In the 1970's and early 1980's much reporting in China especially in more remote areas was possible only in groups. The Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would arrange the tours in consultation with local "Waiban" or foreign affairs offices.

 The tour pictured above was to Datong, a city in Shanxi province just inside the Great Wall from Inner Mongolia. At the time: summer 1982, the local Waiban had organized visits to the Datong Steam Locomotive Factory which was the last factory in China to build steam engines based on a 1950's Soviet design.

The Beijing based journalists pictured include Liu Hengsheng of the Associate Press (standing) (In 2001, he was head of Corporate Relations in Beijing for News Corporation) and Melinda Liu (Newsweek), Jonathan Broder (Chicago Tribune) and Sandy Gilmore of NBC.

Journalist tours organized by the Chinese government often produced stories that were nearly identical to each other and rather embarrassing at that. 

In the summer of 1981, Frank Ching of the Wall Street Journal, Takashi Oka, of the Christian Science Monitor and I all traveled on officially sanctioned tours at different times to Urumqi in western Xinjiang.The local "waiban" chose the people we could interview. Interviewing those not authorized, we knew, could land the hapless subjects in trouble.

Our stories from Xinjiang were meant to reflect how the Uighur minority peoples were faring under Han Chinese rule. Later we discovered we had all been led to interview the same Uighur woman. Our accounts of Uighur life in Urumqi were nearly same, even down to the same carefully rehearsed quotations." 

(Come back to this section in the future for more reminiscences of China in the 70's and early 80's)

Before I got to China in 1978, I wrote extensively on the subject for the Far Eastern Economic Review. The following two stories from 1974 are worth noting for an early perspective on George Bush -later to become U-S President and a fast friend of China. 

Also on the U-S balancing act conducted in the days after President Richard Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China and in the days less than two years before the death of Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

Previous Page  Next Page