Changing Public Perceptions of : Nixon to Obama Introduction by Ambassador Richard H. Solomon Moderated by Mike Chinoy, Senior Fellow, USC U.S.-China Institute

 Marcus Brauchli, Executive Editor, The Washington Post  Jim Laurie, President, Focus Asia Productions HK Ltd.  Melinda Liu, Bureau Chief, Newsweek  James Mann, Foreign Policy Institute Author-in-Residence, Johns Hopkins SAIS  Jerrold Schecter, Chairman, Schecter Communications

[VIDEO]

There are 700 million Chinese today and they are targeted to hate. Their growing power is the world's greatest threat to peace and light.

CHINA The Roots of Madness

Conceived and Written by THEODORE H. WHITE

It all began in mystery and goes on today in mystery, but they must be brought to recognize that they are the biggest factor in the world's disorder, and we must untangle the madness of their mind.

1972

PRESIDENT : The government of the People's Republic of China and the government of the have had great differences and we will have differences in the future. But what we must do is to find a way to say that we can have differences without being enemies in war.

BARBARA WALTERS: I knew nothing about China. I remember when we got off the plane, it was like landing on the moon.

CBS SPECIAL REPORT

This is a CBS News Special Report

The President in China

Banquet in the Great Hall

1979

China's Vice-Premier, , who spent most of the day in Houston, arrived in Seattle tonight where he'll spend the final two days of his American tour before returning to Peking Monday. Jen [INDISCERNIBLE] has been traveling with the Vice-Premier and reports on Deng's activities in Texas.

So the Chinese leave today with their memories and perhaps a new image for Communist China's leading man, for Deng Xiaoping not only went West, but went Western.

1980

Dancing girls in the Chinese production of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice; bare breasts in the Impressionist art at Peking Airport -- this merely symbolic of the liberalization in all areas of life. The Chinese is, well, functional -- lots of blue cotton and an occasional People's Liberation Army grey coat. Enter fashion magnet Pierre Cardin, out to start a revolution of his own, evidently. He celebrated the idea in Peking with his idea of what the well-dressed Peking man and woman might wear in the future. In the market, the reappearance of free enterprise, a relaxation of state control which extends to industry and agriculture as well.

MELINDA LIU: The early '80s theme of China was Deng Xiaoping on a roll, opening up, isn't it great, signing this love affair.

An important part of the Chinese economy is the two-way trade with the United States, nearly 6 billion dollar's worth this year.

1987

China's first international cosmetics exhibition -- thousands of would-be consumers, most of them young women, call at the Beijing Exhibition Center, marveling at the displays by foreign cosmetics companies whose representatives were themselves marveling at the potentially huge market here.

It's an unbelievable market and actually it could be the greatest market in the world.

1989

Rick Moore CNN Newswatch

It is being called a massacre. Chinese troops have taken over by shooting and beating their way through thousands of demonstrators.

Mike Chinoy

2 CNN Reporting

The soldiers have now taken over Tiananmen Square. The protest there is finished, squelched.

DAN RATHER: The images of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square were so searing that in so many people's minds, certainly outside of China, it became the overpowering image.

1992

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: An America that will not coddle tyrants, from Baghdad to Beijing.

Chairman Mao once wrote, "A revolution is not a tea party. It is an act of violence." Today, even thought the symbols of Mao's Communist Revolution still dominate China's political landscape, the country whose successors defiantly hail as the last true bastion of socialism is undergoing a non-violent revolution, perhaps more profound than that which Mao himself inspired.

1994

TOM BROKAW: Just take the NBC guests and my NBC colleagues and grab'm by the arm and say, "You're not going to believe what this was like just twenty years ago." You cannot believe this!

[00:05:00]

That they've done this in this short amount of time is destroyed of my ability to describe it.

2008

What happens tonight is merely a small step, but a great leap. China is welcoming the world! The first-ever Olympics for the world's most populous nation.

BILL REILLY: They're expanding their army. They're obvious brutal people over there. They don't want any human rights. I think they have designs on some more territory.

The People's Republic of Capitalism, a four-night event starting Wednesday July 9th at 10 on the Discovery Channel.

The city has already attracted significant American investment like this Briggs and Stratton plant where Chinese workers are now on the assembly line building American engines. Those engines used to be built here at this shuttered Briggs and Stratton in Rolla, Missouri.

MITT ROMNEY: These guys are after us and looking for ways to harm us.

2012

3

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Tonight I'm announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trade and practices in countries like China.

1967

There are 700 million Chinese today and they are targeted to hate. Their growing power is the world's greatest threat to peace and light.

MIKE CHINOY: You can see in that film that the sort of perceptions of China or trail of China is just worse from one extreme to another in form of course in part by things that did happen in China. But this difficulty in trying to get a more balanced take on China is, I think one of the big challenges for the media and it’s reflected in public attitudes. I was looking over the weekend literally 40 years to the day after Nixon arrived in Beijing there was a Gallup poll which asked Americans: What country do you see as United States greatest enemy? And Iran was number one but number two was China; ahead even of my favorite place, North Korea. With a quarter of the respondents saying that the Chinese were the greatest enemy. Now, that same poll showed that four out of 10 Americans had an unfavorable view of China. But that more than half of them had a positive view of China as a friendly country. So you have this sort of paradoxes within paradoxes in the way in which people look at China. And what I hope you'll do in our discussion here is to try to talk a little bit about the origins of these different images and where the various flip flops have come from and what they tell us both about China and about the way the media operates. And what we might need to think about in terms of trying to get a more balanced understanding of China in our and in our broader public understanding. And to do this we've got a terrific panel of veteran journalists and just going down the row here. Marcus Brauchli is now the executive editor of The Washington Post and previously was the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal but I knew him back when he was a China Hand in the '90s. He actually told me he first arrived in Hong Kong in the mid '80s and spent 15 years covering greater China and the rest of the region based in Hong Kong and for the Wall Street Journal as well as since in Tokyo and in Europe. Jim Laurie, who [INDISCERNIBLE] when he was wearing his cowboy hat as a veteran foreign correspondent who's spent many years at ABC and NBC news. He stayed in Saigon after the communist victory in 1975 and was the first ABC correspondent to be based in Beijing after normalization and has covered China for many years and was there in 1989. And now runs his own video and consulting company and is currently working closely with China Central Television as it just opened a big North American production center here in Washington. Melinda Liu is the Beijing Bureau Chief for the Newsweek Daily Beast Company and also a veteran China correspondent. She opened the Newsweek Bureau Beijing around the time that Jim opened the ABC bureau. Was also in Beijing as I was in 1989 and after covering many other stores in other parts of the world including the Soviet War in Afghanistan, both Gulf Wars, I think and other things has been based

