with ours and are really quite good friends within the obvious limitations, imposed by the Government. I suspect sometimes that faced with a grilling by Helene or the State Security Police, our people would prefer to face the latter.

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Shanghai Adventurer J

ust as in life John’s quirky sense of humour had him impersonating others, in letters to friends and colleagues he could adopt different postures and assume different voices. Such letters are laced with irony and hyperbole and written in a tone of self-mockery. Dear Bernie,7 Delighted to hear from you. Your letter was waiting for me on my return from a quick trip to Shanghai, Canton and the f1esh pots of Hong Kong. In the last of these places I tried to purchase a few simple garments, off the hook, to clothe my humble frame. The shop persons looked at me incredulously — as though I had requested a nightie for an elephant. It seems big westerners have things made. Certainly few shops carry stocks in their sizes. As for shoes, best try the shipyards. Shanghai is an interesting city. Though you Bernie would find the old Shanghai Club has much declined. You would be ashamed to introduce a gentleman there these days. The building retains all its Edwardian splendour and it still has the longest bar in the world (the fourth, I think I have known to be so described). Regrettably now, it is a Chinese hotel and pongs of fish — cod I suspect. The operator of one of the two

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Lazy Man in China

cage lifts — still with brass plates recording their manufacture and installation by Walker & Steven of London & Northampton — refused my request and that of my companions that we take a ride for old times sake. ‘You are all foreigners’ he said ‘and shouldn’t be here’. Of course he was right. Just before my little jaunt down south I had to attend a meeting, with my boss and some visitors from Canberra, at the office of one of the government ministries here. It was an ordinary sort of building, built this century, with a fancy pagoda style roof aimed at giving it some national character. The real national character was however inside. Once through the main door the public was confronted with a line of table tennis tables — all of them in use. Every one agreed that in Australia, we’d have the ordinary decency to put them in a room out the back. These games clearly have an important place in public service life in China. Unlike the Australian Embassy where I work, Chinese offices are not heated — not even in sub zero temperatures. I thought about this during the meeting as I wrapped my hands around an ornately bedragoned tea mug. Apart from the cold and the Sun Yat-sen suited bods on the other side of the table we could have been sitting around a room at Hawthorn. This stationery, acquired only t’other day from a surly stewardess, is to show you that I have indeed flown on CAAC — 4 times. Your suggestion Bernie that I attend a typing in-service and not give one, smacks of elitism. best wishes to you all. always yours John CAAC


Dear Heather,8 To you and to all my other old comrades at the Hawthorn Teachers’ Centre Brigade of teachers and workers — ‘greetings’. … I have as yet no experience of teaching in China but I have heard many a horror story from those who have. These have been mostly Americans who huddle together in the cold, rat and cockroach infested Friendship Hotel and who teach either at Beijing University or the first and second modern language institutes here. At these places the students are very much in control — to their own disadvantage. A teacher may not comment on a student’s work or his progress for fear of being accused of individualism. A student’s work is not graded only that of the class or collective. In practice all work is done in the dormitory, usually by the most able student, and handed in as the class commitment for that day. Principals may not express negative views about students’ work for fear of being ‘criticised’ — a word that embraces anything from being screamed at by the class to being beaten up. In fairness this is not the policy of the present leadership. Their more intelligent offspring are quietly packed off to colleges in America or West Germany or wherever. It’s just that the leadership lacks control in many areas. I met one of these overseas graduates at some do hosted by [Chairman of Conzinc Riotinto of Australia] Sir R[oderick] Carnegie at the Peking Hotel. (Think

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Living and shopping in Shanghai

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of all the opportunities he had to invite me to something in Melbourne.) Anyway this chap — whose name was Mao — at one stage cut a long and wide swathe along the banquet table returning with a dinner plate piled with numerous Chinese delicacies with the whole surmounted by the biggest piece of cream sponge I had seen since Bernadette’s wedding tea. When I commented on this composition Mr Mao explained that he had acquired this particular refinement whilst reading for his Master of Business Management at University of Texas. I’ve heard of the failure of a programme at Beijing Teachers’ University to give its lecturers fifty yuan each to buy books. Apparently the ‘non-intellectual’ workers, remembering the good old days when a teacher could be made to wear a dunce’s cap and given a good poke in the eye with a ruler, scotched the scheme. If teachers were to be given cash to buy books they reckoned so too should the janitor and the furnace man. The other week I took ten days off to visit Shanghai and Canton and pop over the border to Hong Kong. The high point was clearly Shanghai. This city with its 12 million people still has something of an independent spirit left — partly due to its size, its degree of industrialisation and its distance from the bureaucracy in Peking. It also has a most exciting river crammed with big cargo ships, coal barges, ferries and motorised junks. All these vessels travel at top speed and show no concern at all for water safety. Each one blows its horn all the time in imitation, one assumes, of the Shanghai taxi drivers — surely the most vicious in the world. Shanghai also has ‘the Bund’ a waterfront crammed with large art deco towers built by Europeans in the ’thirties — the old Cathay Hotel (now the Peace


Hotel), the Shanghai club, the first Shanghai and Hong Kong Bank and so on. It also has the Yu Yuan Gardens on which the Willow Pattern design is based … There is a beautiful tea house in the centre of one of the lakes. Less happily there is also a restaurant with a big notice that declares it out of bounds to Chinese. It was here that Hawke supped with some of the nastiest people in Asia, and apparently enjoyed the experience. It is Friday afternoon and one of the more pleasant things about life here is that the English speaking Embassies are closed. Instead there is an incestuous custom of each taking it in turn to open its bar to the others. Today it’s the turn of the Americans. I am told that unlike the Down Under at the Australian Embassy and the Bell at the British, this American saloon is but a dreary hall. This is because it doubles as a church on Sundays. But I will go and judge for myself. … Always yours, John Fortified by a drink, he sat down to contemplate the communist capital.9 This is a fascinating and most exotic place in a repressive and sinister sort of way. It is also most bizarre. It is as you know very big with over nine million people — somewhat bigger than London.

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Yu Yuan tea house

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It is flat with hills to the west and north. These hills should enhance the view from my study. As it is they are never visible the smog blocks them out all the time. We live in a foreign enclave not far from the old legation. At every entrance are the guards of the Peoples Armed Police … They wear Fascist looking uniforms and mirror sun glasses and carry both revolver and truncheon. They are not there to protect us but to keep Chinese from entering and being polluted by the foreign devils. This apartheid (every bit as total as South Africa and every bit as racist) is possibly marginally worse in Beijing, close to government and bureaucracy, than it is elsewhere. However the effects can sometimes be worse in the provinces because of the zeal of minor peasant officials. The exception to all this are the cadres. These have foreign currency and can contrive reasons for entering hotels and other places set aside for foreigners. They vary from the tolerable to the despicable. China has been described as an authoritarian country with an authority crisis. No one government faction is really in charge. They muddle along with a series of little coups and counter coups. At the moment the people are in a ripe old state over the debate on moral pollution. One faction announces it is over and its leader disgraced. The next day there is a rumour that it is not over and its leader is about to become Party secretary. Most Chinese play it safe and stick to their Mao suits and short hair … The standard of living here is very low indeed. In the country it could barely be called living. However no group is more cruel to ordinary Chinese people than those who have appointed themselves their guardians. In order to find a comparable discrepancy


in the living standards of rulers and ruled one would have to return to the France of Louis XV. In Louis XVI’s time the gap had narrowed. Incidentally don’t let any idiot gull you that they went to China, saw this and that and really got to know the Chinese. The cadres have really got this tourist cum delegation racket sown up. Last week when Australian filmmaker Suzanne Baker and the ABC’s [Deputy Chair] Wendy McCarthy were here with a media delegation we experienced or rather suffered this silly business for the umpteenth time. Out we all trotted to a banquet with some foundation for international understanding. This would have been hastily thrown together from a list of trusties, given a day or so practice in cliches and fixed smiles. The food was pretty crummy … and the speeches were worse. The idea is to make the visitors think they have made lifelong friendships and had a real Chinese experience. Another tactic is to have the visitors up very early for tours each day. This promotes excitement during the day and extreme fatigue at night. Neither is conducive to looking critically at China or to getting out and about at night and mixing with the crowd. All that aside I’m very pleased to be here. I am not a tourist but a resident and so have a wonderful time falling foul of the bureaucracy, poking my nose into places where the police can’t be bothered stopping me or fear I might know someone and so they’d better not and so on. Helene has become the expert at this last but highly necessary tactic. The most engaging thing about China, and the thing that stops people from going home, is that it is so bloody interesting. People at the Australian Embassy where I work, assure me that it makes all other postings seem much the same as each other.

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Autumn in Behai Park

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Similarly there are so many interesting places to go to … Living in China is fabulous. For once that is the correct word. There are large areas of palaces and temples and many beautiful parks and gardens — most with enormous lakes with pleasure boats that can be easily hired. My favourite is Beihai Park. It was once the site of Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome and during the Cultural Revolution of the ’sixties and ’seventies was set aside for the exclusive use of Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing. The park is actually an island in the lake’s centre which is reached by foot bridge. It is beautiful to walk along the park that borders the island, always with the water on one side. In fact you have to walk as every single space and bench where one might sit is taken by a courting couple. Because of the shortage of space at home there is no chance for them to meet there. It may seem an unusual thing on which to comment but Peking has the most extraordinary variety of hotels. There are new joint venture pubs like the Jianguo and the Great Wall which are most luxurious and most expensive. Liz Taylor stayed at the Great Wall recently. These places are only for foreigners and senior cadres and their families who have access to foreign currency. My favourite is the Peking Hotel with its three huge wings. The middle section which was built first is French. I would say it is early twentieth century Pompadour in style. To the right of it is the Russian wing. This is straight Beria in design with Stalinist touches.


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Beria was the ruthless Soviet secret police chief who tried to seize power after Stalin’s death but was tried for treason and executed. The newest wing is Chinese Great Leap Forward modern and designed to clash with the other two as much as possible. Mao’s Great Leap Forward was meant to hasten rural and industrial production but proved a catastrophe. Although ‘Great Leap Forward’ was a brand name (as in Great Leap Forward Shoe Polish), John was joking. Many business houses have their reps in this hotel and although most of the rooms are known to be bugged few care. At any of its many restaurants you can have a different experience each night: a romantic meal, a potentially awkward conversation with a Soviet journalist, or just nothing because … the staff think they’ll have ‘xiuxi’ (a rest). The foreign community here is such that there is a good social life and there are always people visiting. Here people tend to forget they are Australians or Americans or Indians or even east Europeans. They are diplomats, foreign experts — usually teachers — journalists or business people. All are ‘foreigners’. All are in contact with the Chinese as distinct from making friends with them. To do the latter is considered

Beholden to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin

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irresponsible as one would either be dealing with a provocateur or with someone who genuinely wished to make contact. In the latter case you could be responsible for putting a Chinese in jail for many years.

Willows which dip their tendrils in the carp filled lakes

Anzac Day10 You’ve probably forgotten that you asked about Spring in China. Well I understand it began in the South a while ago … we went to Shanghai and then Guangzhou to meet it. In Shanghai we were a little early, but in the Yu Yuan Gardens … we saw the willows which dip their tendrils in the carp filled lakes, just beginning to leaf. In Guangzhou (Canton) it was like Queensland with an abundance of early blossom and rich tropical growth. All this is quite unlike here. Peking is parched in Winter and although it is flat and with most of its streets intersecting at right angles, these streets are lined, indeed forested with deciduous trees which in Winter appear dead. The transformation that Spring has brought is like a miracle. Last Sunday — Easter Sunday — when our lunch guests had left, we took a ride round the near streets on our bikes. Admittedly this is a diplomatic compound and fares better than most, but we rode for miles along streets where willows met overhead and these were complemented by corresponding lines of blossoming apple trees on the opposite sides of the footpaths.


… On the Saturday night before leaving for Shanghai Helene was invited to bring a friend and go along to a dance hosted by [Cambodian] Prince Sihanouk at his home in the old French legation. The time was specified 8.30 to 1.30. We were advised that the prince preferred no one to leave early or stay late. The dance was in a new hall built on to the old residency specifically for the Prince’s parties. When we arrived this room resembled a rural mechanics institute on a Saturday night. There were tables covered with soft drink cans, ash trays and bowls of nuts and chips. There were children and even a dog. Round the edge of the dance floor, on three sides, there were large club chairs with anti-Macassars. These were reserved for ambassadors, or so I was told when I tried to sit in one. Behind these were two rows of bridge chairs, meant for but insufficient for the many guests. On the fourth side there was a small band (the Prince’s own dance orchestra) and at the front of it was the Prince — singing. He stayed there all night and sang, without a break. At 1.30 he stopped singing to farewell the guests he had ignored all evening and the party was over. The official Chinese guests sat stone faced throughout neither dancing, drinking nor eating. ‘Look at them’ said an American friend. ‘Aren’t they having one hell of a time?’ Within days, John found himself in a quandary: he was invited to play international cricket. Speaking of sport, though nothing has happened yet, I have been invited to play international cricket.11 That is to say I have been asked to play with the Anzacs, a combined Australian/New Zealand team from the embassies etc. which plays teams from the other cricketing nations represented here: England,

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Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the Great Hall of the People

Lazy Man in China

India, Pakistan etc. Someone else asked to play pleaded the lack of cricketing attire. A public school type from our embassy was incredulous that anyone would venture abroad without his creams. The bloke who invited me pointed to a third secretary — Stuart Valentine from Hobart — who he said was the hope of the Anzac side. I recalled that I once sat behind this young man’s mother Barbara Darling at Friends’ when we were both about nine and I remembered his father Roger from Hutchins [School]. This was clearly not acceptable as an excuse for not playing. We have had some excitement at work these last two weeks. The former ambassador, Mr H. A. Dunn retired and when he left the new ambassador, Dennis Argall arrived to take his place. This meant that work at the Embassy was constantly interrupted either for farewell drinks for the old one or welcoming drinks for the new. This was in the line of duty — of course. Helene has been particularly busy. First she had to cover the visit of British Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, who was here for talks over the proposed Chinese take over of Hong Kong … tonight she is again in Shanghai, probably sleeping on the floor of the Jinjiang Hotel. You see we have had [American President] Ronald Reagan here all week being put in his place by the Chinese. Reagan arrived in the rain. Helene has had to work about fourteen hours a day for the last ten days. She has been rushing either to the Great Hall of the


People or to the new Great Wall Hotel where Reagan had his return banquet and where the [temporary American] press centre is. In between she has been rushing back to her studio to file her stories. On her first day — the arrival day — she was somewhat taken aback by the White House T.V. crews who charged into the Great Hall after Ronnie using their big cameras as weapons for smashing and bludgeoning everyone and everything who stood in their ways. This morning she flew down to Shanghai just ahead of Reagan and the White House press corps. She was to cover Reagan’s speech at Fudan University there and [Secretary of State] George Schultz press conference. The Chinese make life as hard as they can for the press. We learnt yesterday that the Government had instructed the hotels to advise reporters, other than approved American ones, that they were booked out. Many, including Helene, decided to go anyway and try and sleep on the floor of those with rooms. Despite all their efforts one local American reporter told me that the President’s visit was ranking about last on all the domestic networks in the U.S., well behind a bush fire in one State and a blizzard in another. Then it was usually one line: ‘President and Mrs Reagan are sight seeing in China today’. … Last Friday night my boss held a banquet for seven or eight Chinese going soon to Australia for a short study tour. It was all a bit dicey, I thought, as she decided to hold it in her apartment which is in this building. First of all the guests had to take their invitations to their brigade, then to the relevant Ministry to gain permission to mix with foreigners in a foreigners’ compound. This approval had to be shown to the Peoples Armed Police guard on the gate.

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All evening the hostess, more accustomed to these situations than I, entertained her increasingly nervous guests with records of Smoky Dawson, Tex Morton, and the Bushwackers. At dinner they poked the strange food round their plates with even stranger knives and forks glancing all the while at their watches as the expiry time of their permits drew closer. Immediately dinner was over, and before coffee was served, they suddenly fled. It’s easier at a hotel. Six o’clock start and everyone gone by 8.30. That’s the Chinese way. P.S. Just had a call from Helene in Shanghai. Seems she heard of some girl not intending to keep her booking at the Shanghai Mansions. Helene went as the girl and got the room. So all’s well. Again my letter is a mixed bag but so too is China. Always yours John.

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More Ill-formed Impressions Dear Doff, Lehene & David,12 I have been meaning to write you a proper letter for some time to talk about my ill formed impressions of China. The longer one is here the harder it becomes — of course — to know what to put in such a letter and what to omit. I’ll start with the present and the apparently superficial. This morning Wo Wo had the staff in, yet again, to explain how certain routine tasks — too tedious to itemise here — were to be performed. That is with a minimum of cleanliness and without too many breakages. Now if this should sound like the well known snare whereby an ordinary decent young woman is transformed into a colonial boss lady after a short time in the East that would be grabbing the wrong end of the chopstick. The late Chairman Mao was of the opinion that it was far more important for the Chinese to maintain a revolutionary attitude through meetings and self criticism and mass demonstrations than to work. Work smacked of a desire for personal advancement and of individualism, in other words, of: ‘taking the capitalist road’. In its place Mao instituted the ‘iron rice bowl’ whereby all would be paid the same — very little — whether they worked or not. The revolutionary

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fervour has largely disappeared but the iron rice bowl hasn’t even started to rust. During the ‘Cultural Revolution’ the Chinese were told that politeness, like work for personal advancement, was bourgeois and hypocritical. This lesson has sunk in. It finds its best expression in hotels, shops and restaurants. The new administration has advanced the idea that far from being bourgeois personal advancement and growing rich are to be regarded as revolutionary. The local people have sought to combine the two, seemingly contradictory, theories. They are still rude and still decline to work but have interpreted the order to grow rich by raising prices and adding extra charges whenever a foreigner hoves in sight. The effect of all this on foreigners, like ourselves, is probably unimportant. It does however have great significance for China’s future. Unless, for example, they stop building collieries before bothering to see if there is any coal under them, and unless they stop permitting new — joint venture — hotels from rotting away through neglect things will continue to be crook for them for a long time. Similarly if they continue to sell a package tour to see — to take another example, from some-one else’s experience — the entombed warriors near Xian [capital of Shaanxi Province] then during the tour to add a charge for the bus, another for the guide, another to see the warriors another to see the chariots another for tea and so on, the tourists will stop coming. ‘How was the trip to Xian?’ I asked a friend from Texas. ‘Why they should name that town Rip-Off City’ was her less than enthusiastic reply. It is now Sunday afternoon. I didn’t make much progress with my letter to you yesterday. This is just as well as it seemed to be developing only one point.


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Yesterday afternoon we went bike riding again. It was a beautiful Spring day. We went first to see an old Jesuit observatory (17th century). Then took off down the crowded back streets of what was once part of the old foreign legation area — the part that was under siege during the Boxer rebellion. This was an anti-Western movement in which the secret society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists believed that training, including in ritual boxing, could make them immune to bullets. In 1900 the Boxers besieged Peking’s foreign legations until overpowered by international troops who occupied and looted the city. China paid enormous reparations, foreign influence was increased and the Qing Dynasty weakened. It is now a maze of courtyard houses built along narrow streets. Streets which suddenly become little local markets. Here and there were old two storey Victorian buildings, remnants of the old British compound. We saw no other foreigners in these fascinating lanes. There were fortunately no police either to kick us out. Bikes are essential in Peking for seeing the town. Last week-end we drove all around the Forbidden City, between the moat and the city walls. … Today — another sunny Spring day — we went to Peking University for lunch, at the invitation of two Australian postgraduate language students. We had

Forbidden City from Coal Hill

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Great Helmsman Mao Zedong

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lunch in the foreign students’ refectory (Apartheid is as strongly enforced on the campus as it is throughout the rest of the country), then went for a walk around the university. The university is one of the most attractive places in Peking and the most contradictory. There are many most beautiful buildings in the Chinese style, including a water tower disguised as a pagoda. These are all set in a beautiful Chinese garden round an ornamental lake. The buildings and the garden are all American. They were built in the twenties when the campus was known as Yale in China. There are in addition some large concrete and glass modern buildings — very ugly. These were all built by the Chinese. There are also two huge statues of Mao, a rare sight in China now. The quotations from the Chairman painted high on the sides of the buildings were however being allowed, indeed encouraged, to fade. It is now Monday and I have just returned from work. Before I leave Peking University I will mention something not as attractive as the early buildings. We had spent the early part of the day with two Australians in the foreign students' college. There each had a pleasant room (though we were told that these rooms had been bare and dirty before their occupants transformed them). All the other facilities, though spartan, were adequate. After our walk around the campus we were shown — albeit by stealth — one of the buildings where the Chinese students were made to live and work. I recalled that line from Paradise Lost: ‘No light but only darkness visible, save to discover scenes of woe’.


We approached through a dark narrow doorway into a dark passage. It was bright and sunny outside so our eyes had to adjust to the gloom. The first thing we noticed was the smell. Off each side of the passages students were living six or seven to a small room. In each room was a small fluorescent bar set in a high ceiling, its light just failing to light the books of the scholars crowding the bunks and floor below. There were filthy clothes everywhere. The smell came from the blocked drains and toilets and from the students themselves. Hot water for bathing was available but once a week. To use it a student would need a voucher, probably from his work unit. This he would take to the shower block some distance from his dormitory. Our hosts while deploring that they were not permitted to mix freely with the Chinese students admitted that foreigners would not be able to handle their living conditions. Well this is a land of contrasts. By seven last night we were back at the Great Wall Hotel for yet another free beano. This time the Peking free-loaders were receiving pay back for posing for publicity photos for the hotel. It was of course Sunday night and staff supervision was at a minimum. The dining room was crowded with young waiters carefully doing nothing. We were well into our dinner before our wine came then after our first glasses were poured the wine was taken and placed on a side table. When after a long wait we asked for another glass, we were told it was all gone. The staff could not distinguish between a bottle belonging to one table and that purchased by another. This would be unworthy of comment were it not that this is a luxury hotel. A room would cost over £100 per night and the meal, had we to pay for it, about £50 [for two] — enough to pay the salary of four waiters for a month.

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… I don’t seem to have given you much of a comprehensive picture of the new China — just bits and pieces really. Most of them from the last few days. I’ll try and fit it all together when we’re all together later this year. In the meantime there’ll be a short break in which Helene Chung will bring you this message: John Dear Mumma, Lehene and David,13 Thought I’d move onto new page so that my prose wouldn’t spoil John’s. The NPC or rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, begins its first session this afternoon. And so shall have to get back down to the Great Hall to hear Zhao Ziyang, and hopefully receive a translation of what he’s saying. Seems as though they’re going to ignore the Hong Kong question, but may revive army ranks — which will please the huge militia. Have also been trying to bone up on AustralianChinese agricultural cooperation, as the Minister for Primary Industry –— John Kerin — arrives tomorrow. He’s got a very busy schedule, which will also keep me on my toes. In line with new ABC directives against racist and sexist language, must remember not to refer to him as ‘the minister and his attractive blond wife’ … Love Wo Wo

My travels with Kerin took me to the cradle of China’s ‘responsibility system’, Sichuan — home of spicy food and the birthplace of chain-smoking plain-speaking paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. China’s most populous province, Sichuan was devastated by Mao’s Cultural Revolution and his policy of state


ownership of both land and produce. Incentive was destroyed. Traditionally China’s rice bowl, Sichuan was forced to import rice for the first time. Parents are said to have sold their children for food. The governor of Sichuan from 1976 was Zhao Ziyang — like Deng a victim of the Cultural Revolution. As Communist Party first secretary of Guangdong Province in the 1960s, Zhao was attacked by Red Guards as ‘a stinking element of the landowning class’ and forced to parade the streets of Canton in a dunce’s cap. The rehabilitated Zhao introduced an individual incentive system in which farmers contracted to produce a quota for the state but kept any surplus for their own table or for sale on free markets. Within three years he transformed Sichuan and created a rural boom. This triumph in China’s south-west prompted Deng, after he gained decisive power in December 1978, to promote Zhao to Peking. So, from 1980 Prime Minister Zhao was charged with reinvigorating the national economy through Deng’s Four Modernisations — in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defence. Accustomed as I was to the apathy that prevailed in Peking, I was amazed by the energy and enterprise of peasants in Sichuan. May was harvest time. Agriculture was intensive with crops grown close together on private plots. Farmers used whatever implements they could find or devise to beat and thresh the wheat. Harvests were piled in mounds on the road to be threshed by the broad tyres of passing trucks, as well as by the narrow treads transporting Kerin’s delegation from Down Under. The Sichuan capital, Chengdu, bustled with hawkers, almost in mockery of Mao from whose raised statue a paternal arm stretched out over the city. Everything was on sale: from rice, wheat, jute and mulberries to freshly-slaughtered pigs carted on the backs of bicycles. ‘Pork!’ called butchers chopping slabs of pink flesh on open-air trestles.

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New washing, old cycling

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Booksellers smiled and pointed to their rows of titles. ‘Panda! Panda!’, touted entrepreneurial artists sidling up to foreign tourists and unrolling scrolls of the endangered species. Life in the country remained much harsher than in the cities, and the average income of peasants lagged far behind the 840 yuan per year of urban workers. Yet the rural incentive system had given rise to the phenomenon of rich peasants. A few even enjoyed incomes of more than 10,000 yuan (US$3,300) a year — more than double Deng’s reported salary. They could afford the luxury of two-storey abodes! The zealous Sichuan farmers I encountered were the early recipients of Deng’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. From Chengdu I accompanied Kerin further south to Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province. Here, he inspected a beef cattle project and a program of artificial insemination conducted through bull on bull — not heifer. ‘I’m not sure how Australian bulls would take to that.’ The agriculture minister apologised to his Chinese hosts for former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s gift of a bull: ‘I’m sorry it failed to perform and then proved too tough to eat! But I want to assure you that most Aussie bulls are very virile.’ ‘It’s a matter of Australian honour!’ added his ‘tall blond wife’. Meanwhile, in Beijing the lazy man was recounting his latest adventures to a former colleague at Victoria’s Deakin University in Geelong.


Dear Bruce and Helen,14 Your letter took a little longer to arrive than it need have because some member of staff put the wrong number on the envelope. That is why we are having this staff meeting. I see from the departmental records that I last wrote to you on the 23rd March, then went down to the British Embassy to represent my country in the bar. That night I went to the airport to meet Helene who was returning from Guangzhou. While waiting for her plane I witnessed the arrival of the BA flight, hi-jacked to Taiwan the previous day. The majority of the passengers were elderly Brits and Americans on package tours. One of these was clearly old Mr. Grace. Mr Grace was head of the London gents’ and ladies’ apparel store in the BBC sitcom, Are You Being Served? Grace Bros was based on Simpson of Piccadilly, home of DAKS, the first self-supporting trousers or Dad’s slacks. He was most expensively dressed and was being wheeled through the crowds in a bath chair by his young female (well sort of young) companion. This lady was so distressed by it all that she passed out. Old Mr. Grace was too doddery to even be aware of this but most of the others were rather distressed by the ordeal of being in China — for which the hi-jacking had been a mere curtain raiser. I enquired as to why so many elderly people come to China, a particularly unfeeling country with regard to foreigners and the least equipped to cater for them. I was told that they come because they insist on coming and what’s more they climb the wall. ‘The Americans lose dozens on the Wall every season!’

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Jazz at the Peace Hotel

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… Shanghai is a fabulous city. It used to be a city for westerners in the ’thirties. It was the place for business and romance; adventure and intrigue. You may recall it was made famous by films like ‘Shanghai Express’ in which Marlene Dietrich played Shanghai Lily. Though it is now much neglected, it retains a lot of its old cruel and romantic history. There is an old French section with old French style houses and Marseille and ’thirties modern flats. There is a big English section with mock tudor villas like my Aunt Ila’s in Alma Road [Melbourne] and there is … the old Cathay Hotel (now the Peace Hotel it is the place where Noel Coward wrote Private Lives). This pub has a jazz club — so-called — every night for foreigners and overseas Chinese only. There in the Busby Berkeley setting half a dozen elderly Chinese musicians took us through: (I wrote down the titles between dances) I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, American Patrol, I’ve Got a Girl In Kalamazoo, Chattanooga Choo Choo, In The Mood, Red River Valley, Strangers In The Night, Tiger Rag and I do not lie, — Ramona. Shanghai may have got cut off in 1949 but it’s preserved many of its treasures. … Yesterday morning Helene set off for Kunming with Kerin, Minister for Primary Industry so I was left alone. I decided to take part in the Australian Embassy bicycle rally — actually open to any foreigners who could read the direction sheet. It was great fun. My group leader


was a third secretary whose mother I once admired in primary school. The rally was twelve kms. but took us four hours. We first ran into problems in a city street where the organizers had a check point to enable the participants to have a coke or a Fosters and perform the very necessary task of transferring peanuts from bowl to distant bowl with chopsticks. A harmless pursuit but one which attracted several thousand onlookers and caused Peking’s huge trolley buses to jam up for some considerable distance — a problem the drivers sought to resolve by blowing their horns in unison. The organisers had a few other endearing ideas like requiring entrants to report on what was to be found behind the doors of certain security establishments. I was much relieved when we rode out into the country. There we had only to contend with malodorous villages and pig pens and sewer fed cabbage patches. There was of course the coarse observations of the yokels who laughed and jeered as they would at any foreigners’ clownish activity. But at least there were no People’s Armed Police, a breed to make your average NSW [New South Wales] copper appear as one of nature’s gentlemen. Back at the Embassy there was of course a barbeque with sausages and Fosters and obligatory casting into the pool for the winning team. When I got home, I filled a bath, hopped in and slept for an hour. … This letter has been written under the responsibility system and in the spirit of the four modernizations.

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Having a Hate Hitachi Day — You have to be cut out for it I

n June 1984 China’s responsibility system had still to reach the cities. The launch of Deng Xiaoping’s industrial reforms — with their eventual improvement in urban living standards — had to wait till October 1984. They would lead to today’s sleek modern highways that allow anyone on wheels to motor intercity and zip from Beijing to Melbourne’s sister city, the now cosmopolitan Tianjin of some ten million people.

Living high, Suzhou

The Republic as you know is very poor and unless you have seen it it is difficult to perceive just what that means.15 Even in the cities there is great overcrowding. The houses are tiny with perhaps one tap to a street and one toilet block for a neighbourhood. In the capital, where we live, the old districts are being torn down and ugly flats are everywhere replacing them but still it seems impossible


to meet the housing demand … Rest assured we are not required to live like our less fortunate brethren. Though rest assured one often marvels at that accident of history or act of divine intervention that placed us amongst the world’s most fortunate minority which lives in countries with free institutions and the consequent high standard of living. As one book I read puts it: ‘You don’t know what inefficiency means until you have lived in a Communist country’. … The Chinese are discouraged by the authorities from mixing with foreigners in case they are polluted with our western ways – such as pornography and Christianity: two western influences you probably didn’t expect to find linked … Helene has travelled a lot within China … and this week she is setting off with [Australian] Deputy P.M., Lionel Bowen. I read in Bowen’s itinerary that next Sunday he is to attend a Church service. As he is a Catholic I suppose that must be Mass. I wish him well. Yesterday we were in Tianjin, a smaller city than Peking.

