Fall of a China-Watcher

It was an unexpected summons. The usually aloof Chinese Foreign Ministry had invited Yugoslav Correspondent Branko Bogunovic, 47, for a chat. Over Indian tea, the woman in charge of the press section recited some Mao-thoughts. Then she got down to business. Bogunovic had to leave the country for writing "distorted and slanderous stories about the Chinese Cultural Revolution." After filing 2,500 stories from Peking since 1957, Bogunovic hastily collected his wife and boarded a train for the Soviet Union.

Bogunovic's ouster is a loss for China-watchers everywhere--capitalist, Titoist, Moscow-revisionist. They had come to rely on him for perhaps the most accurate and detailed dispatches out of China. In 1960, he first reported the sure sign of a Sino-Soviet split: an exodus of Russian technicians. In 1966, he was the first to report the downfall of the once-powerful Peking mayor, Peng Chen. While other China-based correspondents hesitated, he reported flatly that Lin Piao had been picked as Mao's successor.

Fact from Surmise. Like other foreign correspondents, Bogunovic was virtually confined to Peking and denied access to high officials. He saw Mao only once in ten years. No more than two press conferences a year were held in Peking. But Bogunovic knew enough Chinese to get some notion of what was going on. From his years with the Yugoslav Communist Party, he was able to read between the lines of party pronouncements. What he surmised often turned out to be fact.

Oddly enough, it was the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution that allowed Bogunovic to start functioning as a normal reporter again. Suddenly news was available--in the form of posters splashed all over Peking walls. Journalists haunted the streets in search of news. Some of it was contradictory and misleading, but much of it, says Bogunovic, "unlocked the door to top party and state secrets."

Happy To Be Home. But Bogunovic's reports began to exceed the regime's tolerance. No longer called "Comrade" by the Chinese, he was ominously addressed as "Mister." When he covered a demonstration in front of the Soviet embassy, Red Guardsmen surrounded his car. "They began to bang on the windows," he recalls, "and shake the car violently, screaming and shouting. It was a frightening experience." When he lodged a protest with the Foreign Ministry, he got back a scathing denunciation of his "revisionist" views.

It was all quite a contrast to his previous placid life in Peking. "We used to feel personally more secure there than anywhere else in the world," he says. "We could send our children out on the streets. We could leave our homes and cars open, and nothing would be stolen. This violence was a terrible change."

So he was not especially unhappy that he was thrown out. Nor has his disgrace in China damaged his career in Yugoslavia. Back home last week, he learned that he has a good chance of becoming director-general of the Tanyug News Agency, for which he has been reporting. The fifth foreign correspondent to be expelled from China since the Cultural Revolution began, Bogunovic predicts a similar fate for most of his 30 or so colleagues in Peking. "No witnesses are wanted," he says, "whose knowledge and experience go beyond the facts that are printed on the posters."

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