[00:10:00] in Beijing for the past several years. So she's seen it very early on all the way up to the present day. Jim Mann is currently author-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced

4 International Studies. He's previously served for many years as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times both as correspondent here as a foreign affairs columnist and in the 1980s he was the LA Times Beijing correspondent. He's the author of a number of books on China and on other topics including especially for purposes of this discussion a book called the China Fantasy. And lastly Jerry Schecter is a journalist and historian with extensive experience in China and Russia and in Southeast Asia. He worked for the Wall Street Journal and spent 18 years with Time magazine and covered the Nixon trip in '72 and again went to China with Nixon in 1976. He also served in the Carter administration as Associated White House Press Secretary and National Security Council Spokesman and is the author of nine books if I have it right. That’s very impressive. So I want to begin with you Jerry.

JERROLD SCHECTER: Coauthors.

MIKE CHINOY: Coauthors. Okay. Still impressive. I want to begin with you and ask if you would share a little bit the kind of perception of China that you had as you got on the press plane to go to Beijing with Nixon in '72 and how the experience of being there altered both the way you looked at China and the way in which you portrayed it in your coverage in the way in which Time portrayed its coverage. And Time of course is interesting because it was for many years run by Henry Luce, the arch anticommunist supporter of John [PH] Carchack and so forth.

JERROLD SCHECTER: It was unbelievably exciting because I had been in the, in the Hong Kong bureau for Time magazine from 1960 to 63. And it was like looking at China through a keyhole. You - we got our material on China from FBIS, its Federal Broadcast Information Service which picked up radio broadcasts from inside China, translated them and we devoured them like China sinologists, same way we were covering the Soviet Union. And refugees would come through and the Catholic Church had a China watching group with a great clergyman name Father [PH] Ladoni. And he would put out a newsletter which we would then use to, as trying to get material together for a story on China. So when we arrived in Beijing I was on the, I was on the pool and so I got to go on Air Force One. And there was Kissinger joking with [PH] Jargonwa who is in the foreign minister and the tension was broken when Nixon stepped down the runway, strode forth with his hand out and shook hands with . And that basically erased the hard feelings that had existed since the conference in 1954 when John Foster Dulles, secretary of state refused to shake Zhou Enlai's hand. And what the first impression was how subdued the welcome was. There were no crowds on the streets and things were quite. And later I recall contrasting to that the Chinese welcome for Mrs. Bhutto when she arrived on a commemorating a new flight. There were people in costumes on the street waving. But the Nixon arrival was correct and thought somber. We got, we got to our hotel and we got what I can only describe as a Chinese menu with an A list and a B list of what you wanted to do and where you wanted to go on a schedule. And you could go to the Nationalities

[00:15:00]

House or you could go to a Chinese Hospital and watch an operation without anesthesia or you can have acupuncture. And in those days acupuncture wasn’t popular in the United States yet as an alternative medicine cure. And I bravely put out my left hand and a man in a white coat twirled a thin needle between my thumb and forefinger and wow that was, you got a charge from

5 that and supposedly that was going to help you. The banquet was spectacular but there was no real news. And by the end of the week I was getting desperate. And in Washington one could often get to Henry Kissinger and get a briefing if you wanted to tell you what was going on from his point of view. So in desperation I had heard that well there's a new satellite system up here that we brought in a satellite for the visit and it's easy to call Washington. So I dialed the White House operator 202-1414, 245, I'm sorry 456-1414. And said please connect me to Dr. Kissinger. And Dr. Kissinger was in the guest house about five blocks away. But there was no way to get to him. So the operator said, "Okay, please hold on." And she got back on the line a few minutes later and said, "I'm sorry Dr. Kissinger's not available." And I said well please ask him to call me back. I'm in room 301. Well needless to say he never called back but I got a really good sense of how things had changed. I mean in those days it was 50 cents a word to send a cable from Hong Kong or China and the phone connections you had to wait for - book your calls in advance, wait for a couple of hours and the connections were terrible. Here it was just like the world had changed. And it had. But there were no, there were, the whole purpose of the visit it seemed to us was not only to normalize diplomatic relations with China, but to help Nixon's campaign for president and to show who he, what he had really done. And the Chinese went all out for that. I mean there was, we were totally corralled by our minders. There was no such thing as walking around Beijing on your own. And the impression was clearly one of a totalitarian state but well-disciplined people. The porters, the boy porters and the chambermaids wouldn’t accept a tip. Tipping was a capitalist practice that was banned in China we were, we were told. And nobody could leave anything behind. The Chinese were very concerned that nothing be lost even to the extent that one correspondent putting, I think it was, actually not a correspondent it was a White House staff member had left a pair of underwear in the, in her drawer and her wastepaper basket and as we were leaving the porter came down and said did you leave these behind. It was, it was embarrassment of course. We all laughed but the point was that the Chinese didn’t want to be accused of taking anything that didn’t belong to them. I see Ted Koppel sitting down there and Ted got the only real scope of the week when we went out

[00:20:00] to the Ming Tombs and he stayed behind to watch the Chinese families and people who had radios and picnic baskets and we'd all gone back to the hotel, Ted found that suddenly the people who were not wearing Mao jackets but had on nice, the children had on nice colored clothes and they all got up, returned their radios and climbed into a truck that took them all off the stage set. Later after, I think, after you reported the story Joe and I apologized saying that that was overdoing it a bit.

MIKE CHINOY: So let me - we'll come back to everybody but do a quick fast forward. Jim you were on the, you covered Deng trip in '79 and that to me seems to be one of, one of these moments that stands out is as, you know, if you can identify a particular moment like the Nixon trip where something switched in terms of the Chinese perceptions. So talk a little bit about the way in which Deng came across and then the kind of narrative that informed the reporting when you went and opened the Bureau and actually allowed to be based in Beijing.

