John Burns
For nearly 40 years roving the Earth with a notebook in the pocket of my oil-stained trench coat, it has been my guilty secret: I never planned to be a foreign correspondent, much less a correspondent in Mao Zedong's China, then about as enticing to me as the far side of the moon.
That all changed when Pierre Trudeau threw a punch at me - actually, several punches - in the government lobby of the House of Commons in Ottawa. The time was October, 1970, at the height of the War Measures Act crisis, and Mr. Trudeau was at the height of his powers as prime minister. I was just 26, assigned as one of The Globe and Mail's parliamentary correspondents to cover the Prime Minister's Office.
It was a mismatch in more ways than one. Mr. Trudeau was a black belt in the martial arts, and he caught me unawares, knocking me backward and down into an overstuffed leather armchair. His press secretary, Roméo LeBlanc, later to be governor-general, had whispered in the prime ministerial ear that I was trying to eavesdrop as Mr. Trudeau briefed a cluster of Liberal backbenchers on the latest turn of events in the Quebec kidnappings.
In fact, I was trying to get Mr. Trudeau's attention to ask a question. But the upshot was a flurry of unwanted headlines, including one in The Toronto Star, and an order from the Commons Speaker banning me from the precincts of Parliament. That was quickly rescinded when one of the Liberal backbenchers took my side of the story to the Speaker, but by then The Globe's managing editor, Clark Davey, had summoned me to Toronto.
"It's plain you can't go on working in Ottawa," he said.
So what, then, I asked? Halifax? Winnipeg? Saskatoon?
"No, we're sending you to China."
And so it was, on an overcast day in May, 1971, that I crossed the covered wooden bridge leading from Hong Kong's New Territories into the People's Republic of China, then in the midst of the often-violent upheaval known as the Cultural Revolution.
It was not a promising start. Midway across the bridge, I met a dispirited fellow - in a trench coat, I swear - who identified himself as a German correspondent based in China, then one of a tiny crew of Western reporters based in Peking. (Yes, Peking: When we English-speakers start calling the capital of Rome "Roma," and the capital of Russia "Moskva," I'll make the change. But Peking it was to me then, and Peking it remains.)
The sad-eyed German fellow had some ominous advice. "Turn around!" he said. "Go back! It's crazy where you're going! Save yourself now!" With that, he lumbered off toward Hong Kong, never to be seen again within the precincts of Mao's dominion.
I headed north, glancing back as I did so, thinking, "What a sorry fellow - 45 years old, minimum. Way past his bedtime. Won't catch me bellying up to the bar when I'm that old. This is a young man's game."
As I write, more than 38 years later, I am still roaming the Earth, covering wars and other mayhem, though now from the safe aerie of a base in London. Next month, I will have completed 34 of those years at The New York Times, almost all of it as a foreign correspondent, most recently as bureau chief for five years in Baghdad.
All of this I owe to The Globe and that serendipitous decision all those years ago by Clark Davey, choosing a reporter with no knowledge of Chinese, and little of China's turbulent history, for the only bureau any of the Western world's newspapers had in Peking.
In a sense, too, I suppose, I owe a debt of gratitude to Pierre Trudeau, with whom I buried the hatchet during my four Globe years in China when he made a prime ministerial visit and invited me to join him one day for a trip across Tiananmen Square in the Red Flag limousine provided by his hosts. Recalling our fistfight, we shook hands.
'By negative example'
More than most professions, I'd hazard, reporting is a matter of learning by doing, and China taught me some basic lessons that I've tried to abide by ever since. The first of these was a Westernized version of a Maoist practice known as "education by negative example."
As the Communist leaders of that time used it, it was a tool of political and commercial alchemy, best illustrated when Mao's nominated successor, Lin Biao, failed in an abortive coup in the autumn of 1971 and died in a crash in Mongolia while fleeing to the Soviet Union in an aircraft that ran out of fuel. Millions of copies of Mr. Lin's speeches and thoughts were in the state bookshops, and remained there, with the simple expedient of a brown-paper wrapper marked, "Sold at half price for education by negative example."
In my case, the lesson I turned on its head was the one pressed on me by some of America's most famous Sinologists when I visited them ahead of my Peking assignment.
"Never forget that you're an ignorant foreign boy," they said, or more emollient words to the same effect. "No more than a spattering of Chinese. No advanced degree in Chinese studies. In fact, not much of anything by way of qualifications."
Their conclusion: Don't rely on your own judgment, since you very likely don't have any. Trust the Chinese. Judge them by their standards and values, not yours. In other words - words I first heard years later from a frustrated American diplomat speaking of similar attitudes among the State Department's China experts - "check your brains at the border."