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At street level, Shanghai

Lionel Bowen with Mao-suited cadres

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St Joseph’s Cathedral

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Tianjin is only seven million. We went because although few people speak well of it, it is only 125 kilometres from Peking and the road between the two cities is the only one in China along which foreigners like ourselves may take their own cars. Even then it is only we residents who may do it. Tourists must go by plane or train. We decided to take a look at the Cathedral, St Joseph’s I think. It was only built early this century by the French. The crosses were removed by the Red Guards during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution and it was much damaged during the Tianjin earthquake in 1976. It’s all back together again now for the regime to show off to foreign tourists. The tourists must be carefully screened around those other churches either knocked about or just neglected. As [TV identity] Paul Hogan says, we were not tourists and dropped in unannounced to the empty building next door — obviously the old school. Two gents took us into a room and had us fill in our names, nationality, age (Helene baulked a bit at this one), where we had come from and when and when we were leaving. It was never clear whether they were priests or brothers, laymen or government officials. I’d say however that the details of drop-ins was a government requirement. After all this we were taken to see the cathedral. First a steel gate was opened into the church precinct then a door of the cathedral was unpadlocked and we were in. It was like stepping back into the ’forties or ’fifties. The sanctuary lamp was still burning and the high altar was as it once was in Australia and elsewhere


for the Tridentine Mass. The interior was rather gaudy with ugly plaster statues on the Lady and Sacred Heart altars. There was nothing Chinese about it to speak of it was all European. I asked to take photos and to my surprise there was no objection. When asked about attendances our host either exaggerated or became confused. I fully accepted that the Church was surviving persecution and even flourishing as a result, but a regular attendance of five thousand with a million at midnight Mass at Christmas strained my credulity, to say nothing of what it might do to the building. The position of this church is ambiguous. It is not permitted to give its loyalty to the Pope but it is said the people — some of them — whilst denying it officially, are loyal to the Pope in secret. Mr Bowen will have to work all that out for himself. Interesting though! As events transpired, Lionel Bowen was time-tabled by the cadres to attend early Mass but, as John saw it, ‘decided to resolve this complicated theological problem by having a sleep in’.16 You are not the most neglected of my friends, just two of the most neglected.17 But here I am on a Friday night with a holiday on Monday for my monarch’s birthday and the disposition to write … In China one mixes all the time with English, Americans (mostly Americans) Yugoslavs, Indians,

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Sacred Heart altar

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Japanese and Spanish. There is no chauvinism, no comment even on one another’s national qualities or policies. We see ourselves as the Chinese see us — as foreigners … The Chinese can no more distinguish one of us from another (Africans and American blacks excepted) than I could the members of different tribes of Canadian Indians. I’ll tell you a true story which happened a few weeks ago. The secretary in my office is Ugandan. Her husband works for the Tanzanian Embassy. This girl is pregnant so one day she sent her husband to the Chinese doctor to ask for some vitamins she had found helpful. When this young man put his request to the doctor she half looked up and enquired, ‘How long since your last period?’ ‘I’m not a woman’ said the husband. ‘Aren’t you?’ said the doctor. Last week-end Helene and I thought we’d have a look at Tianjin — Melbourne’s sister city H recalled … The drive was fine. The roads in China we have seen are all tree lined as are all city streets. On each side of the road there is usually a row of poplars (spreading Lombardy poplars not the pencil Italian sort we favour). These are backed by a row of basket willows, then a row of firs and so on. Anyway it was thus all the way to Tianjin with a view of flat fields, of crops of vegies and sometimes poplar plantations beyond. We were quite unprepared for the ghastly polluted metropolis of seven million souls which was our destination. Here the streets were also lined with trees — dead ones. The air was filled with dust and chemical gas and coal smoke so that the sky was never visible. It had been a pleasant place clearly in the bad old days before liberation. In the central city I was


reminded of London. There were whole streets of beautiful old Victorian and art nouveau buildings. I even found the old Shanghai and Hong Kong Bank. The name was still visible where the brass letters had been pulled away from the stone. These treasures though neglected were still in good nick. Ironically had the city continued its prosperity they would all, as in Hong Kong, have been pulled down. Now just the interiors had been ripped out and they were being used as factories — were factories. I also found Kiesslings, an old German restaurant in the art-deco style for which the city had been noted, among other things. It was still functioning as a restaurant and still with its original decor unharmed but swimming in muck with empty cartons everywhere piled up to the ceiling. The responsibility system of Chairman of the Central Military Commission Deng Xiaoping hadn’t made much impact on the table staff so, at first, we could neither find out what there was nor learn how to order it. As usually happens in these places, when foreigners arrive unannounced, a functionary — speaking English appeared from a back room. A young couple were turfed out of their table by the window and we were seated and directed to order our meal. (Should you wonder why we did not protest on behalf of the young couple, I can assure you they would not have thanked us. They, not we, would have been designated the trouble makers and their names given to the police.) The meal, all German even today, turned out to be remarkedly (is there such a word?) good and very cheap. It was the only meal we were able to have outside our hotel (one of the misnamed Friendship Hotels). We tried to obtain a table at the place which

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Drawing a crowd

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specialises in Tianjin duck but our presence caused such a disturbance in the crowded dining-room that we had to leave. It was as though we had entered on a camel. The locals weren’t used to seeing foreigners, particularly one like Helene with make-up and fancy clothes. At one stage we stopped the car to take some photos and this in itself was sufficient to draw a large crowd. When we were back in the car changing the film, several dozen crowded around their noses to the window just staring in at the strange foreigners. Most Chinese then wore Mao suits. Women usually had short straight hair, flat black cotton shoes or plastic sandals and no make-up. No such thing as a cheongsam or qipao — the close-fitting dress with its high side splits and Mandarin collar, worn only by ‘decadent’ Chinese in Hong Kong and abroad. The most glamorous garment a Chinese woman dared wear was a pale coloured blouse. This made me seem exotic: in my normal Western clothes, make-up, painted nails and high heels, I could be mistaken for a rich overseas Chinese, a film star or the mistress of a high official! I’m sorry. This was not meant to be a letter from Peking about Tientsin-Tianjin. I find that I tend to take up space with criticism of China then fail to leave space for what I really wanted to say and that is that the whole visit has proved to be a most exotic experience. One thing I must stress though is that


I really could not advise anyone (of my friends) to come here as a tourist. Tourists are responsible for most of the absolute rubbish talked in Australia about China (politicians are all tourists). If you cannot live here, forget it. Tourists are raced around from one cooked up situation to another. Ronald Reagan recently visited a market which had not even existed until just before his arrival. The customers and stall holders were all police … Saturday Not a good day at all. It will be hot and already the pollution is appalling. Helene has been off on her travels yet again. Last time it was with Primary Industry Minister Kerin. This time it is with the Deputy Prime Minister Lionel Bowen. Everyone is coming at once. When Helene was travelling with Mr. Kerin’s party down the south, she was approached by a group of Tasmanian tourists who recognised her from her television days in Hobart. Whilst they readily knew Helene they didn’t have a clue who Mr. Kerin was. After Helene had put them right the Tasmanians gave the Minister a round of applause when they next ran across him in a restaurant. Helene returns today with Lionel Bowen. They have been up north to Shenyang, down to Nanjing, then via Shanghai to Fuzhou. Don’t worry. If I haven’t been there I have to look the place up on the map every time. Apparently in Nanjing Lionel was greeted by a big contingent of school children. At his banquet that night he spoke of his pleasure at this juvenile welcome. The future of our two countries lies with our young people he said or words to that effect. (You have to be very careful when speaking of Labor

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politicians these days.) To be fair Lionel is not our most gripping orator and he is after all a tourist. But whilst the Chinese appreciate a few words spoken with warmth and insincerity, our states-persons give more than what’s wanted. As for the littlies, they would have had no idea for whom they were jumping up and down and shouting, ‘huanying huanying’ welcome welcome. They would just be obeying orders. Their parents would know better than to object to this disruption of the school day. No one wants that long train trip followed by five days in a truck which ends at a gulag in Xinjiang. Lionel’s remark about the future being with the children would have struck his listeners (assuming anyone was listening) as arrant nonsense. Here the future is planned by octogenarians for octogenarians. For the rest, ‘When the wind blows the grass must bend’. Queens Birthday Even working at home there have been too many interruptions. Helene and Bowen party returned very late Saturday night to a remote military airfield somewhere south of the city after a four and a halfhour flight in what looked like a WWII Russian bomber. I’m glad I went out to meet them. The occasion certainly had atmosphere. I was certainly glad to see John — especially with my feet firmly on the ground. On that last leg of the flight I felt so ill with my stomach so churned up that I reached for the emergency paper bag. Unfortunately, this sensation occurred just before Bowen announced a press briefing. I dared not turn to face him. I kept still with my eyes closed and bag at the ready!


Then, after following Bowen on his sweep through eastern China, with ‘Ganbei!’ (‘Bottoms up!’) all the way, I set south. I was on a television assignment that included Zhongshan and Taishan counties in Guangdong Province — the ancestral home of early American and Australian Chinese. In the 1880s my maternal great grandfather embarked on an arduous voyage from Taishan (Toisan in the local dialect) to the tin-mining fields of faraway Weldborough in northeastern Tasmania. At the turn of the century his son, my grandfather, followed in his father’s footsteps. Grandfather later moved to Hobart, established a fruit and vegetable business, Henry & Co., and raised his family. He changed his name from Gin (Yan in Cantonese) to Henry. A non-Chinese name was better for business! The last stop on my television trip was a mosquitoinfested island in the South China Sea, Hainan. This was the island the world watched in April 2001: focused on an American EP-3 spy plane, grounded after colliding with a Chinese F-8 fighter in international airspace south of Hainan. ‘Jet collision rocks diplomacy in the Pacific’, headlined The Age.18 The incident raised speculation of a Sino-American Cold War. But six months later such speculation sank with the collapse of New York’s twin towers on September 11. On that day suicide terrorists hijacked two passenger jets, used them as bombs to crash into the World Trade Centre, and killed thousands of people. This chilling crime against humanity united Presidents George W. Bush and Jiang Zemin in a war against terrorism. ‘Sino–US military exchanges enhance ties’, claimed China Daily.19 Notwithstanding Beijing’s fear of terrorism from Muslim separatists in the far northwestern region of Xinjiang, analysts questioned the depth and durability of the new Washington–Beijing cooperation.

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Gravesite on Hainan Island Photograph by Willi Phua

Lazy Man in China

Back in June 1984 my thoughts were on World War II. I trekked through deep scrub on Hainan Island towards a former Japanese concentration camp that once held almost three hundred Australian soldiers. I was searching for an overgrown gravesite believed to contain the remains of two missing Australian prisoners of war, caught in an antiJapanese ambush by Chinese guerillas. However, my first film report came not from the then backward tropical island where I was treated to fresh fowl — its throat slit and feathers plucked in front of me as I sat at table with cameraman Willi Phua. Rather, I began my television assignment at the economic showpiece — Shenzhen. In 1980 Shenzhen was designated by Deng Xiaoping as China’s first Special Economic Zone to entice foreign capital, technology and expertise. Four years later the former sleepy fishing village was a mass of cranes, concrete and hideous construction sites. Shenzhen had smashed the ‘big pot’ that doled out to indolent and industrious alike. It boasted the highest average income in China, with workers’ pay double and triple that of those fed from the ‘iron rice bowl’. Employees in the growing number of foreign joint ventures were on contract, hired and fired according to Shenzhen’s motto: TIME IS MONEY, EFFICIENCY IS LIFE! So great was the lure of Shenzhen that only those with legitimate business were admitted. A 100-metre long barrier topped by barbed wire and searchlights discouraged an influx of unwanted Chinese. Appropriately, Shenzhen lies just across the frontier from that other enclave of capitalism, Hong Kong. While I worked on the Chinese side, John was having a few days off


on the British-run side. He decided he lacked the correct footwear for cricket in Shanghai, and flew down to Hong Kong instead. It was like a baker’s oven. Inside, his airconditioned hotel was freezing. Having seen the few sights previously and with no shopping to do, he was soon struck by just what an awful place the Fragrant Harbour can be. Peking20 Last time I was there [in Hong Kong] an Australian journalist who lives there assured me it is the centre of the world. It is in fact particularly provincial. It is also remarkably decadent. There are no values other than those associated with making money and money is only valued for the status it can buy. Status can literally be measured, in metric or imperial. It is determined by the height of one’s apartment above sea level. Being at my wit’s end one day I took a tourist bus that was going to various places and ending up at the Peak. An Australian girl on the bus asked the guide if we were to see any old castles on the way. The guide said she did not know. But what she did know was the price per square foot of all the apartments we were to pass on our tour. The most remarkable thing about the harbour city is the ignorance of its middle class and long time residents about China. Many of them genuinely believe that when China takes over it will be business as usual. These people have never visited China and know nothing of the political system here. They don’t realise that the leaders here have only a very tenuous grip on power and that whatever promises might be made by the old codgers presently in the State Council will mean nothing to their successors who will be calling the shots in 1997. David Bonavia who is Rupert Murdoch’s man in Hong Kong and Peking says these

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people are the last Romans in Britain seeing only the new villa and the grapes still ripening on the vine. I haven’t told Helene this yet, but when I was in Hong Kong I had to hand in a large cheque she had written to an office there. When I reached the counter it was gone. I had then, in the summer heat and in panic, to retrace my steps through Hong Kong. Can you imagine it? When I returned defeated to the crowded, un-air-conditioned office, I looked down and saw the cheque peeping out from under a seated woman’s foot. I quite alarmed her with the dive with which I retrieved it. … Here it was all delightful inefficiency. Here at the airport we now have a new menace. Now after waiting an hour or two for the luggage one is no longer permitted to take a trolley and go and have the usual speculative discussion with the Customs man as to what might or might not be in one’s bag. Now one must have a porter or rather porteratrice. These are all very young girls especially chosen for their clumsiness and fragility. They wear bright red nylon blouses, baggy slacks and very wide brimmed Little Bo-peep hats. Each carries a handbag in which to place the dollar one gives her for the use of the trolley. She however remains in charge of the trolley which is not easy what with only one hand free and the hat and the fear of being separated from the other trolley girls. Weak as they are, getting a trolley away from one is like pulling Excalibur out of the stone. You have to be cut out for it. Last Tuesday evening the scene at the luggage terminal would have put the Marx brothers out of business. At one stage these little red charioteers managed to all get their trolleys tangled one with another until there was just one mass of tangled


metal stretching right across the luggage hall. I think it all began with a passenger fighting for possession of one of these conveyances. At one stage the passengers fearing the loss of their luggage after waiting for it for so long attempted to storm across the barrier of tangled trolleys — bags in hand. Several fell. Others for all I could see were probably run over. The old hands were, as usual, able to capitalise on the situation. Seizing the nearest unattended trolley they rushed the Customs gate and were soon free carrying their illegal baby’s milk, religious pictures, pornographic literature, and mahjong sets into the People’s Republic. … I was both pleased and envious to learn that you had bought a video-recorder … There is a video here in the apartment and the Embassy has a small cassette library. The choice is however limited to third rate films previously recorded on Channel 10 and now largely worn out, ancient episodes of ABC Sport, the umpteen episodes of ‘The Dismissal’ [of Whitlam] and so on. There is nothing to watch on television. I used to watch the 7 p.m. news but have given it up. The news always begins with an interminable report of a visit by a vice-minister to some unit that has recently exceeded its production quota. During the report the cameraman will point the camera at one lathe or loom and leave it there. Throughout a breathless narrator assures the viewers that this is the greatest thing since the four modernisations. This report is followed by a similar one and then follows selected excerpts from the [foreign] networks, accompanied by a voice over telling viewers that what they are watching: demonstrations against western political leaders, killings in Lebanon, riots in India and whatever are just the normal components of daily life outside China. One night, just before closing,

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the news reader mentioned that some old man called Brezhnev had died in Russia. John meant long-time Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov. He died on 9 February 1984 after only fourteen months in office. I remember the news buzzing round the tables of Hawke’s return banquet at the Jianguo on Friday, 10 February. Next night Chinese television gave prominence to Hawke’s visit — including his banquet and tennis match with Deputy Prime Minister Wan Li — but treated Andropov’s death as of little significance. Peking is a good place for losing an addiction to the box. Even so the Chinese seem to enjoy their television and a t.v. set is still a great status symbol. Pity help the overseas relative who arrives in China without the latest Sanyo, Sony or National. At places of entry like Beijing or Guangzhou the Customs always seem to turn a blind eye to the big cardboard boxes that clutter the luggage conveyors. Nowadays television sets are shipped out of China and international brands such as Philips, sold in Australia, are marked: ‘Made in China’. But in June 1984 I had to navigate my way through tangled trolleys and conveyors cluttered with Japanese sets in order to rejoin John in Peking. Next day we were winging 900 kilometres south-west. From the northern capital we entered the fabled Tang Dynasty capital, Changan. Now called Xian, the city is best known for the nearby site of the vast underground army of terracotta warriors constructed by Emperor Qin for his protection in the afterlife. Qin (formerly rendered as Chin) vanquished his enemies to become the first ruler of a united empire in 221 BC. China bears his name. Qin completed the building of the Great Wall of China: his teams of labourers


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linked up previously built sections to create a continuous barrier — a wall which has since been constantly rebuilt and changed over time. A ruthless tyrant, he decreed the destruction of China’s Confucian classics — the burning of the books — and buried scholars alive. When John returned from climbing Qin’s unexcavated burial mound, Peking was in summer’s unrelenting grip. I am having a hate ‘Hitachi’ day.21 The weather here has turned stinking hot — much hotter than anything I have experienced. There are five — correction four — Hitachi air-conditioners in this apartment and, just by the by, one Hitachi toaster. All are new. The toaster and three of the air-conditioners have just packed up and Hitachi Peking seems reluctant to do anything about it even though both furniture and broadcast equipment are in danger of being ruined. I have spent the afternoon threatening and cajoling — mostly threatening. Tomorrow I’m switching my tactics and introducing the topic of Japanese atrocities during the War. It’s true that China is in the air. This has nothing to do with China. It’s just what a handful of crazies project into the place to help them with their personal problems. T’ai Chi is still popular with the elderly. It has experienced a revival, along with other things, since the fall of the ‘gang of four’ who saw it as part of the ‘four olds’ – old ideas, old culture, etc. However the T’ai Chi of the elderly, in the speed of its movements, much exceeds the working pace of the young.

T’ai Chi in Huangpu Park

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Muslims at prayer, Xian

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In Xian the other day a friend and I tried to buy a drink at our hotel’s only bar. A girl behind the bar refused us service and pointed to a youth, sleeping seated, head in folded arms, on the lower tray of a tea trolley. After we had gone behind the bar and helped ourselves to the beer cans, the youth reluctantly agreed to take some money. Xian, though grotty, is well worth a visit. The entombed warriors, on whom our barman is modelling his career, are worth a look and so is the Great Mosque. We were there last Thursday through to Sunday. Helene was doing some filming there with an A.B.C. cameraman brought in from Singapore. A difficult exercise as Singapore is not too keen on China and China is not keen on either Singapore or cameramen. The filming was a mixed success. We spent a day filming (I was cameraman’s rouseabout) the breaking of the fast at the end of the feast of Ramadan at the Great Mosque. The Chinese authorities being rather keen to show what religious freedom there was in China. We even had two meals with the Imam there. One of these at his house in the suburbs. This Imam, while quite a pleasant bloke, was clearly a bit of a government stooge. He kept telling us how the revolution was the best thing since baked kebabs. Allah and Mohammed didn’t rate a mention. Helene was pretty keen to film the entombed warriors even though — in my opinion — they’ve been done to death, if you’ll


excuse the pun. The authorities agreed, but every time the subject was mentioned the price went up. In the end the project had to be abandoned. So much for the much vaunted friendship between Australia and China. Once again Xian lived up to its reputation of ‘Rip-off City’. Helene in fact had a pretty bad time of it there after I returned to work in Peking. Her hosts had originally agreed to a set price for filming, cars, hotel, meals and so on. When settling up time came they demanded a much higher figure and refused to return her passport until it was paid. However on balance it was a rewarding trip. Xian is a city of three million people and though, like Tianjin it is very polluted there is much to see. It is I think the only city in China to have all the old city walls intact. They are magnificent if a bit battered. Each city gate is like a huge palace. We also visited their famous Bell Tower, the Drum Tower and the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. (Don’t worry I’d not heard of these things either). Most of all I enjoyed climbing the huge burial mound of the first of the Qin emperors. Not because of what it was but because it was out in the country and was covered all over with pomegranate orchards — all in beautiful orange coloured blossom. Far from Xian and all things Qin, we then departed the Orient. We took a break and unwound from the East on our slow way west to London. Gumpendorfer Str. Vienna.22 Dear David, Lehene, Dorothy, We are approaching you by a roundabout route. We have been in Bangkok, Copenhagen, Hannover, Cologne, Aachen. We have been to the Schönbrunn

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Palace here and many baroque churches and eaten rococo looking and tasting cakes. Today we look at some Breughels and leave tomorrow for Munich. Love John, Helene

RETURN OF THE LAZY MAN

August 1984–January 1985 I have been working at the Australian Embassy for much of the year — working with the First Secretary who is in charge of the aid programme. It was enjoyable but whilst we were holidaying in Europe I decided to resign so as to have time to see more of China and to do a little bit of writing too — not too much as I am rather lazy which is a disability like any other.23

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Not Rushed with Commissions August Bank Holiday24 Dearest Wo Wo, … I’m presently in a pleasant inexpensive little restaurant near Victoria Station. Have found migraine book. I love you. Love John xx While the lazy man still lounged in London, I was in full flight back in Beijing. I was covering the opening of the Sino– Australian ‘airbridge of friendship’. On Sunday, 2 September 1984, a Qantas jumbo took off from Melbourne via Sydney bound for China for the first time. The crew were welcomed to Peking with a duck banquet, including entrees of stewed duck tongue, web duck meat and fried duck gizzard. Four days later amiable Aviation Minister Kim Beazley led a group of forty-four VIPs on the inaugural CAAC flight from Down Under to Cathay. The Jianguo marked the joint airline agreement with Qantastic Australia — ten days of Aussie gourmet delights: oysters, lobsters, lamb, beef and mouth-watering fruit. In an interview with me, CAAC’s Deputy Director General Lu Ruiling dismissed the airline’s reputation for poor safety: ‘That’s due to a misunderstanding because of serious accidents since 1982.’

Return of the Lazy Man

Over a hundred tourists were killed when CAAC crashed in bad weather in Guilin, the enchanting southern city of mists and mountain peaks on the Li River, so often depicted in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Some twenty lives were lost when a plane burst into flames in Canton. ‘Before that, CAAC had a very good safety record,’ boasted Lu. Whereas international practice to combat armed hijackers in 1984 was to land the plane safely before trying to overwhelm terrorists, he confirmed: ‘It’s CAAC’s policy to subdue or fight armed hijackers while still in flight, if the crew are absolutely sure of the safety of craft and passengers.’ ‘What about reports of a CAAC crew wielding an axe to fight hijackers?’ I asked. ‘It’s not very often they use that kind of tool.’ Weary from two months travelling, John too descended on the Han capital. He was looking forward to having a good whinge about jet lag, but I bundled him straight on to the overnight train to Taiyuan, Shanxi Province. The bunks in our private compartment, with its stack of woollen blankets and yards of embroidered linen, were more comfortable than in our sleeper from Cologne to Venice. But unlike Eurail with its magical sights of castles on the Rhine all bathed in the glow of floodlights, our transChina conveyance blasted us with broadcast propaganda. Although we could turn down the night-long Mandarin speaker, we couldn’t turn it off. Yes I have been out of China for about nine weeks.25 I returned last Thursday but I have travelled and seen so much since then that the European trip seems remote … today is my first full day in Peking. The day I arrived back, after a day, a night and a day in the plane Helene gave me some supper then

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Child atop stairs from Wutaishan Valley floor

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took me with her on the 11.30 p.m. train to Taiyuan a night’s travelling time from the capital somewhere southwest from here. From Taiyuan we bused to Wutaishan situated on the flat floor of a valley. To get there the bus had first to climb and then descend some very high mountains. When we reached the floor of the valley we were still at five thousand feet. It was icy cold there but we were pleased to arrive. Whether ascending or descending there was always a sudden drop of thousands of feet at the side of the narrow road. An American on the inner side of the bus said, ‘I can’t see the road. We appear to be flying.’ His friend on the outer side said, ‘Man when I can’t see the road we are flying’. The cadre who had been extolling the beauty of the scenery through his microphone said suddenly, ‘Now I will talk no more.’ He became sick with fear. Wutaishan is a striking place and one can appreciate the mountain scenery when both feet are on the ground. It was once the centre of Buddhism for both China and Mongolia. I don’t expect I’ll ever again visit a more exotic place. There were ancient monasteries, lots of them, on the valley floor and on the peaks all around. These are what we came to see. They have rarely been shown to foreigners before but now the Shanxi authorities want tourists so were showing the attractions of their province to foreign journalists. I went along for the ride. Wutaishan wasn’t the only place we visited in Shanxi. We saw a vast uninteresting space soon to house a huge open cut coal mine and industrial


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complex, or so we were told. This was in or near Shouxian. The derelict Occidental joint venture workers’ town was at remote Pingshuo, which we reached after four hours by bus, three hours by train and a final hop by bus. A sign, adapted from the patriotic finger-pointing Uncle Sam poster, ‘I want you!’ represented the new China. A virile model Chinese worker in blue shirt and safety helmet points his finger and exhorts: ‘Quality No 1, Safety No 1’, i.e. quality is necessary but only through safe methods — in particular wearing a helmet — a concept novel to China. Below the sign sat a heap of rusting, abandoned workers’ barrows, their handles pointing — almost as if in aspiration — upwards. Faced with such a contrast between message and reality, John couldn’t resist the temptation to lie back in the tray of a dusty barrow, in defiance of the order to work. Further north at Datong we saw the twenty or so caves containing many huge statues of the Buddha together with other carvings, bas reliefs and so on. Many of these were missing, having been carted off to imperialist museums earlier this century. I had been disturbed to read about this. Visiting the caves I was not so sure this had

Young novices

The lazy man

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Towered by Buddha at Datong

Lazy Man in China

been a bad thing. The remaining statues are having by far the hardest time of it, what with the local Chinese lads carving their names and addresses all over them and blasting from the local coal mines giving them a good shake up every now and then. Also at Datong, and this was a lot of fun, we visited a factory which still makes steam locomotives. We even took it in turns to have rides in the cabin of a shiny new engine. A great deal of film was used up in this little exercise in important fact finding. An important fact in late September was the initialling in the Great Hall of the People of the Joint Declaration on Hong Kong. After two years of often acrimonious negotiations, London agreed to return the colony to Beijing when the lease for most of the territory expired in 1997. Under the formula of One Country — Two Systems, China agreed to allow Hong Kong to preserve its autonomy and capitalist way of life for at least fifty years after 1997. While Britain acknowledged this as ‘a solemn and important event’, China declared it ‘a major event worth celebrating’. So, on 1 October 1984, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the communist People’s Republic of China, Deng Xiaoping took credit for the successful conclusion of the Hong Kong talks with a spectacular military parade. Although the foremost leader, Deng — unlike the Great Helmsman, Mao — advocated collective leadership, he eschewed a personality cult and delegated day-to-day responsibility to his two protégés, Communist Party General Secretary


Hu Yaobang and Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang. Deng’s only formal positions were as a member of the standing committee of the Party’s ruling Politbureau, chairman of the Central Advisory Commission and chairman of the Central Military Commission. But on National Day the diminutive Deng took pride of place, born aloft along the Avenue of Eternal Peace amidst gun carriers, missiles, dragons, floats and balloons to the chanting of ‘Long live the Motherland’. Yesterday was National Day here.26 This time it was turned into a commemoration of Deng Xiaoping’s regime, a strange situation as that little person isn’t even a part of the government. I’ve never seen such a carry on. Yesterday’s parade, which I saw on television, made [Melbourne’s] Moomba look like a stroll to the corner shop for a sandwich. Those who were there complained of not being able to see a thing so jostled were they by the police and the Chinese television crews. Last night I had a pass to view the evening’s festivities in Tiananmen Square. The pass was necessary as the Chinese always take

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Deng Xiaoping with aides in the Great Hall of the People

Opera performers

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Tank troops under review

Fireworks for 35th National Day

Lazy Man in China

elaborate precautions to keep the ordinary people away from their own celebrations. There is always the fear that they might introduce a note of spontaneity that would not look good on foreign television — or any television. Quite a few foreigners were permitted to attend last night and, as the invitation said ‘… identify with the masses’. Masses on this occasion meaning senior cadres and their spoiled sons and daughters. I had to park in some great courtyard somewhere down the back of the forbidden city and walk towards the fireworks and the laser beams. I walked for nearly an hour through the huge complex. My destination was due south but every hundred yards or so a policeman or a soldier would order me to turn west. When eventually I arrived at a gateway to the Square and could hear the music and see the dancers, I was turned back by the police. The cadre I appealed to said he didn’t know why I was refused entry. It was perhaps because I was too late. I realised later that had I threatened to identify both cop and cadre as a pair of ‘foreigner hating, secret admirers of the gang of four leftist rats’ I would probably have got in. Never mind I am told the illuminations will still be there tonight so I will go in again and try for some photos. I enjoyed [Melbourne’s] be nice to primary teachers


article and was interested to see that it had been published immediately before the anti-rightist campaign when being nice to any sort of teacher quickly went out of fashion. The political scene at home sounds less than edifying. Every item on this morning’s Radio Australia news was about corruption or organised crime. They should all be made to do ‘self criticism’. I have resigned from my job at the Australian Embassy … Which reminds me, I did meet your friend Kevin Gates when he was here. I was standing beside the swimming pool at the Embassy, glass in hand, when this sinister looking character all brilliantine and dark glasses sidled up to me obviously on for a chat. I was about the only one around he could talk to. Although the time was set aside for relaxation and was almost always used for this the permanent staff were all inside affecting, for the benefit of the visiting head of the North Asia desk, to be far too busy to take the time off. You know the Australian Embassy is not unlike a teachers centre. Much the same sort of people (though more from private schools I suspect) work in the same crowded conditions whilst all sorts of strange people wander in and out and monopolise the photocopier. Suddenly it all stops, an excuse is discovered, the barbeque is set up and everyone stands around stretching their back muscles in the sun — chop and glass in hand. As usual, National Day of the People’s Republic of China was followed on October 10 by that of the rival Republic of China, Taiwan. Already it is the double tenth, the anniversary of Sun Yatsen’s glorious revolution which overthrew the hated Manchu and launched a new destiny for the sons of the Yellow Emperor and I still haven’t

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People’s Liberation Army parade before Lenin and Stalin

Lazy Man in China

answered your letter of 22nd July.27 I’m sorry, but three months is like a moment in the history of China so in fact I’m answering very promptly. … Since resigning from the Embassy I have been trying my luck as a freelance correspondent. Naturally I run a poor second to Helene and don’t get much accepted. No-one can say I have been rushed with commissions. The A.B.C. have broadcast two or three of my pieces but I never know when they’re on. I have sent a few short pieces off to the Sydney and Melbourne papers, but really, I think I had more luck with the notes I used to send up the chimney to Santa Claus. At the beginning of this month I actually attended a banquet in The Great Hall of The People. It was to celebrate some anniversary of the China International Trust and Investment Corporation. Your old friend Sir Roderick Carnegie was there and probably others of your acquaintance. The food was atrocious but I’m told it always is there. A congratulatory telegram from Bob Hawke was read out. It was the only one received from a political leader and went over quite well — as far as I could tell. After the meal there was a concert. After the usual acrobats and songs sung by ‘Distinguished singers from our national minorities’ — ethnics to you — we had a burst of ‘spiritual pollution’. That is to say, a comely lass in tight jeans and leather zip-up jacket came out and sang American pop songs to her own guitar


accompaniment. So what! Well in the Great Hall or anywhere in China for that matter this could be compared with putting on Les Girls at John Howard’s retirement dinner. There are not many opportunities to go to the theatre in Peking but … we went to the Zhong Shan Theatre to hear the visiting Australian folk group Sirocco. We were among 1700 young Chinese who clearly enjoyed the concert but were a little shy when it came to expressing their appreciation. There was a famous Chinese singer in the audience, Yun En Feng. She apparently approached the group at interval and sought a spot on the programme. As a consequence she appeared with and sang a duet with their lead singer, Mike Atherton. It was a most exotic night out. … Now for the sports news. Yesterday I was invited for afternoon tea at the Great Wall Hotel to see Vicepremier Wan Li present certificates and ugly modern tapestries to fifty outstanding sportsmen and women — we still have genders here — of the past thirty-five years. They are never in a hurry in China so many of the recipients were already dead but as they were included in the catering there was a most adequate supply of cakes. Amongst the living there was quite a crop of recent gold medal winners from the L.A. Games. I was introduced to a few of these by our hosts, the staff of ‘Tiyu Bao’ or Sports News who were sponsoring the presentations. One to whom I was introduced was Luan Jujie who had won her gold for fencing. She made me a nice set speech about her pleasant memories of Melbourne, which she apparently saw in 1979. When I asked her if she expected to win the gold at L.A., she smiled and said with genuine modesty, ‘Yes, I did expect to win.’

