How The Globe kept eyes on China from Mao’s time to Xi’s

In the final few days of June, 1966, U.S. newspapers published photos of a 19-year-old Chinese man, surrounded by officers in white uniforms who grasped his elbows and shoulders in restraint.

Yang Kuo-ching had been found guilty of knifing to death two foreigners. His subsequent execution by firing squad was “but one tiny facet of the convulsion that this nation of 700,000,000 is now going through,” journalist David Oancia wrote of the show trial, held before a crowd of 1,300, which he witnessed and photographed.

Oancia’s photos gave startling texture to the opening weeks of China’s violent and cruel Cultural Revolution.

But what made Yang’s trial especially notable was that Oancia was there at all. He was a reporter for The Globe and Mail, which for many years was the only Western newspaper to maintain a presence in the country, lending The Globe and its correspondents global importance.

The Peking bureau, as it was then known, provided a rare vantage point on what was then still a fresh-faced Communist regime.

In the decades that followed, it has been Canada’s most reliable window on China, bringing correspondents and readers into the midst of the country along its error-strewn march toward superpower status.

When Mao Zedong strode to power in 1949, he evicted much of the Western world from his newly minted Red China.

The worst chapters in the country’s modern history went unobserved by much of the outside world, including the Great Leap Forward, a failed economic and social campaign whose privations created a famine that killed many millions and drove some to cannibalism, and the violent gyrations of the Cultural Revolution that followed.

Communist China barred U.S. journalists, in particular, from its soil. It was not until 1978 that the Associated Press resumed its presence in China. Other U.S. journalists began to return the following year.

By then, The Globe could already boast decades of China coverage.

The newspaper’s Beijing bureau was the creation of Oakley Dalgleish, the dashing Globe publisher whose fascination with the rising Communist establishment brought him to Soviet Moscow (where he interviewed Nikita Khrushchev) and then Beijing in the 1950s, where he struck a deal to install a correspondent in China.

The bureau became a springboard to reporting from across Asia, bringing Globe readers to Ulan Bator and Pyongyang, Bandar Seri Begawan and Dharamshala, Bangkok and Yangon.

But China has always been the central story. Globe journalists reported from the rubble of the devastating Tangshan earthquake; from the birthplace of former leader Deng Xiaoping and the village where current President Xi Jinping once lived in a cave; from the hospital room where Mao’s fat grandson endured forced dieting; from an illegal motorcycle market and prison factories; from inside the cloistered grounds of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing; from the mosques, lamaseries and churches where some of the most brutal Chinese policies have gained expression; from the flood waters of the Three Gorges Dam and the timeless landscapes of the Li River; from democracy protests and crackdowns; from the capital punishment execution grounds of Beijing and the harsh spotlights shining on prison-like re-education camps in Xinjiang.

The Globe’s time in China brought with it major misses (understanding the country has never been simple; one correspondent wrongly predicted China would never demand sterilization to meet its reproductive targets), partial accounts of reality (it was only after leaving China for Hong Kong that a Globe correspondent documented food shortages so severe that calcium deficiency left toddlers unable to sit up) and journalistic triumphs (Globe correspondents were in the midst of young Chinese who publicly thirsted for democracy in the 1970s, and then watched a decade later as tanks crushed those dreams around Tiananmen Square).

The Globe was there when millions of Red Guards gathered in Beijing, when U.S. athletes arrived for ping-pong diplomacy, when Richard Nixon came to China, when Ottawa and Beijing consummated the restoration of diplomatic relations, when first Pierre and, later, Justin Trudeau were feted by the Chinese leadership, when shipments of Canadian wheat brought sustenance in time of famine and when Tim Hortons and Canada Goose built outlets to profit from the immense new wealth of Chinese consumers.

It all began with Dalgleish, an ardent advocate of official diplomatic recognition for Mao’s China. “There is no basis whatever for continuing to rope off China and make an enemy where, I am convinced, an enemy does not exist,” he said upon his return from a 1958 visit in which he pleaded for a bureau in a meeting with Chen Yi, then China’s foreign minister and vice-premier. A 1959 announcement about the opening of the Beijing bureau noted The Globe’s belief that “China might well hold the key to future peace.”

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In the 1950s, the paper was insatiably keen to witness what Mao had wrought.

It dispatched London reporter William Kinmond on a 1957 trip to China that lasted nearly four months and took him on an 11,000-kilometre voyage from Hong Kong to the north and west of the country, before ending at Taipei. It was a preview of the decades to come, which saw Globe correspondents roaming the farthest reaches of the country.

Subsequent negotiations for the first resident Globe correspondent spanned nearly 14 months. Chinese authorities rejected the newspaper’s first two choices for the position.

