Comparing 1954's China with Today's

[Randy W]

An interesting article in the NY Times, with good photos, if you have access, comparing the author's father's experience as a journalist in the 1950's with her own experience more recently. Unfortunately paywalled.

 

EDIT: Check pdf link in 2nd post

 

Hope, Despair, Control:

• The 1950s China My Father Saw, Echoed Today

 

 

 

A selection of images from my father’s reporting trips, including one of a Chinese peasant in the Tibetan foothills and another of families of Chinese fisherman who, my father wrote, "crowd into Hong Kong to escape harsh attempts to make them join People’s Communes.”William Stevenson

 

William Stevenson was one of the first foreign correspondents to visit the People’s Republic of China. Decades later, despite its transformation, I recognize the same country.

By Alexandra StevensonJuly 31, 2020

 

 

SHENZHEN-HONG KONG BORDER — The bridge was only 20 yards long, but it was the longest journey of my father’s life. Holding a flimsy piece of paper with a Swiss watermark and Chinese characters, he crossed the bridge from the British colony of Hong Kong into Mao’s China, one of the first foreign correspondents to report on a country largely unknown to the rest of the world in 1954. The paper was his golden ticket.

Some six decades later, I found myself staring out at the same footbridge from the other side.

In mainland China on my own coveted journalism visa, I peeked out through the metal bars separating me from Hong Kong, now a semiautonomous territory of China. The closest my father had previously come to China was approaching this bridge to meet missionaries who, he wrote, stumbled “out of the Chinese Revolution with tragic tales fully confirmed by their emaciated bodies and haggard eyes.”

As the bamboo gate swung closed behind him, my father put one foot down on Chinese soil and looked up to see a simple mud village at the precipice of a new era. Decades later, I looked back to see a different view altogether: a towering skyline of glass and metal with one of the world’s tallest buildings in a city going through its own dramatic transformation.

It was almost impossible to get to China from the West at the start of Mao’s rule. The country had declared itself the People’s Republic of China five years earlier, and it was the early days of the Cold War that divided Communist countries from Western democracies.

 

. . .

 

His first trip to China spanned two months and thousands of miles. He met Mao Zedong (whom he tapped on the shoulder from behind his camera, mistaking the chairman for a “humble courtier” blocking his shot) and Zhou Enlai, the premier and foreign minister at the time. But he also talked with factory workers, actors, newspaper editors and shop owners.

He described being filled with hope for the human spirit he witnessed. But he also felt despair because a government-provided handler was never too far away, ready to silence anyone who veered too far from the Communist Party line.

China defied any broad-brush statement. “And yet,” he wrote in one notebook, “under the current leadership, the way in which the government silences alternative points of view makes it hard not to.”

A version of this exists today. I have a long list of names of people who wouldn’t talk to me because I work for The New York Times, portrayed in Chinese state media as the source of “smears and lies.” Sources I’ve interviewed privately are later threatened by the local police, while stridently nationalist rhetoric dominates the state media.

 

 

[Randy W]

A pdf link

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lCvxxPGirM13iDbuuccz6lw-rXue3NEy/view?usp=drivesdk