JIM LAURIE: Well, to preface that when Jerry was in China, Jim was in China, I was in Vietnam. So we were, we were covering for NBC News at that time, the lead up to the spring

6 offensive 1972 Vietnam. So fast forward when I first went to China was 1978 in the mid '70s I had joined the Edgar Snow Society in Hong Kong and the attempt, I thought to curry favor with the Chinese in the hopes that they would give me a VISA, which of course didn't work at all. But I did finally go in, in 1978 to the Canton Trade Fair as it was then known and I was disguised as a trader of porcelain when I first went in with a small, a Super 8 camera to do a first report for ABC News. And it's worth reflecting that in this period from the Nixon visit up to the period when Deng Xiaoping comes back to power in 1977, then begins his reforms in 1978. The glimpses that the world had of China were very partial indeed. We had selective documentaries. Ted Koppel did one in 1974 called the People of People's China. Michelangelo Antonioni in 1972 went into China and did a film which you have to have a great deal of patience to watch because it goes on for about four hours. And it basically focuses on people standing in Tiananmen Square and various other places. A film that was roundly denounced by the Chinese government at the time and I was told later in Hong Kong because of Antonioni that was the reason why American and other television broadcasts would not be allowed to open up bureaus in China because it portrayed the undeveloped country that China was at that time. 1978 my first visit, Deng Xiaoping had come back to power in Beijing. Four Modernizations was the code word, code words of the time. It would as I did in November of '78 drive through Shanghai and you have these great Four Modernization banners all over the country. And I divide coverage of China in two periods. What I call the "gee whiz" period which sort of begins in 1978 and is abruptly ended on June the 4th of 1989. And then there is "Nothing Good about China" period which begins in 1989 and continues pretty much up through the Olympic Games and perhaps I could argue onward. So there's, so I was in the "gee whiz" period of China. And part of the "gee whiz" was this character Deng Xiaoping. There were about a dozen of us. Were you there Melinda in the Great Hall of People? There were a dozen of us invited to meet Deng Xiaoping in January just after the full normalization of relations with China. And we all went in sat in these wonderfully overstuffed chairs with a little white doilies on them and Deng sat before us with his spittoon just to his left and his chain smoking his panda cigarettes. And we then proceeded to try to ask questions and it was somewhat disconcerting 'cause every time we stood to ask a question, Deng Xiaoping would

[00:25:00] expectorate into this spittoon next to him and, you know, Mike Oksenberg later told me there's a difference, there's quite a strategy that Deng had to put off his foreign guests by continual spitting. After the session we had with Deng Xiaoping a, the foreign ministry chap named Yang --

MIKE CHINOY: [PH] Yawei.

JIM LAURIE: Yawei, who is now out in Seattle Washington I believe. I - in any event, he's came to us, the three networks. In those days there were only three networks, not the two thousand there are today. He came to us and said in the interest of [INDISCERNIBLE], in the interest of friendship and cooperation would you agree to censor something. We all said what, censor? We don’t censor. Well the only thing we want you to do is not broadcast the shots of the spit coming from the vice premiers mouth into the spittoon. So we, so we agreed to censor that. And it was never seen on television until Mike Chinoy discovered in the archives at ABC

7 News the spit and has used it in the film that he has done of the history of US China relations. Later that, actually many years later it was an interesting conference in how we perceived China, we were, we agreed in 1979 to censor this incident. In 1989 when Deng Xiaoping was hosting Mikhail Gorbachev there was a clip on China Central Television of Deng Xiaoping by now in an advanced state of Parkinson's disease shaking with his chopsticks and unable to pick the food from his plate and it drops down to his plate and ever network without question broadcast that image of Deng Xiaoping, these visual images.

MIKE CHINOY: What about the cowboy hat?

JIM LAURIE: The cowboy hat.

MIKE CHINOY: That turned Deng into kind of the cuddly communist.

JIM LAURIE: January 28th Deng Xiaoping heads off to the United States, January 28th of 1979. And it was covered like an American presidential trip. Anywhere there was a plane behind that had been chartered by the American media. All the networks were there, all the major magazines and newspapers and the highlight was the visit to Houston, Texas. And there was when Deng Xiaoping, I can't imagine very many Chinese leaders or any leader taking the risk of putting on a cowboy hat, getting in a stagecoach and going around the rodeo in Houston, Texas. And Deng seemed to be obviously he was ultimately confident in his position at that point. He then went to the Houston Space Center, the Johnson Spacecraft Center and asked the kind of questions that anybody would ask. His first question about the astronauts in terms of their spaceship was where in the spaceships do you go to the toilet. He wanted to know. So he, it was always characteristic in the little contact that we had with Deng Xiaoping of this remarkable character, fearless individual willing to do and say anything at virtually anytime. And the media coverage was glowing. As I say, this was the "gee whiz" period. I think J Matthews says in your film, you know, the lead of my Washington Post story at one point was I shook hands with Deng Xiaoping. And it was, it was almost, you know, all the issues that we are consumed about today, issues of human rights. They were there certainly but they were put to one side as the coverage essentially was all about China opening up, the new China. ABC News did a, did an hour in January 1979 called "New Beginnings" and anchored by Frank, the late Frank Reynolds. And there was this attitude of every story that I did in this early period and when I opened the ABC bureau in 1981. They were telling me from New York we want the first, we want the first private restraint, the first private car, the first, you know, all of these firsts. And so we were consumed by these wow "gee whiz stories. And that was the sense that we had reporting. And of course we were very much limited. I will always remember the little travel permit that we were issued which labeled us aliens, the alien travel permit. And the sign on the outskirts of Beijing in Russian, English, Chinese and French which said no aliens or no foreigners beyond

[00:30:00] this point. And you didn't go beyond that point usually in those days. But that’s a glimpse of the china that I first saw.

8 MIKE CHINOY: And then before, I want to get to Melinda in 1989, but Jim you were there in the mid-80s? And I knew your first book is Beijing Jeep was about the early attempts by American companies who saw the China [PH] mark. Talk a little bit about that period in the sense of, is it going to, the portrayal of China, the image of China that the people were getting.

