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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. Below is today's resurrected item
Author's note: Below is an article I wrote for the Daily Telegraph in 1981 about the status of the Roman Catholic Church in China. Here we are in 2008, and the Vatican and the Communist Party are still negotiating. The status of the Roman Catholic Church is one of those China sagas, like Tibet and Taiwan, where you can turn back the clock a quarter of a century, and time more or less seems to have stood still.
There was a story attached to this article, and after all these years, it might as well be told, although I will leave out the key name.
I collected stamps when I was a boy, and in 1981 resumed the hobby because I found it to be a great excuse for meeting and talking to ordinary Chinese people. Stamp collecting was the first underground hobby to break to the surface of traumatized post-Maoist Chinese society—and in the early 1980s people were pulling amazing old stamps and sheets of stamps out of secret places in which they had been hidden to prevent their destruction by the Red Guards, and were trading them in steamy, garlic-flavored, blue Mao-jacketed huddles in post offices in all the main cities of China. There was a post office on Nanjing Lu in Shanghai, on the north side of the road, about three intersections from the Peace Hotel, and I used to go there and hang out whenever I was in the city. One day, I got picked up, as it were, by a guy who invited me home to see his stamp collection. I said sure, and we boarded one of the old crowded Shanghai buses.
I was surely one of only a handful of foreigners in the city riding a local bus that day and everyone was staring at me, and my philatelic friend suddenly stated loudly: "I am a Catholic." The people next to us looked at him as if he was crazy, which he clearly was a little. We finally got off the bus, I have no idea where, and walked down the dark lanes to a tenement house dating from the 1920s or earlier. Up rickety stairs into a long Dickensian room with wooden cross beams holding up the ceiling, and everywhere, absolutely everywhere, Christian Catholic images. Crosses, images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
We sat down and started talking about religion, although at one point in the evening, we did actually look at his stamp collection. He knew I was a foreign journalist, and he absolutely knew that we must have been followed or noticed. But he wanted to talk about the situation of the Roman church and loyal Catholics in China, and I of course wrote it all down. It turned out he was a key figure in the underground Catholic church information network.
There had been no similar interview or contact up to that point by a foreign journalist with the underground church that I was aware of. He didn't place any restrictions on me, but I felt a huge sense of responsibility, and I waited several months before I sent the article to London, knowing that it would be read with interest by others in Peking maybe even before it was read by the sub-editors in London. I changed his gender, and did not include some information that would have clearly linked the story to Shanghai, including a story about a vision of the Virgin Mary appearing before a large group of Catholics who had gathered at Sheshan, the Catholic cathedral on a hill west of Shanghai, just the previous year. I am not religious, and there was a slightly mad light in his eyes. But given the pressures he and his fellow believers were under, it was not surprising that they moved somewhat away from normal behavior patterns.
Among other tasks, he was responsible for listening to short-wave radio (not necessarily a legal activity through to the end of the 1970s at least), noting all information and pronouncements about the Pope and the church, then passing them on to other cells around China.
He was in effect the Xinhua News Agency of the underground church.
A few months after the publication of the article, I was sitting in a bar in Taipei having a drink with Lionel Tsai, the Reuters bureau chief who had fled to Taiwan with the Nationalists in 1949, and in walked an old white-haired gentleman who Lionel invited to sit with us. His name was Father McGrath, an Irish Catholic priest, and he had lived and worked in Shanghai for many years, also moving to Taiwan in 1949. I told him something of the story of my stamp-collecting friend, and Father McGrath said: "I know him, I know the whole family." He had bad news. The guy had recently been picked up and put back in prison.
I have no way of knowing whether it was because of my conversation with him, or because of the article. Or maybe neither. But he knew the risks far better than I did. But I hope he is now okay. China has changed so much since, and if he is still alive, it is my understanding that he can now probably believe in whatever he wants without having to be either afraid or slightly whacko.
Catholics Keep Faith in China
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
November 7, 1981
The faithful gather secretly in small groups throughout China to worship the god they believe in, fearful always that the Communist authorities will discover them.
The Roman Catholic Church of China, loyal to the Pope and outlawed by the Chinese authorities, is still clinging tenaciously to life more than 20 years after all its houses of worship were forcibly closed.
I recently talked at length with a member of the underground church. She told me of great bravery in the face of implacable opposition from the authorities, who view Catholics loyal to the Pope as "lackeys of the Vatican".
