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203 21 CHINA’S MOST DESPICABLE the message from beijing was sent twice to make sure it got through clearly: “Hong Kong journalists are a despicable bunch, and Bradsher is the most despicable of them all. He will never be allowed to visit China again.” A British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent first brought the message down to Hong Kong in the spring of 1974. A week or so later, a Canadian correspondent brought the same message to the British Crown Colony. Both had heard it from officials of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s press office while on reporting assignments in Beijing. The press office controlled all of the professional activities and many aspects of the private lives of those journalists who were given visas to live and work in China, or just to make working visits. American correspondents were not then among the chosen few with residential visas, and only rarely were allowed to visit. The reason was that the United States still had diplomatic relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek ruled a remnant regime claiming to represent the mainland that he had lost to the Communists in 1949. For American journalists, and for correspondents from most other countries except for a small group allowed to live in Beijing, Hong Kong was the base from which to try to cover news from the big Communist power. Officials were angry about my reporting from Hong Kong because it perceived a continuing power struggle in China. They insisted there was no struggle , no questioning of the leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, no disagreement within the leadership group of Mao and his comrades headed by veteran prime minister Zhou Enlai and a newly promoted young radical who had emerged from “the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” Wang Hongwen. But I had been writing from Hong Kong for the Washington Star for eighteen months or so, since the late summer of 1972, that there was a continuing struggle . According to my analysis, there was not yet an end to the Cultural Revolu- 204 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures tion, which at its violent peak in the late 1960s decimated the ranks of men who had led the Chinese Communist Party for decades and disrupted the country’s political, economic, social, and educational life. The infighting had merely gone underground to continue in less public forms. I had interpreted Wang’s promotion at the party’s tenth congress in August 1973 as confirmation of a revitalized power struggle and had then found mounting evidence of dissention. Mine was, however, a fairly lonely analytical position that ran contrary to public pronouncements from Beijing and to the overwhelming majority of media and diplomatic reporting, as well as to the U.S. government’s position. Most people accepted Chinese claims of calm unity because, they thought, the Cultural Revolution was over. The message from Beijing was not delivered directly to me. Neither the BBC man nor the Canadian correspondent knew me personally, and neither tried to get in touch with me when he reached Hong Kong. But they quoted the press officials’ statements to political officers in the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. The consulate had the largest staff of diplomatic specialists on Chinese affairs in the British colony, so many correspondents regularly sought their views. A friend who shared my background in both Soviet and Chinese affairs and was the best analyst in the consulate’s political section, Sherrod McCall, passed the message along to me. Sherrod and I agreed that the message was itself a sign of the power struggle . The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s press office seemed to be in the hands of radicals aligned with Wang who did not like my calling attention to their efforts to change the policies of the more pragmatic elements in China’s leadership associated with Zhou. At the time, the disruptive, destructive, and sometimes bloody struggles of the Cultural Revolution were generally considered to have ended, so any talk of continuing leadership conflict was unwelcome. And I was also unwelcome—for a while. It proved to be a surprisingly short while. Writing about China from Hong Kong since December 1969, and making two trips there before receiving the message that I would never be allowed to visit it again, was the culmination of more than a decade of fascination with the country, some study of it...

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