JAMES MANN: Very much as, very much as Jim said and more so. I would go a bit further and I would say that there were ways in which this "gee whiz" image of China furthered America’s strategic and military interest. I mean this was the period when the United States was working with China to deal with Soviet Union. And the extent that there were human rights issues or issues of political repression really the US government was not particularly interested in hearing them or dealing with them. I can remember that at one point, I think it was the 10th anniveristy of Mao's death in '86 I did I think three, a three part series on where China was and part of it was Deng's reforms and one part of it was continuing political repression. A couple months later Mike Wallace came to Beijing preparing to interview Deng and, you know, I had a lunch with him, you know, and he, I tried to tell him look this place is not opening up politically as well as economically. Isn't the way that people back in the state think? And he didn’t take it up. About two or three years after Tiananmen, I talked to, I was by then back in Washington. Talked to friends in China working for television stations and they said, you know, every time a visiting correspondent comes in its take us to the repression. So things had completely flipped. And the embodiment, the single anecdote that brought it home to me, very much the conventional wisdom which I was brought in with is exactly what Jerry says. You know, if you stay in a Chinese hotel the room attendants are so kind and nice that they will return your used razor blades to you which, you know, was true. It wasn’t the whole truth. And lo and behold I went on what was the single most hostile diplomatic exchange between the United States and China. That was Warren Christopher's trip to Beijing in 1994 and I was stunned because before we landed the security officials on the plane brought the correspondent or, you know, just were kind of briefing the correspondents don’t leave anything in your room because the room attendants are all spies and I said oh well, you know, it's probably the same room attendants and, you know, it’s a little bit of - but they're not all spies and they weren’t all razor blade returners in the ‘70s either. What had changed was the American attitudes and just one last thing. The role of the, when we talk about media, there's a difference between the correspondents in Beijing, Shanghai and China and the visitors. And a lot of the images came from back in the states both ways that is, you know, "gee whiz" China and, you know, China as total repression. Both are dictated, not dictated that would be the wrong word but are encouraged by what people back in the states, whether it's TV producers, anchors, newspaper editors. You could see people wanting that story, you know, the first “China goes disco” or, you know, “China is putting everybody on trial” even when that’s beginning to slack off. So when we talk about the media impressions of China actually remarkable little of it, I think is set by the actual correspondents in Beijing who are or in China who are reporting China day to day, week to week, month to month quite well. Melinda's been doing it for years.

MIKE CHINOY: The obviously, the critical turning point and in some ways still have, still at some level shapes or informs the whole discussion on China is 1989. The man in front of the tank is one of those images that is, my old professor at Yale, Jonathan Spence said

[00:35:00]

9 the, you know, June 19 - June 4th 1989 is a date that’s going to haunt authoritarian governments in China for centuries which I thought was an interesting observation. And it certainly been central feature at some level a lot of the discussions, talk a little bit, I mean you were there as I was for a lot of that. About the experience and the extent to which it sort of shattered this image or that had built up too much of the - I remember in 1984 Reagan 'cause Reagan went to China and he talked about China's so called communist. And there was this sense that the Chinese were becoming like us. They were going capitalist, they were eating Fried Chicken, they were going to discos and so on. And then suddenly this whole other side that had been forgotten about or ignored or kind of off in the corner emerged in a very, very brutal shocking way. So, you know, yeah.

MELINDA LIU: Yeah. I think that the events of spring 1989, while we're talking about flip flops in perception provided perhaps the most dramatic flip flop from a benign image to a terrible image for China. You know, if the Nixon trip were the opposite, you know, something that was weird and evil turned out to be maybe someone that the United States could partner with I think the crackdown on the protest in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 was a shocking and stunning reassessment and reversal of what had been a largely positive image of China. Why was it so overwhelmingly positive? I think partly because - as some of my colleagues have pointed out, partly it was because we saw a population that seemed very alien and very different, communist, you know, wearing no bright clothes and, you know, becoming more like Americans, more like us. And that’s got to be great. That’s got to be good. It had been, there had been no private markets, no private sector to speak of economically. Suddenly private markets people are buying and selling things. Entrepreneurs were starting their own little businesses. Of course in those days, the businesses were repairing bicycle tires, you know, today the businesses are, you know, building gigantic social media companies that list for amazing amounts of money on, you know, on the New York Stock Exchange. Good, becoming more like us. But what we, what I think all of us in America sort of failed to adequately appreciate is that the complexities of China were not something you could stereotype into something very simple. It was a really complex nation, complex government, bureaucracy, and a very complex people. In fact, these days I think China is more like five different countries and when you try to cover it being based in China it's almost like a person with split personality. You know, the five faces of Eve except it’s China. I don’t think we adequately appreciate that because going into the spring of 1989, what was the big story? Well, first of all we, you know, as we heard, you know, there had been all these, dismantling of the peoples’ communes in favor of private family run farms and isn't that great, you know, the first disco, the first, you know, all of those wonderful upbeat stories that we all covered. You know, I covered the peoples commune that was being dismantled and literally one family was overjoyed because they had, there had been a wheelbarrow that had been communally owned and communally used and this family was getting the wheel of it and the rest of it was going to another family. And they were like this is our wheel. You know, I'm like - but anyway the big story that we all expected in the spring of 1989 was not a prodemocracy protest movement spontaneously generated by, you know, thousands and thousands of people. It was the historic visit by Mikhail Gorbachev to China ending three decades of

[00:40:00]