It is a story which suggests that China's new and much-vaunted policy of religious freedom is at best highly selective. The Roman Catholic I met agreed to talk to me only on the strict understanding that her name and identity would remain secret.
She has been a Roman Catholic all her life. During the past 32 years of Communist rule in China, she claims her whole family has been persecuted for their beliefs life untold thousands of other Roman Catholics.
In 1957, the Chinese Government set up their own Catholic association independent of the Roman Church in an attempt to sever the spiritual and temporal ties between the Vatican and the faithful in China.
A few churches of the "Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association" have opened in the past year or so, but the woman said most Catholics in China would have nothing to do with it.
The faithful hold religious services clandestinely, often with look-outs posted outside to warn of intruders. "We attend Mass every Sunday we can, sometimes in people's homes, sometimes elsewhere. The number at each service varies. Sometimes there are as many as 100," she said.
But security usually makes it impossible for the whole service to be completed in one place. "The priest gives us the sacrament and we take it home and receive it there," she said.
Wearing ordinary clothes, the priests perform weddings, christenings, and say the last rites, all in strict secrecy. The government seems to know who most of the priests are.
Some members of the church with access to short-wave radios and foreign newspapers and magazines, search for pronouncements by the Pope, which they translate into Chinese, transcribe many times over and distribute to other groups of the faithful.
No one knows how many Catholics, either Roman or independent, there are in China. Before the Communist victory in1949, the Vatican estimated its Chinese flock at about 4.5 million.
The government says the number has dropped since, but many official and unofficial religious leaders say the number has been rising steadily in the past decade or more, partly as a result of increasing disillusionment with communism.
The woman did admit: "Things have been slightly easier in the past few years." But she said she and other Roman Catholics in China looked forward to the day when the church could operate more in the open, working to make China a "Godly country". This article is from Danwei.org
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 Spiritual pollution from 1982 Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. Below is today's resurrected item.
Author’s note: In the early 1980s, the conservatives led by Deng Liqun were firmly in charge of propaganda and culture. They continued to bash away at maintaining a pure “socialist” cultural foundation for China’s masses, in the face of huge changes in attitude as China’s people awoke from the mass hysteria of the Cultural Revolution and blind acceptance of the party’s interference and control of everything down to the songs you listen to on your new black market-bought cassette player.
This was also the age when bell-bottomed jeans (喇叭裤子) were constantly being criticized by the official media, egged on by nasty old men reminiscent of the teacher screaming at Rogers Waters that “If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding”. Mind you, the quote in last paragraph below is spot-on. Frank Zappa expressed exactly the same view on many occasion.
Western pop music a low note to China
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
November 4, 1982
Can you tell a decadent song when you hear it? If you can’t the Chinese People’s Music Publishing House has come to your rescue.
A pamphlet issues recently entitled “How to distinguish decadent songs”, gives guidelines for the musically naïve and condemns almost all Western popular music as unhealthy and sometimes even harmful.
In the past few years, there has been an explosion of interest among young Chinese in pop music from outside China, an interest which the Communist Party has been unable either to accept or control.
The pamphlet is mostly concerned with Chinese language pop songs produced in Hong Kong and Taiwan but also sharply attacks jazz, rock and roll, and disco as being equally subversive.
The best way to pick a decadent song is by the way it is sung, according to the pamphlet, which gives the following checklist of corrupting signs: “Quivering rhythm, extra notes, or an unclear, loose drunken pronunciation.”
Next come the song’s lyrics. Decadent songs “give a distorted reflection of life and do not express working class sentiments. Specifically, some are shallow, some sexually enticing and some are about the uninhibited seeking for pleasure.”
Songs dealing with non-socialist love are to be avoided, the booklet sternly warns.
“So-called love songs have the greatest influence on youth, but in the lyrics, it is just “love me, love me forever, never forget me” etc. Individual love becomes the be-all and end-all of life.”
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Psst, Teresa Teng tapes Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
Author’s note:
This article reflects of how isolated and deeply warped the old “socialist” Chinese economic system was, and how far the country has come in consumer economic terms. Back then, people in Canton were furtively buying contraband Hong Kong shirts, there were shortages of everything, the massive “factory to the world” had not yet opened for business and even Poland could export blank cassette tapes to China.
The successors to that Canton black market are the massive shopping malls of China’s coastal cities. China now over-produces everything, and while cassette tapes have all but disappeared, Poland surely finds it as impossible as anywhere else to escape reliance on Made in China goods.