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After the presentations there was a concert during which people chatted and moved between tables exchanging autographs. My neighbour at table was a young interpreter from China Sports Committee Propaganda Department. I asked the name of the first song she replied, ‘My motherland’. The next song’? This was called ‘My Chinese Heart’, and the next song was called ‘Peach Flower Blossom’. This was not a love song my mentor hastened to explain. Rather it was about a young soldier of the People’s Liberation Army who, contemplating the blossom’s beauty, thought only of his country. In China sports and politics definitely do mix, like [Australian Opposition Liberal Party leader] Andrew Peacock in the Essendon [Football] Club rooms. Anyway our little tea party would have beaten an athletic club pie night hands down … My very best wishes to you and all the peace loving haters of Soviet hegemonism at Hawthorn, John

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Waiting for the Beautiful Ballerina H

elene is very busy today and I’ve seen scarcely anything of her.28 All week the Communist Party Central Committee or Political Bureau — I forget which — has been preparing everyone for big changes to policy on economic planning. Helene had to go into the Foreign Information Office this morning and collect a translation of their sixteen thousand pictograph policy statement, then digest it and send off several news stories on it. I had a glance through it myself at lunch time. It says, in effect, that while the Party still believes that under a socialist system the workers must own the means of production it is wrong to equate such ownership with bureaucratic central control, with fixed prices and full employment. That this wrong equation has persisted for so long has been due to China’s reliance upon an incorrect, non Marxist, Russian model. In short it appears that the profit motive is fine,

Leonid Ilyichev is questioned Photograph by Taichro Hata

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even anti-capitalist and that workers can now be hired and fired at the will of the bosses without surrendering their ownership of the means of production. I admit I’ve only scanned the document but that seems to be the essence of it. Soviet Vice Foreign Minister Ilyichev is in town at the moment. We have a wonderful photo of Helene arguing with him at the airport, taken by a Japanese cameraman. Last night we went to see a Chinese ballet for which the information office had given us tickets. Ilyichev was there in the vast Russian built theatre as guest of honour. The Chinese must have been trying to tell the Russians something. The ballet, ‘The Legend of Hua Mu-Lan’ was a traditional story about driving off invaders from the north. The music and the choreography however was new. The performers were, as always, most competent but the ballet was atrocious. The dancing was really only acrobatics and the music was trite in the extreme. Naturally we fled at interval only to find the car boxed in. Rather than go back into the theatre we decided to abandon the car and try and hitch a ride in the car park. Two handsome clean cut young men said they would be happy to drive us to our apartment. They looked like U.S. Marine officers. They turned out to be Russian diplomats, a first and a third secretary. At least East and West were able to agree on the urgency of getting away from the bloody awful ballet. Helene asked these two characters in for a drink … They accepted like a shot. They were obviously highly trained as they had both found my one bottle of vodka before we had even sat down. They abandoned this however when they found a bottle of J. B. Scotch. Eventually I had to cut off the supply or they would still be here. I still cannot find the bugs they must


have planted. What’s worse we have accepted an invitation to some strange sounding entertainment that combines ice hockey with eating and boozing. Don’t forget if you’re ever asked I have been completely open about all this, but I can’t wait for the beautiful ballerina to ring me up and arrange a meeting. The big news in England must still be the bombing of the Grand Hotel. Mrs. T[hatcher] is getting slow. She should have blamed it on [unionist] Mr. Scargill. Isn’t that the pub that features in Brighton Rock. … Always yours John Dear Lehene and David,29 I don’t know what Wo Wo’s burbling on about. I went into her office a moment ago where she is having a Chinese lesson. She muttered something about her taking a plane this afternoon to visit [Vietnamese] refugee camps in the south of China and that I might be able to go too. I hope nothing happens before we’ve had time to have lunch. I’m starving. That’s a digression. I’m writing principally to thank you very much for your particularly well chosen card. It’s the only one I received and so has a whole sideboard to itself. That’s not quite true as it shares the display area with the table lamp that Wo Wo gave me for my birthday [a ceramic omnibus, memento of our holiday with you in Burford, England]. At night the lamp is used to illuminate the card. Whilst we are still on the absorbing topic of 23rd October I will tell you what we did to celebrate. Helene took me to lunch at Maxim’s and we both enjoyed it very much. The place is far more splendid and incongruous than I had expected. It is very big with many rooms, foyers and bar. The decor as you

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Surface-to-air missiles on display

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know is a somewhat gorgeous example of fin de siecle ornamentation. It has been done so as to closely resemble the original. Even the aged and smoke stained ceilings have been reproduced. There were only five other diners in the whole place so we had plenty of service. … Since last I wrote we have had big celebrations here for National Day. For days before the big parade on 1st October tanks, gun carriers and truck loads of soldiers would rumble past under our window all night on their way to the night long rehearsals in Tiananmen Square. I would be woken at four a.m. to see them all driving home. The soldiers and sailors would be squashed onto the backs of trucks like vertical sardines — erect and uncomplaining having marched up and down for most of the night. Wo Wo went to the parade but like the Chinese I was kept away and had to watch it on television. For once we ordinary comrades had the best of the arrangements. As it was designed as a television spectacular, viewers were able to see all the floats and patterns and colour displays, formed by the marchers. Helene saw little of this as she was too close. Also her view was obscured by television crews, organisers and so on. To add injury to insult, there were groups of youthful marchers who with rehearsed expressions and cries of joy were throwing imitation bouquets into the crowd. These floral tokens were apparently quite heavy and one hit Wo Wo in the head.


We have had two lunch parties here recently, both to farewell journalists who were leaving. The first was for Stephen Jessel of the B.B.C. who is off to Brussels. It was also intended to welcome his successor Mark Brayne. We had a buffet for about twelve and hired a drink waiter so that I could do more drinking than hosts are supposed to. This character didn’t manage to serve one drink ’though he spilt quite a few. I kept tripping over him whenever I tried to serve people. For our next lunch — to farewell David Bonavia of the London ‘Times’ — we had only eight and were able to sit at table. We still had to have cooks both times and all the mess that goes with them but it was all very pleasant. Hardly a great news item but when we entertain it is a rarity. Well we have had lunch. It is still not clear whether or not Wo is going to Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces as she hopes. There is apparently a planned visit by overseas — not Peking — correspondents and Wo Wo is trying to get permission to go too. There have been phone calls to Hong Kong and Guangzhou to speak to United Nations people and we have already missed the 2.50 p.m. flight to Guangzhou. It looks from here that Wo Wo will eventually obtain Chinese and U.N. approval and go tonight or in the morning but I will remain, as it is easier to obtain permission for one than for two. … Love John Dear Con,30 … I will tell you about my enjoyable lunch at Maxim’s. All the year I have harboured reservations about visiting the place like:- ‘ridiculously expensive’, ‘not really China’ ‘just a Cardin tax gimmick’ etc. etc. As luck would have it this was good timing because

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Confession at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception

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the place has been going so badly that they have now introduced a businessmen’s lunch (masculine nouns are still permitted here though with all this opening up to the west that may stop.) This lunch is Y60-00 (about A$28) and includes a half bottle of quite agreeable French wine. The interior of the place is magnificent — all faded art nouveau. It is supposed to be an exact replica of the one in Paris … Some like you, familiar with the original, may pick flaws but it was near enough for me and the handful of other diners — overseas Chinese most of them, showing off their jeans and smelly sneakers to the Chinese waiters dressed up in white bow ties and claw hammer coats. There were about four waiters to every diner this day and the food was also good. Perhaps I have had better in Melbourne, though not at lunch time. What am I saying? When did I ever have time to go to a restaurant at lunch time? Now if one of my old masters were to ask me, ‘And when were you last at Mass?’ I could answer, ‘Last Sunday Father’. I went at 7.30 a.m. to the Cathedral of The Immaculate Conception because I had planned to do a story for some A.B.C. breakfast show and because there was a rumour around town that Jaime Cardinal Sin [of The Philippines] was going to show up there. Around the time Mass was due to start I was standing around outside chatting to the celebrant who seemed in no great rush to start. That was a mistake. Once inside there was no hope of a seat and not much room to stand. I doubt though that this had anything to do with Sin. Few Chinese would have known he was in town.


The effort the worshippers put into that Mass resembled the efforts the P.L.A. must have put into fighting the Nationalists. Rosary beads and missals were going full bore throughout Mass and through into Benediction which followed. The choir seemed to sing non stop although admittedly I was not there all the time. I had the impression too that choir and congregation stayed on for the next Mass and Benediction too. Cardinal Sin made a brief appearance towards the end of the second Mass. When the people worked out who he was they almost all rushed to kneel before him to beg his blessing and kiss his episcopal ring. It was a most extraordinary sight. I once happened by accident to be somewhere in Italy when the Pope bowled in to a rousing and passionate welcome. Compared with this though it bordered on the cursory. I am still reading Ross Terrill’s biography of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing. You know the Gang of Four lady. Unfortunately for her she had to make China her arena. Now she is in jail and likely to remain there. Were she born in Australia she would naturally have found her way onto the executive body of some school parent organisation and carried out her activities unhindered and in relative obscurity. … Always yours John. By now it was November and time for the American presidential race with all its religious fervour. Ronald Reagan

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Homage to Cardinal Sin, with Bishop Fu (left)

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was set for his second term. But despite his actor’s appeal, the White House incumbent hadn’t won the hearts of all Americans in Beijing.

Kung Fu tournament Photograph by Willi Phua

I went yesterday to the new Great Wall Hotel where the American Embassy had set up a tally room to monitor the election results.31 I was greeted, like everyone else, by young Chinese staff, some in Mao suits, wearing straw boater hats with red white and blue ribbon round them. Inside there were balloons buttons and banks of television sets. There was also an elaborate buffet breakfast of the sort that helped kill Elvis Presley. The television coverage was interesting. At one point the front man said, ‘In America we are inclined to forget that we aren’t just electing a President of the United States. We are electing a president of the free world.’ I suggested to the young American lawyer hopping into sausages and maple syrup sitting next to me that many people overseas would find the remark offensive. He replied that he too found it offensive. There was an air of gloom over the whole proceedings as most Americans in China — teachers, professors, diplomats etc. are anti-Reagan. Only the typists from the Embassy seemed pleased with the result. The seven hundred or so invited Chinese were delighted with the occasion as the T.V. station covering the election kept showing ads for undreamed of products and previews of a particularly salacious looking film to be shown in America that evening. At the end of the satellite transmission the


M.C. said jokingly he was sorry that we wouldn’t be able to see the advertised late night movie. A Chinese official announcer immediately translated his words into Chinese. Last Saturday night we went to the Peking Opera. I’d seen it twice before in Melbourne. Both times one really only saw selections and the second time, last year I think, it was very expensive. This time we saw a whole opera and it cost next to nothing. The singers had beautiful voices and one in particular had incredible range. The audience was mostly working men who enjoyed it all enormously. Obviously they’d all seen it many times before. I taped some of the performances and have asked the A.B.C. if they want a story on it. I’m not very hopeful. On Sunday we went to lunch at the Xin Qiao Hotel not far from Tiananmen Square. This pub is a huge heavy Russian pile with a distinctly post Beria atmosphere. You would like it. Plenty of snooker tables, none of which seemed to be in use. There are also lots of chandeliers and on every gloomy landing a bas relief depicting happy peasants, factory workers or national minorities (ethnics). None of these are permitted into the hotel which is only for foreigners and compatriots (overseas Chinese). We had lunch in the western dining-room on the top floor which serves borsch, chicken Kiev (the dish which always squirts butter on your tie) and chocolate Sunday. The Russian hegemonists have gone but their recipes remain. Yesterday as Helene had flu I went to the Foreign Affairs press briefing. These are boring affairs as the spokesmen never talk about anything any reporter is interested in. For example the American election results had just been announced but the official affected almost total indifference to the matter. I was amused

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Carry on Imam Photograph by Willi Phua

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though when meaning to say, ‘Premier Zhao said’ he blurted out with, ‘Chairman Mao said — ’. You might derive some amusement from the enclosed photo taken some few months ago at the Great Mosque in Xian. Helene and I and all the other mullahs are actually watching an exhibition of kung fu, staged as part of the celebrations for the end of Ramadan. I think it looks like a scene from, ‘Carry on Imam’. Peking had meanwhile mellowed into autumn — its best season — and the weather was most congenial, except for the constant smog and the dry air of encroaching winter. It’s also the time when Peking dishes out the most ghastly chest and throat complaints — only of course to the soft foreign community.32 It is clearly all a revenge for the opium wars. Already the great long dry spell of winter is with us. Even with the humidifiers going full bore we still get electric shocks as we touch things or anyone else. Helene has the flu, with a dreadful throat to boot. The Australian doctor says she mustn’t use her voice if she’s to be back on air in a reasonable time. I remind her of this advice whenever she starts to describe some job she wants me to do. Two weeks ago we decided to go out and see some of the autumn colour in the hills north of the city … The Fragrant Hills were spectacular on this day. Those trees which were not a brilliant red were a shimmering


white gold. There were I recall quite a few evergreen pines or firs acting as a counterpoint to all the autumn colour. There is no such thing as getting away from it all in China. There are crowds and some noise wherever one goes. However everyone acts with such decorum that it’s almost as good as having the place to yourself. I had a good time taking photos of happy school kids and young people practising nineteen thirties style western dancing all in an autumn setting. I’ll probably be a real pest with my slides when I return. … A little while ago there was a cry from the bedroom. Helene had just spilt a mug of revolting hot black Chinese cough mixture on the bed. This formed a lake in the middle of one of those Scandinavian quilt things then quickly soaked through just about everything. Never mind! It’s amazing what can be squeezed into an electric drier.

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Catching Up with the Work Load O

utside the comfortable foreign compounds, China’s anticrime campaign continued. Although forty-four crimes were punishable by death — far fewer than today — the system then was much harsher. China is still governed by the law of rule rather than the rule of law. But now, not everyone accused is necessarily convicted: the legal reforms from 1996 include a presumption of innocence. In the eighties the accused was assumed guilty. Fifteen months after an anti-crime campaign began with the mass execution of thirty criminals in Peking in August 1983, a representative of the Public Security Bureau appeared briefly before foreign journalists for the first time. He couldn’t comment on the number of executions — estimated by foreign diplomats at between 5,000 and 10,000, and routinely documented by blood red tick marks on public posters. He could say that prompt and severe penalties had reduced China’s crime rate by thirty percent. The other day there was a press conference by a Mr. Wang Jing Rong, Director of Research for the Struggle Against the Prisoners, if I heard his title correctly.33 He was really the spokesghoul for the Public Security Bureau, the organisation that’s been winning itself a lot of kudos lately by arresting thousands of people, hauling them before howling


mobs for ‘struggle sessions’, then shooting them in the backs of their heads. This activity was considered sufficiently novel to attract a lot of questions at the conference. According to Mr. Wang there were only two causes of crime: the pernicious effects of the ‘cultural revolution’ (What did you do in the ‘cultural revolution’ Mr. Wang?) and the no less pernicious influences of contact with foreigners — an unavoidable product of opening up to the west. Anyway, he said, it had been necessary to have a lot of executions lately due to the Bureau slackness in previous years — catching up with the work load. Besides, he added, the executions had proved very popular with the masses. This description of capital punishment as popular art at least had the virtue of being true to life. … I’ll finish with a brief account of this afternoon’s little adventure. I was invited out to a tea party at Beijing Radio to celebrate one year of their English program. After being met at the gate I was ushered through a huge public foyer, where the staff were playing badminton, up several flights of stairs and into an office where I had an excruciatingly awkward conversation with two important looking bods both speaking excellent English. I was thinking this wasn’t much of a party when one asked me what I thought of their programs. I replied that after only one year one should not expect too much and certainly a great deal had been achieved. An astonished woman assured me they had been broadcasting for thirty-seven years. It was then we discovered I had been shown to the wrong building and the party was elsewhere. However, most Pekingese were preoccupied neither with crime nor English broadcast celebrations. It was winter

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and, without today’s variety and abundance of vegetables, people were preoccupied with cabbages.

Cabbages in Peking

Yes cabbages, mountains of them piled up on the footpaths and roadsides of the capital — no such thing as counters to put them on.34 The same scene is repeated right across northern China. There’s a simple explanation. It is now early winter and cabbages are the only vegetable available, or soon will be. Shortly there will be no vegetables at all for about four months. The ground will be hard and dusty and nothing will grow. People are taking home cabbages on their bikes, a few at a time, up to a ration of about two hundred per family. These are stored on balconies or in courtyards or in bedrooms and even living rooms. These piles of cabbages will be the basic food for winter. It’s not as dreary as it sounds. The Chinese are very inventive with food and make pickles and dumplings and all sorts of things from the one vegetable. There will be plenty of fresh vegetables available in the south of China and a great variety too. However there is neither the transport nor refrigeration nor organisation to bring food to the north. These might just as well be growing on Saturn for all the chance there would be of shipping them to the north. Last Sunday we had five friends in for dinner. It is usual when entertaining in Peking to hire a chef … This time we took the last of our shoulders of lamb we


brought up from Hong Kong and prepared a Sunday roast ourselves. I stuffed some apples with walnuts dried fruit and honey and baked those too. It was a great success as our visitors were used to having the same chef prepared dishes at other people’s places. I notice we have one chicken left. This will be for Christmas dinner. I bought some plum puddings when in London and brought these back to China for Christmas. After that we will have to do some shopping in Hong Kong for Helene when I’m on my way back to Australia. Sadly for us both, John’s twelve months’ leave from the Victorian Education Department was coming to a close. We arranged a holiday in Hong Kong and Malaysia in time for his return to Melbourne by February 1985. While still together in Peking, in November 1984 we shared the pleasure of seeing John’s first newspaper article published in The Australian. ‘Film-makers put China on the marketing map’ told of plans by the Italian company Fiction Cinematografica to produce a film on the life of the last Qing emperor, Pu Yi, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and Franco Giovale. This epic, after its release in 1987, became an Oscarwinning international hit, although not screened in China until almost a year later. It required ‘a little adjustment to account for Chinese habits’, according to Age Beijing correspondent Peter Ellingsen

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Last Emperor’s brother Piu Jie (right) and wife with aide

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in August 1988: ‘Approved version precedes “Last Emperor” in China’. As John reported in 1984, The Last Emperor is based on Pu Yi’s autobiography, From Emperor to Citizen: At their press conference the Italians rolled out their prize property. He is comrade Pu Jie, the 78-year-old younger brother and former aide-de-camp of the emperor Pu Yi. Pu Jie and his wife, a cousin of the Japanese emperor, Hirohito, now live in retirement in Beijing. His importance at the press conference was to demonstrate by his presence that he was acting as adviser to Bertolucci’s film team and script writers and to nobody else. … The film will show, as does the autobiography, that Pu Yi was repressed by his role as Qing emperor in the Forbidden City, and later as the puppet ruler of the State of Manchukuo, established by the Japanese in northern China in the 1930s. According to Giovale, it was not until Pu Yi was imprisoned by Mao that he learned to do things for himself. Giovale admits that to the Western mind reeducation is a terrible word, but the film will show that Pu Yi’s life began in the prison when he was 40. This view was endorsed by the Chinese writer Wen Da, who ghosted Pu Yi’s autobiography. He describes Pu Yi as one who was born a man then became a dragon then became a man again. John, with his year in the Dragon Kingdom about to end, took the opportunity to revisit his favourite Chinese city. In late November he boarded, with whitening knuckles, a CAAC Ilyushin to Shanghai.


Dear Mum,35 Thank you for your letter. It was waiting for me when I returned from an eleven day tour of the southern part of China. After visiting Shanghai, China’s biggest city of over twelve million people and Suzhou, famous for its ancient gardens, I met up with Helene and a party of Peking’s foreign journalists for a tour of the southern province of Fujian. Fujian as a matter of interest is Tasmania’s sister state. A few years ago the Governor of Fujian and Tasmanian Premier Robin Gray signed a friendship pact between the two states. I’m not sure what this amounts to but there it is. Whereas Peking is freezing at the moment — there was snow this morning — Fujian Province being near the equator is pleasantly mild. We travelled by bus from Fuzhou, the capital in the north of the Province through places called Quanzhou, Huian, Jimei and others I’ve forgotten to the southern city of Xiamen, (also called Amoy) in the south. Most of these places were by the sea so we saw plenty of junks — both sailing junks and motorised ones — and also plenty of sampans. In Fuzhou we visited a huge market where there were fresh vegetables we rarely see in the north and lots of live produce. The fish section was huge with lobsters, crabs, shark, octopus, squid, eels and dozens of varieties of both fresh water and ocean fish. Practically everything was alive. The fish were all swimming in

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Helene looks out from the crowd

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Free enterprise eatery

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tanks. The crabs and lobsters were crawling around on the counters and some of the big ocean fish though hung up by their gills were still breathing. I’m pleased to say that the very large sharks on sale were dead. There were they said snakes and dogs for eating on sale in another part of the market but I’m pleased to say I didn’t see those. The Chinese people here in the north are very critical of the eating habits of the people in the south. They have a saying, ‘The southerners will eat anything on legs that is not a table and anything that flies that is not an aeroplane.’ When we were in Xiamen we went to dinner with some Australian students there to a little hole in the wall restaurant. All the fish we had was swimming around in tanks outside before we ordered it. Then it was netted and cooked. If we’d ordered duck that would have been killed and plucked whist we were waiting. This excellent meal which we washed down with several bottles of beer came to about seventeen dollars for the six of us. I was amused to learn that you’d heard one of my pieces on the radio but unless you’re very fond of 7ZR I don’t know that I’d leave it on just in the hope of hearing my croaky voice … Take care of yourself and don’t catch any more colds or flu. Lots of love, John xxx


Dear Ken, Annette & Imogen,36 … I still haven’t quite sorted out the experiences of the last eleven days, so won’t tire you with many of the details. In Xiamen (Amoy in the local dialect), after much trouble with the Public Security Bureau, we visited the four Australian students at the university. After we had all shaken off our keepers we heard how whilst the university was a waste of time they were getting a lot out of their two year stint. All four were graduates in Chinese. They said the Chinese had no idea what to do with them and at first kept them all locked in their dormitories at night behind an iron grill — we saw the grill. Now that Xiamen has become a special economic zone with openings to the west (silly metaphor) the foreign students are allowed plenty of freedom. As a result they have become completely street wise, eating at all the cheap cafes, exchanging their foreign currency on the black market. We went out with them to a magnificent meal in a free enterprise restaurant and then to choir practice to a Christian church hidden away in a dark alley. Hardly an adventure you will say, but it is here. By accident, I met a group of Australian and German students in Shanghai. They were very good to me, leaving their bicycles in town so I could travel with them on the bus to the happy hour at the Australian Consulate then off to a meal with them to the cheap restaurant in the Peace Hotel where

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Fresh feathered food

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I happened to be staying. One of the German girls had an interesting story of travelling in Yunnan Province where the minority groups there are organised into armed bands of brigands, attacking travellers and even trains. … Love and best wishes to all of you from both of us. John.

Suzhou Canal

Dear Con,37 …I hope you received my card from Shanghai … From Shanghai I made a day trip to Suzhou to see some of the famous gardens there. The Chinese made this visit as difficult as possible. Though the train journey only takes an hour they would not sell me a return ticket. Instead they insisted I be met by a C.I.T.S. [China International Travel Service] guide and driver and taken to a hotel where I could negotiate my return ticket. On arrival the guide told me the hotel booking office couldn’t sell me a ticket until 12.30 and that now I should have lunch — it was 10.30 — and over lunch we could discuss my visits to the Friendship Store and the silk factory. There must have been something about the manner in which I insisted that I would not be seeing the silk factory etc. that made my guide forfeit his free lunch. Before he went I asked him to order me a small portion of crisp duck so that I might be quickly on my way to see the gardens. After a twenty or thirty minute delay the duck, cooked in clay, no, mud, arrived — a whole duck that is, beak, webbed feet — the lot! Although I got rid of the guide I couldn’t have managed without the driver. The city was larger than I had thought and the gardens too far apart. The car


was just a battered little Toyota or Russian Volga but wherever we parked people would rush up to have their photos taken, standing beside it. Suzhou is thought by the Chinese to be the Venice of the East. It is not remotely like Venice. It is much like any Chinese city, vast, flat and polluted. It does however have a section of the Grand Canal and a few local waterways besides. Then of course there are the gardens. Unfortunately the first of these that I saw turned out to be the best. This was the ‘Master of the Fishing Nets Garden’. It was small but the relationships between buildings and spaces were amongst the best I’d seen anywhere. I visited three other gardens, saw and photographed bits of the Grand Canal and climbed some old pagoda the driver took me to to fill in the time before my train left. At Suzhou station I had to wait in a room reserved for foreigners and VIPS. It was here I saw perhaps the most unusual person I’ve seen since I’ve been in China. A young woman, very attractive in a hoydenish sort of way was being seen off by her relatives. She was extravagantly dressed in a camel coat with a huge fur collar. On the collar she sported a large gold metal bow. Her hair was permed and she was heavily though carefully made up and her teeth were white and even. I thought she must be from Hong Kong at first but a few details gave her away. Amongst these were the bells on her hand bag which

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Suzhou Pagoda

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tinkled as she walked, together with the stockings, above the short cowboy boots, which finished just below the knee. Some scruffy young men — probably her brothers — were taking turns to be photographed with her whilst she ordered them about telling them to put her case ‘there! no there’. One of the lads with very little English came over and sat beside me, to practise his English he said, but really to show off. ‘You know’ he said, waving his arm in the direction of the girl who beamed at the attention, ‘She is a movie star!’ ‘Oh! a movie star’ I said finding it not hard to look impressed ‘A movie star from Shanghai’? ‘No’ said my new friend ‘A movie star from Guangzhou’. We never see anything like that in Peking.

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Not So White Christmas O

ur first Christmas together in Peking was under a fortnight away. It was well organised: a leisurely meal with friends at a Japanese restaurant followed by midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, and guests for lunch next day. We would heat the brandy, pour it over the Christmas puddings and serve them flaming at the table. We would relax, uplifted by the voices of King’s College Choir on the new Christmas tape, Once in Royal David’s City, John had cradled from London for the season. Fate intervened. No sooner had he finished a threepart series on Fujian, commissioned by the Hobart Mercury, than he was suddenly rushed off on 22 December for dental treatment in Hong Kong. I was already there. I was on the heels of haughty British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She had been welcomed to Peking by Zhao Ziyang in iced up Tiananmen Square, before the two entered the Great Hall of the People to sign the Sino– British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong. At her press conference in the colony, the Iron Lady

Thatcher welcomed by Zhao

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Thatcher before handing Hong Kong to Deng

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tried to allay people’s fears for 1997. She failed to explain why Britain waged war to defend a few Falkland Islanders and all their sheep from being absorbed into Argentina, yet so quickly succumbed to handing over five-and-a-half-million Chinese to the communist rule from which so many of them fled. John and I hoped to return together in time for Christmas. But I had to whip back before him to cover the highest ranking Soviet visitor in fifteen years, First Deputy Prime Minister Ivan Arkhipov. Beijing was playing its Moscow card against Washington in the Cold War’s strategic triangular power game. Then, with no flight available till Boxing Day, John was stranded at the Furama Hotel. It was a terrible disappointment. Never mind. He found a more than adequate Christmas lunch in the hotel coffee shop and afterwards strolled around in the island’s warm winter sunshine. I wandered up to the Anglican cathedral just before lunch, too late to attend the Christmas matins but just in time to see all the colonial types tumbling out into the sunshine.38 Most of these seemed to affect Edwardian dress and I could still hear them haw hawing when I was some distance down the steep path that leads into town. On the level land in central Hong Kong the few parks and squares were all packed with Filipino servant girls enjoying a day off listening to transistor radios and eating from tin pannikins the cheap food they’d purchased from nearby barrows and stalls.


Whilst on the subject of dining I’ll tell you of my recent visit to Peking’s Shanxi duck restaurant. I’m not much taken with this particular dish however on this night I was pleased enough to be included in the party even though the temperature was well below freezing and the oil heater in the room turned on only after we were all seated. When the bill arrived it seemed a bit steep so we asked for an itemised account. We found then that not only were we charged for the small cakes which are essential for the dish but also a substantial sum for cigarettes and matches. Our complaint that these were not ordered, mentioned or even sighted was declared irrelevant. These things were not necessarily supplied but must always be paid for. One of my more interesting, indeed amusing experiences has been that I seem to have become an object of interest to a First Secretary at the Russian Embassy whose name is Zakhar Krymov. I first met this cove at a theatrical performance at which we found we shared a dislike of the tedium of Chinese ballet. Zakhar is in the political section at his Embassy and has been to China three times, always by train. The first time was as an infant in 1948 when his father came to make contact with Mao. Since our first meeting he has bought me lunch at the Peking Hotel and invited me to a day’s watching ice hockey which is to be combined with eating and drinking — all out at their massive embassy compound. I rather fear however that this attractive sounding annual event may take place after I’ve left Peking. There! I’ve made a clean breast of it. Unfortunately I’ve been asked to confess all to one of the hotel door hammerers at the Australian Embassy.

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Hand washing in Fujian

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Since I last wrote to you I’ve had a week in Fujian province as part of a party of foreign journalists. The tour was sponsored by the local authorities and as I was a particularly small potato (local expression) I only squeezed in by arguing that I was from Tasmania, Fujian’s sister state. This was a cheek as I hadn’t then lined up any Tasmanian paper to take a story. I nearly didn’t make it because the authorities in Shanghai wouldn’t let me buy an air ticket as I lacked an, ‘Alien’s Travel Permit’ for Fujian, a province not normally on the tourist beat. Eventually a policewoman issued a permit on the grounds that my name was like that of Martin Luther King. In Fujian we found that one of the aims of the journalists’ visit was to promote tourism. It’s all rather confusing. Fujian is mostly mountains with a thin coastal strip. We started in the north at Fuzhou, the capital then travelled by bus down to Quanzhou then on to Xiamen (Amoy) then flew back to Peking. I don’t know which was better the cities or the countryside in between. Whereas 80% of the Chinese live in the country, in Fujian the average is 88%. Agriculture on the communes is most intensive and practically everything is done by hand or with the aid of curious ancient technology, particularly for irrigation. In one section the main product appeared to be white granite. Almost everything was made from it. There were granite roads and granite houses with granite fences. There was a large granite aqueduct and even a granite power station.