10 Sino-Soviet rivalry and estrangement. And again, you know, it was, it sort of fit. It was sort of easy to see the geostrategic importance of this. What we totally ignored was what was going on internally in China. A lot of corruption, a lot of public dissatisfaction, overall a very high level of inflation which was creating a lot of dissatisfaction among people, just ordinary people. And so I remember having exchanges with my editors in New York because of course we were preparing this gigantic package on Sino-Soviet relations and Gorbachev coming and all this stuff. And I said well, you know, there's, there are these small demonstrations that are going on around Beijing and it's not totally unprecedented but they're bigger than they used to be. They're more persistent. And this was like maybe a week and a half before Gorbachev arrived. And I said they're significant. Maybe we should do a story as part of our package because, you know, this is unusual. And one of my editors in his wisdom said nah just fold it into the running story, you know, just a sidebar right. Well, yeah, you know, then the magazine went to bed and, you know, by Monday, the protests were huge, you know, the Gorbi visit to the extent that there was anything going on, you know, was still about, you know, about the protest themselves. Everyone got caught flatfooted. I mean all the, all the media that had more than a day or two of lead time were all talking about geostrategic implications. And meanwhile the real story was out there in the streets. And I don't know if you recall this but, you know, Gorbachev - it was pretty obvious that there was going to be some kind of clash here of expectations because Gorbachev would normally have been welcome with huge pomp and ceremony, you know, gigantic welcoming reception at the airport and Great Hall of the People and reviewing the honor guard in the Tiananmen Square. None of that could take place. He was literally sneaked in, you know, through back entrances to the Great Hall of the People. A visit to the Forbidden City with council because they can't get to the Forbidden City because they're just so many protesters in the Square. And I remember I sort of calculated that if Gorbi's visit was going to go the way it was supposed to go or something similar to the way it was supposed to go the Chinese authorities would have to clear the Square the night before he arrived. So I actually, I just assumed they would. So I said oh well I'll get this story, I'll just stay all night in the Square. And I did; waiting and waiting and waiting. And I just remember, you know, the next day, the sun came up and, you know, all, I called them rebel flags, you know, the demonstrators had put up flags on the official flagpoles in the Square and they were all flapping and colorful and I just thought, “Oh my God, how is this going to possibly work?” And of course they did get some diplomacy done in the end but it - the Soviet retinue itself was very much transfixed by what was going on around them. All the chaos, all the last minute changes and it was a huge loss of face for the Chinese who were hosting this. And again the fact of the protest fed into another kind of perception of, American perception of China which was oh my goodness this is surprising and they're becoming even more like us. You know, now they're pro-democratic. People in the streets, you know, the prodemocracy. And of course it, I think it is accurate to say that there were many protests that were prodemocracy protests. I think even more so they were anticorruption protest, they were anti-nepotism protest, there was a lot of dissatisfaction with what people perceived to be abuses of power by government leaders and what not. And also I don’t think Chinese had really a good understanding what democracy is. In fact I spoke with a Chinese woman, I remember this very much, very vividly. She said to me I don’t kwon what democracy is but China needs more of it. You know, in other words there was this yearning sort of amorphous and there was a strong tendency on the side of editors to

[00:45:00]

11 sort of again, simplify what the student leaders of these protests wanted and how they were going to get it. And what Americas role should be. I remember having several conversations of, you know, where the question was well how can we Americans help the students win. And I said well win what. You want the People's Republic of China to be ruled by 19-year- old [INDISCERNIBLE], you know, the idea of a grassroots uprising like that, being able to be organized I think was again a very bad misperception on our part.

MIKE CHINOY: So when the tanks rolled in and people were killed and it was all on television which accentuated it all and that just totally, I mean it’s a stroke. Change the view of China.

MELINDA LIU: Overnight.

MIKE CHINOY: Butcher, the cuddly communists became the butchers of Beijing.

MELINDA LIU: Overnight.

JAMES MANN: Actually, a mild decent on that it wasn’t all on television. If it was all on television the reaction would have been much worse.

MIKE CHINOY: A lot of it was on television.

JAMES MANN: Well not the actual shootings east of the Square but west of the Square.

MIKE CHINOY: But to that, just to jump forward you were started following China in the mid-'80s but you were based in Shanghai in the mid-'90s, right, mid, late '90s?

MARCUS BRAUCHLI: Right.

MIKE CHINOY: So you sort of came in afterwards and sort of were picking up on the sort of post-Tiananmen on the economic boom and that emerged, so talk a little bit of both about how the emerged as a central narrative and where the kind of ghost of Tiananmen continue to hover in terms of shaping the reporting and the way in which people would have looked at China in that point.

MARCUS BRAUCHLI: Well, first of all I think it's interesting to listen to the comments of the, of Jim and Jerry about the early days US coverage of China because it's very anecdotal and there was a lot, a lot of freight that traveled with each story of, you know, seeing, seeing one glimpse of something became a perception about the whole country. And when you listen to Jim Mann and Melinda talk you see that there starts to be more and more depth of information and, you know, journalist can be very reductive. We have to be somewhat reductive to convey information to audiences that, you know, are maybe trying to understand something far away but really you [AUDIO CUTS OUT] mention so you try to simplify it. But as more and more information becomes available it gets harder and harder to be really reductive and be effective. And Jerry mentioned this Jesuit group in Hong Kong, Father Ladani use to collect information

12 on China in the early '80s. When I first came to Hong Kong actually he was still doing it and they would do things like they would go to the common railroad, railway station and they'd look at the trains that brought vegetables in from Guangzhou province. And they examined the grease on the axles of the trains trying to get some understanding of what the petrochemical industry in China was up to and how it was doing. I mean really, and this was not, this was even after normalization. But by the time, by today, you know, if you went to China, I don’t know this but I guess you probably will find reporters who work for Bloomberg who just cover the petrochemical industry in China and you probably find people who work for Petrolium News and, you know, I would - when I first went to Hong Kong in 1984 I was covering Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and the Philippines. And I was one person for a news service then. Today that news service has something like 100 people in China including people who translate who's from Chinese and people who translate news into Chinese. So there's vastly more information and in spite of their being vastly more information what I find most interesting is the challenge we all have still in eradicating or eliminating misperceptions. I mean I think it's probably impossible task and the questions why is it that misperceptions persist in spite of there being such vast amounts of information. I think that the answer is, the answer lies somewhat in how journalists do their job and in the way people read information, connect information faraway places. I think in essence what journalists do and their editors do, I hear a lot of criticism of editors up here and its, you know. You put information in certain frameworks that people understand. And if you look at China in the last, in the last 20 or 30 years there are certain frameworks that survive, certain understandings that survive. Like there's the notion that China is a