Did I get rich by middle age? Certainly by his standards.
Chinese queue openly at black market stalls
By Graham Earnshaw in Canton
June 8, 1981
Want to buy a black market Japanese calculator in Canton? Go downtown near the river. They’re selling them for about 10 pounds sterling each.
In the past year, Canton’s streets have exploded into life with thousands of hawkers setting up stalls and vying for business, not all of it legal.
The relatively open way in which people flaunt the law indicates either that the Chinese authorities here are extremely liberal or else they have just given up trying to control it all.
China has basically two black markets – one dealing in foreign goods and the other n hard-to-get Chinese consumer goods sold at marked-up prices. Both are hard to miss in Canton.
Down near a ferry wharf, young men squat with packets of black market American cigarettes in front of them going for 40 pence a packet.
Under a pedestrian walkway, teenage boys offer factory-made shirts to passers-by in blatant contravention of the regulations. No one seems to mind.
Further on, a man squats by a wall with three blank cassettes displayed casually in his hand. Two yuan (60 pence) each, he said.
Where do the cassettes come from? “They said Poland. How would I know?” he replied.
The next man is holding tapes from Hong Kong of Chinese singers denounced by the Communist authorities as “decadent” and “bourgeois”. He says he sells several dozen a day. Then a crowd of several dozen gathers on the pavement outside a newly-opened shop selling Swiss watches. This is the real black market.
The people huddle around in little groups, fingering shirts and trousers from Hong Kong. Young men furtively pull exotic pairs of sunglasses from under their tee-shirts and show them to prospective customers.
Calculators and cassettes of foreign make change hands in the semi-darkness. The police are nowhere in sight.
Once again, near the ferry terminal, teenage boys squat on the road shuffling three playing cards in front of them, inviting passers-by to best on which card is the court card.
But gambling is illegal in China. So is fortune-telling which is denounced regularly by the authorities as a “feudal superstitious practice”.
But near the Pearl River, there is a line of gentlemen reading palms and examining heads to divine the future of their customers.
“Ah yes,” said the white-haired peasant I chose to look at my palm. “You have good fingers. Your father has great talent which you have inherited.”
A pause as he squints closer under the dim streetlight. “By the time you reach middle age, you will be rich.”
Surprisingly, none of the people engaging in these supposedly shady activities minded talking to me.
But on second thoughts, it is obvious. I was the only person in the crowd they could be certain was not a plain-clothes policemen.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
The March of Pinyin English
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
September 2, 1980
For many people, China's capital is now called Beijing, its former leader Mao Zedong and its largest river the Changjiang.
The Chinese sprang these new spellings for Peking, Mao Tse-tung and the Yangtze River on an unsuspecting world last year as part of their plan to standardise the way Chinese names are spelt overseas.
They have had varying success with their new spelling system, known as Pinyin.
Peking is now spelt Beijing by many newspapers and magazines, but the late Chairman has generally kept his old spelling, and the Yangtze is still called the Yangtze by just about everyone except the Chinese themselves.
Overall, however, Pinyin has proved over the past 18 months to be more than a match for the old Romanization system used to render Chinese characters into European languages, including the Wade-Giles system in English.
Noting the trend, The Daily Telegraph has decided gradually to introduce Pinyin spelling for Chinese names. But in order not to confuse readers, familiar names and places in China will still be spelt in the old way, with new names being rendered in Pinyin as they
come along.
The Chinese Communist Party vice-chairman Teng Hsiao-ping will therefore stay as he is for the foreseeable future rather than changing to Pinyin-ised Deng Xiaoping.
But the name of China's soon-to-be-appointed Prime Minister will be spelt according to the Pinyin system—Zhao Ziyang.
Other new names will also be Pinyin-ised as they appear in the Chinese leadership.
To people used to the old Wade-Giles system, Chinese names spelt according to Pinyin look a bit strange at first, basically because of the letters Z, Q, C and X, which are used with pronunciations different from those in English. Here is a quick guide:
X sounds like an ordinary S, while Q sounds like CH. C sounds like a hard TS, while Z is a softer DZ sound. ZH sounds like an English J.
Premier Zhao Ziyang's name, therefore, sounds something like Jow Dzuh Yang.
Pinyin is not a perfect system for spelling out Chinese, but neither are the systems it is replacing. Anyway, we are going to learn to live with it.