Almost all the vegetation in Fujian is from Australia except the banyan trees. The roads are lined with eucalypts, casuarinas, silky oaks and cape wattles. Whole hillsides have been replanted with Australian trees and shrubs so that they resemble the bush. In the communes these trees are cut back lightly and tree stacks in the shape of haystacks are made from the cuttings. When these are dried they’re used to fuel the kilns turning out bricks and pottery jars. The bricks are used for housing, the huge jars are carried on either end of bamboo poles by peasant women who use them as aids to irrigation. That’s enough about Fujian. I’m starting to sound like a school essay. Then, pen and paper set aside, John dusted down the thirty-year old dinner suit he’d lugged all the way to China, for a dinner dance on New Year’s Eve. This was put on by the Australian Embassy at the new Lido Hotel.39 There was a good crowd and we knew many of them. There were however a few ring-ins. One of these was an Australian tourist who sat amongst us stuff-shirts in his rolled shirtsleeves hopping into the free grog as though it would all be cleared away any second. He was a nice bloke but a little inclined to express himself more colourfully than was appropriate. When his wife went to the toilet a little before midnight he expressed his concern. ‘My wife will have to get her arse into gear’ he said ‘if she’s to get back here by midnight.’ When we left the party at around three this bloke had passed out with his head face forward on the table. His wife had long gone to bed. They were to be up at crack of dawn the next day for an excursion to the Great Wall and the Ming

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Tombs. However I doubt if he’d managed to get his arse into gear for that. It’s around minus twelve here at the moment and sometimes colder. All the lakes and rivers are frozen over and people are ice skating on them. There are still things I haven’t managed to see like Mao’s tomb and the Imperial Palaces which are just down the street from here — typical. Eastern & Oriental Hotel, Penang, Malaysia Georgetown40 The E. & O. is really fun — sort of faded Hollywood 1930s cum Somerset Maugham. It is right on the water and Helene and I have had the pool to ourselves. The town is very seedy like a place in a Graham Greene novel. There is even a dirty old pearl lugger moored just offshore. We leave tomorrow. Helene returns to Peking via Hong Kong — where we had three days — and I go to Kuala Lumpur then to Melbourne and Hobart. My stay in China is over but now I am really sorry.

PEKING VIA BABYLON OR SODOM

December 1985–April 1986

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e were parted for six months, till the Australian winter of 1985 when I flew down to Sydney and Melbourne. I raced from one studio to another and from this doctor to that dentist — having all the briefings and checkups unavailable in China. And on both sides of Bass Strait I was deluged by family, friends and associates. By the time I boarded Qantas heading back to Beijing in sweltering August, John and I had had scant time to ourselves. Not until December could we relax together. Argao, Cebu, Philippines41 I believe The Philippines would conform with Graham Greene’s requirement — definitely a place on the fringes of life. Helene flew to Manila Sunday from Peking via Xiamen. I flew from Melbourne via Sydney. As I looked out over Manila Bay last night I wondered whereabouts it was that Admiral Dewey US N[avy] gave that order in 1898. ‘You may fire [against the Spanish fleet] when you are ready Gridley.’ Today we flew to Cebu City then spent two hours in a hot minibus on a bad road crowded with people and colourful jeepneys (jeepnies?) until we reached the beautiful beach resort of Argao. We have a cabin right on the beach and the seafood in the restaurant is very good. I hope to do lots of reading and sea bathing and so does Hélène who needs the rest more than I do. We were away from Peking, away from Melbourne and away from the Philippines election campaign set to sweep Corazon Aquino to power. Under coconut palms we unwound and rediscovered each other. Only occasionally did we venture, in a little cab powered by a motor bike, onto the road lined with pink hibiscus, water buffalo, rice paddies and pretty children. We roamed through the market place or

Peking via Babylon or Sodom

strayed into old churches. One had sparrows flying round inside. Then, via the poverty and child begging of Manila, we returned to the icy order of the imperial city. I assured John that this fortnight in China would be different from 1984 when my hours drove him mad with worry. On at least two occasions that year, he suddenly appeared wrapped in a robe well after midnight in my office to demand: ‘What are you trying to prove!?’ In December 1985 anti-nuclear demonstrations by Muslim students from the remote north-western Xinjiang kept me on the go. But they didn’t prevent John and me from trundling along to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Three thousand Chinese packed like matchsticks into the cathedral in sub-zero temperature. With frosty breath, many cycled for an hour each way bundled up in heavy padded cotton coats and warm fur earmuffs and woollen hats. On Christmas Day we were due at noon at the old Summer Palace. Some bounder chose this period to hijack a Soviet plane to China and so keep me from my pudding till dark of night. At the height of Melbourne’s summer, John recalled our freezing Christmas. Melbourne42 Did I also tell you about Christmas and New Year in Peking? We had Christmas dinner as one of the guests of Nancy and George Langston. George I think is a banker with a very heavy cold, which he gave me. Nancy we know rather better as she is the Peking

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Baroque ruins of the old Summer Palace

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correspondent for ‘The Economist’. They live in a villa — one of a number that used to house the concubines attached to the old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) the one burned down by the Brits in 1860. Anyway these places are set in an old garden with a large ornamental lake. We enjoyed it all immensely. Most of the guests were Americans and dinner wasn’t served until 5.30 by which time most of the non-Americans were probably all drunk despite sundry strolls around the frozen lake. On New Year’s Eve I had started to recover from the bad cold I’d caught from George, and Helene and I went as guests of Kevin and Lucy Hobgood-Brown to a dinner dance at the Great Wall Hotel. This was great fun but we couldn’t stay till midnight as we had agreed to go to a party at Jim Pringle’s apartment. Jim is a Scot who works for ‘Newsweek’ and he has a beautiful Cambodian wife. Jim is well known, so I learned, for his work with Reuters during the Vietnam War. It was a wonderful party and we stayed much too late. We left at the same time as a Canadian journalist who punctuated his departure by exploding a number of fireworks in the stair well and foyer of the apartment block. I asked him if he wasn’t concerned at disturbing people who might be asleep. ‘It doesn’t matter’, he said. ‘They’ll just blame it on the Libyan kids’. By spring 1986 John had taken long service leave and was again ensconced in the Middle Kingdom. He felt almost as though he’d never left. I’d not long returned from the United States, only to be dispatched by the Australian doctor, Arthur Hartwig, for medical tests in Hong Kong. I was now on sick leave.


8-122 Qi Jia Yuan, Peking People’s Republic of China43 As I hope to earn a little as a freelance journalist in China I had better brush up my limited typing skills. Indeed I will be the only working journalist in this apartment for a while as poor Helene is diagnosed as having a chronic duodenal ulcer and has been ordered to take a complete rest for at least six weeks. As Mr. Fan [our interpreter] said this morning, ‘Miss Helen, I tell you not to work so hard — and now it is too late’. I think that sort of comment is less than helpful. She started to feel unwell on her return from the States. Neither Hartwig nor the French doctor could work out what was wrong with her so she was sent to Hong Kong for tests … Now she is taking tablets and is on a strict diet for six weeks. I hope she is better after that. Helene’s sickness hasn’t prevented her coping with a busy social programme since my arrival. On Tuesday night we went with friends to a new restaurant on the 26th floor of the new CITIC [China International Trust & Investment Corporation] building. There would have been a spectacular view but the restaurant windows were covered on the outside — perhaps to prevent foreigners spying. The name of this establishment is, ‘Window on the West’. The only thing Helene could have was a vanilla souffle, because of her diet. I managed a little bit

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Helene and John at the Great Wall Photograph by Mark Hopkins

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The Great Wall at Mutianyu

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more. Poor Helene, she can’t have meat or tea or coffee so I have to clean up all the meat in the freezer as well as all the wine tea and coffee. We have been to one dinner party this week and we had one here last night to farewell the Far Eastern Economic Review correspondent. Tonight we’re trying out a new Japanese restaurant and to compensate for all this we have taken our bikes down in the lift most days and gone cycling in the nearby streets. On Sunday, a really pleasant day, we went with three other foreigners to a section of the Great Wall, recently restored and open to visitors. This was near or rather a thousand feet above, a scruffy little village called Mutianyu in the Yangshan mountains about sixty kilometres north east of Peking. We had to climb up 1200 granite stairs before reaching the Wall. Before we reached the top my thighs were aching with the intensity of a dull toothache. The walk was worth it however. The view from the wall, set on the razor back of a 1,400 ft. ridge, was awesome. We could see mountain peaks stretching northward for miles and the old Wall itself could be seen twining around like a dragon for miles too. It wound around so much we couldn’t tell what was going east and what west. It is much more spectacular than the section at Badaling which was opened in 1956, the section on which Richard Nixon remarked, ‘It’s a great wall.’ In ten days time I’m off to Zhejiang province with a party of foreign correspondents. This is where China hopes to build


a nuclear power station and where it has its largest deep water port. The capital of this province is Hangzhou where there is a beautiful lake. It was on a boat on this lake that the Communist Party held its first meeting to avoid attention from the Nationalist police. Not exactly so. The Communist Party began its secret first congress in Shanghai’s French concession on the top floor of a girls’ school closed for summer in July 1921. When snooping visitors roused the suspicion of delegates, they left Shanghai to reconvene in a tourist boat on nearby South Lake, Zhejiang. Next day Mao, delegate for Hunan Province, rather than rejoin his colleagues on South Lake, went sightseeing with a fellow Hunanese further south in Hangzhou. They wandered through the gardens and temples around Hangzhou’s West Lake. It should be all very interesting and I hope for one or two stories. After ten days in Zhejiang I’m taking the train to Changsha, capital of Hunan Province. One of my colleagues from Hawthorn is teaching in the No. 1 Normal University there, the same one in which Mao Zedong taught in the ’twenties. No: his colleague was at Hunan Normal University whereas Mao attended and later taught at Hunan Public 1st Normal School, a reconstruction of which John would visit

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Site of the First Communist Party Congress, Shanghai

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Railway fast food, Zhejiang

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and be shown the desk at which Mao didn’t sit! Ironically, being off work caused me stress. After ten months’ negotiations with China’s Foreign Ministry, I finally received permission for a television interview with Politbureau member Hu Qili. Hu was the most prominent of the new technocrats and it was widely believed he was being groomed as the next Communist Party chief. This would be his first interview with a Peking correspondent and the first television interview ever granted by a Chinese leader. Unfortunately, I was obliged to decline on grounds of health. Then I felt worse — I was sick with the thought not only of the wasted effort but the wasted opportunity. Reluctantly, Doctor Hartwig gave me the go-ahead. John again acted as camera rouseabout. Afterwards he assumed his occasional ‘priestly’ role as father-confessor to a member of the faithful in Australia. Peking44 Dear Helen, ‘If you are not guilty, have a care of appearances, which are as ruinous as guilt.’ W. M. Thackeray Our heart is rejuvenescent from the pleasure it receives from writing to one of the dearest of our young brethren. I write on the eve of setting off on a journey to farthest Zhejiang province where less fortunate souls hunger and thirst, in the darkness of their sins, for the word of the Gospels.


I will be away for a week leaving at 6 a.m. to board one of C.A.A.C.’s dodgy Ilyushins or Antipovs [Antonovs] or whatever … Helene is not going on the Zhejiang trip. She has a chronic, active, duodenal ulcer and must rest for six weeks. Her doctors would prefer her to go to Thailand or the Philippines or Libya or somewhere and just lie on a beach. But as she has a comfortable apartment here and has not previously had time to enjoy it, she has decided to stay put. Unfortunately although the A.B.C. knows she’s on sick leave she keeps receiving work related telexes, including instructions to provide detailed information in this and that form, about her health, her doctor’s prognosis, recommendations and so on … Sick leave keeps her very busy. I have been very busy going places and writing since I’ve been here but letter writing has been neglected. I’ve been to a new section of the Wall, written of the experience and even been published. Now I’m wondering if I’ll have anything else published — perhaps I’m a natural pessimist. I went one day on Helene’s coat-tails to Zhong Nan Hai the Chinese Kremlin to sit quietly while Helene was interviewing Hu Qili for A.B.C. television. A cameraman had been flown in from the Punjab, an A.B.C. cameraman [Willi Phua]. The Chinese insisted on this. The interview took place in a red, wooden pavilion which jutted out into a lake, very colourful but quite unsuitable for television as light was admitted on four sides. Not the best for my slides either. Anyway it was a scoop for Helene as Hu Qili is likely to replace Hu Yaobang as Communist Party General Secretary. Now she’s not working at all. She’s out with some ladies who’ve all gone off on their bikes to buy silk flowers.

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For all the value of that ‘scoop’ — it was a fizzer and never shown on television — I may as well have spent more time cycling and buying silk flowers. There were technical problems with the interview, not only with lighting but the crackling of paper: Hu Qili read out long stilted prepared answers in Chinese, which were translated by a stumbling interpreter whose English was so poor that Hu corrected it. Although fluent in English, in the interview he used Mandarin on principle: Chinese sovereignty was at stake. And not until the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Shanghai in October 2001 would I see (from the distance of Melbourne) a Chinese leader — President Jiang Zemin — speaking in English on television. After my interview with Hu Qili I realised we were both guinea pigs: China’s Foreign Ministry was testing the use of foreign television. However, although the experiment proved a television failure, it provided copy for radio coverage by me and agency and newspaper reports by colleagues.45 As to the future of the two Hus, both would be disgraced. Hu Yaobang was dismissed for failing to control student demonstrations in 1987. And his death in 1989 sparked the protest movement that culminated in the Beijing massacre. During the unrest that year, Hu Qili was banished for his relatively liberal stand. He fell from office at the same time as Hu Yaobang’s replacement as Communist Party chief, Zhao Ziyang. Although Hu Qili reappeared in 1991 as vice minister of electronics and as minister between 1993 and ’98, Zhao was held under house arrest and played a public role no more. Meanwhile, John set off for Zhejiang.

… OR SOMEWHERE

April–June 1986

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J

ohn imagined his Zhejiang junket would be a chance to write to his comrades but it proved something of an ordeal — though not an entirely unpleasant one. Zhoushan Zhejiang Province46 I have just come from a banquet held at a hotel somewhere in a place called Zhoushan, which I thought would be a fishing village but it is a small city of about 1 million souls somewhere in an archipelago in the East China Sea off the coast of Ningbo. This afternoon we visited a new port near Ningbo built to take iron ore shipments from Australia and Brazil then we came here by hydrofoil. I am with a group of correspondents on a tour of Zhejiang. I thought it would be something of a junket but have had to rise at 6 every morning as each day has begun with a 7.30 a.m. departure for some factory or whatever. We started at Hangzhou the capital where I visited an ancient Chinese drugstore. Our day began as soon as we alighted from the plane with a boat trip on West Lake. It was beautiful but we would have enjoyed it more had we been permitted to go to the lavatory first. That night we had a press conference with ‘Responsible persons of Zhejiang Province’ followed by a banquet accompanied by much beer and local rice wine. Off again at 7.30 next day for a very long drive on an awful bumpy road to visit Haiyan General Shirt Factory and an interview with Bu Xinsheng the Manager. Mr Bu coined a wonderful mixed metaphor. Referring to Mao Zedong’s policy of the ‘iron pot’ which guaranteed everyone a wage regardless of whether he worked or not, Mr Bu said, ‘The Iron Pot had become a playground for lazy bones’.

…Or Somewhere

That afternoon we drove for goodness knows how long to visit the new nuclear power station construction site at Qinshan. Yesterday we went to a commune outside of Hangzhou to have lunch with farmers who by ‘adapting the responsibility system and learning truth from facts’ had achieved a high standard of ‘comfortability’. Each family had a two storey house and was supposed to have cooked our meal. We had about thirty courses and so did all the other correspondents in the other houses. We are sure the meals were catered for and the families didn’t in fact live in the houses at all — if they were families and not just public security police put together to look like families. Our house didn’t look lived in, apart from the fish in the bath. Then we had a five hour bumpy drive in a mini-bus to Ningbo — population 5 million — I had barely heard of it. This morning we visited Chiang Kai-shek’s former home — the Generalissimo is having something of a revival of late. It’s the soft sell for the Taiwanese [to entice them back to the motherland following the Hong Kong agreement]. We also visited his Mother’s grave. This tour is exhausting. After it’s over I’ve 24 hours in a train to Changsha to visit Kelvin. I’m a little?? drunk. Must go to bed to leave at 7.30 tomorrow.

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Bottoms up

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Postcard: Library Building Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan47 Dear Diana and Gary, It’s really quite easy to visit Changsha. You simply board the train at Hangzhou and after a night and a day and part of another night and having seen several million peasants, thousands of water buffalo and a few score scruffy towns you’re there, shaking the hand of an old acquaintance. The night after my arrival I was required to give a lecture on Australian History for which small service I have been given my own apartment with meals for 4 days. Back to Peking tomorrow then to Bangkok Thursday. Always yours, John. Postcard: Weather Observation Station P.S. Clearly Gary you [as a meteorologist] should have this card too [just as Diana as a librarian has the other]. Our reasons for going to Bangkok are that Hélène has been ordered to have a complete rest for six weeks. Certain important A.B.C. ‘responsible persons-in-charge’ (Chinese term) are visiting China next week and with all the will in the world it would be difficult for Hélène not to become involved [with ABC Managing Director Geoffrey Whitehead] — were she in China. Changsha is an interesting city with an intriguing and bloody history but with most unfortunate overcast weather. Very bad for taking slides but I am trying. John Things were not quite as they seemed at Changsha. On his departure John was presented with a bill for the apartment he was obliged to accept rather than stay with his former colleague.

…Or Somewhere

‘I’m not paying this,’ he objected. ‘Then we shall keep your ticket,’ threatened the Chinese. ‘Until you pay, you can’t fly out.’ Like me in Xian in 1984, he had to pay his own ransom. Scared by a speeding taxi ride to the airport, he calmed himself with a beer on the four-engined Ilyushin. He unclipped a Parker ballpoint from his bush jacket, and began a story on rip-offs in China. Neither were things quite as they seemed at Qi Jia Yuan. That evening I interviewed the Panchen Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama in spiritual significance to Tibetans (and another exception to my sick leave). Next day John completed his article and telexed it to the South China Morning Post where he now had his own Sunday column. He then prepared for guests: we were taking friends of our friends the Kameners, Evelyn and Norman Rothfield of Melbourne, to the Mongolian Hot Pot. We asked the driver, Mr Li, to bring them to Qi Jia Yuan for pre-dinner drinks. The Rothfields’ knock on the door that evening interrupted us: we were on our knees on the carpet in the midst of a long tearful discussion — about separation. We quickly rose and reached for tissues. I slipped into the bathroom to touch up my eyeliner while John opened the door. ‘How good to see you both. How are you?’ We sat down: poised, perfect hosts. After the deceptive bonhomie of the restaurant, John and I became very emotional. We were crying and filled with anguish. Yet by bedtime, exhausted, I apologised: ‘I’m sorry, darling. I don’t know what’s come over me. Please forget what I said. Let’s just go to sleep and forget it all.’ By morning he was typing away to a colleague.

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Peking 30/4/198648 I am recently back from my twelve day visit to Zhejiang and Hunan. The most interesting feature of this was the various attempts of the Chinese to rip me off. In Hangzhou we were quoted a nightly rate for the pub but were told that though we had stayed 7 nights we must pay a flat sum for 8. When we protested we were told that we must pay this as some of the other journalists had already been over-charged and had paid so we must pay also. When we said that those overcharged should receive a refund it was argued that as it took a day to clean rooms before guests arrived this day should be paid for. In the end some paid for eight days some for seven and several left without paying anything. On the train to Changsha I was the sole occupant of a 4-berth compartment. Some heavies burst into this cabin when I was just dozing off to say that as the sole occupant I must pay four times the fare. When I refused they said that others would then come in. When I told them that of course others should come in they said, in effect, that there was no-one to come in because no-one would wish to share a cabin with a foreigner and that I should therefore pay four times. I didn’t. In Changsha I was less fortunate. Kelvin’s University insisted I was a guest and must have an apartment of my own rather than staying with the Edwards. They asked me to give a lecture a request I could hardly refuse. Then over the week-end my hosts insisted on showing me the various parts of their scattered campus and the scientific equipment from Japan and West Germany which was so prized it was never used. It was for visitors to admire. I had things I wanted to see in Changsha but these had to be given a miss.

…Or Somewhere

On the morning of my departure I was presented with an account for the room I didn’t want, and which was so abominably filthy that I spent little time in it, for the three awful breakfasts in their awful foreigners dining-room (for awful foreigners presumably) and for the transport to the places I didn’t wish to see. Nothing was said about paying me for the lecture though I was prepared to give them V.I.S.E.C. [Victorian In-service Education Committee] rates … Anyway I paid this bill as the Chinese held onto my plane ticket until I did. Apart from that the tour was a success and I particularly enjoyed Changsha. Our first experience of Peking’s May Day holiday was in 1984: John delighted in a day off from the embassy while I covered Reagan in Shanghai. In a lazy morning he strolled with embassy colleague Robbie Howell and her family through a festival in the park of the Forbidden City. Laughter and lunch followed at the Friendship Hotel, capped by an exhibition from Brooklyn Museum, and drinks at Qi Jia Yuan. How different in 1986. May began as a tearful and painful month for us both. We resumed our tearful discussion, then cancelled our flight to Bangkok. I booked John a seat on British Air to London and phoned my sister Lehene, to ask if he could stay with her. As he packed his bags, I felt the sting of his words: ‘You haven’t listened or talked to me. You’ve devoted yourself to your work. You’ve left no time for us.’ Peking May Day49 Dear Renate and Bob, I have not been a good correspondent since I’ve been in China and for that I’m sorry. Anyway, this short note is to tell you that Helene and I have decided to separate. The initiative came

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from Helene who has, over the long period of separation felt inhibited by being tied to me and she feels that our feelings for each other have diminished more than is redeemable. The separation is of course amicable, even loving and as I well know they’re not always like that. We will remain the best of friends and keep in touch and continue to take an interest in and support one another. I have asked Helene Bob to send you [as our GP] the X-rays and the full medical report on her ulcer. She will probably though not necessarily, return to Australia at mid-year. In either event I think she needs the fullest expert advice on her condition before accepting anything that may be recommended in Hong Kong. After six weeks rest and treatment with Cimetidine (I noticed someone at the Alfred [Hospital] has been critical of this particular medication) she is to return to Hong Kong for an endiscopic (clearly not the correct spelling) examination. She should advise you of the result of that too. I feel awful leaving her alone when she is ill but that is what she wants. She is sad but feels relieved now that the decision is made. Incidentally I have had more material published in Hong Kong since I’ve been here than I did in all of 1984. I’m sorry to be leaving that too. I even sold one of my crummy photographs to Reuters for a crazily inflated price. I will try and write up some more of my China material in London. Your friends Evelyn and Norman came here for dinner on Tuesday evening and we had a pleasant time together. I should imagine they will be tired when they return to Melbourne after the Chinese have run them off their feet … I have been away for over a week in Zhejiang and Hunan Provinces. In the former I visited many cities

…Or Somewhere

and towns but in Hunan I was only in Changsha, a big city on the Xiang River and the scene of Mao Zedong’s formative years. I have more and I think much better slides. So be warned. I am flying out of Peking this afternoon for London. I could have gone almost anywhere. I have five months leave left and must work out a plan of how to spend it enjoyably and constructively. How’s that for a burst of the protestant ethic? … Incidentally the news about Helene and me is not, of course, confidential. Tell anyone you may wish to. Always your friend, John. John’s burst of Protestant ethic led him from London to Kent: to a teaching job at his English friend John Thorpe’s school, the Northfleet School for Girls. A third of the pupils were Indian, mostly Sikh. They were very dim and very badly behaved and the little English roses not much better. One girl’s hobby was collecting plastic shopping bags and pictures of pigs. Outside of class John found Kent in spring like a book of fairy stories. There really were ‘hosts of golden daffodils’ and birch forests, their floors carpeted with bluebells. He made the most of circumstances and explored literary Kent, visiting Knole, family home of Vita Sackville-West; walking The Pilgrims’ Way and taking the path of Chaucer’s reeve and the nun’s priest; and frequenting the Leather Bottle and other pubs associated with Dickens. But his heart was in China. Meopham50 I miss the splendid horror of it all. And I’m going to miss writing for the South China Morning Post which was kind enough to give me my own regular column and to print everything sent them. I’m pleased you enjoyed the Haiyan General Shirt Factory song. When we visited the factory we were

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first sat down in a long room, each with his own spittoon and side table on which was a packet of Great Leap Forward cigarettes and mug of steaming Dragon Well tea. When we were comfortable and the Chinese had all had a good hawk and a spit from somewhere came the strains of this song. As the band played and the choir sang large nylon curtains at the end of the room slowly parted to reveal a display of very ugly nylon shirts. ‘Double Swallow’ was the brand name and that is what we did. … I won’t rabbit on about school — well just a little bit … My 3J has the makings of a really crack regiment of Red Guards. I reckon we could take apart a temple and scatter all the monks in twelve minutes flat and that would be just a warm up for what we would do to any intellectuals who crossed our path. If [Mao Zedong’s wife] Jiang Qing had had 3J at her disposal she could have really, ‘carried the revolution through to the end’. Meopham51 I have been surprised this week, almost offended. There has been a most high level delegation visiting Britain from China. Led by Hu Yaobang, this group includes [Vice Premier] Li Peng, but there has been practically no publicity — nothing compared with the attention such a group would attract in Australia. I suggested to my friends that these blokes rule a quarter of the world but they were unimpressed. I added that if they were made to feel welcome they could reopen shipyards up and down the Clyde and goodness knows what else. They said yes but as news it can hardly rate with Prince Andrew and Fergy. One of the things that still interests people here is war, particularly WWI and the Falklands. Even

…Or Somewhere

Agincourt still gets a run. Miss Jefffrey told me that whilst I was in charge of her classes there would be a visit from a Maths. teacher Mr Walker who would be speaking to the gels about his war experiences. I expected a real old stager — a fighter pilot or a rear gunner from bomber command at least. To my surprise some guy about our age rolled up to talk about his even more than usually unremarkable experiences as an evacuee. He droned on about how he went to live with this family and then with that. I said how I could remember much more interesting things about the war; about Auntie Sybil who used to sleep with American servicemen for perfume and silk stockings and how my mother said that Sybil was a snob because she would only sleep with officers. Anyway my friend John who lined me up for the job said he didn’t think Miss Ayres would be too keen on this. … I must admit I miss China. It all seems pretty tame here by comparison. Still I mustn’t complain. I seemed to get into some awful scrapes with officialdom when I was there. One thing I discovered whilst I was there is that, despite what’s said in the west, the Chinese are none too happy about Deng Xiaoping. They’re frightened of all the arbitrary executions. We don’t read so much about these in our papers now. They’re boring and do nothing to help iron ore contracts. Meopham52 Speaking of winners and losers, Helene and I are having a sort of trial separation. The initiative came from Helene who must have been having a think about things when I was on the journalist tour of Zhejiang. The parting is all completely amicable — even loving. It is just not clear at the moment how it will all work

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out. That last cliche seems to express an exceptional degree of vagueness which is, I hope, inappropriate. … It must be admitted that I’m not very sure what to do with myself now that I find myself so rudely thrust abroad, albeit by my own decision very largely. Apart from touring Kent and spending a week in Paris I have done little except to haunt the book shops and print shops around Charing Cross Road. I have been looking to see what there is of engravings and prints of China. There’s not much but I have found some seventeenth century maps done on parchment. Two of these are hand coloured copper plates by a famous Venetian cartographer, working from surveys and maps of the Jesuits in China. It is extraordinary to see how much was actually surveyed by them. Much of the east and the centre seem to be incorporated. They’re expensive but I’m very tempted. Helene seems not to have recovered from her ulcer but is better than she was. She is celebrating with lots of late nights — well quite a few — and a fair bit of hard work. I understand though that she’s doing fewer reports. Then that same day: Meopham53 I am going back to China at the week-end and will be working there until the end of July. Helene still not very well … So [Melbourne’s] Terry Radic has written a play showing Jiang Qing as misunderstood. No I’d best not comment. As an epistolary form the postcard demands moderation. Always yours, John.

YOUR TINY HAND IS FROZEN

July 1986

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8-122 Qi Jia Yuan, Peking People’s Republic of China54 I am now back in Peking after a curious journey which took me first to Amsterdam by British Caledonian, then by China Airlines (the Taiwanese mob) to Hong Kong via somewhere in the Middle Fast — Babylon or Sodom or somewhere — then Bangkok and Taipei. I stayed a night in H.K. with my friend David Bonavia and his lovely wife Judy and two very distinguished looking cats. The idea was to have a good night’s rest before flying on to Peking. Well so I did have a good night’s rest. After staying up until 1.30 drinking peach brandy, I slept like the proverbial top. Next morning I woke in a pleasant air-conditioned room and looked out on to the western harbour through the foliage of a beautiful candle nut tree. That morning I just sat around reading and eating until it was time for my plane. It was far too hot to take a cab into town. Peking is hot and dusty and as Helene has not been very well we’ve not been out much. Well that’s not quite true, we have been to a performance of ‘La Boheme’ with Pavarotti in the Tian Qiao theatre and a recital by the tenor in the Great Hall of the People. I am just doing a segment on Pavarotti in China for A.B.C. morning radio but I won’t bore you with too many of the details. It was however an experience to see Pavarotti as Rudolfo dressed in heavy, black overcoat and long, red woollen scarf and with sweat running down his face in the fierce heat and humidity singing, ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’. Seriously I’ve never thought all that much about the rotund Italian tenor but now I’m a fan. He has a beautiful voice which he uses, or seems to use, effortlessly and he’s a very good actor. It was over

Your Tiny Hand is Frozen

thirty degrees in the theatre and no air conditioning. Somehow, sweat and all, he persuaded me it was mid-winter in Paris. Mimi looked consumptive enough. She was sick and pale with the heat and her hair drenched with her own sweat, hung in sticky fronds around her face. It’s all been subsidised by the Italian Government as a goodwill gesture to China and this has benefitted all of us here. It would cost $50 to $100 to hear Pavarotti in New York or London. Here it cost only A$4 each. I wasn’t so keen on the recital in the Great Hall. A 10,000 seat auditorium would be too much for any singer to fill with his voice and the place itself is really awful, vast and ugly. I feel depressed when I hear socialist politicians boasting of having been there. All through the recital the public security goons were stomping around the aisles shouting to each other through walkie-talkies. On Saturday night there was a party for journalists at Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s place to celebrate his consort’s Princess Monique’s 50th birthday.55 I’ve been to one of these functions before. They are really public relations ventures designed to woo the press of countries not unfriendly to the anti-Vietnamese alliance. The main feature is always the Prince’s singing — he rather fancies himself as a crooner.