[00:50:00] megalith, this one giant, you know, centrally controlled place. You' see china described in reputable newspapers as a totalitarian state which reflects a true misunderstanding of what a totalitarian state is. China is more of a free for all economy than a free market economy. It’s a very chaotic place today. You know obviously there are still - China is still described as a communist country which is as somebody here said it's nominally true that China's a communist country but it depends on how you define . What, you know, what you're reading of Marx was or Lenin was. People have tried to address it, journals have tried to address that in their coverage. Nick Kristof used to refer to China, I think it was who first did as a market Leninist economy, is that, was that Kristof? You know when I was at the Wall Street Journal we actually got in a habit of calling it nominally communist then explain what we meant because we were trying to, you know, we didn’t want to be accused of not appreciating that the communist party was ruling but ruling the country but we on the other hand is clearly wasn’t engaged in anything that would resemble communism as created by Marx. China was also described and is described still as a mercantilist state. I think that was a concept that was framed part by that people as China grew more and more economically successful and prosperous the understanding Americans had of Japan seemed convenient to apply to the country next door because it's all Asia and they surely are behaving in the same way. Clearly, you know, China wasn’t behaving in the same way, it wasn’t maybe is doing more so but it wasn’t behaving in the same way that Japan did. They were, you know, their idea of international trade was very different from Japan's idea of international trade and their idea of foreign investments radically different from Japan's idea of foreign investments. But it was a convenient metaphor and I think one that if you saw that Romney clip I thing that still the idea that prevails today. Then of course

13 there's the more recent description of China as a capitalist society which is also kind of true but kind of not true because of course it's state capitalism as is now described and state capitalism is not capitalism as we know it and it tends to overlook all the elements of corruption and all the distortions in the system. And then there are all the more recent interesting depictions of China frame this understanding China as a sort of, as an imperial power which is giving signs of being some ways but not just politically and not just militarily but in terms of its culture and its art. And in most pointedly importantly in terms of its wealth and how it deploys its wealth to advance its interest. And all of these things each one of things is a separate framework for trying to explain China to an American audience. At each one of them is partly right, partly no right. And you can never, unless you write a book like Jim Mann and I commend all of his books which are extraordinary but if you, unless you really get into great nuance and detail, unless you have an audience that cares a lot it is hard to convey everything in the sufficient depth to really give people a full understanding of a place that as Melinda says is, you know, extremely complicated.

MIKE CHINOY: I want to open it up to the audience because we've still got some time and this is a big panel and if we go around again it will be almost time to finish. I'd like to ask Ted Koppel who went on the Nixon trip and then many years later did the People's Republic of Capitalism that wonderful piece for Discovery. If you have any thoughts about, you know, how journalists can somehow come to grips with, I mean the problem that today in China is as Melinda knows, it's so complicated it's so diverse, it so doesn’t lend itself to an 800 word article, a two minutes spot on the evening news. That it's really hard to capture the essence of what's going on and I think it creates a real problem for journalist who are trying to do that.

TED KOPPEL: I think we're always about 10 years behind. We were clearly 10 years behind. Sorry. I was just saying I think we're always about 10 years behind in our perceptions of China. It strikes me as particularly interesting that for all of us who were over there in 1972. And all of the reporting that went on, very little, almost nothing was written at the time about the which was at that time the dominant reality of China. It strikes me as equally interesting that these days as we look at China and as we denounce somewhere tepidly I think the way they crack down on human rights. That very little is written about the continuing reality of China self-perception and that is the thing most to be feared is chaos. And whatever is

[00:55:00] required to keep China from falling into chaos is legitimate. That answers a lot of what's going on in Tibet. It answers a lot of what the Chinese accord for Syria today means. And yet there's very, very little reporting on that certainly in my industry in television that goes on.

MIKE CHINOY: Anyone else have? Yes. Identify yourself.

JOE BOSCO: Joe Bosco and a consultant for the defense department. I'm intrigued by your description of this so called "gee whiz" period where there was seemed cooperation between both the American media and the American government not to dwell on human rights issues in that kind of problem within China. And my question is, is it possible, is it conceivable that Deng Xiaoping and his people knew that and therefore when they had to make the faithful decision on

14 June 4th, 1989, they made the calculation that we can get away with this as long as we keep on with the economical development?

MIKE CHINOY: Well, Jim and then Melinda.

JAMES MANN: Well, two answers cut in different directions I guess. The first is yes they would have known that the United States was, you know, was not going to respond in any major way. They had, they had established a long relationship with several administrations as everybody at this conference has said. But secondly I would say also that it wouldn’t have mattered that it was not, that they were doing what they, what Deng, some of the people not all of Chinese leaders obviously not had thought had to be done. And I don’t, I really think that was entirely domestically motivated. I don’t think the US was a factor.

MELINDA LIU: I agree very much. Quite frankly I think what will Washington think if we crackdown was perhaps at the very, very bottom of the list of priorities. You know, what was going on here wasn’t, was yes uprising in the street but most importantly a power struggle in the corridors of power and Deng Xiaoping, as cute and cuddly as he appeared with, you know, the cowboy hat and everything like that, these guys have been cutting each other's throats for decades. And the, you know, this was the sort of thing that was going on, you know, within the communist party for a long, long time. And indeed not, you know, that sort of reaction is not restricted to China it's something that came very naturally given that Deng was already, it would now appear. In a so elderly that some of the information that was reaching him was perhaps being selectively filtered by different factions. And he would possibly making decisions based on not a comprehensive understanding of what was going on. The, yeah --

JERROLD SCHECTER: His power base was, his power base is the army. And he had support of the army and he probably would have lost it had he not made that decision and gone along with the repression.

MELINDA LUI: That’s true but the --

JERROLD SCHECTER: Which is not to, which is not to apologize for it, for him but it was difficult internal decision but again as far as the United States influence I think it didn't matter because what did matter was control in China and in fact, you know, a month later Bush sent Scowcroft and Eagleburger to say let's move on.

JAMES MANN: If I could just add one thing on that incident and the American relationship Bush did try to call Deng in those days before the final crackdown. And Deng didn’t take the call, the call didn’t go though which is usually interpreted half right as, you know, I don't want to hear whatever he has to hear, I don’t want to hear it. But it also was also his way of preserving a relationship with, I mean he didn't want to hear it and he didn’t want to have an argument about it. He just wanted, I'll leave it at that.

MIKE CHINOY: Yes, in the corner.

[01:00:00]

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JAMES CHOW: Thank you. It’s a wonderful panel and I'm a graduate student of Georgetown University. My name is James Chow and I have a question for Mr. Mike Chinoy. And I know that you work in China for a long time and actually I'm reading your books, Two Decades in the Heart of the Dragon that I spent over two years just --

MIKE CHINOY: Available on amazon.com.