Beijing wanted to ensure The Globe’s coverage was written by a naïf, unschooled in the country and less likely to see through its carefully constructed facades.

“We learned that anyone who had experience in China (pre- or post-revolutionary), anyone with knowledge of the language (unless a Party nominee), was unlikely to be welcome,” Dalgleish wrote later.

Even after securing agreement to make Australian Frederick Nossal the first Globe correspondent in 1959, the inaugural Beijing bureau lasted just six months. Chinese authorities refused to renew Nossal’s visa, ensuring his expulsion just weeks after the arrival of his wife and four children, including five-year-old twins. Beijing could point to no specific reason, claiming only that his reports “had not been, in all respects, accurate.”

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It took nearly four years for China to allow another Globe correspondent to return. By then, Beijing was prepared to send one of its own to Canada.

China allowed The Globe into Beijing only on the condition that Ottawa open its own borders to a Chinese journalist. In July, 1964, the New China News Agency – now better known as Xinhua – sent to Ottawa its inaugural Canadian correspondent, Pu Chao-min.

Pu cut an unusual figure in Canada. Ottawa required him to secure permission before leaving the capital, since Globe correspondents could not travel freely in China. He brought Canada into the Chinese press, filing articles about the spread of Maoist thought in Canada. Nonetheless, he received great warmth from The Globe, whose editors personally welcomed him.

“This was not just an ordinary journalist,” John Fraser, The Globe’s Beijing bureau chief from 1977 to 1979, recalled years later. “This was the highest-ranking Chinese Communist Party member to be in North America.”

It was not until many years later that a more detailed picture of Pu’s full importance to Beijing came into focus.

Canadian security services identified him as an operative of the United Front, a shadowy and powerful organization dedicated to furthering the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. Even under RCMP surveillance, he occasionally managed to evade his followers, crossing the Ottawa River to hold meetings in the forests of Quebec, security sources told The Globe in 2000. China wanted Canada’s nuclear-energy secrets, and it is believed Pu was charged with securing them.

In 1985, a University of Toronto engineering scholar was shocked to find a near-perfect replica of a Canadian research reactor in China.

Pu was only part of that effort. But had The Globe not struck a deal to go to China, it’s doubtful he would have been in Canada.

For The Globe, the Beijing post was a coveted prize. In establishing the bureau, the newspaper also created a “Peking service” to distribute, and profit from, the unique coverage its correspondents provided. Users included The New York Times, the Vancouver Sun, the London Daily Mail, Le Figaro and other publications in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany and Australia.

In 1968, Globe correspondent Colin McCullough submitted photos of then-premier Zhou Enlai and other top political and military leaders, which he had snapped during a visit by an Albanian delegation to Beijing. “Some of these Chinese leaders have seldom, if ever, been photographed for publication in the West,” a Globe telegraph noted.

Three years later, The New York Times cabled Toronto with an all-capitals request, days before then-correspondent Norman Webster would cover one of the most important diplomatic breakthroughs of the 20th century: “Anticipating Webster will photograph American pingpongists in Peking, would you rush us enlargements of his best pictures plus contact sheets?”

Webster sent out the pictures via Shanghai and Paris. “Hope it gets to you,” he wrote the Toronto editors. “Should be first film out if it does.”

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Being witness to history came with its own struggles, particularly for writers more at ease behind a typewriter than a lens. Worse were the dirty tricks. “Although you may have to take plenty of duds to get a couple of good pictures, you run a good chance of getting nothing back from the developers but the duds,” Webster lamented in early 1970. At least seven of his frames, he said, had “been deliberately washed out.”

Photography, too, brought different people into the pages of The Globe. Many correspondents worked alongside spouses to both take pictures and document their reporting, including Fraser’s wife, Elizabeth MacCallum. She received tiny-type credit for her images in the newspaper, but recalls editors whose attitudes created a club of “angry Beijing wives.” Some were themselves journalists. But their work in China was hobbled by the jealousies of a newspaper that coveted the work of its unique bureau. Editors bristled at the thought of competitors benefiting from the work of spouses The Globe had placed in China. “The Globe and Mail doesn’t care about your wife,” Fraser says an editor once told him.

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From 1959 until today, The Globe has dispatched just one woman to China: Jan Wong, a one-time Maoist who was the newspaper’s first Mandarin-speaking Beijing correspondent. By the time she arrived in the city for The Globe in 1988, the bureau had been open for nearly 30 years.

A few years earlier, Fraser had played a unique role in his reporting from a democracy wall that appeared in Beijing, when he forged an intensely personal connection to those who, for a time, gathered to imagine a different political future for their country.

