China Un-covered
“…and he had once famously dined with a warlord in Yantai while the blood of his recently executed enemies dripped from the floor above into his noodles and shredded beef’’ _ Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao, by Paul French.
I have been posted to cover China more than a century too late. This realisation dawned while I was perched on a high stool in a modern-day Irish pub in Beijing, listening to analyst and historian Paul French discuss a sword duel between two foreign editors in long ago China.
Swords? I cannot properly brandish a pair of chopsticks.
As French discussed his latest book, nothing dripped from the roof on his snug audience of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, but a seemingly lost Mumbai monsoon splattered Beijing.
“China in my period (1820s to 1949) was more of a story than the China in your period,” said the Shanghai-based author about his exhaustively researched book on the colourful — spies, concubines, opium-addicts, newspaper wars — and dangerous history of China’s earliest foreign press corps. In his words, covering today’s China is comparatively ‘tame and safe’.
Okay, so should I go home before I get a complex?
I have to hide this book from my editors or they will immediately start telling me I have it so easy. There is no opium war, no Shanghai war, no rebellion, no pillage, no burning Summer Palace (the only blaze I encountered was a burning five-star hotel) and certainly no warlord to interview at the risk of never going home at all.
Headlines those days screamed ‘all foreigners in Peking dead,’ though, as French narrated, the forces sent out to avenge the headline landed up to find most of the foreigners were actually alive. “They weren’t infallible; they got the story completely wrong as often as they got it partially right,’’ he wrote.
Somebody asked French how the journalists were trained before coming to China. I nearly fell off my perch. My office forgot to do that. I just showed up in Beijing with my notebook, spices, tea bags, set of forks…
French said the old hands were not fluent Chinese speakers because the dialect of each region varied drastically. But one chap knew eight dialects. I still forget how to order tomato ketchup in Chinese. When I say in perfect Mandarin — I would like to interview you — many Chinese say no anyway.
But something in common — they didn’t have local story fixers, and journalism didn’t pay even then.
Finally, French gleefully discussed how several of the old-timers died ‘horrendous’ deaths. Many were creatively tortured in a Shanghai prison, tortured by a warlord, stabbed on the street or succumbed to malaria. Unlike several foreign journalists in today’s China, I have not been detained, interrogated, had my camera smashed and cell phone confiscated. Malaria is nearer home. I could report the sighting of space-age Chinese mosquitoes orbiting outside my 21st floor window.
Had I really been posted to cover China over a century ago, I would be a footnote in French’s book as the vegetarian correspondent who had quickly starved to death.
Hindustan Times


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vivek Reply:
February 2nd, 2010 at 10:23 am
ha ha ha
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