Author's note: The Chinese effort to force Pinyin spelling on the world was fundamentally cultural imperialism. I used to say that I would call Peking "Peking" until the day the French started calling London "London". What made the difference on that word was the 1989 upheavals and June 4—the tidal wave of reporting out of the Chinese
capital fundamentally changed its name around the world from Peking to Beijing. At the start if the Pinyin push in 1979 / 1980, the official English media - which means Xinhua News Agency's English service, The Peking Review, and that wonderful pictographical magazine which by memory was called China Self-Destructs—something like that—rendered Hong Kong as Xianggang, Tibet as Xizang, and the Yangtze as Changjiang. Luckily, these names did not stick. The pinyinisation of Mao Tse-tung's name cleared up significant misunderstandings. I once heard an American pronounce his name as May-o-tit-see-tongue. On the other hand, Zhao Ziyang's name was unpronounceable to many foreigners, and from a global PR name recognition and pronouncability perspective, ditching him in favour of Li Peng made total sense.
The "X" in the new system caused the most confusion. There was a Fuxing Hotel in Beijing in the 1980s that had to change its name due to the embarrassment the name was causing for visiting American tourists.
Editor's note For everything you ever wanted to know about Pinyin, see the excellent Pinyin.info. This article is from Danwei.org
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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. Below is today's resurrected item:
Author's note: China in in 1981 was still to a large extent taking the total thought control approach that survives today in North Korea. But in retrospect, I think I was probably a little simplistic in the way I viewed the orphanage. Maybe a psychologist would say that it was better for the kids to return to Tangshan to face and overcome their nightmares. And in fact, all children in China at that time were taught to believe that the Party is god. In a diluted form, so they still are today. I tried to go back to see the orphanage in 1986, but it had already been closed down. Maybe partly as a result of this article, who knows.
Now we have the Wenchuan earthquake, and while the loss of life appears to be nowhere near Tangshan in scale, there will surely be lots of orphans. We’ll see how the Party handles it this time, but I am confident it will be in a more humanitarian way, which I guess means placing the kids with families. For reference, see this AP story published yesterday: Chinese eager to adopt quake orphans.
Children of China's Party
By Graham Earnshaw in Shijiazhuang
May 2, 1981
In an orphanage in this city, the Communist Party of China is rearing a corps of children as its own, training them to love the party as their own mother and father.
They are the orphans of Tangshan, the site of the devastating earthquake in 1976 which left 250,000 people dead and probably millions more injured and homeless.
Nothing could be done for the dead, but the party immediately recognised the potential of the 500 orphans found amongst the rubble of Tangshan City.
The order came down from above: none of the orphans are to be sent for adoption to other families, all are to be kept in the care of the state and taught unswerving loyalty to the party.
"The party is the sunlight and I am the flower," the children sing. "The party's benevolence is as infinite as heaven. Socialism's benefits are boundless."
Five years after the earthquake, there are still 346 children in the "Orphanage of Foster Revolution." More than 200 others have already gone back to Tangshan City, east of Peking, to live and work.
Most are happy to go, said the orphanage officials. If they do not want to go back to the source of such traumatic memories, "they are re-educated and then sent back."
The orphans, ranging in age from five years to 17 years, live a cloistered life within their compound in the middle of this city, carefully watched by their teachers and virtually never allowed out.
Three young girls paraded before visitors were only six months old when the earthquake hit and no one knew their names, so they were given a new surname - "Party."
Their full names roughly translate as "The Seedling Fostered by the Party", "Revolutionary Redness Fostered by the Party" and "New Generation Fostered by the Party."
Outings are group events organised by the orphanage. There are no individual contacts with children outside. There is no pocket money - the orphanage supplies all their needs, and the children would not be allowed out to the shops anyway.
"They love the party much more than most children," said the headmaster Mr Dong Yuguo. "The party has given them a second life."
But why are they kept so isolated?
Because they are busy, and because if they went outside with other children, they may hear people talk about their families and parents, which would make them feel bad," he said.
To a Westerner at least, the explanation rings false. Despite the laughing faces, the school has a sinister ring to it.
These children are amongst the few in China that the party can control completely. There are no competing allegiances, none of the influences of family and friends. They are the party's to mold and shape.
Another of the orphans' songs runs: "If revolutionary resolve is established when young, then we will dare to brave mountains of knives and sea of fire, closely following the Communist Party."
"I love the party because the party takes care of us, gives us clothes and education and loves us very much," one 17-year-old girl told me in halting English. "I will go wherever the party sends me."
