around Fish
The Mainland Section of the American Consulate General in Hong Kong was the China Watching headquarters of the world during the 1960s. Without diplomatic relations for more than ten years, all Americans could do was watch and listen. The three-story office building on Garden Road (still there, and larger) housed a staff of several hundred, many of whom were assigned to collecting and assembling data on the People’s Republic and guessing what it meant. Other sections did consular work, facilitated U.S. trade with Hong Kong and Macao, and took care of American citizens.
A newly minted language officer, I showed up for work at Garden Road in February 1964. As luck would have it, a shortage of analysts gave me a rare opportunity to choose the field I wanted to cover. China’s external affairs were hot. These were the peak years of Sino-Soviet polemics, month after month of propaganda broadsides exchanged between Moscow and Beijing, richly detailed and highly insulting barrages of invective between rival approaches to Communism (Khrushchev’s “revisionists” and Mao’s Stalinists). Dirty laundry about the relationship, collecting since the Soviets pulled their technical experts out of China in 1960, was now washed in the public media.
By comparison, domestic politics seemed cool and dry, but I was attracted by the opportunity to learn the names of China’s players and the system that they had built. I wanted to get the most out of Chinese language capability so arduously acquired over the past two years. My choice of internal affairs turned out to be momentous.
The process of watching China was, and still is, labor intensive. My colleagues and I read every newspaper we could get our hands on, including provincial publications smuggled into the colony wrapped around fish. Native linguists listened to every radio broadcast, from every province. Refugees were debriefed and their stories written up.
I was to sit each day at the end of a conveyor belt of such data, tasked to convert it into meaning. More than 90 percent of the material we analyzed was in the public domain. Clandestine sources and methods existed, to be sure, but their yield was limited. Our starting points were the prevalent slogans and the jargon of daily political discourse in the official media. Any deviation or repositioned language meant something. We felt like subscribers to a dull and repetitive orchestra that played the same pieces day after day. We listened for squeaks from the oboes or sour notes from the horns, changes of rhythm or volume, all potential indicators of debate or shifts in policy.
The reading skills I had acquired worked as a rough strainer. I could scan People’s Daily editorials quickly, moving smoothly through the set rhetoric. The formulations I could not understand right away signaled what was new and needed analysis. The Consulate General had a staff of translators I could consult, as well as a towering Manchu-language teacher named Tang Hung (also a fine painter), with whom I could discuss new terminology.
The Importance of Being Literate
Chinese literature provided a crucial code to political expression and debate in the Mainland. Editorials were shot through with references to figures and stories from great classical novels of Chinese literature. The plots and characters of The Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, to name a few, were embedded in the upbringing of every educated Chinese, whatever his or her politics. In particular, The Three Kingdoms, a fourteenth-century novel of struggle and statecraft set around 200 AD, represented an encyclopedia of every political and military ploy in the Chinese lexicon, as well as many of the plots in Chinese opera. If you had not read this book, you simply could not decipher the editorials. Other classics, including Confucius’ Analects and Sun Zi’s Art of War, also helped. These had been assigned reading during our training years. The time we had spent in Taiwan acquiring and reading pirated English translations of these works—one could buy the entire Encyclopedia Britannica for $18—turned out to have been invaluable.
In this most closed of systems, all serious political attacks were masked in cultural allegory. As we will see later, the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution was fired in a Shanghai editorial panning the revival of an opera lionizing an official fearless enough to criticize his emperor. The reviewer was aiming at contemporary political leaders who had crossed Chairman Mao.
In 1964 and most of 1965, the China we were watching was quiet on the surface. I wrote learned dispatches, called “airgrams,” sent by diplomatic pouch to Washington each week on some aspect of the domestic political scene, from party politics to population control. I learned the traditional tools of the China-Watching trade and the names and histories of the leadership.
The Politics of Night Soil
Culture was an important part of my portfolio. One of my reports covered the Festival of Peking Opera on Revolutionary Themes, which took place in Peking during the summer of 1964. In June, Madame Mao, under wraps for decades, made her first public speech at this event. “Do you eat?” Madame Mao asked her audience of theater professionals and officials from the Ministry of Culture, as reported in the People’s Daily. “That food came from the farmers! So serve the farmers in your plays and operas.”
One work that drew rave notices in the People’s Daily was a one act opera called The Bucket. Here’s how it went:
The curtain opens. A bucket sits center stage, nothing else. It contains night soil, the contents of the family chamber pots and privy, a valuable commodity in rural China.
Enter stage left the virtuous wife (cymbals, squealing strings, and woodwinds), who sings a fervent aria describing her plans to spread the contents of the bucket on the communal fields to increase production for the benefit of the revolution. Cheers.
Enter stage right the husband (Chinese Communist theater conventions, like our TV sitcoms, usually portray the male in the buffoon or bourgeois villain role). His aria describes the advantages of dumping the bucket on the family private plot to improve vegetable yields and their personal earnings. Boos, hisses.
The husband and wife sing a competitive duet, each grasping their side of the bucket. A tug of war ensues (drums, cymbals, gongs, flutes).
Enter center stage rear the mother-in-law, who casts the deciding vote in favor of fertilizing the communal fields. Curtain, applause.
Though the allocation of human fertilizer was a real issue in the Chinese countryside, I found this grungy debate in classical opera form ridiculous, even hilarious, a view shared by Seymour Topping, the New York Times Hong Kong bureau chief, who wrote it up after I briefed him. So did a number of Chinese officials, we later learned. This turned out to be a big mistake, probably the biggest of their lives. For Madame Mao’s revolutionary operas, plays, films, and ballets––works like The Red Detachment of Women, White-Haired Girl, and Red Lantern––would be the only sanctioned entertainment for years to come. She had convinced Mao that this was a vital way to purify the thoughts of the Chinese people.
The festival turned out to be a harbinger of big trouble, of which we had no inkling then.
A Collegial Rumor Mill
China Watching was intensely and competitively collegial. Visiting diplomats whose governments had embassies in Beijing became treasured sources and friends. Journalists with special knowledge and good contacts as well as scholars with relevant research projects were courted for what they knew. No passing traveler to or from China had to worry about where his next meal was coming from. It did not matter who or what you were, whether government official, newsman, or trader, if you had some knowledge or connection to offer, you were welcome at the table, literally. At regular lunches, organized by my colleagues and me, we chewed over different lines of analysis and traded bits of intelligence.
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