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Pavarotti in tavern scene

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This night there were two bands, a Chinese one and a Cambodian one, based in Paris. For a while the two took it turn about until the Chinese band started in on a most pusillanimous interpretation of ‘Red River Valley’. It was too much for the more with it Cambodian French who proceeded to annihilate the Chinese band, by coming in over them with a hard rock version using all their percussion and amplified electric guitars. However it all turned a bit sour for me when a journalist with many years experience in Vietnam and Cambodia started pointing out the former Pol Pot henchmen in the French Cambodian band. One in particular was apparently a well known murderer of his former countrymen. His present job is to keep an eye on Sihanouk for Pol Pot. Amidst all his activity John was rather confused, anxious and unhappy in his first week or so back in China. I was continually ill and sometimes bombed out with tablets. My ulcer didn’t seem cured, and I’d compounded the problem by attending a Sichuan banquet seasoned with chillies just before his return. A rare outburst from John cleared the air. There was no chucking of camera: no, nothing like that. Just a few straight words aimed by him before we sat down for a chat. There was no reproach — not then; not later. Only a reaffirmation of what we meant to each other. Well Annette I have to tell you that my card to you and Ken has been outdated by events.56 Helene and I are now together again in Peking. No doubt our traumas are little different from those of many others of our acquaintance — just dearer. However I was grateful for your kind letter.


It occurs to me that you may have heard of our change of situation — a twee way of putting it but I can’t think of a better — from Bruce Healey whom you will be seeing this week at the ASAL [Association for the Study of Australian Literature] Conference. Helene has been in touch with Bruce making enquiries about a fellowship in journalism at Deakin University … Tomorrow we’re moving out of this apartment and into the Jianguo Hotel a few doors down in order that the apartment may be prepared for the new A.B.C. Peking correspondent, Richard Andrews. On Friday 25th we fly back to London by Cathay Pacific. This flight takes us non-stop from H.K. to London. Peking57 We wanted to go Aeroflot through Moscow but (a.) the Russians wouldn’t give us a visa and (b.) the Chinese wanted to rip us off for a small fortune for the right to purchase a non CAAC ticket in Peking. HK little realises what it is in for after 1997. … Helene … plans to take up a six month or so fellowship at Deakin University in early September where she will be writing a book and being journalist in residence in the School of Humanities. I of course expect to be doing something no less glamorous at Hawthorn, that is unless it becomes impossible to wrench the V.I.S.E.C. [Victorian In-service Education Committee] minutes from the incumbent scribe. John’s China adventure also equipped him for a role Down Under. He would later work in the restructured Ministry of Education’s overseas programs unit and concentrate on the exchange of international teaching fellows between Victoria and its sister-state, Jiangsu — a job he would really enjoy.

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It’s now the next day and I’m writing standing at the window ledge as the packers have taken all the chairs. At one stage Helene told me to rescue this typewriter with the letter still in it. Anyway Xavier Herbert wrote ‘Capricornia’ standing at a window ledge in London. … A note to close on. Down the road the Chinese have put up huge neon signs depicting Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. They have no idea what these characters are. They simply hope, like the cargo cultists of New Guinea, that they will lure foreign currency into the store. That is to say they believe foreigners are attracted by, ‘The movement and the colour’. Within twenty-four hours Chinese security were attracted to the movement of a white man they spied in a part of the country closed to him. As John told friends in Texas:58 This old town is buzzing today with the story that John Burns, an Englishman who is Peking bureau chief of the ‘New York Times’, has been taken into custody, allegedly for spying whilst on a motor cycle tour through Shaanxi province. You’ll have read all about it in the American papers by now so I won’t bore you with the details. We don’t have many of them anyway. At the same time we’ve had our own problems today. Helene bought a few pieces of furniture a short while ago to take back to Australia. She had them from the free market which the bureaucracy is supposed to be encouraging as part of Deng’s policy of opening to the outside world. Well we’re encouraged to buy and they’re allowed to sell. The trouble is we’ve been caught by a new policy which says that in order to obtain a red seal to permit the export of furniture one has to have first purchased the goods at a state


owned shop. This is the policy of the Cultural Relics Department. Their aim is not to protect the articles or prevent their leaving China. It is simply to ensure that foreigners pay through the nose for them first. So much for encouraging enterprise … I started this letter this afternoon. It’s now almost mid-night and we have been to the cinema to see a controversial new film, ‘Black Cannon’ about a Chinese intellectual who falls foul of the Public Security Bureau and unjustly loses his job. It’s not at all a bad film and you should see it should it be shown in the U.S. Culture is all very well but now Helene has to file again on this John Burns story though as far as I know there are no new developments.

The Black Cannon Incident is by Huang Jianxin, one of the ‘fifth-generation’ directors nurtured by Wu Tianming at the Xian Film Studios. Wu led the resurgence of China’s film industry. His best-known graduates are Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin) and Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern and The Road Home). John began this letter with apologies for the writing paper:59 You see the packers have been in and everything imaginable has gone. Imagine my dismay when I found tonight that the corkscrew has gone too. To bring you up to date … I returned to China at the beginning of this month. Helene as I may have told you has been very sick with a chronic duodenal ulcer, brought on it would seem, by her habit of working very long hours to meet deadlines, and not eating regularly. She has been treated with Tagomet

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(I think) and is now resuming all her bad habits and patterns — of course! Fortunately the opportunities to engage in this particular form of controlled suicide will not be there after Friday… This last week in Peking was to be an easy one combining resting with sight-seeing. That has all gone by the board now as John Burns, the tall dark and handsome correspondent from the ‘New York Times’ has gone and got himself put in prison in Peking for espionage. In brief at the beginning of June our John and a mate climbed on motor bikes and set off from Taiyuan in Shanxi down through Yan’an which is in Shaanxi and on to Xian. From there they planned to push on to Sichuan province and visit Deng Xiaoping’s birthplace. It’s rumoured that John who’s at that particularly impressionable stage of middle age had recently watched a video of Jack Nicholson in ‘Easy Rider’. We are in the midst of a furore as Burns has joint Canadian and British citizenship and works on an American paper. The U.S. State Department has got itself involved and so has the [British] Foreign Office. The peculiar thing about it is that the Chinese Foreign Ministry is staying right out of it. There is a theory, a very likely one, that the Ministry of State Security is trying to embarrass Deng Xiaoping and frustrate his rightist policy of ‘opening to the outside world’. No-one here thinks that Burns was engaged in spying. Anyway this has meant that Helene is flat out like a lizard drinking. There’s a farewell dinner for her tonight but neither she nor her fellow correspondents are very interested. They are only interested in finding out the latest and then filing. Helene is particularly busy as she’s working not only for the A.B.C. but for


C.B.S. in New York as well as for the B.B.C. Poor Mark Brayne the B.B.C. correspondent has a most unfortunate talent for being on holiday every time a decent story breaks. He’ll just about cut his own throat over this one. Yesterday the ‘South China Morning Post’ telexed me to do a feature on John Burns for their Sunday paper. I did it O.K. without even leaving the office. I just hope to hell the Chinese keep John in the cooler until I’ve left the country, otherwise he’ll kill me and sue me afterwards. I’m going tonight to the Peking opera, ‘A Phoenix Returns to Her Nest’. I saw it in 1984. It was done then by the Peking Opera Company. It is being performed tonight by a group from the University of Hawaii, in English. I’m taping some of it tonight as I’m doing a feature on it for A.B.C. Radio, ‘Morning Arts & Music’. Fortunately I’ve found my old tape of the Chinese version. There is a real rush to finish all commitments by this week. … Please forgive the somewhat tedious, even verbose, nature of this epistle my child but Father is preparing to go on a long journey. Our work for Our Lord in this place is almost completed. Then, two days before departure:60 I’m pulling out of here on Friday. It’s not likely I’ll come back here in a long time although I have already said the same thing once this year.

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American performers in Peking

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Helene’s farewell party was last night though there have been some dinner parties too. The event was overshadowed by the John Burns affair … Burns was, until 6 a.m. today, the correspondent for ‘The New York Times’. He was thrown in prison a few days ago just as he and his wife and kids were going on holiday … Anyway yesterday was high drama. Helene wrote a letter to the Chinese Foreign Ministry refusing to attend the farewell banquet they had planned for her today and so the Executive Editor and the Foreign Editor of ‘The Times’, who’d both flown out to see Burns, came along to the farewell party representing, as they said, John Burns and to thank Helene for her gesture. In the meantime everyone has been working flat out on stories. I even did one myself. Now the John Burns industry is closed down as he was expelled from China first thing this morning. On Friday, 25 July 1986, we too left China — with a curious sense of loss. As I later wrote in Shouting from China from the distance and perspective of Australia, with John thinking it through with me: I was being uprooted from a place that had totally engrossed me for 3 years. China had been the most secure yet the most hostile, the most exotic yet the most dreary, the most stimulating yet the most depressing experience of my life. I loved and hated it. I had been frustrated in my efforts to report news, infuriated by the bureaucracy and driven almost to despair by the inefficiency, but I had become fascinated by the country and its people. China’s majesty and squalor, virtue and injustice, beauty and horror had caught me in its spell.


So, on that sultry summer evening, when bleary-eyed and weary from partying and filing till time to board our craft, together we tore ourselves from Peking, the city and the posting that almost tore us apart. On our circuitous journey home and far from Asia, we found ourselves relaxing in Scotland dressed up like Burberry ads against the cold, and later lazing on the island of Corfu rarely out of swimsuits. It was high season there and the beach at Ipsos was very crowded but we simply jumped into a sugarblue boat and motored round to another, quieter beach. We took a tour with other tourists and ferried to the Greek mainland to visit some archaeological sites: we crossed the River Styx and consulted the Oracle of the Dead. We wandered through the remains of ancient Nicopolis, built by Octavius Ceasar to celebrate victory over Mark Anthony, when he was confused and blinded by love for Cleopatra. In idyllic mood, we occasionally summoned the energy to taxi from our beach resort to sample the once Venetian city of Corfu. Built between two forts on a peninsula, it’s a jewel on the Ionian Sea. Here we sat in open-air restaurants eating delicious squid and drinking crisp white wine. Sometimes, when John had drunk sufficient wine, he could almost see Venetian galleys being rowed into harbour. So distant seemed the adventures of assignment Peking, it was almost as though they hadn’t happened — they weren’t real. Or, if they were real, they happened to others — our other selves.

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1988–93

It was a bit difficult talking to all the lefties about China. They always assume that any criticism of a socialist country must indicate secret support for General Pinochet of Chile. I end up moderating the truth for the sake of social harmony. John in Melbourne to Helene in Beijing (13/3/85)

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Empress Dowager’s marble boat

y late 1988 we were in our new home, a renovated Victorian terrace in inner Melbourne. In a conceit based on two famous sites in China, John dubbed our small courtyard, the Garden for Listening to the Ming. The Pavilion for Listening to the Orioles is in the splendid grounds of the Summer Palace and sits on Longevity Hill overlooking a beautiful lake with its historic marble boat and arched bridges. This former imperial retreat favoured by the Empress Dowager lies north-west of Beijing. Its decorated Long Gallery and fabulous halls are surrounded by pines, cypresses, willows, magnolias and exotic blooms. In this magnificent setting we suffered an atrocious meal at the Pavilion for Listening to the Orioles. John was intrigued by the name. Faraway in Fujian Province we crossed a causeway to reach the island capital of Xiamen, formerly the treaty port of Amoy — a name still used in the eighties by local officials. Our bus entered a street with charming buildings on either side.

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‘What’s this street called?’ asked John. ‘It’s called simply, Missing the Ming Dynasty Road. In the seventeenth century,’ explained our guide, ‘Amoy was ruled by a warlord who stayed loyal to the Ming emperor long after his defeat by the Manchu invaders. The warlord renamed Amoy, Siming, which means something between “Missing the Ming” and “Remembering the Ming”.’ One day in Melbourne John, clearly remembering the Ming, asked, ‘What’s the Chinese word for “listen”?’ ‘Ting,’ I said. He put that with ‘yuan’ for garden and came up with, ‘Ming Ting Yuan.’ Such was the effect on the man who no more wanted to go to China than to Afghanistan. Melbourne 16.2.8961 Last Friday night we had two visitors from China, a young woman doctor studying for her Ph.D. at The University of Tasmania and her mother, a professor of English from Guangzhou Normal University. I was not looking forward to the evening very much, expecting a somewhat stiff conversation full of the Party line. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Madame turned out to be what would have been called a rightist. She had been educated at a Missionary school in Hankow [Hubei Province] and spoke perfect English with very little accent. She remembered the Japanese war and

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At the Long Gallery of the Summer Palace

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was very open about her sufferings during the anti-rightist campaign of the fifties and about her experiences of having to work on the land during the Cultural Revolution. After that she had been sent to a labour camp which, she said, was much better than working in the countryside. I suppose it is some sort of indication of the changes that have taken place in China recently that someone with such a bad political record should be given a passport to visit her daughter in Australia and stay as long as she wishes. … You will be amused at this. We recently watched a boring Chinese propaganda film on T.V. called ‘The Herdsman’. It was so boring we could hardly stay until the end. This consisted of the hero, a herdsman about to return to the plains of Inner Mongolia after refusing his decadent father’s blandishments to go with him to the U.S.A. The final scene was shot at Peking Airport and who should wander across the set but me in my old army bush jacket? I worked it out that I must have been returning from Xian … Always yours, John I then tapped out a few lines to my former Beijing colleague, Voice of America correspondent Mark Hopkins, who’d transferred to Boston. Melbourne Thursday, 30 March 1989 I read a newspaper interview with the director of the New South Wales Art Gallery, Edmund Capon, who’s presenting three programmes on art in China on ABC television. He said, ‘It was wonderful to go to China, but it was wonderful to leave.’

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I understand what he meant, and no doubt you do too. No, we don’t miss the awful aspects of China — the lack of real news, the poor communications, the climate and the deprivation of western culture and any choice in consumer goods. But we do miss the exceptionally good company, and I suppose I miss the heightened tension of working in such a difficult environment, i.e. I miss hitting my head against a brick wall! Because much of my work is concerned with north Asia, including China, I have found myself still hitting my head against the same brick wall. For example, a fortnight ago I was chasing the Culture Minister, Wang Meng. I waited in a restaurant, outside his banqueting room, for several hours in order to interview him. Then he set the next morning, when most of the time was consumed in his taking breakfast. When we finally sat down to record, after about ten minutes he cut the interview short. True, he was already late for an appointment; and true, after a soft start, I was asking him about [dissident] Fang Lizhi and the intellectuals’ demand for the release of political prisoners. The film director, Wu Tianming, proved far more satisfactory. And I recorded enough for a good twenty minute program with him. If you have a chance to see his film, ‘Old Well’, do go. It’s surprisingly frank in its discussion of repressed sexuality in China and in its mocking of politics and the Party. It was on here last week as part of a Chinese Film Festival, so I saw all four films I’d not previously seen. John saw three. Some of what is being praised as the new wave is quite poorly produced, with little plot, visual or entertainment value. However, ‘Old Well’, ‘Yellow Earth’, ‘Red Sorghum’ and especially ‘The Big Parade’ are well worth seeing.

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I’d read of the audacious Fang Lizhi before his visit here last year. But I didn’t reckon on his honesty. Amongst other things, he told me that Marxism is already dead, that no one believes in it any more, and that Deng Xiaoping is almost as bad as Mao Zedong, that Deng is in fact 50:50 (50 percent good and 50 percent bad)! If you have opted out of the China field, this will all seem very strange to you by now. But both John and I still follow events in the ‘motherland’ quite closely, for my work and also simply from interest … John keeps on buying books on China, and even reads them, while they merely add to the list I want to read. … We like it here, even though we don’t do any of those supposedly Australian things, like sailing, playing football or eating meat pies. We haven’t been to Ayers Rock, where the dingo allegedly took the missionary’s baby, or even seen ‘Crocodile Dundee’. We’ll save that up till we see you. I’d last seen Mark when I stayed with him and his partner Elizabeth during a return visit to Beijing in August 1987. I was about to see him and other former colleagues again, as the world’s media converged on Tiananmen Square. In mid-April 1989 former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang suddenly died of a heart attack. Hu Yaobang and his fellow reformist, Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang, had been the two men positioned by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping ‘to prop up the sky’ over China. Yet in January 1987 Deng replaced Hu as Party chief by Zhao. Hu was dismissed for failing to control pro-democracy protests that winter. An important influence in those protests was astrophysicist Professor Fang Lizhi. He claimed that although a discussion of human rights is taboo in China, Chinese people —

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like all human beings — are born with rights. He called for democracy and told his students: ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. Criticising government leaders is a symbol of democracy … Now no one is intimidated.’ Fang spoke too soon. When demonstrations spread from Fang’s province of Anhui to nearby Shanghai and then north to Beijing, Hu Yaobang was held responsible and forced to resign as head of the Communist Party. Two years later, when Hu died in the spring of 1989, grieving students called for his rehabilitation. A march to mourn Hu developed into the most daring pro-democracy demonstrations ever to challenge the Party. On Saturday, 20 May, martial law was declared by Prime Minister Li Peng, a cold, conservative Soviet-educated technocrat. Li had succeeded Zhao Ziyang when he stepped into Hu Yaobang’s shoes as Party boss. Next to fall was Zhao. He was rumoured to be under house arrest, dismissed for his opposition to martial law and his conciliatory attitude to the students. The leadership was in crisis. Deng had sacrificed his second prop. So would the sky fall in? [Monday, 29/5/89]62 I am writing from Geelong where I am attending a conference. Helene is in Peking covering the events in Tiananmen Square for Radio Australia and Metropolitan Radio. She very much wanted to go and persuaded her employers that she was the best one to send.

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General Secretary Hu Yaobang Photograph by Xinhua

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When I arrived to augment the coverage of other ABC correspondents, Beijing seemed familiar. But a large red banner strung across a tree on the airport road signalled change: DOWN WITH LI PENG. The bold black characters filled me with admiration for the students’ courage; yet dread for the reprisals they surely faced. My reaction to Tiananmen Square was disbelief. An official order was blaring out from a loudspeaker, ‘Students must leave the square’. But everyone ignored it. I wended my way up the stone steps in the centre of the square to the Monument to the People’s Heroes, festooned with banners and flowers in honour of Hu Yaobang. Thousands of animated students huddled in groups by khaki, blue, red and white tents, topped by the fluttering red banners of their different universities and colleges. It was like a carnival with welcoming smiles and traditional Chinese courtesy. Gone was the rudeness I remembered. Families and busloads of foreign tourists, licking ice-creams and clicking cameras, wandered peacefully through the throng. ‘You’re a journalist,’ cried a student, eyeing my tape recorder and notebook. ‘Will you write your name here?’ she asked producing a new handkerchief. A crowd gathered. More handkerchiefs and young men thrusting forward their chests, ‘Please, write your name on my T-shirt!’ ‘Tell our story to the world!’ they urged. Naive and optimistic, this generation had grown up in relative stability and prosperity. They enjoyed the fruits of Deng’s open door and trusted it would open further. They had already achieved far more than could reasonably be expected. They had defied the Communist Party and won weeks of tolerance. They had gained mass support, rallied by a million people at a single march. Workers and sections of the official media had joined their call for government accountability,

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less corruption and an end to nepotism. And they had savoured a few glorious days of press freedom. Yet they had gained no tangible concession. Within thirty-six hours of my arrival, it was obvious there would be no such concession. The carnival was over. Television News of an emergency meeting of crusty Maosuited octogenarian hardliners resurrected by Deng showed his tolerance was waning. This was reminiscent of the brief Democracy Wall movement from late 1978, when a few activists were lulled into speaking their minds in wall posters and unofficial publications. Deng used the posters to rise to power. He then smashed the wall and imprisoned its leaders, including the intrepid Wei Jingsheng. Wei’s crime was to call for a Fifth Modernisation — democracy. While watching the protest in 1989, I thought of Wei, still serving his fifteen-year sentence. Just as Deng crushed Democracy Wall, now that his economic reform had fuelled the desire for political reform, he would crush that. In Poland Solidarity had wrought concessions from the communists and Deng was determined to prevent such disaster in China. He would cling to power. He had to clear the square — by teargas or by more forceful means. As the sense of euphoria gave way to despondency, the students — disorganised, and confused in their aims — became more divided. The square grew bedraggled and its flagstones oozed defeat. Only a hard core wanted to stay. A few called for martyrdom. A spiky-haired student blazoned, ‘I welcome all the People’s Liberation Army. I’m in favour of bloodshed.’ However, most students reverted to their customary cautious selves and drifted off. I was ordered back to Australia.

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Postcard: Longevity Hill in the Summer Palace. [Beijing] Darling John, Will be thinking of you tomorrow morning. But will be back with you very soon. Love Wo Wo Thurs 1.6.89

Mockery of Mao

Next morning, while I thought of John facing a surgeon’s scalpel in Melbourne, I returned to the square and the thirty-metre high Goddess of Democracy erected by students to revive public support. The white polystyrene and plaster figure, modelled on America’s Statute of Liberty, stood with her back to the embalmed body of Mao in his Mausoleum. The goddess held aloft the torch of liberty in both hands, almost in mockery of the chairman, whose portrait on the vermillion Gate of Heavenly Peace presided over the square. I wanted to stay to see the story through. Of course. But I dragged myself to the airport, intending a weekend in Hong Kong, not knowing I would remain there reporting for a week. As I flew south late that Friday, fresh protestors from the provinces were replacing weary Beijing students. Taiwanese pop star Hou Dejian was due to go on a hunger strike with three mainland intellectuals and to hold a press conference to test the new censorship of martial law. Although the city seemed calmer than when I arrived eight days earlier, it was more tense. Greater troop reinforcements ringed the city while solders exercised ominously close to Tiananmen Square.

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John to Robbie Howell and Stanley Campbell, Waco, Texas Melbourne 16.6.1989 Well what do you think of all the bastardy in the People’s Republic? Have you, I wonder, had the detailed and awful television coverage we have had here from C.B.S., B.B.C. and our own A.B.C. We even had the embarrassing spectacle of our Prime Minister [Bob Hawke] blubbering on T.V. at the news of the massacre. He hadn’t of course wept over Tibet. That hadn’t been on television. So far. I have been impressed with [George] Bush [senior]’s response. He seems to be following T.R. [Teddy Roosevelt]’s dictum of, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’. The rumour is abroad here that just as Fang Lizhi is holed up in the U.S. Embassy so the leading student dissident Chai Ling is hiding in the Australian Embassy. I like to think she is either in Judith’s office or in the ‘Down Under’ bar. Helene … was in the capital right up until Friday 2nd June. That is two days before the Tiananmen massacre. That Friday she went down to Hong Kong to cover the story from that angle. The photos she took in Tiananmen show even more graphically than the T.V. just how young and peaceable the crowd was. Now that Helene is back, she has been asked to prepare a second edition of her book, adding in the recent material. Penguin wants the extra material done quickly, so Helene is flat out like a lizard drinking as we say in this country. I have had no such adventures … My biggest drama was a few weeks ago when my dermatologist discovered a skin cancer at the top of my nose, a basal carcinoma I think he called it. Anyway it had to be

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removed by a plastic surgeon no less and now it is completely removed and I have been cleared by the pathologist. I had hoped the plastic surgeon might decide to give me a complete face lift while I was under the knife and remove all signs of ageing. Alas that was not to be. When Helene was in Peking she saw many of the journalists who were in Peking at the time we all were. These horrible events had brought most of them back. We knew quite well Al Pessin, the V.O.A. correspondent who was expelled the other day. I wonder what excuses the China lovers will dream up for this one. 27.7.89 We were intrigued to read here that [Chinese secret police chief] Qiao Shi’s daughter is apparently studying medicine at Baylor (your university, Stan) and took part in some demonstration outside the Chinese Consulate in Houston. Does Baylor have a campus at Houston? Please write and tell me all about it. I have just spoken to Helene who told me the bad news that the Chinese student dissident Chai Ling has just been arrested in Shenzhen, the special economic zone near Hong Kong. She was the one thought to be hiding in the Australian Embassy [although it was actually pop singer Hou Dejian].

[Monday, 16/10/89] As I write this letter I have half an ear to the radio. It is after 5 p.m. and I am listening to ‘International Report’, a new news programme covering the day’s

Ming Ting Yuan

stories. The reporters are all from Radio Australia and the presenter and principal reporter is Helene Chung. Radio Australia hasn’t broadcast to domestic audiences before. Did you know Nancy Langston in Peking? She was a journalist with ‘The Economist’ and lived with her banker husband in some apartments that were once part of Yuan Ming Yuan, the old summer palace. Nancy, an American, is now in Hong Kong editing a new journal, ‘All Asia Review of Books’. Such is the corruption prevalent in the old Peking clique of bourgeois bad elements that Helene and I have been reviewing some Australian fiction for the new journal. How’s that for ‘guanxi’ [connections]? One of the books that Helene has reviewed is Nicholas Jose, ‘Avenue of Eternal Peace’. Jose is, or was until recently, the Australian cultural attache in Peking … I have reviewed Bill Green, ‘Compulsively Murdering Mao’. This one is about an Australian government mission to China during the Cultural Revolution and is both funny and violent. 31.5.90 One of the big political issues here is posed by the thousands of Chinese students who came here before Tiananmen. They have all been demonstrating like mad against the Chinese government and then claiming they must be permitted to stay to escape persecution at home. This is upsetting the warlords from the other ethnic groups no-end.

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Lazy Man Down Under Melbourne 18 March 199163 I am working now in the overseas Programs Unit of the Ministry of Education. I am particularly concerned with exchanges with China. Victoria has a sister state relationship with Jiangsu province and Melbourne has a sister city relationship with Tianjin. Naturally China makes sure it gets much more out of these things than we do. I get frustrated sitting in on meetings where decisions are made by people who have never been to China and tend to view the place through rosecoloured spectacles. Even so, the work is often interesting. One balmy autumn evening on a Monday in May 1991, I joined John at a reception he helped organise for Chinese, Japanese and French international teaching fellows. Although the chief of the ministry gave the main speech, it was an informal function held in the lush garden of an educational centre in Lansell Road, Toorak. We enjoyed ourselves and John was pleased with its success. Afterwards we retreated with friends to the nearby Kingdom Restaurant. When we came home he popped into the bathroom but then emerged frightened. He’d just passed blood.

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‘It could mean cancer,’ he said. After what we believed was successful surgery John was soon back at work. It was a particularly busy period and he seemed fine. He was immersed in the renegotiation of the educational agreement between Victoria and Jiangsu. Duty sometimes had him at the airport at dawn to meet new arrivals from China. He entertained them at home, accompanied them to various campuses around the state, and led one delegation on a packed itinerary to Canberra and Sydney. So confident were we of John’s health that in early 1992 we finalised plans to travel abroad. We would holiday together for three months in England, France, Holland and the former Soviet Union. But I would first take-up an invitation from the United States Information Agency to study foreign affairs in America. So, I set off three weeks before John. Melbourne Monday, 18 May 1992 Dearest Wo Wo, You have only been gone a few days and I miss you terribly. How I must take you for granted. It was wonderful hearing from you on Saturday. Of course I would have liked to have heard more detail about your interviewing all the top military brass in Honolulu. … Please take very good care of yourself my love and have a wonderful time — Stateside. Much love John xxxxxx John was having a less than wonderful time. Just before I left, he felt unwell but we were assured there was nothing to worry about. Yet, within a week of meeting in London, we were flying back over Europe and Asia.

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John to Robbie Howell and Stanley Campbell Melbourne [Monday, 9/9/92] Please forgive my having taken so long to write to you. Part of my excuse is that I have been quite ill lately and the other part, I suppose, is that I have been lazy. Helene had a wonderful time in the United States visiting both the North and the South. Unfortunately she did not go to Texas … It’s just as well Helene made the best of the U.S. as our planned holiday in Europe was a fiasco. I had felt unwell for weeks before I left for London. My doctors assured me there was nothing of consequence wrong with me, including the surgeon who had operated on me over a year ago. Having felt ghastly during my stop-overs in Bangkok and Amsterdam, I sought medical advice in London. It turned out that I had a recurrence of my bowel cancer so as soon as Helene arrived in London we had to make plans for an immediate return to Australia for treatment. Since returning I have been in hospital for surgery and am now having a five week course of radiotherapy and chemotherapy combined. My oncologist, who is an old friend of ours, is confident the problem can be managed successfully. Anyway I’m feeling fine and Helene and I are both out and about seeing shows and visiting people and I’m told I can go back to work in October or November. John to Lehene and David Goodenday 27.9.92 Despite the warning from the doctors of all sorts of dire side effects [from the chemo- and radiotherapy] I have felt reasonably well and apart from having to visit the bathroom a little more frequently and to have

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a rest in the afternoon I have lived a normal happy life. Oh! I must admit to having lost, temporarily, some of my pubic hair but hardly anyone has noticed that and no-one has commented upon it. A month later: Since leaving hospital and undertaking therapy I have had no energy for gardening at all. However one day last week I started pulling out a few weeds and ended up working until sundown pruning trees and ripping out vines and creating huge piles of garden waste to be disposed of. I decided I must really be a lot better. ‘Wuthering Heights’ is being serialised on T.V. here and Wo Wo and I have not missed an episode. I am even rereading the novel. It is remarkable that the Bronte sisters living such an isolated life could have had such powerful imaginations. Wo Wo is preparing the evening meal as I write — a scene of domestic bliss. And then: My main news is that I am back at work. I returned early last week; and apart from feeling tired at the end of the first day it is now almost as if I had not been away. … Perhaps Wo Wo has told you of the results of my five weeks of radio & chemotherapy. I had to wait a month after the end of the treatment before having a C.A.T. scan. We were pleased that the result was above average for such treatment. The tumour had shrunk considerably and I am not having any further treatment, for the time being. My doctor will no doubt want to monitor it from time to time, but for the present the prognosis is good.

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So happy were we with this news that we decided to celebrate by getting married. Until now we’d felt no need for formalities. My mother, Dorothy, brought me up always cautioning against marriage and urging me to maintain my independence. In mid-1946 she caused a scandal with the first ‘Chinese’ divorce in Australia: I was fifteen months old and Lehene not three. Our mother later lived with an artist, a radio announcer and then Egyptologist and author Leslie Greener, whom she married only after he’d proposed for a decade. On John’s part, his former marriage also made him wary of legal ties. Yet before going to China, we signed an affidavit declaring we regarded our relationship as permanent. This was not just required by the ABC to recognise John as my ‘spouse’: it reflected our state of mind. On Saturday, 20 December 1992, in the presence of eight friends, we exchanged our vows in an elegant room of the former Royal Mint, then the Registry Office in Melbourne. A five-hour lunch with vintage wines followed at Masani’s restaurant. Next day we flew to Hobart and settled ourselves into a suite in the tower overlooking the yachts on the river Derwent. Wrest Point Hobart64 Yes it is true. Helene and I were married on last Saturday — a very quiet wedding. Just a handful of friends as witnesses followed by lunch at a restaurant in Carlton. We all fitted at one round table and Con O’Donohue provided wines from his vast collection. Afterwards John became quite sentimental about our wedding. He made a point of introducing me as, ‘my wife, Helene’. When I introduced him as, ‘my partner, John’, he took me to task: ‘You should refer to me as, “my husband, John”.’

Ming Ting Yuan

He wistfully felt the plain gold band he’d slipped onto my finger, looked at me and sighed, ‘We should have done this years ago.’ We were exhilarated, filled with hope for our life together. Then, in March 1993 John’s cancer count rose. We fell flat. ‘It’s a strange feeling being told that nothing can be done. You’d think they could do something,’ mused John. But after the initial shock, even as he gradually weakened in the following months, we remained positive and continued a normal life, enjoying friends, exhibitions, films, theatre, travel and walks together. What we treasured was our time alone. Now, when I reflect on that period, what I especially remember is the deeper sense of intimacy we developed, the moments of heightened joy — some of our happiest times. On Thursday, 9 September 1993, John felt pain in his abdomen and the doctor suggested tests in hospital. We both imagined it a minor matter, similar to what we’d once experienced before, when John went to hospital but was home within days. I packed his overnight bag, including the book he was reading, Beijing Jeep, by a China colleague Jim Mann, and we threaded through the afternoon peak hour traffic. Precisely five years earlier, on Friday, 9 September 1988, John had stood with me under the plane trees that line our street. He looked with satisfaction at the house we were moving into that day, and boldly declared: ‘This will be home till I’m carried through the picket fence.’