Everyone studies hard, trying to get into college or university. If they don't, they go back to work in Tangshan where their parents died.
But they will go back as committed Communists striving with one mind to do the party's bidding.
After five years of constant drilling and propaganda, it would be surprising if they did anything else. This article is from Danwei.org
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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
Tangshan earthquake survivors in terror or new quake
November 2, 1983
By Graham Earnshaw in Tangshan
The survivors of the Tangshan earthquake in northeast China in 1976 which killed a quarter of a million people are still living in terror of a repetition of the disaster.
Before the quake hit on that hot summer's night in July 1976, Tangshan had been just another Chinese coal mining town with a population of about one million.
But in a few seconds, the power of the earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, destroyed over 90 per cent of the city's buildings and left 248,000 people dead and dying.
It was by far the biggest natural disaster this century, and the horror of it for those who experienced it first hand will never be wiped off their memories.
Tangshan was closed to foreigners for seven years following the disaster, and foreign journalists have only just been allowed to visit the city to find out what really happened.
Mr Yao Guangqing, a city official now involved in reconstruction work, gave a vivid description of his experience during the quake:
"The weather was very hot and close for a few days before the earthquake, and dogs and chickens refused to go inside buildings.
"There was no forecast, no sign that this was going to happen, but there was a noticeable change in people's behaviour.
"The evening before the quake, there was an outdoor film show, and it took more than four hours to run the entire movie. people were very restless, and the film had to be stopped many times due to fights breaking out amongst the audience.
"As I walked home, I passed a fish pond and noticed the fish jumping up out of the water, indicating that the ground temperature had risen very high.
"That night, I couldn't sleep, and I lay in bed, just dozing. suddenly I was woken by a bright flash in the sky and the room was brilliantly lit as if by lightning. there was a roaring sound like a very big wind except that the air was still, and intermittent sounds of explosions. Then a great shaking motion began, up and down.
"I was shocked awake by the light, shook my wife awake and spent a long time looking for my slippers. it is my custom to put my slippers on when i get out of bed.
"By the time i reached the door, the up-and-down rolling motion had begun, and the building was rocking so much, i couldn't get the door open. I went back and clung to the bed. Outside the window, the trees were swinging back and forwards crazily.
"When the rolling motion finished less than a minute later, I opened the door and ran into the courtyard and found that all the buildings around had collapsed."
The Tangshan coal mines, once owned and run by a British company, are amongst the biggest in China, and 2,200 miners were underground when the quake struck.
A total of 1,951 miners died, but ironically, every single one of those underground made it the surface alive. most miners died in their beds at home, a few died when buildings at the mine collapsed on them. Most of Tangshan's residents lived in one-storey brick buildings with sturdy concrete roofs which collapsed almost instantly, trapping and crushing people beneath. Most people died in this way.
At the railway station, many travellers stranded over-night had been sleeping outside, but went inside the station building just before the quake hit to escape a sudden rain shower. those wishing to stay dry mostly ended up dead.
One foreigner who happened to pass through Tangshan a year later described the destruction as being similar to the "worst pictures of bombing during world war two".
For days afterwards, people struggled to extract relatives and neighbours from the rubble. there were airdrops of biscuits and clothing, and water trucks began to go round the city after the first few days.
The one consolation was that the quake struck in summer -- if it had been winter, casualties would have been even higher.
China in mid-1976 was in the midst of political upheavals as Chairman Mao neared death, and many people saw the quake as a sign from the gods that political changes were imminent.
The chairman died six weeks afterwards, but interestingly, not one of the many Mao statues around the city collapsed during the quake, an indication of how strongly they were built.
The Chinese proudly refused all foreign aid -- a decision the present administration regrets, and the massive job of rebuilding the city has been carried out entirely on their own.
The cost in human terms was huge. Very few families seemed to have escaped completely, and thousands of paraplegics now fill hospitals in and around Tangshan, their injuries all dating from precisely the same instant.
With thousands of people suddenly turned into widows and widowers, the local Communist Party street committee began organising them into marriages of conveniences to provide some family warmth for the survivors.
"It worked out very well for me," said one old lady who was married to a worker from a nearby street. "I get on much better with my present husband than the one who died in the earthquake."
Hundreds of thousands have been rehoused in new, quake- resistant blocks, but large areas of the city are still crowded with temporary shelters which over the past seven years have become almost permanent.