JAMES CHOW: Actually there's a lot of changes happening in China and I was wondering what biggest changes do you think in terms of the working environment for foreign journalists in China today compared to over there as [INDISCERNIBLE] in Beijing? Thank you.

MIKE CHINOY: Well I should, Melinda who's resident there should add to this. But I would say certainly compare with the Nixon trip its night and day. I mean Dan Rather whom I interviewed for this film I did talked about how it was a major production for him and his crew to sneak out of the and get around the corner and try to take some video of a shop before the minders came in and said no you have to go back to the hotel. Today with the exception of Tibet and parts of Xinjiang, the Chinese government's own rules allow foreign journalist to travel freely. It's much easier to talk to people. China, it's much easier to have personal relationship and friendship with Chinese people to go to their homes. I mean I remember when I moved to Beijing in 1987 it was a big deal when it was decided that Chinese could go to the disco, the [PH] Great Well Sheraton Hotel which had previously been foreigners only. So the interaction with China as a society is much easier and China itself is a much more open society with the internet opening amazing doors just in terms of understanding things going on. That being said, it's still very difficult and purely on sensitive stories and a lot of people in local areas even though the government, central government rules say you can talk to the local, officials don't let you. There are lots of cases of reporters being harassed and beaten so it’s a mixed bag but if you take a step back and look at where it was 40 years ago, where it is today its vastly better. I don’t know if you have anything more to say.

MELINDA LIU: Yeah. I would, just a couple of thoughts. I would agree with Mike. Definitely compared to when I opened the Newsweek bureau in 1980 and '82, you know, just dramatic improvement in terms of access. Peoples willingness to talk, even government officials willing us to talk, you know, for a time it was I wouldn't say common, but it was possible, you know, to have a casual off the record dinner with the vice-premier and to, you know, exchange views. However since the Olympics in 2008 I have to say things have gone back again and a little bit. And this is a, this again is a pattern that we've seen throughout the decades. I'm confident that they'll go forward again at some point but there has been a bit of backward slippage. And it's very interesting again. It's not what you think of the big bad , you know, cracking down on foreign media. It's not so simple as that. It seems to be that the central government is still onboard and indeed sometimes when journalist get in sticky situations in the grassroots, the foreign ministry is there, is the one that helps get them out of it. But it’s the local authorities now who are trying to protect their interest who's maybe, whose jobs and whose bosses promotions rely on not having protest getting out of hand. And just very recently mid-February the foreign correspondences club were trying to send out a message to members saying such and such, a Dutch journalist was beaten up yesterday by a group of thugs

16 and men who appeared to be plain clothes policemen in the village of Panhe, [PH] Zhejiang Province while covering the recent uprising against local party officials. Now what was weird about this is that this foreign journalist at one point was in the company of foreign affairs officials at the grassroots. Car was stopped, the journalist was taken away from the foreign affairs officials by these guys who beat them up and then given back to them and the foreign affairs officials were not necessarily happy about this beating up thing but they were also powerless to stop it. So you can see how complicated this is. These are two groups of government officials who weren’t on the same page and indeed probably had very different views about how to resolve that situation with the journalist caught in the middle. And that’s the increasingly the case where local fiefdoms now are trying to protect their interest and so you - very often you get in the middle of different levels of bureaucracy.

[01:05:00]

MIKE CHINOY: So then, wow a lot of people. Yes. Please, go ahead.

BARBARA PILLSBURY: This is Barbara Pillsbury working in China and not since 1978 in health and population. Melinda would you mind commenting on your experience as a Chinese American and how the Chinese populous and the Chinese government has reacted towards you as a Chinese American in terms of greater access, more restricted access, higher expectations, etcetera?

MELINDA LIU: Sure. It - I think it balances out in the end. I would be lying if I were to say it didn’t make a difference that I'm a Chinese American. It does make a difference. I think certainly if I were in a crowd I wouldn’t stick out as much as a Caucasian, obviously. So there might be some situations where I can slither around and maybe talk to some people more easily than if I were obviously a foreigner. But on the other hand there are also situations where it's not an advantage to be ethnically Chinese. If I and I, this has happened to me. If I'm covering an antique government protest in ethnic minority areas, Xinjiang or Tibet, I'm, I, you know, I appear to be Chinese and so, you know, a Tibetan with grievances against, you know, sort of the Sinicization of their culture and their neighborhoods would not necessarily open up to me whereas if I were Caucasian they might. And I, yeah, I very vividly remember actually going to Tibet as part of government sponsored trip in 1980 and for Tibetans this was amazing to see foreigners and they were stuffing papers into people's pockets with their stories, all kinds of stories, culture, revolution stories and what not. And I got my share of them as well but I defiantly didn’t get as many as some of the Caucasian, you know, blond haired Caucasian guy. Literally we'd come back from walking around and there'd be all these papers, you know, just stuck into our pockets by people who wanted to get their story through to foreign journalists. The government is, the Chinese government I think is very quite sophisticated these days about dealing with Chinese Americans or foreign nationals of Chinese—as you may know the current American ambassador to Beijing is Gary Locke and he's ethnically Chinese. And there are some expectations like oh, you know, you must understand China better because you're overseas Chinese but I think in general they know that that ambassador is there to protect the interest of the United States. And at the same token, you know, me as an American journalist they do understand that I have my job to do and so I think it's sort of - in the big picture it just sort of evens out. I don't think I have a leg up or a horrible disadvantage either.

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MIKE CHINOY: Right. I've been told only one more question unfortunately. Why don’t we take you there? Yes.