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Martin, John Winton Lover, advisor and husband of Helene Dorothy Chung died peacefully at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday 29 September 1993 Melbourne Aged 59 A perfect union. Together always.

Ming Ting Yuan

October 1993 Thank you for your sympathy and support in the loss of John. He was my light and my love for 17 wonderful years. But in his illness he showed extraordinary courage and asked me too to be brave. I am consoled by the knowledge that I am not alone in pain, but bonded to so many friends, relatives and colleagues who all in different ways share my tears and grief. I was with John as he drowsed off into what was to be his final sleep. I stayed by his side for those four long days and nights, and kissed him and held him in my arms as he breathed his last. Now he is at rest. Helene

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OLD COMMUNISM, NEW CAPITALISM

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All This is New but … O

New Beijing

ld Fan was right, I think, as the taxi edges forward in the snarled-up traffic. I’m riding along Changan Boulevard — the Avenue of Eternal Peace. I’m not far from Tiananmen Square. Beyond the tops of vehicles lining the ten lanes soar sparkling glass citadels of corporate commerce, enormous hotels, dazzling international shopping plazas and overarching cranes. Yes, my former interpreter was right. (In the Chinese custom I called him Lao Fan — literally Old Fan — because he was older than I). I recall a humid summer afternoon in 1984 when John and I were seated in the rear of our air-conditioned, pale bronze Toyota. The driver Xiao Li (literally Little Li because he was younger than I) was heading along an almost deserted Changan to the ABC bureau only minutes away. From the front passenger seat boomed the prophetic voice of Old Fan: ‘One day Beijing will have so many skyscrapers and so many cars it will take an hour to reach the office!’ Tuesday, 4 June 2002: The anniversary of the massacre.

Old Communism, New Capitalism

China Daily features a beaming silver-haired former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and a bespectacled Hu Qili, vice chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. They’re at an international air transport meeting in Shanghai. The relatively liberal Hu Qili — who, as a ‘rising star’, kept crackling his papers during my fiasco of a television interview — fell from office during the demonstrations of 1989. From a far greater height fell Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. Hu Qili and Zhao called for dialogue but were defeated by those who called the shots. Why, if Hu Qili can appear in public — even though in a rather insignificant role — is Zhao Ziyang still under house arrest? ‘Because if Zhao were rehabilitated,’ explains a seasoned diplomat, ‘he’d become the focal point of discontent — the focus of a coalition. There’s a nascent demand for an explanation of 1989. In any re-evaluation of 1989 some of the present mob may not come out rosy. That includes the unpopular Li Peng.’ I picture the dour prime minister who declared martial law. ‘Hu Qili was more associated with Hu Yaobang than Zhao,’ the diplomat continues. ‘And Hu Qili played a much more minor role than Zhao. Zhao’s lucky to be treated so well. He almost brought the Communist Party down. He’s taking the blame for letting things go too far: for allowing the demonstrators to get out of control. Zhao Ziyang lost in 1989. The hardliners won. They’ll never let him out!’ In 2002 the heir apparent is youthful-looking Hu Jintao, an engineer, born in 1942. He’s destined to succeed Jiang Zemin as both Party boss and president of state, and to address a joint sitting of the Australian Parliament in October 2003 — a coup for the Howard government. Hu Jintao gained political clout through his toughness as Party secretary in Tibet in the late 1980s when he repressed anti-Chinese riots. Hardly the record of someone likely to fight to release Zhao Ziyang.

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Meanwhile Zhao is in relative good health for a man in his eighties. ‘He’s allowed to play golf once a week but only at a local green, not a joint venture course. They don’t want him putting with foreigners,’ a close associate of Zhao reveals. ‘He’s not allowed visitors but he likes to keep in touch with the outside world through short wave radio. I sometimes worry about the effect on his ears,’ he adds, referring to China’s regular jamming of foreign news broadcasts and the irritating buzz and humming of short wave. Wednesday, 5 June 2002: I awake to a CNN report on the imprisoned dissident Xu Wenli. His wife He Xintong has staged a one-day hunger strike outside the compound of her home. ‘The authorities should free him. At the very least, he should be sent to hospital,’ she tells Beijing correspondent Jaime FlorCruz. ‘My husband’s contracted hepatitis-B from prison and he needs urgent medical attention.’ The CNN and BBC images in my room — as the US probes its failure to prevent the terrorist attack on September 11 and as Queen Elizabeth celebrates her fiftieth jubilee — show how much China has changed. However, the cost of cable subscription is beyond the means of most Chinese, while anyone applying for such a link would be deemed a troublemaker. Yet He Xintong’s appearance on CNN — even though seen only by foreigners and Chinese monitors — is a great leap forward. I’m due to meet Jaime FlorCruz for breakfast at Starbucks next day. He was with Time magazine in the eighties and has lived and breathed China since the seventies. ‘That was a good story on He Xintong,’ I congratulate him. ‘You can interview her if you like,’ Jaime surprises me. ‘Of course her phone is monitored and police are about.’


I’d not intended to do any ‘interviews’ on this visit. I simply want to update myself and return to some of the places I associate with John. But my adrenalin is pumping again. I don’t want to put He Xintong or any Chinese at risk but after CNN she can’t be any more exposed. She wants to tell her story. And talking to me is no offence — subject, of course, to the whim of the authorities. By Friday evening I’m shaking hands with He Xintong in the Jianguo lobby. Two others join us: a young man who’s offered to show me the hutongs or lanes of Beijing and my former driver Little Li. Casually sitting and chatting over mineral water and nuts was unthinkable when John and I lived here and most Chinese weren’t allowed through the revolving glass door. Now there’s no apartheid in hotels and restaurants. The former three-tier price system — in which foreigners were charged exorbitant rates, overseas Chinese less and local inhabitants the least — has all but disappeared. And, unlike the past when foreigners had to use Foreign Exchange Certificates, locals and foreign devils alike use the same currency. Little Li, being off-duty, has cycled here and chained his bike outside. I remember how I offered him a drink from the privacy of my Jianguo mini bar in 1983 and how I watched him wince as he downed a bottle of coke. It gave him status. It enabled him to boast, ‘I drank Coca-Cola at the Jianguo.’ He’s moved on since then and can’t wait to tell me his news: ‘BMW. My daughter’s husband owns a BMW.’ He scrambles for my notepad, writes down the registration and sits back. ‘What does he do?’ ‘Hotel section manager.’ ‘What does your daughter do?’ ‘Hotel section manager.’

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I suggest a meal, imagining some place free of Westerners and well-heeled locals. Little Li prompts, ‘There’s somewhere close by. We can just walk across the road.’ New China Town is a bar and plush nightclub with a mini-skirted female vocalist throbbing into the microphone. At first only Li in his leather slip-ons is comfortable here: he’s now chauffeur to an East European ambassador and New China Town is on his beat. But the other two soon adapt, we all relax and enjoy the night on the mezzanine floor where hip young waiters roller skate by, balancing laden trays in their hands. Afterwards, I take a taxi with He Xintong to the subway where she’s left her bike. We drive through the mass of fairy lights that glow from all the buildings along Changan Boulevard. Such illuminations were previously employed only on special occasions like the thirty-fifth anniversary in 1984 of the founding of Communist China. By 2002, weekend lights are routine. ‘All this is different. All this is new,’ she says. ‘But in politics nothing has changed. China is still the same.’

Save Xu Wenli

Despite police and nosy neighbours, on Saturday afternoon I follow He Xintong, a retired teacher, into her home of two rooms divided by a shared corridor in a typical decades- old mediumrise compound that’s never been maintained. ‘My husband,’ she points to a photograph of the man condemned for forming the short-lived China Democracy Party. She holds another photo close to her face for


my camera. Xu Wenli is tall and handsome: his face shows breeding and learning. The couple look wonderful together. I look at this undaunted woman single-handedly running her ‘Save Xu Wenli’ campaign and I empathise with her. I’m reminded of John — how I’ve lost him. My eyes well with tears and I begin to choke. But I blink away the tears, refocus and concentrate on Xu. In late 1998 Xu Wenli called for a multi-party system. When challenged by the Communist Party — still unregistered after five decades in power — he counter-challenged: ‘Let’s register your Communist Party and my Democracy Party. Both should be registered.’ He pushed beyond the limit and landed a thirteen-year sentence. No stranger to justice in the People’s Republic, Xu, an electrician and underground editor, was first jailed in 1981, charged with ‘counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation’. Like Wei Jingsheng, Xu’s political courage was posted on Democracy Wall. Although both were released in 1993 as part of China’s bid to host the 2000 Olympics — which Beijing nonetheless lost to Sydney — both were re-arrested. But while Wei was exiled in America by mid-2002, Xu and other members of his Democracy Party remained in prison. Although dissidents are free to talk among themselves and Chinese analysts can express views on contentious issues on the record to foreign correspondents — views often out of step with the government — such tolerance is accorded only so long as the individuals don’t challenge the system or seek to organise and represent a group. Some commentators suggest the Internet will lead to political freedom. China is the world’s fastest growing Internet market. Government attempts to bar certain sites — including those of foreign news organisations — are no obstacle to computer-savvy youth. In offices and homes, but especially in Internet cafes, they surf their way over the web,

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communicate throughout the world and download what they fancy. But new technology is also transforming China’s surveillance industry. ‘The police are stronger,’ notes an observer. ‘What used to be a rather amateurish system has become quite professional.’ Against that is a more questioning mentality. Chinese are more litigious, with a few prepared against heavy odds to pursue their rights through the courts. The press too is more daring, sometimes exposing corruption or callous neglect of workers. Less subsidised than before, it’s more alert to readers, more motivated to increase sales — to entertain and investigate — rather than pump out dreary socialist propaganda. China is experimenting with elections at the village level. This is an embryonic form of democracy. At the very least it’s important as a pressure valve for aggrieved peasants. But few see this as a move towards nationwide representative government. ‘At best,’ contends a journalist, ‘there might be some tinkering within the Party — a choice of candidates for the one slot. But within the Communist Party.’ ‘A multi-party system? No way,’ scoffs a diplomat. ‘Not with this group of leaders. They want power. They won’t share power. In an election they’d have nothing to offer.’ At her home He Xintong serves me a dessert of sweet black sticky rice balls in warm syrup. I lick my lips. Then, picking up a Chinese-language paperback published in Hong Kong, she asks, ‘Do you recognise this face?’ ‘No,’ I peer at the cover. ‘Who is it?’ ‘Liu Xiaobo.’ Liu Xiaobo! The independent writer, fearless social critic, former academic and one of four hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square on the night of Friday, 2 June 1989. The hunger strike was Liu’s idea. He induced Taiwanese pop star Hou Dejian and two others to join him to support the


demonstrators and reinvigorate their movement. They were there — trying to persuade students to vacate the square — when troops closed in on Saturday night. While Hou Dejian escaped to the Australian Embassy, Liu was seized and imprisoned for eighteen months. In 1995 he served another seven months. In late 1996 he was sentenced to an additional three years of so-called ‘re-education through labour’. This followed a petition for wide-sweeping political reform and the impeachment of Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin. ‘I’m going over to visit him now. Like to come?’ We’re soon passing a forest of apartment towers, then climbing out of a taxi and mounting flights of concrete stairs. ‘His home’s very nice,’ He Xintong approves, knocking on the door. The lean Liu Xiaobo and his young wife Xia, a bubbling shaven-haired artist, have been living in the light spacious apartment of a relative for six months. The ergonomic desk and computer, easy chairs and floor-to-ceiling black bookshelves mirror the pages of an Ikea catalogue. Our arrival interrupts the World Cup they’re watching on television, accompanied only by endless cigarettes. But we’re welcomed with mugs of steaming tea. ‘Are you interested in soccer,’ asks Liu. ‘No,’ I shake my head. ‘I’m really hooked.’ I enjoy the banter and laughter that flow between Liu and his visitor. They clearly have much in common. After what they’ve endured, it’s good to see them relax, and in congenial surroundings too.

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Liu Xiaobo and He Xintong

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‘Can you understand us?’ asks Liu. Like He Xintong, neither Liu nor his wife speak English. ‘No, unfortunately,’ I reply in my pathetic barely rudimentary Mandarin. The laugh is on me. Six months later, on Christmas Day 2002, when I’m still comfortably tucked in bed in Melbourne, I hear the morning’s radio news. Xu Wenli has been released: he and his wife have begun a life of exile and joined their daughter in the United States.

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The Pooch is Not for Poaching I

n a street opposite the Jianguo my eye catches a new lowrise building, sandstone and off-white, with a mock classical façade trimmed in gilt. I wander into the hallway and, to my right, discover a traditional Chinese medicine clinic. Its open door reveals a clean white-coated doctor bent over a woman lying on a treatment table. ‘Excuse me, but do you mind if I look on?’ Clearly, they’re as intrigued by my interest as I am by them. Yes, it’s a private practice. And yes, I may take a photograph. And I may reposition them the better for my lens. If the woman can afford such treatment, I reason, she must belong to China’s new middle class who have discretionary income — a class estimated at about 200 million. Her face, her hairstyle, clothes, handbag and manner all point to this. Indeed, Shen Hui manages her own electronics firm. She pricks up her ears when I say I’m a former ABC Beijing correspondent. ‘My daughter studied commerce at Melbourne University,’ she tells me between pummels. ‘She now broadcasts on Radio Beijing.’ Next morning I’m in the suburbs with correspondent for The Australian, Lynne O’Donnell: her fluent Mandarin proves handy, especially for talking our way round security guards. We’re circled by multiplying new high-rise apartment blocks, all equally undistinguished. All are rather crude in workmanship. But up twenty floors, out the lift and into the

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home of Shen Hui, we slip off our shoes, step from the polished timber floor onto a Chinese carpet square, and find an attractive two-bedroom apartment with all the amenities of the West. ‘This is my daughter Zheng Jing.’ ‘And this is Samantha,’ coos Jing in perfect English, cuddling their pet Pomeranian. Their lifestyle began to change in the mid-eighties when Shen Hui switched from teaching electronics to selling electronic components. She bought her own Toyota. She’s now into her fourth car, a Nissan, and continues to drive herself but hires home help three hours a day. The family’s 100-square metre apartment is worth a high six-figure sum in Chinese currency. They’re moving to another double the size for 2 million yuan (US$240,000). On the glass coffee table sits the mail. The top envelope bears an Australian stamp and the address of a Melbourne real estate agent. ‘Our South Melbourne apartment’s let out,’ says Shen Hui. ‘Jing doesn’t need it any more. And her father and I don’t need to fly down twice a year.’ Then, looking from her daughter to her Pomeranian, she reflects: ‘In the past ten years the changes have been huge. Every day is different.’ Her husband is a railway official. So is their new life due to his work? ‘No, it’s all due to me.’ The latest drawcard for the status conscious yuan billionaire is Rolls Royce/Bentley Beijing. Even before opening day management rejected the offer of an eager new Chinese capitalist. ‘I’ve got cash,’ he panted, pushing a wad of notes over the counter. ‘Here, lucky money. Lucky number eight. Eight point eight million yuan.’


Faced with more than a million American dollars, the salesman kept his cool. ‘Thank you sir. Pleased to help you sir. Let me show you a model.’ ‘I want the same model as the Queen,’ he demanded. ‘And I want to be the only Chinese owner till the end of the year. Then I’ll upgrade.’ ‘Well, that could pose something of a problem, but nothing I hope we can’t resolve,’ soothed the salesman. ‘We can’t give you the exact model made for Her Majesty because hers is bulletproof. But we could provide you with one virtually the same, though marginally smaller because it’s not bulletproof. As to your other requirement, that we sell the model exclusively to you in China, I’m afraid, that wouldn’t be possible.’ The frustrated financier picked up his bundle of money, stuffed it back into his bag and stalked off. A week later a sales assistant is keeping jaw-dropping sightseers at rope’s length from the limousines. ‘We’ve sold five so far,’ she says. ‘But sorry, no. No cameras allowed.’ Just a block away in another world live families untouched by modernity. After years of poverty and political upheaval, their ambition is to enjoy a game of mahjong — previously banned — or a wager on cards. They nurse their grandchildren or pass the day sorting out lengths of garlic in the grimy lanes outside their homes. One grey-haired woman plants a pot of petunias on her window ledge. A genial young man with good English has offered to show me the hutongs or

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Mahjong

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lanes around the picturesque antique district of Liulichang. I bought a jewellery box from the store where he works. But when the time came for us to meet, I’d been joined by He Xintong and Little Li. So it’s after 10 o’clock Friday night, and quite dark by the time I’m guided by Andrew as he shuffles along in his black cotton shoes. ‘The restaurants here are quite good and cheap,’ he remarks as we inhale the rising fumes from skewers of squid sizzling over a burner. ‘I like seafood.’ Activity in the hutongs hasn’t closed down. A girl cheerfully wipes a wooden cutting block with a soiled rag, directing the debris into a basin of soupy grey water that sits beside a bowl of eels on the makeshift bench. Four barechested men around a table play with the clanging blocks of mahjong, large red triangles of watermelon at hand. A mother bounces a child still wide awake in the adult hours. ‘They’re all country folk,’ comments my guide as we turn into a side lane. ‘You can see it in their faces.’ As the lane darkens with no sign of light ahead, I begin to wonder what I’m doing nosing up an alley so late at night with a near stranger. I’m mad, I think. I wouldn’t do this normally. We turn right into another lane, pass two taxis parked outside their drivers’ homes, walk another thirty metres and stop. ‘This is it,’ Andrew stands proudly by a carved wooden entrance set in the high stone wall of a conventional courtyard home. I admire the doorway and the traditional red paper signs of good luck he’s pasted on the wood and feel ashamed of my mild panic. These signs are part of a resurgence in precommunist customs from burning incense to wearing a cheongsam or qipao — the clinging silk dress with slits thighhigh. Even under the sweltering midday sun I’d seen women dolled up in qipaos to totter for hours on high heels through the Forbidden City.


A young bride from Shandong, dressed in a red qipao with its high, stiff tight collar, told me, ‘We bought these this morning. This is the first day of our honeymoon.’ Her husband looked dapper in gold shirt and tie. Outside Andrew’s courtyard I imagine myself stepping into an open square surrounded by living quarters on four sides. Instead, I’m taken through a maze of very narrow uneven dirt paths — all that remains of the former courtyard that has been built over to accommodate about twenty people. ‘Are you alright?’ he asks leading the way in the dark. ‘Yes, but I’m sorry I’m so slow,’ I answer, following gingerly. ‘I really can’t see. And I’m afraid of falling.’ ‘This all used to belong to my great-grandfather, and then my grandfather,’ Andrew calls over his shoulder. ‘But after liberation in 1949 my grandfather was allotted just four rooms. The rest were assigned to other people. My father and uncle inherited two rooms each.’ We pass his uncle washing himself with a plastic hose in the still stifling night air. His aunt appears and we exchange pleasantries. His father, an engineer, and his mother, a teacher, have recently bought a flat for 50,000 yuan (US$6,053). Many work places are selling units to their occupants for only a quarter the market value. Because his brother sleeps at his factory’s dormitory during the week, Andrew is relatively well off. He has use of two rooms with electricity. But his bed, desk, chair and bookcase are squeezed against boxes of family belongings. The cramped communal kitchen has gas burners but no hot water. The cold tap, which serves both kitchen and bathroom, is outside. ‘This will all be pulled down. The wreckers could come any day,’ he furrows his brow. ‘I’ll miss it. It’s home. But I want modern facilities.’ Renovating traditional hutong homes with twenty-first century amenities is the ideal, but the cost is exorbitant and the

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same number of inhabitants can’t be re-accommodated in the same space. The practical solution is high-rise. For Andrew, the question is not so much being moved into a modern apartment block but the amount of compensation he receives. ‘I want to stay here in the city where my family’s always been, not be sent out into the suburbs. That’s why my parents are worried. They’re saving everything they can. When this is pulled down the cost of a new apartment on this site will be very high — more than the compensation. So unless we have the money, I’ll be forced out to the suburbs.’

Ballroom dancing in the park

Beijingers and others in the developed coastal cities are believed to have large savings, stashed in banks and hidden under mattresses. The government is urging them to spend. Consumption is a key to China’s growth. ‘Money supply may prop falling prices,’ runs a headline in China Daily.65 The country is awash with more Chinese-made products than purchasers. This is the reverse of 1989 when buyers were frustrated by scarcity and inflation helped fuel demonstrations nationwide. One day I wander into Ritan Park where locals go daily to exercise, fish or just to escape the indoor heat. From under the trees by the side of the lake a cassette player pumps out an old time tune. A group of fit retired Beijingers are enjoying ballroom dancing. They glide to the music with the relaxed expressions, movements of torso and tilt of head acquired from years of practice. I cross the path of a solitary tall Manchurian and strike up a conversation. ‘A lot of people are living quite well,’ I smile.


‘A lot of people are losing their jobs,’ he retorts. ‘They’re unemployed and very angry.’ Although this 59-year-old former foreign trade bureaucrat has a pension, increasing numbers of those laid off by rusty loss-making government enterprises have little if any means. Mao’s ‘iron rice bowl’ has been hammered by the policies of the late Deng Xiaoping. His successors have almost smashed the ‘big pot’ of socialist egalitarianism and no longer dole out to city dwellers from the cradle to the grave. The certainty of having very little has been replaced by plain uncertainty. Abandoned factories may have no funds to distribute to sacked employees, a Party boss may have pocketed the lot, or the government doesn’t necessarily provide a subsistence package. Tens of thousands of demonstrations are occurring each year although not reported by the official media. Amnesty International claims that during March and April 2002, rallies, strikes or factory sit-ins were reported almost every day. Particularly restless areas include north-eastern Liaoning Province and the Daqing oil fields of Heilongjiang. China’s ‘socialist market economy’ is seething with workers protesting for unpaid wages and entitlements. The government press no longer conceals the fact of unemployment: ‘Jobless woes escalate’, acknowledges Shanghai Daily.66 Under World Trade Organisation rules, markets will open to China but China in turn must open its market. This will increase unemployment. Urban unemployment is exacerbated by the so-called ‘floating’ population of peasants who are lured to glistening cities, especially on the coast, in hope of work. In 2002 China’s floating peasantry is estimated at 150 million, including some two million in Beijing alone. Lucky ones ascend the cranes of dirty, dangerous construction sites shunned by former factory workers. But the majority of those drifting from the provinces remain out of work.

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So the new rich thrive while the ranks of new poor expand. Those with a job are saving for hard times ahead. Alongside the growing gap between urban haves and have-nots is the gap between city and country. The 2000 census shows almost 460 million urban Chinese with an annual disposable income per head Taking a break

of 6,280 yuan (US$760). Beijing’s official 12.6 million population live on incomes higher than average. Andrew the shop assistant earns an annual 12,000 yuan. He would need an entire three months’ salary to buy a motor scooter or a washing machine; over a week’s salary for a Flying Pigeon pushbike; and over three weeks’ salary for a DVD player. The retired foreign trade bureaucrat has a pension of 24,000 yuan while Little Li as a chauffeur enjoys 30,000 yuan. It would cost Li almost two years’ income to buy the cheapest car. Each owns his own home but leads a life of no frills — except Li when on a night out as a perk of his job. The over 800 million rural Chinese manage on incomes less than a third that of their city cousins. And country incomes are declining. It’s expected that many will suffer a further fall when competition under the World Trade Organization leads to a price reduction in grain. China calculates that 90 million of its people are poor, many of them disabled or in the inhospitable hinterland: they have less than the equivalent of twenty-seven American cents a day. Western sources, using the international standard of US$1 a day, estimate 200 million or more Chinese struggle below the poverty line.


In The Good Women of China, former Chinese radio journalist Xinran Xue describes a village not far from the tourist site of Xian and almost as remote from the modern age as are the entombed warriors. She encounters a household of eight daughters who share a single pair of trousers, which they each take turns to wear, to marvel at the sights outside their cave home. Xinran notices something bizarre in the village: females from their teens walk ‘with their legs spread wide apart, swaying in an arc with each step’. She discovers some unusual leaves drying under stones and is aghast — saddened — to learn that these are what the women use during their menstrual periods. Each girl is given a precious set of ten leaves (from trees far away) and the set must last her lifetime. The transition from impoverished backward country into a modern state is painful. Despite the agricultural reform which produced China’s first 10,000 yuan-a-year farmers — in the 1980s the envy of city folk — agriculture by Western standards is inefficient and labour-intensive. Too many farmers are tending too many small plots. According to one analyst: ‘China must somehow shift most villagers into urban centres of employment or create manufacturing jobs in the countryside, so that those left to farm have the economies of scale essential to mechanised twenty-first century production.’ During the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Britain achieved such a transition — with the social cost documented by Dickens.

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Peasant in valley of Wutaishan

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Meanwhile, those toiling the land are burdened by arbitrary taxes, tolls, fines and not infrequent beatings from corrupt local officials. This is fomenting deep rural unrest. So the leadership is threatened by revolt in both city and countryside. There’s also tremendous environmental degradation. Smog blankets major cities. Beijing’s sky is a dirty grey and the air hangs heavy like curtains blocking out the sun. In Shanghai the tops of buildings are shrouded for two of my three days. The desert is encroaching at the rate of a kilometre a year due to deforestation. The Yellow River is drying up and doesn’t always reach the sea; there’s an acute water shortage in the north — with villagers having to go without. Elsewhere, calamitous flooding occurs over immense areas, especially around the Yangtze. ‘But China’s no basket case,’ insists a diplomat. ‘It won’t descend into chaos. It won’t implode. The Chinese will find a way. China will be the leading regional power.’ As a correspondent sees it: ‘What’s working in China’s favour is the inexplicable patience of the people — their resourcefulness, their resilience, after all they’ve been through.’ Sums up another: ‘It’s being held together by a spider’s web’ — a tight but fragile grip.

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New Tang Captial I

n my ten days in two showcase cities, I’m haunted by the words of Australian scholar Pierre Ryckmans, the former Belgian cultural attaché to Peking whose Chinese Shadows appeared under the pseudonym, Simon Leys, in 1974: Passing travellers see a changing landscape, and they are less conscious that they are being carried everywhere in a cage; the residents, who must stay put in Peking, have plenty of time to count all the bars. That decades-old assessment is no longer applicable: I’m not caged, and it might be argued that today’s residents don’t have time to count all the bars and nightclubs! But Leys reminds me how superficial impressions can be. I feel so free, in 2002, to roam around that I’m not aware of the restraints. And what strikes me as extraordinary is the very ordinary. Far fewer people in the capital are afraid to speak to foreigners. ‘I couldn’t talk to you before,’ laments my escort in Ritan Park. ‘I would have been in trouble. You might have been a “spy”. That’s why my English is so poor. I’ve forgotten most of it.’ This conjures up memories of an elderly Chinese man entertaining himself by playing first a bamboo flute, then a two-stringed Chinese violin in Ritan Park one Saturday afternoon in spring 1984. He was then exceptional in opening up to foreign devils. As John recalled:67

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When we got talking he produced his photo album with photos of himself and his family taken before the revolution of 1949. He spoke good English because he used to work for the Westfield Corporation in the days it was in China. He said he carried the old photos because of the memories they recalled. For some strange reason we both failed to follow, he insisted his name was Mr. Murphy. He even had it written on his hat. In 2002 over 6,000 foreign companies are represented in Beijing, and the number of resident foreigners is estimated at 100,000. ‘It’s like in the Tang Dynasty,’ reflects an old China hand over dinner, surrounded by his prized collection of Chinese antiques, many displayed in illuminated glass cases around the walls. ‘There was an influx of foreigners between the seventh and tenth centuries. The Tang capital, Changan — now Xian — was a very cosmopolitan city.’ Today’s cosmopolitan city has spawned English or bi-lingual lifestyle magazines that specifically target expatriates. They’re distinct from the Beijing Official Guide for foreign and Chinese tourists. Beijing Real Estate Guide offers: ‘Everything you need to know about interior design’; City Week: ‘Entertainment listings, news, and reviews’; Chinaweek: that’s Beijing: ‘The Next Generation. Up close and personal at the Beijing Film Academy; Eating Yin: Foods to quell the fire within’. The variety of exhibitions, films and theatre featuring local and international stars, and the array of nightclubs, bars and restaurants offering every cuisine and catering to every palate are astounding. Even though I know that fresh food is readily available, I’m not prepared for the supermarket at China World. Rows of packaged fruits and vegetables, a choice of European and Australian dairy products, household staples and cleaners,


health and hygiene items, racks of imported wine, stationery and gift wrap, and English and Chinese paperbacks fill the shelves. The abundance makes me relive my horror of 1983 when, opening the kitchen cupboard at Qi Jia Yuan, I found a rat had ripped through the muesli I’d carted from Melbourne. What would it matter now? The Western-style supermarkets are patronised not just by expatriates but by Chinese elite. By the time I’m introduced to the Russian market with its live crabs, prawns and fish, and stalls of lycees, mangos, cherries, peaches, oranges, melons and pears, I’ve become blase. I’ve forgotten that my only taste of mango in Peking was when I nursed two from Hong Kong and celebrated with a tea party. Although correspondents are restricted to designated zones and foreigners concentrated in certain areas, non-Chinese fan out through the city. Former CBS cameraman John Liu, now a producer for the London-based Television Trust for the Environment, lives with his wife, children and parents in a contemporary version of a traditional courtyard home. Designed by his American Chinese father around a spacious landscaped garden, it sits on the city fringe near the old stables of Qing Emperor Qian Long. Businessmen and consultants fill the hotels, serviced apartments or high security luxury towers — sometimes with rich Chinese as neighbours. Families with children are attracted to villa estates. Co-habitation between foreigners and Chinese citizens is tolerated — even in openly homosexual relationships. The lively night scene includes gay bars, with a strip not far from the Australian Embassy at Sanlitun. Australian diplomats and their families live in the new embassy compound, purpose-built to meet their work, social and recreational needs. It’s close to the old embassy where I regularly went for briefings and where John worked as a local recruit in the Australian aid program. The forbidding fortress-like exterior

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Australian Embassy in 2002

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belies the pleasant garden views available from within. In keeping with other embassies, its high grey wall is topped with barbed wire. This follows the attempts by desperate North Korean refugees in early 2002 to seek political asylum in various diplomatic compounds — much to the embarrassment of Beijing. I cast my mind back to the 1970s when Garry Woodard succeeded Stephen FitzGerald, the first Australian ambassador to the People’s Republic. I try to picture the scene when Woodard set the embassy residence ablaze when he fell asleep — after a glass or two — still smoking a cigar. He saved himself by falling facedown onto the carpet. As flames swept out of the building, his wife frantically threw furniture from the window while firemen stood helpless at the gate, blocked by Chinese guards. Woodard’s response when I check with him: ‘I can’t remember what my wife did but I regard any attempt to save Commonwealth furniture as commendable.’ I assume fire precautions have improved. Most foreign correspondents still work in the three Chinesebuilt diplomatic compounds. The expanded ABC bureau has moved from the small office I acquired through bribing housing officials with a Peking Duck binge, into the adjacent apartment that was home to John and me. In 2002 our L-shaped living room — where John couldn’t find the bugs the Russian diplomats must have planted — is the general office, with the television correspondent occupying the former dining section. Our bedroom — where I spilt that


revolting black Chinese cough concoction that seeped into the doona — is the TV editing suite. And John’s study — where he typed out his ill-formed impressions on China — is the domain of radio. Two correspondents and a cameraman are assisted by a bright young team of two interpreters, a driver and an office manager — all with excellent English. The advance in telecommunications means I would be less prone to losing my voice. No more shouting from China. No more hearing only intermittent sound over the phone — like seeing only every second frame of a film. No more wasted hours wrestling with a Chinese telephonist trying to connect to Sydney. No constant crackling, hum or buzz. It’s now normal for Chinese to have telephones at home though many more need to be wired — one reason for China’s heavy dependence on mobiles. And, at the Jianguo I can even call Australia using my Telecard! What I can’t do at the Jianguo is find a directory listing the telephone numbers of foreign news bureaus. Beijing has a directory of foreign business houses but omits the foreign media. In the 1980s when China produced no directory at all — telephone numbers being ‘state secrets’ — the Foreign Ministry issued each bureau with a list of correspondents. However, a Hong Kong company published a red-covered directory of foreign firms, bureaus and embassies. I flew to Beijing naively confident that with China’s much vaunted opening up, the contact details of foreign bureaus would be readily available — if not from a directory in my room, at least from the Jianguo business centre. Not so. ‘Try public relations.’ ‘Try marketing,’ suggests the PR consultant. ‘You really should go back to public relations,’ insists the marketing manager. Back at the business centre — where I began — staff can put me onto the official New China news agency, China Daily and other local news organisations but not to a single

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foreign bureau. Just as well I’m armed with a few numbers to begin my ‘secret visitor’s business’. Increasing numbers of foreign correspondents speak fluent Mandarin. Language ability, the willingness of more Chinese to be interviewed, and the fact that journalists can get around the rules and travel independently through the provinces — without seeking permission and without a minder — have eased their task. But some claim it’s become a less interesting post — probably because it’s more ‘normal’; and others, that it’s harder to interview a Chinese leader. ‘In the 1980s Beijing used the media to promote its image of the open door and now that it’s won the 2008 Olympics, entered the World Trade Organization and is besieged with foreign firms, the media’s no longer needed,’ complains one correspondent. ‘Journalists used to have a higher status.’ ‘They’re going to make it really tough to cover the Olympics,’ fears a television reporter. ‘I’ve got to do this much work,’ he says stretching his hands apart, ‘for only this much on air,’ his hands almost touching. On officially organised trips for journalists, Chinese Foreign Affairs minders are as vigilant as ever against any unrehearsed, unauthorised comment from locals. A group of about forty correspondents and television crew has just returned from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region where Muslim separatists are campaigning for independence. The region’s large ethnic Uighur population have more in common with their Muslim neighbours in Kazakhstan than with Beijing. During the trip security officials followed and photographed correspondents day and night. A dispatch from The Age correspondent, John Schauble, is headed:68 ‘This is China: let me see you shake your tail. Chinese may eat McDonald’s and dream of owning a car, but the State still finds it hard to let go of old habits — such as spying on journalists’:


Local police, plain-clothed but obvious, would simply follow us into the night with all the subtlety of the Keystone Cops, even if our quest was no more sinister than a cold beer … Only the most naive (or optimistic) reporter would have seriously believed anything approximating a balanced view of the situation in the Chinese hinterland was going to emerge during such an expedition. But even the most seasoned were stunned by the determination of our trailing secret police to guarantee it would not. John Schauble takes me to a twice-weekly foreign press briefing in a spanking new building. We miss the first announcement because he’s still negotiating on my behalf at the gate. I have no accreditation and I’m grateful to be let in. Spokesman Liu Jianchao has just announced the forthcoming visit to Beijing of a senior US defence official. There’s wired simultaneous translation and the whole affair is more professional than when we used to gather weekly at the decrepit International Club. But there’s still only a stock answer to a question or the dismissal of an idea with the phrase, ‘That’s sheer fabrication.’ My last night in Beijing is at the home of Jasper Becker. As correspondent for The Guardian in 1986, he was part of the journalist contingent that included John Martin on a tour of Zhejiang — the tour I missed because of my ulcer. Jasper has since written the ground-breaking Hungry Ghosts, which documents how 30 million people starved to death because of Mao’s Great Leap Forward; and The Chinese, a compelling book on contemporary life and politics. When we meet again Jasper has just lost his position as Beijing bureau chief for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. He regards this as a blow to Hong Kong’s freedom of expression and accuses the daily of self-censorship.