Most of the shelters have roofs consisting of nothing more than tar paper held down by bricks, because residents still don't dare to put anything heavier above their heads.
Many people strongly resisted moving into the new four- storey housing blocks, even though seismologists say the chance of another strong earthquake in the area is remote.
"We are terrified of another earthquake," said one old woman, shaking her head. "I can still imagine it now, the roaring sound as it rolled through, and the roof falling." This article is from Danwei.org
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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
Sexy Adverts Upset Chinese Workman
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
February 26, 1982
An official Chinese newspaper yesterday published a letter from an irate railway worker complaining that too many advertisements featured attractive women with outstanding figures. Such “titillating illustrations” were very unsuitable, the worker said.
He went on: “One paper carried an advert for a type of cloth material which included a curvaceous woman with flowing hair standing on one side intentionally emphasizing her prominent breasts. If all adverts were like this, the effect on public morals would certainly not be good.”
Advertising returned to China three years ago after two decades of being banned as a bourgeois capitalist practice.
Editor's note:
The Beijing News (新京报) has been running a series of articles about the last 30 years of reform, each one quoting an old People's Daily article, a little like this series of Graham Earnshaw's old pieces.
Yesterday's article quoted a CPPCC member who in 1982 had this to say about the popularity of non revolutionary, non traditional pop music that was enchanting the masses in the early days of reform:
"Now they are playing love songs by Teresa Teng (邓丽君) everywhere. It's not only students learning to sing them, even old ladies are singing them, it's really bad..." This article is from Danwei.org
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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
Author's note:
The following item very much reflects the feel of the early 1980s, when China was hardly open and relationships between foreigners and Chinese were virtually non-existent. The headline, written not by me but by a sub-editor in London, is crude, but general xenophobia was quite strong in those days. China officially had been isolated for so long, accusing the US and Europe of being imperialists and the whole Soviet bloc of being hegemonists. Its only friends until quite recently had been Albania and Yugoslavia.
From today’s much more open perspective, it is interesting to get a feel for Chinese-foreigner relationships all those years ago. Confucius and Chairman Mao between them had left the Chinese people looking at the world in a hierarchical and combative way. But this report indicates much progress in the past 27 years. Racial attitudes have largely softened as Chinese people have gained greater awareness of the world. And while then, just a sports victory could result in aggressive pushing and shoving of foreigners, now even the purposeful official incitement of anti-French sentiment results in no violence, and only a postponement by a few days of a shopping trip.
Chinese retain their ancient dislike of foreigners
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
November 20, 1981
The xenophobia of China today has come to the fore once more in recent weeks during demonstrations after sports victories and over the vexed question of marriage between foreigners and Chinese people.
For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, the Chinese automatically considered anyone from outside their country to be a barbarian, and remnants of the extreme racial concept still exists today.
China's successes in the recent women's volleyball championships in Tokyo were the occasion for unprecedented marches by thousands of youths through the streets of Peking and other major Chinese cities.
Some foreigners who mingled with the crowds were roughly jostled and even beaten, and on the day China beat the United States volleyball team, a crowd of several hundred gathered outside the American Embassy to shout "Long Live China."
The demonstrations were mostly innocent fun by young people glad of an excuse to make some noise. But to foreigners who were also in Peking in the late 1960s they brought back terrible memories of Chinese mobs which turned on foreigners without a thought.
The average Chinese has a not-quote subconscious belief in the innate superiority of his race which has been battered but not extinguished by the indignities suffered at the hands of foreigners over the past 200 years.
Ordinary Chinese people still seem to rank the races of the world in their minds, although unlike the old days, they are not so sure about who is number one.
One African student reported being told by a Chinese university intellectual: "We have to be frank. White people are better than us, but we are better than you." This article is from Danwei.org
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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
‘New China’ Girl Gives State 35,000 Pounds
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
August 5, 1981
A 23-year-old girl in eastern China who recently inherited more than 35,000 pounds sterling has given the whole amount to the State “to help the country realize the four modernizations”, the People’s Daily reported yesterday.
The paper said she did not have a place of her own to live and was staying at a friend’s house. “I wouldn’t be able top spend so much money in a whole lifetime, and anyway if I kept the money it would not bring me any real good fortune,” the paper quoted her a saying.
“I belong to new China and real good fortune comes from relying on one’s own labours to support oneself.”
