Perils of Peking

Correspondents resident in Peking can easily identify with the frogs in the old Chinese proverb that live at the bottom of a well: "They look and look and only see a patch of sky." The shifting political mood of China determines just how much sky will be visible. Now some members of the Peking press corps fear that a new constriction will accompany the regime's campaign against foreign and "bourgeois" influences.

John Burns, 29, of the Toronto Globe and Mail, one of the most enterprising and energetic of the correspondents, had been able to travel fairly widely. He had also developed what he calls "a good relationship" with a number of Chinese officials who have become more sophisticated in dealing with Western journalists. They are even adopting such phrases as "off the record" and "for background only." Last week Burns reported that travel permits are becoming scarce again, even for routine trips, and that both official and social contacts with Chinese were increasingly rare.

If that is to be the new pattern, it would reverse the trend of the past three years. After the birth of Ping Pong diplomacy in 1971, the Chinese allowed the resident foreign press corps to increase from 18 reporters to the present 42 (including 24 from non-Communist nations). Though no U.S. news organizations have yet been permitted to open bureaus, many prominent American journalists were treated royally during extended visits. Their reportage created the impression that China was opening up in a substantial way--an impression that is apparently illusory.

Most of the visitors who received special treatment realized that they were seeing only small patches of sky. After New York Times Columnist C.L. Sulzberger left China, he wrote a wry piece last November indicating how little he had really been able to observe: "I can only boast I am the first American columnist over 60 to visit Inner Mongolia since 1949, and the first with a Greek wife to lunch in Chengchow."

The resident newsmen, jealous that they rarely have access to either Inner Mongolia or Premier Chou, have far more to complain about. Their living conditions may be excellent; a modern, eight-room apartment rents for $180 a month, and the wages for a domestic staff of four--interpreter, driver, cook and maid--are only $290 a month. But the Western reporters must labor under conditions alien to their professional standards. The Chinese make serious political analysis and hard-news reporting almost impossible.

Wind and Tigers. There is no censorship as such, but once in a great while a reporter's dispatch mysteriously disappears. The correspondents must live in the segregated foreign quarter and need special permission to travel more than 15 miles from the center of Peking. When one Briton tried to venture out of the city, the militiaman who stopped him warned: "There are strong winds, and tigers may eat you if you go too far." Foreigners are not allowed provincial newspapers, and interviews with knowledgeable Chinese are difficult in the best of times. So the newsmen rely on the People's Daily, Peking's main newspaper, and the English-language report of the Hsinhua agency. When the Tenth Communist Party Congress convened in the Great Hall of the People last August, none of the resident foreign correspondents even knew the session was taking place.

In the face of these difficulties, even some of the most resourceful reporters, like David Bonavia of the London Times and Ulrich Grudinski of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, lean toward dry accounts based on official pronouncements, whether the subject is the latest grain harvest or the smear-Confucius campaign. When Grudinski has the urge to talk to expert sources, he pops down to Hong Kong to mingle with the community of professional China watchers there. The most limited correspondents of all are the Japanese, who operate under rigid self-censorship. When the Japanese were re-admitted following the Cultural Revolution, the major Tokyo papers agreed that their reporters would not file "hostile" stories. The result has been uniformly bland coverage.

Western reporters like Burns and Hans-Joachim Bargmann of West Germany's D.P.A. news service are spared that kind of restraint and come through with interesting and revealing pieces from time to time. Burns recently risked official displeasure by reporting fresh evidence of recurring xenophobia: "Foreign residents find themselves sternly questioned by police for photographing Peking street scenes."

But for the most part, newsmen stationed in Hong Kong--with easier access to seasoned China experts as well as Chinese returning from mainland visits--tend to file more knowing reports on politicking within China's hierarchy. Hong Kong-based reporters dismiss the Peking corps' output as mainly "sights, sounds and smells." Yet, as Burns points out, there is a wide market for atmospheric human-interest tales. Thus Burns recently filed a poignant portrait of an elderly White Russian emigre in the remote northern city of Harbin. Last spring he ran in Peking's annual seven-mile "round the city" foot race, finishing 1,165th in a field of 1,500. But it made a good story.

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