STAN CRAMER: I'm Stan Cramer. It seems to me that the story that we heard that the Gorbachev retinue was transfixed by what it saw. Takes us to what happened in 1989 in the fall in Eastern Europe where Gorbachev refused the orders, the request of the East European authorities, sometimes heads of state party leaders, issued against those crossing the Czech Hungarian border against those going at the wall. And the cost of Gorbachev shooting perhaps scared by what he had seen as a result in China, cost him, cost Soviet Union its empire because in, whether you call it a totalitarian or authoritarian dictatorship, whether, when parties stayed if you don’t shoot you're going to lose because the water drains out of the bathtub, the water of authority when you cannot suppress. So now dealing with the [INDISCERNIBLE] or the combatants well any rising protest in China in the future, my own guess is the Tiananmen situation would come up again and the authorities would be faced with the choices they had in '89 or that Gorbachev had and it’s a very difficult thing to foresee what they would or would not do. And it seems to me one of the things all of us ought to be concerned about is that the Chinese government works towards the transition

[01:10:00] to it's a more democratic multi-voice, even possible multi-party state in order to avoid those kind of ways of resolving the obvious gaps in China that are there within the population and [INDISCERNIBLE] people as well. So what, how do you foresee this future crisis of that sort of internal crisis being resolved by what is still a single party state and is not made up of political discourse and provocation anywhere near the priority that it probably should be if it wants to avoid this kind of situation that was just portrayed.

MIKE CHINOY: Why don't I, why don’t I sort of add, expand on that a little bit since you're asking about the sense of how China would deal with the future crisis to talk, ask everybody very quickly in a minute to just talk about sort of how they see the way in which we cover China more generally and in terms of trying to address both the coverage of a situation like that and the kind of image that China's going to have going forward. Why don't we start at this end and just go down the --

MARCUS BRAUCHLI: I'm not sure I'm qualified to say how they would react. It's been a long time since I've been there. I'm sure Melinda will have more recent ideas on it. We obviously, you know, for a leadership that includes Washington and people in power in the United States we pay close attention to how China's government evolves and I think we, what we try to do is anticipate the news by explaining, by exploring the nature of the government and the people who are running the government better. And if you understand who they are and how they think we might be able to anticipate it. I be - and with that I will just defer to people who may be closer to the, this government and the situation today.

JIM LAURIE: I, first it's worth noting that the public security apparatus today in China is far greater and far more extensive then it was in 1989. The amount of money, you can see this in the

18 recent national people's congress statistics that they spend on internal security is extraordinary. They've also become more sophisticated. The biggest question that we used to ask in '89 is why not tear gas, why not bullets, why not something, why something other than live ammunition. Well today they have bought all of that. Today they are utilizing all of that in every province of the country. So they have the apparatus for demonstration crowd control that was not in existence in 1989. In terms of the future of coverage of China, I'm going to pick up on something that Marcus said earlier and I wasn’t sure that he was referring to television. But I think that we're always going to have little snapshots and we're always going to have little anecdotes and we're never going to have the comprehensive picture of China that perhaps all of you deserve and all of us want.

MELINDA LIU: I think you're very good question about the ethnic unrest and it is a serious problem again paradoxically because we've been talking a lot about very tragic incidence of the past. There have been situations defused. If maybe only for temporary period of time, but defused by much more sophisticated and much less heavy handed policies by people who I could, I would identify as more progressive Chinese officials, party secretary of Guangdong province, for example has been praised recently for defusing a pretty stubborn protest situation in one of his cities. So that’s maybe something that, you know, again in our tendency to simplify and stereotype or perceive in a certain way maybe we haven't appreciated them totally. In terms of broader perceptions going forward of China what were I think there's a real possibility for miscalculation and miss, sort of missed signals between both sides is the fact that even as many Americans tend to see China as this rising threat, this muscular dragon, etcetera, etcetera. There was a gallant poll in February that where 53% of Americans consider China to be the world's top economic power. Weirdly the Chinese don’t see themselves that ways. The Chinese perceive themselves to be

[01:15:00] much weaker. One of the leading newspapers in China, The Global Times in December of 2011 when asked whether China had become a world power, only 14% of Chinese said yes. So we get this headline like this where they're saying hey, you know, American don’t get us and what they're saying is the reality is we're much weaker, much more screwed up, much more dysfunctional then what you think. And I think there, there is a possibility for things getting lost in translation because a lot of Americans would think oh, you know, China's this rising muscular power and the Chinese don’t necessarily see this, always see themselves as, you know, they don't necessarily always act as an arrogant empire. There are still some officials who say we don’t want to be an empire, we've been there, done that, done it many times. Didn’t work, wasn’t good for us. So we, you know, they don't want to be perceived in that way.

MIKE CHINOY: Jim.

JAMES MANN: I'd say in response to Mr. Bosco's question that in a way we are already seeing what China's strategy and approach will be. That is this is now, you know, decades after Tiananmen and technology has advanced. At the time of Tiananmen China was able to station security people at fax machines in, around major cities to make sure there wasn’t faxes coming in and out. Well that so much ancient history. Now they're worried about cell phones. And as,

19 you know, we just saw in domestic political context that Romney's campaign tried to do a, in Detroit, a Mike Dever line up a perfect television coverage and they missed the fact that there would be cellphones to show how few people there were there. Well, what I think they're really not worried about television coverage. They're worried about the fact that people have cellphones and that any crackdown will be broadcast. So what we're seeing is a two prong strategy. The first which we saw immediately after the Arab Spring is never to allow those protests to develop. To stop them before they start to make sure there are not large crowds gathering because that inherently creates a different situation and so that yeah, they, I think that seems to me to be one good reason why for on their terms why they've cracked down so severely after the Arab Spring.

MIKE CHINOY: I'm told they run a very tight ship here. They told the next event is starting already.

JAMES MANN: Okay.

MIKE CHINOY: So if you would 30 seconds worth, final thoughts and let Jerry 30 seconds and then we'll.

JAMES MANN: No I'll 15 seconds. The second part of the strategy is just they cut off cell phones. I mean they did this in Xinjiang a couple years ago. So that’s if you get, you know, they have a whole series of things what happens when you get protest developing, just cut off social media.

MIKE CHINOY: Jerry, 30 seconds.

JERROLD SCHECTER: I think they can't cut off the internet and they're going to have to give way to public opinion on many issues. Not the least of things that fascinated me was that thousands of people left money in front of the artist [INDISCERNIBLE] house so that he could pay a tax bill that everybody says was a phony. In a society like China where it is growing and rising there has to be change and we have to press for it.

MIKE CHINOY: Well thank you very much. I think the one final word on this is China is complicated and it is a challenge all of us to try to figure it out [INDISCERNIBLE]. Thank you all.

[BACKGROUND CHATTER]

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