Wong documented the devastating conclusion of that era, first from Tiananmen Square and then from a room in the Beijing Hotel, where she timed the long volleys of shots as soldiers gunned down students with copper-jacketed bullets and anti-aircraft machine guns. She watched as a man stood before a row of tanks, one of the most indelible images of modern China. After the shooting stopped, she set out to document its toll, interviewing two people who survived being run over by tanks – one with crushed legs, one with a mangled arm and an ear torn from his body – as well as soldiers who had shed their uniforms in shame and even a high-ranking general who made a remarkable admission. “Deng Xiaoping didn’t handle it properly,” he told her. “It was a mistake.”

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Wong’s reporting benefited from her skill and curiosity, but also from a growing Chinese openness to the outside world.

The first correspondents were constrained so tightly that they could not even access state media from provinces outside Beijing; they cultivated informants for their ability to deliver information on the going price of food. The requirement for permission to leave the capital was rescinded only ahead of the 2008 Olympics.

Today, the state finds its most intrusive expression in digital surveillance that monitors communication and cameras equipped with facial recognition that can frustrate attempts to conduct journalism undetected. Sneaking into rural China – such as The Globe’s efforts to document the mass internment of largely Muslim people in Xinjiang – has grown more difficult even as travel has grown easier on silken highways and space-age trains.

Being in China has nonetheless allowed correspondents to touch history in often unique ways. John Burns secured the chopsticks used by Richard Nixon during his history-making trip to China.

In 1976, after the death of Mao, The Globe sent to the Great Hall of the People a large wreath, draped in a ribbon inked with handwritten characters: “In memory of the great leader Chairman Mao.”

“Under no circumstances publish this picture, but please send me one print of it,” Ross Munro, the correspondent at the time, wrote in a note accompanying photos of the wreath, suggesting he recognized the delicate nature of commemorating a man who was both chief architect of Red China and head executioner of millions.

Through it all, the parsing of Chinese affairs has remained little changed. Indeed, a time-travelling correspondent from the 1950s would be startled by the familiarity of working in modern-day China: in the struggle against misunderstanding (one correspondent recounted a trip in which a local official was constantly addressed, in English, as the “Chief of Intercourse”); in the shadow-chasing hunt for information; in the reliance on local Chinese reporters whose personal risk-taking and vital contributions often went uncredited; and in the nights rendered sleepless by work in a time zone situated for maximum incompatibility.

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The quotidian absurdities, too, have remained familiar. Allen Abel described in 1984 a day in the Beijing bureau:

6 a.m. – Awaken gently to murmur of construction men battering sewer pipe outside bedroom window. Check Telex machine for effusive praise from Toronto office. None.

10 a.m. – Housekeeper reports death of washing machine.

2 p.m. – Dispatch translator, housekeeper, driver in car to find part for washing machine.

3 p.m. – Press briefing by Information Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Two hundred correspondents await announcement on Sino-Soviet relations, Vietnam border dispute, changes in Central Committee of Communist Party. Announcement: China to send fisheries delegation to Equatorial Guinea. End briefing.

4 p.m. – Staff returns from search. Good news: washing machine can be fixed. Bad news: toilet broken.

7:30 [p.m.] – Chinese secret contact phones. Speak in whispers. “The usual place.” Meet secret contact. Secret contact wants new pair of tennis shoes.

10 p.m. – Spray cockroach killer down drains, under fridge, into closets, through rattan carpet. Check Telex machine for effusive praise from home office. Retire contritely.

It is, with only the most minor of alterations, an account that could have been written by generations of Globe correspondents.

Through those tangles of daily life, many Globe correspondents have won National Newspaper Awards for their reporting from Beijing, including Oancia, Webster (after whom the award is now named), Wong, Miro Cernetig, Geoffrey York, Mark MacKinnon and me.

But, nearly 65 years after the expulsion of Nossal, The Globe is once again without a correspondent in China. The paper’s current Beijing bureau chief, James Griffiths, works from Hong Kong, unable to secure a visa as friction and suspicion fray relations between Canada and China.

History echoes.

After his departure, Nossal described the polite frigidity toward foreign correspondents from those he encountered, who treated them as “a quite unnecessary evil which had been imposed on them by sheer misfortune.” It prompted a question for him: “Why did they allow reporters in at all?”

A quarter-century later, Abel ruminated on the same, pondering the inscrutability of a posting whose importance has, since its inception, been wrapped in tangles of diplomatic messiness and journalistic ambition, between the kind embrace of the Chinese people and the iron dictates of the state that rules their lives.

“This is how it goes for the Peking bureau,” Abel wrote in 1984: “feast and falsehood, light and shadow, a grasping at chimerical straws.”

Nathan VanderKlippe is an international correspondent at The Globe and Mail.

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