Author's note: one can guess at the pressure brought to bear on her. But back then, with the Cultural Revolution still fresh in everyone’s minds and nobody with any money in sight, the dangers of being “rich” were significant. Times have changed. This article is from Danwei.org
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 Bullets from Sina: at least in 2008 they are virtual Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
Crowd Attacks Journalist
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
November 16, 1981
A foreign correspondent in Peking was roughly man-handled by a crowd yesterday and then detained by the police for questioning after he took photographs of people beating up a young man in garish clothes.
Stan Oziewicz of the Toronto Globe and Mail said the police told him he had "offended the masses by photographing them without their permission."
Author's note: We're back seeing the masses being collectively offended again at the moment.
Editor's note: The image above with the CNN logo adorned with bullet holes is from this anti CNN Sina.com page. It's good note that there has been some progress: sticks and stone may break foreign journalists' bones, but Sina petitions signed by anonymous youngsters on the Internet...
There is more on the Sina campaign and general anti CNN stuff on Imagethief and on Sinobyte. This article is from Danwei.org
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 I salute you, now get a job Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
China Drops 'Jobs For All' Policy
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
November 25, 1981
The Chinese government announced yesterday that it will no longer accept responsibility for providing full employment, supposedly one of the main advantages of the Socialist system.
In a major policy shift, the People's Daily said that the onus for finding jobs for China's millions would in future be shared by several different levels, including the workers.
Individuals will be encouraged to support themselves financially by various legal means, and controls on private businesses will be relaxed even further in an effort to soak up the huge pool of unemployed in China's cities.
The paper stressed the need to expand the self-employed sector of the economy. This means more street hawkers, piano-tuners, shoe-shine boys, rat-catchers, cobblers and other service trades - virtually all of which were abolished under the Cultural Revolution.
But many young people, brought up under Chairman Mao to condemn small traders as evil speculators or "bourgeois remnants", are not willing to take such jobs.
As an added incentive to workers to find work on their own, the new directive suggested that some self-employed people could become eligible to join the Communist Party - the road to real power in China. All workers in China have until now been "assigned" work by the State, with virtually no choice as to what that work may be. There are no unemployment benefits for those not lucky enough to be assigned jobs.
An article in the official party magazine Red Flag in June said that there were 10 million people "waiting to be assigned jobs." An official in Shanghai earlier this year said that she understood the number of unemployed to be over 20 million.
Author's note: The first step on the road from socialist nightmare towards whatever it is that China is becoming was taken in 1979 with four words "bao chan dao hu" (包产到户)—basically killing the communes by handing agricultural production to farmer households. This was the urban equivalent.
The image above shows Deng Xiaoping, architect of China's reforms, in 1981 (source).
This article is from Danwei.org
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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
‘Careless Talk’ Warning
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
March 16, 1981
The Peking Workers Daily told readers at the weekend not to reveal state secrets to foreigners. They
should be friendly but oppose servility and anything “which injures Chinese integrity.”
“When talking with foreign guests, political discussion should be avoided. When certain questions come up which require an answer, be precise, brief and reserved,” the paper said.
Author note: Relations between foreigners and Chinese people, and particularly Chinese and foreign journalists/diplomats, were very rare and weird in that era. You still see a hint of that time in the guards on the gates of the Jianguomenwai and Qijiayuan compounds. The number of Chinese people with whom I had even a vaguely natural relationship was very small indeed, and most for me were related to Democracy Wall in one way or another, and highly dangerous for my friends. Conversations with officials were almost always stilted, as required by this article. There were only occasional touches of humanity. Once, an official of the Foreign Ministry whose job it was to call on foreign journalists and criticize their “unfriendly” reports, came to an official cocktail party and was seen to be limping. When asked what had happened, he smiled ruefully and said: “You see, I picked up an rock and …”
This article is from Danwei.org
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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
“Dancing Tree” Has Yen For Good Music
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
December 6, 1981
Peasants in Yunnan Province in southwest China have found a small tree which “dances” when beautiful music is played nearby but which ignores loud martial tunes.
“When music is played near the tree, the trunk sways in time to the rhythm and the leaves turn from side to side. As soon as the music stops, the tree also immediately ceases to move,” the Canton Daily reported.
“When people standing near the tree talk softly, the tree will also begin to dance, but if the talking is loud and raucous, it does not move,” the paper added.
