Editor’s Note: Mike Chinoy is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute and a former Beijing Bureau Chief and Senior Asia Correspondent for CNN. His new book is “Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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In the summer of 1973, just one year after then-US President Richard Nixon’s historic trip, I made my first visit to China. One of the places I was taken to was the Wusan People’s Commune outside Shenyang in northeast China. There, I met model Maoist peasant Yu Kexin and ate lunch at his modest home. It was the highlight of my visit.
In 1993, as CNN’s Beijing bureau chief, I decided to retrace that trip to see how the country had changed in the intervening 20 years. I managed to find Yu and discovered he was now running a tractor repair shop. He lived in a new flat with a TV. As a beneficiary of the market-oriented reforms introduced by then-senior leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, his life had clearly improved.
As soon as local officials were out of earshot, however, Yu confessed that almost everything I had seen during my first visit had been an illusion. He told me that in fact, conditions then were terrible, and that even the food I had so enjoyed had been trucked in from the city by local officials the day before — just to impress the foreigners.
To me, this episode underscores a central theme in any discussion about covering China — the difficulty of finding the truth in a vast, complicated country with a long history of distrust of outsiders and a secretive and authoritarian political system.
The tension between American journalists seeking to understand Chinese reality and the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control the narrative — the central theme of my new book “Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic” — dates back to the earliest days of the Communist revolution.
Indeed, when Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic in Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, not a single American correspondent was there to cover the event.
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