And I did, at least for a while. On my first night in China, in Canton, I saw a body floating face down in the Pearl River near my hotel. "What's that all about?" I asked my guide from the New China Travel Agency.
"Maybe he fell in the river," he said.
"But his head has been bashed in," I said.
"Never mind," the guide replied after a pause for thought. "Perhaps he fell down and banged his head before he fell in the water."
It was a conversation that set the paradigm for much that followed. When the Foreign Ministry arranged a visit to a labour camp outside Peking, I met a prominent nuclear physicist assigned to swilling out pig pens on a collective farm, who told me all he knew of any value came from being reduced to a lowly worker.
When preparing to gate-crash the Peking marathon in 1973, running through the city streets at dawn, I passed a public security-bureau compound where, regularly, there was a staccato of rifle fire, followed by pistol shots. When I told my interpreter I thought I was hearing executions, he said, "No, maybe rifle practice."
When I suggested that rifle practice would involve repeated bursts of gunfire, not just one, he paused like the man in Canton. "Perhaps they have very few bullets," he said.
Again, it was a providential encounter with a Canadian, this time an army sergeant working as a mechanic at the embassy, who helped to reset my course during that first year. "You the reporter fellow that puts that stuff in The Globe and Mail?" he asked as he worked on the newspaper's Volkswagen Beetle.
"Yes, I am," I said.
"You write rubbish," he said, dispensing with courtesy. "This place is one vast prison camp, but I don't read that in the paper."
That set me to thinking, and to the realization that for all I lacked in a scholarly Chinese education, I had one unarguable advantage over the scholars in America, many of them then busy approving the Cultural Revolution as "a great and noble human experiment." As one of them had assured me, I had two eyes and two ears, and I was living in China, under tight restraints from the government, to be sure, but free to jump on my bicycle at any time and wander out into the China that was at my doorstep.
Little as I was seeing of the whole country, it was more, far more, than those from afar who judged themselves experts. If the Chinese jigsaw had 2,500 pieces, and I had only a few dozen of them, it was enough, often, to reach toward the truth. If the eye was amber and the tail was striped, it was almost sure to be a tiger. If the rifle shots sounded like drumhead executions, they probably were; the Chinese themselves later admitted that millions had died violently during the Cultural Revolution.
The lesson may seem nihilistic as far as scholarship is concerned, but it isn't. Scholars and those who write great books are an invaluable fount of knowledge. I learned more about China from Barbara Tuchman's biography of General Joseph (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell, Sand against the Wind, than anything else I read. But a reporter who abandons his own counsel, tested daily by putting his feet on the ground, will founder quickly.
'Serious warnings'
Once I had learned that lesson, I began to make some headway, or so I would like to think. To be sure, the Foreign Ministry took umbrage in a frighteningly disconcerting manner, summoning me in the small hours of the morning on repeated occasions for "serious warnings" delivered in empty rooms decorated only with a portrait of Mao.
"You have insulted the leadership of the People's Republic of China, and abused the hospitality of the Chinese people!" the guardians of the official truths shouted. "Do you have anything to say?"
And then the details of the indictment: Why had I written about millions of Chinese snoozing through their working days in the beloved habit of xiu-xi (pronounced shew-shee), disregarding the Stakhanovite productivity legends put about by the Communist Party?
Why had I written about the 1,101 ways that the chairmen of revolutionary committees had of lying, when it was "well known to one and all" that Chairman Mao commanded all to tell the truth?
Why had I mocked the national airline for depositing me for days in the airport of some far-flung provincial city when what I had paid for was a flight to Shanghai? And so on.
But with all this, there was another truth, decisive for me on that first assignment in China, as it has been since in a career spent, largely, in some of the world's nastiest - in the sense of politically repressive - places: Just as it was impossible to ignore the misery of much that was commanded by the rulers of China (ditto South Africa under apartheid, the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev and a host of other places and periods since), it was impossible not to embrace the wonders of Chinese culture and the boundless generosity and goodwill of ordinary Chinese people.
And guess what? The combination of those two approaches, in the end, proved not only a formula for personal happiness in a hard place at a hard time, but expedient too: Many of those in the Chinese hierarchy, at least at the level where I operated, proved in time to have seen things no differently than I did.
When I returned to China in 1984 for The New York Times, one of the officials who summoned me for those serious warnings took me out to dinner in a smoky inn near the Foreign Ministry.
"Why didn't you expel me?" I asked.
"Because you were writings things we thought, but couldn't say," he said. "Privately, we were cheering you on."
John Burns is London bureau chief of The New York Times.