Author note: In 1981, the Chinese official media shook off decades of a politics-only diet and started to publish a few small items that were weird but also politically safe. Working for the Daily Telegraph, there was little chance to talk to ordinary people or do anything approaching ordinary reporting. I had a very cultured and educated “translator” who later became an ambassador, and we subscribed to every single newspaper then available in China, and spent our days together going through them, looking for interesting stuff – trouble in the provinces, a hint of some new twist in the latest political campaign, and weird news items like this one. Some of them I even managed to resell to the National Enquirer, but don’t tell Lord Hartwell.
This article is from Danwei.org
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Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
Message to Hu by Dalai Lama
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
July 17, 1981
Tibet’s exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, has sent congratulations to the new chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Daily said in Peking yesterday. He urged Chairman Hu Yaobang “to continue with your courage and efforts in recognizing realities and respecting people’s aspirations”.
Publication of the double-edged message by the Chinese media has significance. Diplomats suggested that the Peking authorities calculated the message might convince some of the Dalai Lama’s followers in Tibet that he was coming round to accepting Chinese control there.—END
Author note: And so the story rattles on, decade after decade. This item indicates there is a precedent for an admission of dialogue. Hu (as an Australian diplomat put it in the mid-1980s, it’s not who ya know, it’s Hu Yaobang) was the party chief through the 1980s, and was one of the two Chinese leaders for whom the Dalai Lama has expressed admiration – the other being Deng Xiaoping. Hu took the view that Tibetan culture had been damaged by the huge officially-organized Han migration to Tibet in the 1960s and 1970s and withdrew large numbers back into the heartland. Deng famously stated that as long as an individual accepted the concept of no division of the People Republic of China - i.e. no independence for Taiwan or Tibet – then everything else was negotiable.
I visited Lhasa in 1982, on one of the first foreign journalist group visits, and as I always did in those days, had my Martin guitar with me. I lugged it up all the steps in the Potala right to the roof, and played some songs sitting up there. I did not, as I often claimed, play a version of Louis Armstrong’s hit, Hello Dalai. But I did play Chuck Berry’s Maybelline. The KGB agent on the tour – the Tass correspondent - then played a Russian tune called “Tibet”. And the valley gleamed beneath us. This article is from Danwei.org
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 U.S. State Dept. Map of Beijing 1981 - sourceGraham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:
Legal hazards facing drivers in Peking
March 5, 1981
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
A good way of causing a traffic accident in Peking is actually to drive according to the letter of the law.
Not only is it illegal to drive at night through the Chinese capital's dimly-lit streets with headlights on, but trying to respect the law on pedestrian crossings appears to only increase traffic chaos.
As a test, I drove down the length of Peking's busiest street, the Avenue of Everlasting Peace, trying to stay within the law. I failed, and probably avoided an accident as a result.
Zebra crossings were painted across some of the main roads last year and regulations enacted which state that drivers must give way to pedestrians on the crossings.
But no driver in Peking takes the slightest notice of the regulation despite the law's clear warning that any accident involving an injury in a zebra crossing is automatically assumed to be the fault of the driver.
My attempt at driving lawfully not only failed, but I also caused confusion amongst the pedestrians uncertain of why I was stopping, anger amongst drivers behind me convinced that I had the right of way, and impatience in the case of one policeman who testily waved me on as I stopped to let pedestrians cross.
One car almost ran into me as I slowed to remain within the law.
The utter confusion which reigns on Peking's streets appears to be getting worse despite attempts to deal with the problems.
For years the biggest hazards have been swarms of jay-walking pedestrians and the cyclists zig-zagging amongst the traffic in death-defying fashion. Few Peking citizens seem to realize that cars can kill.
But the twin nightmares of serving cyclists and darting pedestrians have been joined recently by another danger - a corps of novice taxi drivers conscripted on to the roads to help deal with a recent influx of foreign
tourists.
Driving at night down Peking's dark thoroughfares is particularly hair-raising because of the law banning headlights.
When asked the reason for the curious ban on headlights Chinese officials have said that it is to stop the cyclists being dazzled.
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Author's note: At the time, there were almost no cars on Beijing streets except for a few buses, army jeeps and the occasional Red Flag limo. It was all bicycles. It was possible to drive very fast, and I once did Jianguomen to Beida in 15 minutes. Madness. At night camel trains of several camels, as well as donkey carts, would pass along Jianguomenwai Dajie, so deathly quiet after 9pm that it was possible to clearly hear the Peking station clock playing the East is Red on the hour every hour. Another explanation given for the ban on headlights was to prevent giving the US imperialists or Soviet revisionists guidance on any possible bombing run. This article is from Danwei.org
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