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‘It’s pressure from Beijing for less critical, more “friendly” stories on China.’ The Post denies this, claiming he was dismissed for insubordination to China editor, Wang Xiangwei. Jasper’s treatment by the Post is disturbing as it follows the departure of independent veteran Willy Wo-Lap Lam as China editor. He resigned rather than cease his provocative column on Chinese leaders and Hong Kong power brokers. His successor, Wang Xiangwei, is a Chinese national formerly employed by the government-run China Daily. According to the US State Department, some Hong Kong journalists and media practise some self-censorship, especially in reporting mainland affairs. Now that Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China, Jasper’s dismissal adds to the suspicion that the vigorous free press that prevailed in the former British Colony was rolled up with the Union Jack in 1997. Jasper’s dinner party is reminiscent of life in the 1980s. His wife Antoinette and other guests are also foreign journalists and much of the conversation naturally revolves around China coverage and how to beat the system. A French correspondent is concerned with the plight of young Tibetans: ‘They’re sent out of Tibet to schools for ethnic minorities in provinces around China. They return home Sinocised. In Tibet students have to choose between the Tibetan language or Mandarin and English. As English is essential for their contact with supporters in the outside world, they choose English but lose their native tongue.’ It’s a most enjoyable and stimulating evening, but without the intensity and edge of that bygone era. Then, every word could be vital clue to a story. Tonight, time is found to discuss the World Cup: not just the politics of the game but the sport itself.


The China story is now so diverse that correspondents specialise. And with 190 foreign bureaus in 2002, with perhaps 400 journalists — compared with 120 journalists in 1986 — correspondents no longer live in their colleagues’ pockets. The incestuous hothouse atmosphere of 1980s Peking is history. Life is more normal. Even the setting is different, as Jasper has moved to a garden estate for his children’s sake. Gently winding roads are lined with villas and each villa has a neat front lawn and a garage — very Western suburbia. The rear of his home looks out onto a lush communal garden where children play in relatively clean air. Before dinner I stroll with Jasper around the lake that meanders through the grounds. As I ponder the dramatic changes in Beijing I wonder how John and I would fare. How would my posting — transferred to today — affect our relationship? Undoubtedly the ease of communication would let us stay closely in touch by phone, fax and e-mail when apart. Less chance of growing apart when separated for almost a year by the distance between Australia and China. Yet, when I put the question to John, I hear his voice: ‘It’s hypothetical. You can’t say. You don’t know. You can only deal with the circumstances you find yourself in at the time.’

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SKY HIGH FOR SHANGHAI

They have no system or efficiency; they won’t make a straight road if they can make a crooked one; they won’t hurry unless a policeman is after them. But, with all their faults, they are permanent and everlasting — the patient, smiling, inscrutable, foolish sons of Han. Frank Clune, Sky High to Shanghai, 1939

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A

fter a week in the imperial city I’m bound sky high for Shanghai. My Sunday morning CAAC flight is uneventful. I can choose from a trolley load of hot or cold beverages and my glossy inflight magazine is one of the most informative I’ve seen. Suddenly I yearn for the past. Where is my breakfast of warm ice-cream, Lucky chocolate wafer, green tea, sticky lollies stuck to inedible paper, CAAC key ring, and yesterday’s China Daily served by a surly stewardess in frilly pink? From the front seat of a taxi on the elevated freeway from the old Hongqiao airport, the skyline is unrecognisable: shot through with rockets, triangles, domes and spires that whish by too fast for my eyes. Shanghai’s architecture is as brilliant as Beijing’s is dull. My last assignment here in 1985 was partly to report on the city’s experiment in private housing and the work of urban planners. I could never have imagined such a transformation. I’m booked at the renovated Peace Hotel — the old Cathay — where John and I lingered over our first lunch in our favourite Chinese city. My room overlooks the Bund — the historic waterfront — and across the Huangpu River with its constantly moving cargo and on to the remarkable creation of Pudong. This stunning high-tech finance and trade centre arose as if overnight in the nineties. After the slump that followed the massacre, which drove out foreign investors, Deng Xiaoping relaunched China’s economic reform in 1992. That gave birth to Pudong — now central to Shanghai’s ambitious goal to overtake Tokyo as the financial capital of the East. I don’t ferry across to Pudong until the Wednesday of my departure. My fellow commuters are a few awe-struck provincials — a bit like me — and a crowd of grubby workmen clutching their bicycles ready to exit. At Pudong’s ferry terminal are tatty outdated buses and a few scraggly hawkers. They’re not ‘Pudong’. Pudong is epitomised by the Oriental Pearl TV Tower and Jin Mao. The space-like former with its enormous pink

Sky High for Shanghai

balls is a bit too tizzy for me. Sleek Jin Mao is more to my taste. The world’s third tallest skyscraper in 2002 (after Kuala Lumpur’s twin Petronas Towers and Chicago’s Sears Tower), its series of overlapping roofs has its origins in Chinese pagodas. The structure looks so light I can imagine Jin Mao as a toy: with a press of its spire, its eighty-eight floors of glass panels, intertwining rods and steel sheets would collapse neatly into each other onto the ground, until pulled back up again into the sky. From Jin Mao’s observation deck, the Skywalk, I make out the Bund in the distance with its Euopean buildings preserved. After decades of neglect, they were tarted up for Queen Elizabeth’s tour in 1986 when the Duke of Edinburgh made his jest on ‘slitty eyes’. To the far left is the former Shanghai Club where — when it was the shabby Dong Feng Hotel reeking of cod — John and I weren’t allowed in the old cage lift. To my right is the Peace Hotel and, further along near Garden Bridge, an overpass almost scrapes against the former British Consulate. In its grounds I photographed John with fellow foreigner, American Broadcasting Corporation’s Jim Laurie, next to the sign which warned: NO ADMITTANCE FOR THE FOREIGNERS.

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TV rocket and Jin Mao (second from right)

No admittance for the foreigners

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Out on the flat expanse of the empty streets around Jin Mao, I experience a strange eerie sensation as if in another world. About half of Pudong’s buildings are empty. And standing here I can almost believe the finding that Shanghai is the one Chinese city where the number of registered permanent residents is shrinking — the result of the onechild policy. But anywhere else you’d never guess it. In 2002 Shanghai teems with 13 million locals and about four million ‘floating’ job seekers. In stark contrast to Pudong is People’s Square with its waterfall, gardens and milling Shanghainese. Surrounding the square are three low-rise buildings each of a human scale. Each integrates Chinese motifs into Western design to produce a modern masterpiece. In the Urban Planning Centre I walk through a recreated street of 1930s Shanghai with its glamour of gangsters and glitz. I’m caught by a photographic exhibition of significant early Shanghai architecture, including the famous department stores, Sincere Co. and Da Sun — now Shanghai No 1 Department Store. Like Wing On department store, these were founded by Australian Chinese entrepreneurs from Guangdong and modelled on Anthony Hordern’s and David Jones in Sydney. The photographs of Shanghai past surround an enormous model of future Shanghai. Alas, many more charming old residences will be sacrificed for new towers. Across the road from the Planning Centre lies the Shanghai Museum with its circular roof and skylight. This is a museum. Its several floors of galleries are simply planned around a central atrium, enabling me to move easily through the various bronze, jade, calligraphy, coin, clay, ceramic, seal and furniture exhibits without getting lost. Quite a feat! Its modern exhibition techniques allow each piece to be seen to advantage. Explanations are in Chinese and English. So


different from the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the displays inside each pavilion are roped off at the doorway and lost in the dark and gloomy distance. Actually, I’m being unfair to the capital. During my stay there the Millennium Monument had mounted a wonderful photographic exhibition of Old Peking — photographs taken by Hedda Morrison in the 1930s and ’40s. The exhibition, from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, marked the thirtieth anniversary of Sino–Australian diplomatic relations. German Hedda Hammer had married Peking correspondent for The Times, Alastair Morrison, son of Australia’s first China correspondent, George Ernest Morrison. In 1894 Geelong-born George Morrison dressed up as a Chinese in a traditional long robe, placed a false queue to hang down from his hat, and made an overland journey from Shanghai to Rangoon. He travelled by sedan chair, boat, donkey, mule and foot. His account of this epic journey, An Australian in China, led to his appointment as Peking correspondent for The Times. Morrison of Peking became a living legend. And his name was immortalised in Morrison Street, until renamed Wangfujing. But I’m supposed to be in Shanghai and it’s getting late. By the time I reach the Shanghai Grand Theatre, with its suspended curved roof sweeping upwards, its doors are closed. Oh well, I content myself with an advertisement for Les Misérables. On my first night in Shanghai I have my first experience of universal middle class behaviour in the People’s Republic. Through a mutual friend in Australia, I meet a Chinese called Wendy, and we stroll around Xintiandi — New Heaven and Earth. This is an imaginative development in the former French Concession: gutted buildings have been renovated to create a precinct of boutiques, posh restaurants and outdoor cafes next to the site of the Communist Party’s first congress

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Shanghai musical

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in 1921. Wendy and I settle on a Japanese menu in the courtyard. Later, she recognises a Chinese couple about to be seated. ‘That’s Jane, my best friend!’ Like Wendy, Jane and her husband Sam are in business and all live in Pudong. Wendy and Jane love shopping and laugh over their exploits. Jane is a Shanghainese, Sam a southerner and Wendy from Beijing. I’m from distant Tasmania. But supping with them is much the same as anywhere. We could be any four Chinese faces around a table at Southbank, Melbourne; Hampstead, London; or Georgetown, Washington. I have to remind myself I’m in Shanghai. I also have to remember that most Chinese are without the means of Wendy, Jane and Sam. Shanghai is no more ‘China’ than is Beijing, but Shanghai is China’s cutting edge. ‘Where would you like to go?’ asks Sam when it’s time to leave. ‘Maybe I’ll wander into the old Jinjiang Hotel.’ Minutes later we’re standing on the curb until Sam, behind the wheel of his white Audi, swoops up from the underground carpark. I’m dropped off at the Jinjiang, before the others head for the tunnel across the river to Pudong. In the West, nothing could be more unremarkable. Here, it’s remarkable as a measure of how ‘normal’ life can be for China’s affluent. By now it’s 10 o’clock Sunday night and the shops around the Jinjiang Hotel are shut. They used to sell beautiful velvet scuffs. I cross the road to the former gracious Jinjiang Club where John


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and I drooled over its famous vanilla soufflé. Not surprisingly, it’s changed. What was originally the Cercle Sportif Français is the sleek high-rise New Otani Hotel and it could be in Japan. (Who was it who bemoaned, ‘Nostalgia’s not what it used to be’?) I don’t have the courage to enquire about the billiard room or the swimming pool that gave the old place such character. I leave, missing John and feeling churned up. Back at the Peace Hotel in the nightclub where John and I danced to the tunes of the 1930s and ’40s, the jazz band is still playing. Most of the musicians are over seventy and the percussionist hasn’t moved in twenty years. It’s crowded with every table full and no Chinese excluded. The only concession to this century is a card on which patrons can request a favourite song — for a fee. On Monday morning I wake to the News on Radio Australia, then switch to CNN: Australian Prime Minister John Howard is in Washington, addressing a joint sitting of Congress and meeting President George W. Bush. There’s a report by Jaime FlorCruz in Xinjiang, the base of China’s campaign against terrorism. Beijing claims it’s not being given due credit for its effort against terrorism. Xinjiang militants allegedly receive weapons and training from Afghanistan in their fight for freedom from China. But is Beijing using the war against terrorism as a pretext to quell legitimate activism by Muslim Uighurs? In the dragon-phoenix hall on the eighth floor, I have breakfast in the sun and overlook the harbour and the Bund. The drone of traffic rises from ten lanes of glinting moving metal: the trees have been swallowed by cars. Not a single

New treeless Bund

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Enter KFC

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cyclist is in sight. Shanghai is revving in top gear while the West, having counted the cost and sat through the snail pace of the fast lane, is reserving more space for bicycle paths. At a table across from mine a honeymoon couple smile shyly at me. The husband, a broad-shouldered white American tackles bacon and eggs, alongside his diminutive Chinese wife — adorned, in the new fashion, in a clinging red cheongsam or qipao. Red is the colour of luck. The night before, outside the banquet hall, they happily agreed to let me click alongside their photographer. On another floor outside another hall, another couple — Chinese — also gave me permission. Both brides were in long flowing white Western gowns and their grooms in black tie. A long march, I think, from the impersonal mass wedding of fifty couples I witnessed at the Beijing Hotel in 1985. Their vows were celebrated with a feast of peanuts and crackers. In the frenzy of consumerism in the streets and lanes around Starbucked Yu Gardens, it’s hard to navigate a path to the tranquillity of magnolias, camellias and willows. I’m lost in rows of rackety stalls that resemble parts of Hong Kong just as I’m lost in the memory of my time here with John: exploring the gardens together and devouring dumplings in the picturesque tea house on the lake. Why are there so many pleasure seekers and bargain hunters this Monday afternoon? Surely not because of the Queen’s Birthday. That’s not why young and old are bowing, burning incense sticks and offering gifts at this Buddhist shrine. Except for the caffe lattes and the ubiquitous face on the red, white and blue billboards of KFC, busloads of foreign tourists and the


English spoken by vendors, Shanghai’s old Chinese city with its layers upon layers of curved pointed pagoda roofs is very Chinese. Outside a popular canteen rank and file refresh themselves with tea or coke while glued to a screen showing the World Cup. Parents take it in turn to snap their children seated on the backs of two open-mouthed brass lions posing as tortoises. Inside, out of the heat, I choose a steaming bamboo basket of two packets of glutinous rice wrapped in lotus leaves. Delicious. And cheap. Eating out in Beijing and Shanghai ranges from the ridiculously cheap to the gold-plated palatial and prohibitive. More Chinese eateries are following Japan in advertising with models of their dishes. A cafeteria on the Bund has models of every type of Asian cuisine. I’m tempted by the duck for about US$2. I’m given a tray with five compartments holding in turn roast duck, steamed rice, beancurd, buck choy and broth. It’s not quite up to the model. But I forget that as I sit opposite two country girls from nearby Anhui Province — prattling away in their coarse accents (not as coarse as mine), and laughing through the fume of their cigarettes. Like their rural worker friend seated next to me, they’re on their first visit to the big smoke. The CITIC building houses Australia’s Consulate on the twenty-second floor. Down in the bowels is a shopping plaza where bright young Chinese snatch a break under the golden arches. Opposite McDonald’s is Wagas, owned by an Australian Chinese born in Papua New Guinea, Jackie Yun. She serves an excellent latte and her carrot cake is scrumptious.

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Starbucked Yu Gardens

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The Colonel’s route through China

Nanjing Road

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Did I really carry that carrot cake Lehene baked for me in London all the way back to Beijing? I crawl by taxi through peak hour traffic in order to wander around the faded fin de siècle buildings that survive the wrecker’s hammer in the former French Concession. Most are now restaurants and nightclubs. But where is the Red House — once Chez Louis — where John and I savoured that onion soup? Stepping out from the Peace Hotel and onto Nanjing Road at night, I’m bombarded by neon signs. Lights in every colour flicker and change their gaudy shapes. Shanghai à la Las Vegas. A wrinkled beggar, not yet picked up by police, squats on the ground beside his bowl. Ignored. Patient parents and grandparents with children in hand, tired workers at the end of their shifts, uninhibited couples and rushed tourists fill the mall. They pile into restaurants, scuttle through stores or idly watch the passing crowd. A slim artist from Inner Mongolia in white T-shirt and tight black pants promotes her brushwork. ‘See, in this scroll, I use a different technique. Special price for two.’ I hope she makes it in Shanghai. On Wednesday morning it’s my last chance. I’ve been hesitating till now. ‘Could you make me a jam soufflé please,’ I ask


the young chef whisking, scrambling and frying eggs to order under the ornately carved red, gold and green ceiling of the breakfast room. A blank response. But back at my table by the window the black-suited maître d appears. ‘What can I do for you ma’am?’ he enquires in faultless English. ‘I was wondering if I could have a jam soufflé please. Your hotel’s famous for its soufflé. I’ve had it before and that’s why I’m back.’ ‘Oh, that was a long time ago. You must be a very old customer. We don’t have it any more. We have a Chinese and Western buffet breakfast. I’m very sorry.’ ‘But do you think you could make one today. I’ve come all the way from Australia.’ ‘Oh, the chef’s very busy in the kitchen. It takes a long time. And we don’t do it any more.’ ‘But do you think you could ask him please?’ Next thing the head chef in his starched white cylindrical hat is out of the kitchen and at my table standing with the waiter and mulling over old times. Soon I’m facing his fluffy white soufflé sprinkled with icing sugar and folded with strawberry jam inside. Bliss! As I leave Shanghai I slip a sepia card of the Peace Hotel with its distinctive triangular bell tower into the post.

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Peace Hotel (with triangular bell tower)

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Tues 11/6/02 10.45 pm Darling John I have walked my feet off in this fabulous city, trying to absorb some of its excitement, romance, seediness and culture. It certainly makes Beijing staid and sedate. The new architecture here is extraordinary — an imaginative blend of East and West. The towers are inspirational, not heavy monumental and overbearing as in the capital. Shanghai seems to throb with life. All it needs is my Shanghai adventurer-at-large. Love Wo Wo xxx

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Endnotes

ADVENTURES OF A LAZY MAN IN CHINA 1 31/1/84 postcard to Lehene & David Goodenday: St Paulo 1964.12.8. The background shows Communist China. The 400 year anniversary of the Jesuits being celebrated at the Ruins of St Paul’s Dec. 8 1964. 2 They were based at Glenbervie Teachers Centre, Toorak, and moving to Hawthorn Teachers Centre. This 15/2/84 letter integrates material from John’s letter to my Nationwide colleague Tania Nesbit (5/3/84). 3 27/2/84 to Marcia Laing, Hobart. 4 13/3/84 to colleague Con O’Donohue. 5 The following passage is from John’s letters to: Max & Erica Linton (25/3/84), his mother (29/3/84 and 22/5/84), and Diana Logan & Gary Bradley (25/4/84). 6 25/3/84 to the Lintons, Melbourne. 7 12/4/84 to colleague Bernie Parker. 8 13/4/84 to Heather Ellis, and includes material from John’s letter to Wal Trudinger (27/6/84). 9 23/4/84 to our former English literature tutors, Ken & Annette Stewart, and includes material from John’s letters to Kerry & Lyndie Cardell (5/5/84) and cousin Rosemary Martin (11/6/84). 10 To Logan & Bradley, Melbourne, and includes material from John’s letter to paternal aunt Ila & Jim Reed (29/5/84). Anzac Day commemorates the ill-prepared landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp. at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, and their bitter campaign against the Turks.

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30/4/84 to the Lintons and integrating material from John’s letters to his mother (26/4/84 and 10/5/84) and cousin Kevin & Rhonda Reed (4/5/84). 12–14/5/84 to my mother Dorothy Henry Greener, Hobart, and the Goodendays, London. 15/5/84. 21/5/84 to Bruce & Helen Healey, Ocean Grove via Geelong, and includes material from John’s letters to his mother (14/4/84) and the Lintons (30/4/84). 4/6/84 to Bill & Mary Smith, Hobart, and includes material from John’s letter to his mother (6/6/84). John to Rosemary Martin, Melbourne (11/6/84). 8,9,11/6/84 to Len & Shirley Moore, Geelong, and includes material from John’s letter to his mother (6/6/84). 3/4/01. 7/6/02. 22/6/84 to Con O’Donohue, and includes material from John’s letter to David Goodenday (28/6/84). 6/7/84 to the Smiths, and includes material from John’s letter to John & Susan Thorpe (2/7/84). John’s 28/7/84 postcard to the Goodendays and my mother whom we were meeting in London: William August Rieder (1796–1880), Franz Schubert, Wien.

RETURN OF THE LAZY MAN 23 John to Dee Briscomb (6/10/84). 24 27/8/84 postcard: Original illustration by Beatrix Potter for The Tale of Two Bad Mice. 25 20/9/84 to the Stewarts and integrating material from letters to Con O’Donohue (21/9/84) and Len Moore (27/9/84). 26 2/10/84 to Con O’Donohue, and includes material from letters to Wal Trudinger (27/6/84) and Con O’Donohue (21/9/84).

Endnotes

27

28 29 30 31

32

33 34

35

36 37 38 39

40

10/10/84 to colleague Wal Trudinger, and integrating material from John’s letters to: Elizabeth & Andrew Owen (8/10/84), Len Moore (17/10/84), his mother (25/10/84), and Bob & Renate Kamener (26/10/84). 20/10/84 to John & Susan Thorpe, Kent, England. 24/10/84 to the Goodendays. 31/10/84 to Con O’Donohue. 8/11/84 to Kerry & Lyndie Cardell, Geelong, and includes material from John’s letter to Len Moore (5/11/84). 9/11/84 to Kevin & Rhonda Reed, and integrating material from John’s letter to Con O’Donohue (6/11/84). 16/11/84 to Wal Trudinger. John to his half-sister Gillian Gregory, Hobart, 21/11/84, and includes material from John’s letter to Wal Trudinger (5/11/84). 9/12/84 and includes material from John’s letter to his mother (6/11/84). 9/12/84 to the Stewarts. 12/12/84 to Con O’Donohue. 29/12/84 to Wal Trudinger. 2/1/85 to the Smiths, and includes material from John’s letter to his mother (28/12/84). John to his former colleague at the Australian Embassy, Robbie Howell, and her husband Stanley Campbell, Waco, Texas (24/1/85).

PEKING VIA BABYLON OR SODOM 41 11/12/85 to Howell & Campbell. 42 16/2/86 to Howell & Campbell. 43 5/4/86 to Pam & Cliff Caldwell, Melbourne, and integrating material from John’s letters to: his mother (2/4/86), Howell & Campbell (2/4/86), and the Thorpes (9/4/86).

213

214

Lazy Man in China

44 45

15/4/84 to Helen Healey. Including Robert Thomson, ‘China’s heir apparent talks tough on trade’ (The Age, 12/4/86), and John Martin, ‘On a rendezvous in the new Forbidden City’ (Sunday Morning Post, 20/4/86).

… OR SOMEWHERE 46 19/4/86 to Con O’Donohue. 47 27/4/86 to Logan & Bradley. 48 30/4/86 to Christine Collins. 49 To Renate & Bob Kamener, Melbourne, and integrating material from John’s letter to Helen Healey (1/5/86). 50 23/5/86 to Con O’Donohue. 51 12/6/86 to Wal Trudinger. 52 25/6/86 to our Peking colleague Mary Lee, Singapore, and includes material from John’s letter to Con O’Donohue (16/7/86). 53 25/6/86 postcard to Con O’Donohue: Greenham Common Peace Camp 1984. YOUR TINY HAND IS FROZEN 54 5/7/86 to Frances Patrick, Geelong, and integrating material from John’s letters to: Betty Ellis & Heather Ellis (7/7/86), Marjorie Wilkinson (8/7/86), and his mother (10/7/86). 55 John to colleague Heather Morrison (9/7/86). 56 15/7/86 to Annette Stewart. 57 16/7/86 to Con O’Donohue, and includes material from John’s letter to Bruce Healey (16–17/7/86). 58 18/7/86 to Howell & Campbell. 59 20/7/86 to Helen Healey and integrating material from John’s letters to: the Cardells (19/7/86), the McCowans (19/7/86), Wal Trudinger (21/7/86), and the Lintons (22/7/86). 60 23/7/86 to Christine Collins.

Endnotes

MING TING YUAN 61 John to Howell & Campbell. 62 John to Howell & Campbell. 63 John to Howell & Campbell. 64 Postcards to John’s maternal aunt-in-law Dorrye Watkins, Melbourne, and to the Goodendays (28/12/92). OLD COMMUNISM, NEW CAPITALISM 65 11/6/02. 66 11/6/02. 67 To Ila & Jim Reed, Melbourne (29/5/84). 68 15/6/02.

215

216

Correspondents

Most details are confined to the period of the correspondence Briscomb, Dee: Melbourne Playbox Theatre publicist. Caldwell, Pam and Cliff: our fellow students at University of Tasmania, Hobart, Pam a teacher, Cliff a finance director. Cardell, Kerry: John’s colleague at Gordon Institute of Technology/Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, married to nursing sister Lyndie. Collins, Christine: John’s colleague in Victorian Education Department. Ellis, Betty: John’s colleague in Victorian Education Department, no relation to Heather. Ellis, Heather: John’s colleague in Victorian Education Department, no relation to Betty. Goodenday, Lehene (née Chung, 1943–2001): my sister, born in Hobart, a librarian, educated at St Mary’s College, Hobart, Open University and University of North London; a gentle and generous soul, married to English company director, later part-time magistrate David Goodenday. Gregory, Gillian: John’s half-sister, a medical receptionist married to John Gregory. Healey, Bruce: John’s colleague at Gordon Institute of Technology/Deakin University. Healey, Helen: secondary school teacher, once wife of Bruce; in letters to Helen, John sometimes adopted the mantle of ‘priest’. Henry Greener, Dorothy: my mother, a former artist’s model and hairdresser, widow of Egyptologist, author and broadcaster Leslie Greener.

Correspondents

Howell, Robbie: John’s American colleague in technical cooperation at Australian Embassy, Beijing, 1984, until returning to teach at Waco, Texas; married to Stanley Campbell, historian at Baylor University, Waco, on exchange as a ‘foreign expert’ at Beijing’s Second Foreign Languages Institute (Erwai) in 1984. Kamener, Bob: our GP and friend, married to school teacher Renate. Laing, Marcia (née Maisie Watkins, 1909–1996): John’s mother, a former buyer for Connor’s department store, Hobart; widow of Launceston sports photographer Stanley Martin and married to former motor mechanic Gerald Laing. Lee, Mary: successor to David Bonavia as Peking correspondent for The Times and Far Eastern Economic Review, until leaving for Hong Kong and Singapore in 1986. Linton, Max: scientist who lived in the same Melbourne boarding house as John in the 1950s, married to scientist Erica. Logan, Diana: librarian married to meteorologist Gary Bradley. McCowan, Ranald: John’s colleague at Gordon Institute of Technology/Deakin University, married to secondary school teacher Judy. Martin, Rosemary: John’s paternal cousin, a teacher. Moore, Len: John’s colleague at Gordon Institute of Technology/Deakin University, once married to Shirley. Morrison, Heather: John’s colleague in Victorian Education Department. Nesbit, Tania: my colleague on ABC’s This Day Tonight/ Nationwide, Melbourne. O’Donohue, Con: John’s colleague in Victorian Education Department.

217

218

Owen, Elizabeth: journalist married to businessman Andrew Owen. Parker, Bernie: John’s colleague in Victorian Education Department. Patrick, Frances: mutual friend of Bruce Healey. Reed, Ila: John’s paternal aunt, married to Jim. Reed, Kevin: son of Ila and Jim, an agricultural scientist, married to Rhonda. Smith, Bill: John’s school friend at St Virgil’s College, Hobart; married to Mary, formerly of my school, St Mary’s College. Stewart, Ken and Annette: our tutors in English literature at University of Tasmania; attached to University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales. Thorpe, John: John’s university friend in Hobart; a teacher who returned to Kent, England with his Australian wife and fellow student Susan, an osteopath. John stayed with them and their son Simon when teaching in Kent in 1986. Trudinger, Wal: John’s reclusive colleague and source of sanity in Victorian Education Department. Watkins, Dorrye: John’s maternal aunt-in-law. Wilkinson, Marjorie: mutual friend of the Healeys.

219

Index ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) ix, xiii, xv, 10, 121, 150, 153, 157, 164 and women 11, 48 archives ix Beijing bureau xv, 3, 7, 16, 25, 139, 170, 192–3 Brussels 10 Fan Shancheng (Old Fan), interpreter 25, 28, 117, 170 Li Tianchuan (Little Li), driver 28, 127, 170, 173–4, 182, 186 visitors 35, 126 abortions 25 advertising 1, 50, 92, 140, 206, 207, 208 Afghanistan 10, 149, 205 Age, The 63, 99, 194, 214 agriculture 49, 110, 187 see also commune; economy — rural air safety 74–5 air-conditioning 69 ‘Alien’s Travel Permit’ 110 All Asia Review of Books 159 Alomes, Steve 14 America, United States of 46, 92, 156, 158, 162, 175, 178 Information Agency 161 relations with China 40–1, 63, 157, 195 State Department 196 American Broadcasting Corporation 201 American Embassy 33, 92, 157 Americans 41, 51, 92, 116 Amnesty International 185 Amoy see Xiamen Andrews, Richard 139 Andropov, Yuri 68 Anhui Province 153, 207 antiques 19, 140, 190 apartheid 34, 46, 173 Argall, H.E. Dennis 40 Arkhipov, Deputy Prime Minister Ivan 108 Army see People’s Liberation Army Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation 122 Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) 139 Atherton, Mike 83

Australia Chinese students 41–2, 149–50, 159, 161, 179 relations with China 12–3, 50, 61–2, 71, 74, 111, 124, 151, 157, 203 Australian Chinese 63, 202, 207 Australian Consulate, Shanghai 103, 207 Australian Embassy 16, 17–8, 30, 33, 35, 67, 81, 109, 157, 158, 177 aid program 22–4, 50, 191 ambassadors 40, 192 bicycle rally 52–3 cricket 39–40 new building 191–2 New Year’s Eve dance 111 Australian POWs 64 Australian, The 99, 179 autumn 94–5 Avenue of Eternal Peace see Beijing — Changan Boulevard

Baker, Suzanne 35 ballet 86, 109 Bangkok, Thailand 71, 126, 129, 162 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 51, 89, 143, 157, 172 Beazley, Aviation Minister Kim 74 Becker, Jasper 195–6 Beihai Park, Beijing 36 Beijing 33–7 see also Forbidden City; Great Hall of the People; Mao Mausoleum; People’s Heroes Monument; Tiananmen Square; Workers’ Stadium airport 1–2, 12, 22, 51, 66–7, 85, 150 Changan Boulevard 2, 12, 79, 170, 174 hutongs (lanes) 45, 173, 181–2 Liulichang 182 magazines 190 Millennium Monument 203 New China Town, nightclub 174 pollution 1, 34, 188 population 33, 185, 186 Silk Market 3 Wangfujing Avenue 6–7, 203

220

Index

Beijing Hotel see Peking Hotel Beijing Teachers’ University 32 Beijing University 31, 45–6 Bell Tower, Xian 71 Bertolucci, Bernardo 99 bicycles 2, 3, 4, 38, 45, 49, 52, 103, 118, 186, 205–6 ‘big pot’ 64, 124, 185 Big Wild Goose Pagoda, Xian 71 bin Laden, Osama 10 Bjelke-Petersen, Premier Johannes and Senator Florence 20–2, 25–6, 26–7 Bonavia, David 65, 89, 136 books 20, 32, 91, 140, 152, 159, 163, 165, 187, 189, 191, 195, 199, 203 burning of the 69 Bowen, Deputy Prime Minister Lionel 55, 57, 61–2, 63 Boxer rebellion 45 Brayne, Mark 89, 143 Brezhnev, Leonid 68 brigands 104 Britain 40, 48, 78, 107–8, 132, 142 British Consulate, former, Shanghai 201 British Embassy 33, 51 Bu Xinsheng, factory manager 124 Buddhism 76, 77–8, 206 Burns, John 140, 141, 142, 143, 144 Bush, George, senior 157 Bush, President George W. 63, 205 Bushwackers, band 42

CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China) 14, 21, 30, 74–5, 100, 121, 139, 200 cabbages 98 cadres 19, 25, 34, 35, 36, 80 Cairo, Egypt 11 Cambodians 39, 138 Campbell, Eric 7 Canberra 10, 30, 161 Canton see Guangzhou Capon, Edmund 150 ‘capitalist road’ 5, 43 Carnegie, Sir Roderick 31, 82 cars 3, 4, 12, 21–2, 56, 105, 170, 173, 180–1, 186, 204, 205 drivers 3, 18, 27

Cathay Hotel see Peace Hotel Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Beijing 90–1, 115 Catholic Church 6, 44, 55–7, 90–1, 115, 134 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) 143, 157, 191 Chai Ling, student 157, 158 Changan see Xian Changsha, Hunan 119, 125–6, 128–9, 131 Chen Kaige, film director 141 Chengdu, Sichuan 49 Chiang Kai-shek 125 children 14, 22, 26, 61, 62, 207 clothes 27 China Daily 63, 171, 184, 193, 196, 200 China Democracy Party 174, 175 China International Travel Service (CITS) 104 China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC) 82, 117, 207 China Sports Committee Propaganda Department 84 China World, Beijing 190 Chinese names xv Christianity 55, 103 see also Catholic Church Christmas 99, 107, 108, 115, 178 Chung, Helene see also Martin, John Winton attitude of Chinese 60 at work 40–1, 48, 62, 70–1, 74, 88, 122, 142–3, 144, 153, 158–9 Australian Chinese origins 4, 12, 63 Beijing posting ix, xv, 2, 10–2, and relationship with John 8, 114, 115, 127, 129–30, 133, 138, 145, 197 Beijing tactics 28, 35, 43 illness 117, 120, 121, 126, 130, 141 Shouting from China xiv, 8, 139, 144, 157 CITIC see China International Trust and Investment Corporation CITS see China International Travel Service city walls 71 clothes 3, 24–5, 27, 29, 60, 82, 106, 182, 183, 187, 203, 206 see also Sun Yat-sen suits cheongsam 60, 182–3, 206

Index

Clune, Frank 199 CNN (Cable News Network) 172, 173, 205 Cold War 10, 63, 108 commune 125 communications 18–9, 151, 193, 197 Communist Party, Chinese (CCP) 49, 55, 85, 153, 154, 171, 174, 175, 176, 204 1st congress, 1921 119, 203–4 Central Advisory Committee 79 Politbureau 79, 120 concerts see theatre and drama concubines 4, 28, 116 consumerism 206 corruption 1, 5, 81, 155, 159, 176, 188 Coward, Noel 52 crime 81, 96–7 Cultural Relics Department 141 Cultural Revolution 14, 20, 36, 44, 48, 49, 56, 97, 150, 159

Da Sun, department store 202 Dalai Lama 127 dancing 39, 80, 95, 111, 116, 184 see also ballet Daqing oil fields 185 Darling, Barbara 40 Datong, Shanxi 77–8 Dawson, Smoky 42 Deakin University xiv, 14, 50, 139 deforestation 188 democracy 5, 152, 153, 155, 176 see also China Democracy Party Goddess of Democracy 156 Democracy Wall 155, 175 demonstrations 115, 122, 153–6, 159, 171, 177, 184, 185 Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader 24, 50, 59, 133, 152, 153, 154, 185, 200 and Hong Kong 78, 108 origins 48–9, 142 positions 78–79 reforms 49, 54, 64, 140, 155, 200 Der Spiegel 19 dogs 4, 19, 102, 180 Diaoyutai, state guest house 12 Dietrich, Marlene 52 donkey carts 16, 26 dragons 15

221

Drum Tower, Xian 71 Dunn, H.E. Hugh A. 40

East China Sea 124 Economist, The 116, 159 economy 54, 85–6, 184, 200 see also incomes; living standards free enterprise 3, 25, 49, 103, 140 rural 49 urban 50, 54 education, private 4 elections 176 Edwards, Kelvin 124, 128 Ellingsen, Peter 99 Empress Dowager 148 English language 3, 106, 122, 180, 189, 190, 196 broadcasts 97 entombed warriors 44, 68, 70–1, 187 environmental degradation 188 see also pollution espionage see spying executions 7, 96–7, 133

factions 24, 34 Falun Gong 6 Fang Lizhi, astro–physicist 151, 152–3, 157 Far Eastern Economic Review 118 Fifth Modernisation 155 films 99, 100, 106, 141, 150, 190 Chinese Film Festival 151 fireworks 14, 80, 116 FitzGerald, Stephen 192 FlorCruz, Jaime 172, 205 flu 16, 93, 94, 95 food and beverages 22, 32, 35, 64, 74, 82, 99, 104, 109, 124, 190–1, 207, 209 see also restaurants beer 23, 102, 124 maotai 22, 23 seafood 101–2 shortages 49 vegetables 98 Forbidden City (Imperial Palace) 45, 80, 100, 112, 129, 182, 202–3 foreign business representatives 37, 190, 191

222

Index

foreign correspondents and media 22, 35, 41, 76, 96, 101, 110, 118, 120, 124–5, 142, 175, 188, 192–7, 203 see also journalists Foreign Affairs briefings 93–4, 195 population 197 foreign diplomats 19, 37, 40, 86, 96, 109, 171, 176, 188, 191–2 Foreign Exchange Certificates 173 Foreign Ministry Information Office 85, 86, 93, 120, 122, 142, 144, 193, 194–5 Foreign Services Bureau 28 foreigners 18, 37, 45, 58, 94, 140, 172, 190 Chinese attitude to 19, 30, 44, 45, 58, 60, 80, 103, 128, 189, 201 contact with Chinese 25, 37–8, 41–2, 55, 97, 194 legation, former 45 living conditions 2, 28, 34, 191–3, 197 population 190 Forestry Department 23–4 Four Modernisations 3, 13, 17, 20, 49 Fragrant Hills, Beijing 94–5 Fragrant Hills Hotel, Beijing 18 Friendship Hotel, Beijing 31, 129 Friendship Store, Beijing 3 Frohlich, Judith 23, 157 From Emperor to Citizen 100 Fudan University, Shanghai 41 Fujian Province 6, 101–3, 107, 110–1, 148 Furama Hotel, Hong Kong 108 Fuzhou, Fujian 61, 101, 110

Gang of Four 17, 69, 80, 91 gardens 33, 36, 38, 46, 104, 105, 148, 149, 197, 206 Gates, Kevin 81 Geelong xiii, 50, 153, 203 Germans 103 Giovale, Franco 99, 100 Goodenday, Lehene and David 129, 164, 207, 216 letters and postcards 12, 43, 71, 87, 162, 164 Gordon Institute of Technology xiii, xiv Gordon, Murray 11 Grand Canal, Suzhou 105 Gray, Premier Robin 101

Great Hall of the People 12, 14, 40, 41, 48, 78, 79, 82, 107, 136, 137 Great Leap Forward 37, 132, 195 Great Mosque, Xian 70, 94 Great Wall Hotel, Beijing 36, 41, 47, 83, 92, 116 Great Wall of China 24, 26, 27, 51, 68–9, 117, 118 Greece 145 Green, Bill 159 Guangdong Province 21, 49, 63, 89, 202 Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region 21–2, 89 Guangzhou (Canton) 4, 21, 29, 32, 38, 75, 89 Guangzhou Normal University 149 Guardian, The 195 Guilin, Guangxi 75

Hainan Island 63, 64 Haiyan General Shirt Factory 124, 131–2 Hammer, Hedda see Morrison, Hedda Han Chinese 3, 200 Hangzhou, Zhejiang 119, 124, 128 Hankow, Hubei 149 Hartwig, Arthur 94, 116, 117, 120 Hata, Taichro 85 Hawaii 161 University of 143 Hawke, Prime Minister Bob 12–3, 14, 15, 16, 33, 68, 82, 157, 171 Hawke, Hazel 12 He Xintong, activist 172–3, 174–5, 176, 177, 178, 182 Healey, Bruce and Helen 51, 120, 139, 216 Heilongjiang Province 24, 185 Henry Greener, Dorothy 164, 216 Herbert, Xavier 140 hijacking 51, 63, 75, 115 Hobart 14, 61, 63, 107 1963 xiii 1992 164 Hobgood-Brown, Lucy and Kevin 92, 116 Hogan, Paul 56 holidays 4 homosexuality 191 Hong Kong 11, 12, 29, 32, 60, 64–6, 99, 108, 130, 136, 156, 157, 159, 196 free press 5, 195–6

Index

handover 40, 48, 139 Joint Declaration 78, 107–8 middle class 65 Hopkins, Mark 117, 150, 152 hotels 36, 44 see also Fragrant Hills; Friendship; Furama; Great Wall; Jianguo; Jinjiang; Lido; Peace; Peking; Xin Qiao Hou Dejian, pop star 156, 158, 176–7 housing 50, 54–5, 125, 174, 177, 179, 180, 183–4, 187, 200 Howard, Prime Minister John 83, 171, 205 Howe, Sir Geoffrey 40 Howell, Robbie and Campbell, Stanley 19, 23, 44, 129, 217 letters and postcards 112, 114, 115, 157, 160, 162 Hu Jintao, President 171 Hu Qili, Politbureau member 120, 121–2, 171 Hu Yaobang, General Secretary 78–9, 121, 122, 132, 154, 171 death and pro–democracy protest 152, 153 Huang Jianxin, film director 141 Huangpu River 200 Hubei Province 149 Huian, Fujian 101 Hunan Normal University 119, 126, 128–9 Hunan Province 22, 119, 126, 128–9, 130 Ilyichev, Vice Foreign Minister Leonid 85, 86 incomes 50, 64, 179, 186, 187 individualism 31, 43 Inner Mongolia 15, 150, 208 International Club, Beijing 19, 195 Internet 175–6 ‘iron rice bowl’ 43–4, 64, 124, 185 Islam 70, 93, 94 see also Muslims Italy 137 Ives, Ros 26

Japan 10, 64, 69, 100, 128, 149 jazz 52, 205 Jessel, Stephen 89 Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife 36, 91, 132, 134 Jiang Zemin, President 4, 63, 122, 171, 177 Jiangsu Province 22, 139, 160, 161 Jianguo Hotel, Beijing 2, 3, 4, 36, 68, 74, 139, 173, 179, 193

223

Jimei, Fujian 101 Jinjiang Hotel, Shanghai 40, 204–5 Jin Mao, skyscraper 200–1 Jose, Nicholas 159 journalists 17, 19, 37, 41, 76, 89, 116, 117, 118, 128, 137, 138, 154, 158, 196, 197 see also foreign correspondents American 41 Chinese 79, 155, 176

Kamener, Robert and Renate 26, 127, 129–30, 217 Kazakhstan 194 Kerin, Agriculture Minister John 48, 49, 50, 52, 61 Kiessling, restaurant 59 kites 16 Krymov, Zakhar 109 Kublai Khan 36 kung fu 92, 94 Kunming, Yunnan 50

Laing, Marcia 101, 217 Lam, Willy Wo-Lap 196 Langston, George and Nancy 115–6, 159 lantern festival 14 Last Emperor, The 99–100 Laurie, Jim 201 law and justice 96, 175, 176 Leys, Simon see Ryckmans, Pierre Libyans 116 Lido Hotel, Beijing 111 Li Peng, Prime Minister 2, 132, 153, 154, 171 Li River, Guangxi 75 Liaoning Province 185 Liu Jianchao, Foreign Affairs spokesman 195 Liu, John 191 Liu Xiaobo, writer 176–8 living standards 4, 34, 54, 180, 186 see also housing Logan, Diana 126, 217 London, England 10, 11, 12, 71, 74, 99, 107, 129, 131, 139, 162, 207 Lu Ruiling, CAAC spokesman 74–5 Luan Jujie, fencer 83

224

Index

McCarthy, Wendy 35 mahjong 67, 181, 182 Malaysia 99, 112 Mann, Jim 165 Mao Mausoleum 6, 112, 156 Mao Zedong 12, 37, 46, 49, 78, 100, 124, 131, 152, 185 and CCP 119 early years 119–20 ‘iron rice bowl’ 43–4 maotai see food and beverages March of the Volunteers, anthem 13 marriage 164, 183, 206 martial law 1, 153 Martin, John Winton 8, 166–7 see also Chung, Helene attitude to China xiv, 10, 24, 28, 33–6, 37–8, 43–4, 147, 148–9, 157, 158, 160 Australian Embassy 17–8, 23–4, 73, 81 boyhood 40, 52–3, 133 freelance journalism 82, 117, 120, 195 print 99–100, 121, 127, 130, 131, 143 radio 20, 90, 93, 102, 136, 143 Gordon Institute of Technology/Deakin University xiii, xiv health 160–3, 164–5 humour 29, 51, 66–7, 86–7, 120, 131–2 image of self 9, 23, 73, 162 letters from China xiii, xiv, 8, 15 separation 127, 129–30, 131, 133–4, 138 teaching in England 131, 132, 133 temper 6 University of Tasmania xiii Victorian Education Department 10, 31, 99, 116, 139, 160, 161 Maxim’s, restaurant 87–8, 89–90 May Day 129 media see foreign correspondents; journalists medical research 20 medicine clinic 179 Melbourne 32, 54, 58, 79, 80, 83, 93, 114, 115, 148, 160, 178, 180, 204 Registry Office 164 The University of ix, 179 Mercury, The 107 middle class 4, 179, 203–4 military parade 78, 79, 88 Ming Tombs 27–8

Monash Asia Institute ix Monash University ix monasteries 76 Mongolia 76, 208 Mongolian Hot Pot, restaurant 23, 127 moral pollution 34 Morrison, Alastair 203 Morrison, George Ernest 203 Morrison, Hedda 203 Morton, Tex 42 Murdoch, Rupert 65 music 84, 136 Muslims 63, 70, 115, 194, 205 Mutianyu 118

Nanjing, Jiangsu 61 Nanning, Guangxi 22 National Day 79–80, 81, 88 National People’s Congress (NPC) 48 Nationwide 11 nepotism 155 New China news agency (Xinhua) 20, 153, 193 New Otani Hotel, Shanghai 205 New Year’s Eve 116 New York Times, The 140, 142, 144 Newsweek 116 Ningbo, Zhejiang 124, 125 Nixon, Richard 118 North Korean refugees 192 nuclear power 125

O’Donnell, Lynne 179 O’Donohue, Con 89, 104, 164, 217 Olympic Games 3, 83, 175, 194 one-child policy 202 opera 4, 79, 93, 136–7, 143

Panchen Lama 127 pandas 50 Parker, Bernie 218 parks and gardens see Beihai Park; Ritan Park; Summer Palace; Suzhou; Yu Yuan Pavarotti, Luciano 136–7 Peace Hotel (Cathay) 32–3, 52, 103, 200, 205, 208–9

Index

Peacock, Andrew 84 peasants 22, 25, 49, 126, 176, 185, 187 income 50, 186 Pei, I.M. 18 Peking Duck 16–7, 74 Peking Hotel 13, 26, 31, 36–7, 109, 206 Peking Opera Company 93, 143 Penn, Patricia 11 People’s Armed Police 27, 34, 41, 53 People’s Heroes Monument 6, 154 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 13, 48, 79, 82, 84, 91, 155 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 78, 81 Pessin, Alan 158 Philippines 90, 108, 114–5 Phua, Willi 64, 70, 92, 94, 121 Pingshuo, Shanxi 77 pollution 1, 34, 58, 61, 71, 105, 188 poplar trees 58 population 186 floating 185, 202 foreign 190, 197 middle class 179 pornography 55, 67 poverty 186–7, 208 press see foreign correspondents; journalists Pringle, James 38, 116 profit motive 85 Pu Jie, brother of Pu Yi 99, 100 Pu Yi, Emperor 99, 100 Public Security Bureau 96, 103, 141 Pudong, Shanghai 200–2, 204

Qantas 21, 74, 114 Qi Jia Yuan, compound 3, 17, 127, 129, 136, 191 Qian Long, Emperor 191 Qiao Shi, secret police chief 158 Qin, Emperor 68–9, 71 Qing Dynasty 45, 99 Qinshan, Zhejiang 125 Quanzhou, Fujian 101, 110 Queen Elizabeth 172, 181, 201 Queensland 20, 21, 22, 38

Radic, Therese 134 Radio Australia 81, 153, 159, 205

225

Radio Beijing 97, 179 Reagan, President Ronald 40–1, 61, 91, 92, 129 Red Guards 5, 12, 49, 56, 132 religion 70 see also Buddhism; Catholic Church; Christianity; Islam repression 24, 25, 33, 133, 171 Republic of China (ROC) see Taiwan responsibility system 48, 59, 125 restaurants 5, 23, 44, 59, 93, 109, 116, 127, 182, 203 Reuters 116, 130 Rimmer, Gordon xiii Ritan Park, Beijing 184, 189 Rolls Royce/Bentley Beijing 180–1 Rothfield, Evelyn and Norman 127, 130 Russia (Soviet Union) 37, 82, 93, 115 relations with China 68, 85–6, 108 Russian Embassy 109 diplomats 86–7, 109, 161 Ryan, Damien 11 Ryckmans, Pierre 189

St Joseph’s Cathedral, Tianjin 56–7 Sanlitun, district 7, 191 Schauble, John 194–5 schools, Chinese 19 Schultz, George 41 Science Show 20 secret societies 45 security 140 Shaanxi Province 44, 140, 142 Shandong Province 183 Shanghai 16, 17, 29, 31, 32–3, 38, 41, 42, 52, 55, 61, 101, 104, 129, 153, 200–10 see also Jinjiang Hotel; Peace Hotel; Pudong Bund 32–3, 200, 201, 205, 207 French Concession 52, 119, 203, 208 Nanjing Road 208 People’s Square 202 population 17, 101, 202 pollution 188 Urban Planning Centre 202 Xintiandi 203 Shanghai and Hong Kong Bank 33, 59 Shanghai Club 29–30, 33, 201 Shanghai Daily 185

226

Index

Shanghai Grand Theatre 203, 204 Shanghai Museum 202 Shanxi Province 75–8, 142 Shen Hui, business woman 179–80 Shenyang, Liaoning 61 Shenzhen, Guangdong 64, 158 shepherds 16 Shouting from China see Chung, Helene Shouxian, Shanxi 77 Sichuan Province 48–51, 49, 50, 142 Sihanouk, Prince Norodom 39, 137–8 Sin, Jaime Cardinal 90, 91 Sincere Co. 202 Singapore 11, 70 Sirocco, folk group 83 snow 16 South China Morning Post 127, 131, 143, 195–6, 214 South Lake, Zhejiang 119 Soviet Union see Russia Special Broadcasting Service ix Special Economic Zones 64, 103 ‘spiritual pollution’ 82 sport see also Olympic Games awards 83–4 badminton 97 cricket 39–40 golf 172 ice hockey 87, 109 skating 16, 112, 174 soccer 7, 177 table tennis 30 tennis 68 Sports News 83 spring 38, 45 spying 63, 117, 140, 142, 189, 194 State Security Ministry 142 State Security Police 28 Stewart, Ken and Annette 103, 138, 218 students 5, 31, 32, 46, 102, 115, 131, 153, 154–7 see also Australia — Chinese Australian 45, 46, 102, 103 living conditions 46–7 Summer Palace 148, 149 Summer Palace, old 115, 116, 159 Sun Yat-sen 81 suits 24, 25, 30 supermarkets 191

Suzhou, Jiangsu 54, 101, 104–6 gardens 104, 105 Sydney 114, 161, 175, 202 Powerhouse Museum 203

T’ai Chi 69 Taishan (Toisan), Guangdong 4, 63 Taiwan 51, 81, 125, 136, 156 Taiyuan, Shanxi 75, 76, 142 Tang Dynasty 68, 190 Tanzanian Embassy 58 Tasmania 61, 63, 101, 110 State Archives of ix The University of xiii, 149 taxis 1, 22, 32, 127, 177, 182, 200, 208 Taylor, Elizabeth 36 teachers and teaching 31, 32, 80–1, 132 television 67–8, 79, 80, 88, 90, 92, 155, 157, 120 Temple of Heaven, Beijing 16 Temple of the Reclining Buddha, Beijing 15 Terrill, Ross 91 terrorism 10, 63, 75, 172, 205 Terzani, Tiziano 19 Thatcher, Prime Minister Margaret 87, 107–8 theatre and drama 82–3, 84, 190 This Day Tonight xiii Thorpe, John and Susan 131, 133, 218 Tian Qiao Theatre, Beijing 136 Tiananmen massacre 1, 5, 122, 157, 170, 177, 200 Tiananmen Square 5–6, 12–3, 79, 80, 88, 93, 107, 152, 153–7, 176 Tianjin 54, 55–6, 58–60, 160 Tibet and Tibetans 6, 127, 157, 171, 196 Time 172 Times, The 89, 203 tourists 6, 35, 44, 56, 61, 154 elderly 51 killed 75 transport 25 see also bicycles; cars buses 2, 3, 53, 76, 78, 103 roads 54, 58, 200 trains 15, 75, 78, 104, 126, 128 water 32, 101, 104, 124

Index

Uighur ethnic minority 2, 194, 205 unemployment 185 United Nations 89 United States see America

Valentine, Roger 40 Valentine, Stuart 40 Victoria 10, 24, 139, 160, 161 State Library of ix Victorian In-service Education Committee 129, 139 Victorian Ministry of Education 139, 160 Vienna, Austria 71 Vietnam War 116 Vietnamese refugees 87 Voice of America 150, 158

Wan Li, Deputy Prime Minister 68, 83 Wang Jing Rong, Public Security spokesman 96, 97 Wang Meng, Culture Minister 151 Wang Xiangwei, editor 196 water buffalo 126 weather 1, 30, 69, 94, 126, 151 Wei Jingsheng, dissident 155, 175 Wen Da, author 100 West Lake, Hangzhou 119, 124 Westfield Corporation 190 Whitehead, Geoffrey 126 Whitlam, Gough 50, 67 Williams, Robyn 20 Willman, Diane 11 Window on the West, restaurant 117 Wing On, department store 202 winter 38, 94, 98 Woodard, Garry 192 work, attitudes to 43–4, 77 Workers’ Stadium 7, 17 World Cup 7, 177, 196, 207 World Trade Centre 63 World Trade Organization 185, 186, 194 World War II 64 Wu Tianming, film director 141, 151 Wutaishan, Shanxi 76, 187

227

Xiamen (Amoy) 101, 103, 110, 148–9 Xian, Shaanxi 44, 68, 70–1, 94, 142, 187, 190 Xian Film Studios 141 Xiang River, Hunan 131 Xin Qiao Hotel, Beijing 93 Xinhua, see New China news agency Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region 62, 63, 115, 194–5, 205 Xinran Xue, author 187 Xu Wenli, dissident 172, 174–5, 178

Yangshan mountains 118 Yangtze River 188 Year of the Rat 14, 16 Yellow River 188 Young Pioneers 22, 27 Yu Yuan (gardens), Shanghai 33, 38, 206–7 Yuan Ming Yuan see Summer Palace, old Yun En Feng, singer 83 Yun, Jackie 207 Yunnan Province 22, 50, 104

Zhang Yimou, film director 141 Zhao Ziyang, Prime Minister 13, 24–5, 48, 49, 78–9, 152, 153 house arrest 122, 171–2 with visitors 20–1, 107 Zhejiang Province 118–9, 120, 124–5, 128, 130, 195 Zheng Jing, broadcaster 180 Zhong Shan Theatre, Beijing 83 Zhongnanhai, CCP headquarters 20–1, 121 Zhongshan, Guangdong 63 Zhoushan, Zhejiang 124

To Badaling (Great Wall) Beijing University

BEIJING

HAIDIAN DISTRICT

Friendship Hotel Beijing Foreign Language Institute

Exhibition Centre Beihai Park To Summer Palace To Fragrant Hills

Imperial Palace Nationalities’ Zhongnanhai Palace Gate of Minzu Heavenly Place Hotel

To Babaoshan Cemetery To Marco Polo Bridge

Radio Beijing

Changan Boulevard (Avenue of Eternal Peace) Great Hall Tiananmen Concert of the People Square Hall

Liulichang

Kentucky Qianmen Fried Chicken

Maxim’s Restaurant

To airport To Mutianyu (Great Wall)

Australian Embassy Sanlitun

Beijing Art Gallery

Shopping

Wangfujing Avenue

Great Wall Hotel

Workers’ Stadium Foreign Ministry Ritan Park

Shopping

Beijing Hotel

Jianguomenwai

Friendship Store

International Club Beijing Railway Station

To Shi Du

Silk Market Jianguo Hotel Qijiayuan

Rolls Royce/ New China Bentley Town

China World

PANDANUS BOOKS Pandanus Books was established in 2001 within the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) at The Australian National University. Concentrating on Asia and the Pacific, Pandanus Books embraces a variety of genres and has particular strength in the areas of biography, memoir, fiction and poetry. As a result of Pandanus’ position within the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the list includes high-quality scholarly texts, several of which are aimed at a general readership. Since its inception, Pandanus Books has developed into an editorially independent publishing enterprise with an imaginative list of titles and high-quality production values.

THE SULLIVAN’S CREEK SERIES The Sullivan’s Creek Series is a developing initiative of Pandanus Books. Extending the boundaries of the Pandanus Books’ list, the Sullivan’s Creek Series seeks to explore Australia through the work of new writers, with particular encouragement to authors from Canberra and the region. Publishing history, biography, memoir, scholarly texts, fiction and poetry, the imprint complements the Asia and Pacific focus of Pandanus Books and aims to make a lively contribution to scholarship and cultural knowledge.

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The Man Who Loved China

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My Fair Lazy

The Lazy Project Manager

Lazy Lions, Lucky Lambs

Maigret and the Lazy Burglar

Jean Of The Lazy A

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Geoffrey A. Landis - Lazy Taekos

Jean of the Lazy A

Jean of the Lazy A

Jean of the Lazy A

Jean of the Lazy A

Maigret and the Lazy Burglar

Court Life In China

Duizend Dagen in China

Een Barbaar In China

Spionage In China

Pollution in China

Duizend Dagen in China

Een barbaar in China

Een Barbaar In China

Duizend Dagen In China

Big in China

Lazy Man In China

Lazy Jack

Lazy Bones

Lazy Taekos

The Man Who Loved China

The Man Who Loved China

The Man Who Loved China

Mistletoe Man (China Bayles Mystery)

My Fair Lazy

The Lazy Project Manager

Lazy Lions, Lucky Lambs

Maigret and the Lazy Burglar

Jean Of The Lazy A

Geoffrey A. Landis - Lazy Taekos

Geoffrey A. Landis - Lazy Taekos

Jean of the Lazy A

Jean of the Lazy A

Jean of the Lazy A

Jean of the Lazy A

Maigret and the Lazy Burglar

Court Life In China

Duizend Dagen in China

Een Barbaar In China

Spionage In China

Pollution in China

Duizend Dagen in China

Een barbaar in China

Een Barbaar In China

Duizend Dagen In China

Big in China

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