China Without Gee Whiz

There are no flies in China. Nor is there much theft, bad food or bad manners.

Instead, there are all these photogenic peasants singing patriotic songs as red flags snap in the breeze, etc.

Such is the travelogue romanticism that has dominated much Western reporting from China since the Ping Pong diplomacy days of 1972, when large numbers of visitors were admitted for the first time since the Communist takeover in 1949. Now, however, some revisionism is in vogue. In the past year such ideologically diverse American publications as Commentary (more and more conservative) and the New York Review of Books (still insistently liberal) have run pieces critical of conditions in China. The occasional U.S. journalist allowed into the country is more discerning than before about what he sees, thanks to a growing body of scholarly and journalistic reportage. Harrison Salisbury, for instance, fresh from a month-long tour of China, has been able to write in the New York Times about the educational system, border strife and other subjects with greater depth than he could during a 1972 trip. He explains: "There was a lot of gee-whiz reporting then. It was like landing on the moon."

Of the 39 foreign correspondents based in Peking, probably none have been writing about the "new" China with more skepticism than the Toronto Globe and Mail's Ross H. (for Howard) Munro. Since his arrival 2 1/2 years ago in the Chinese capital, where he is the only resident North American journalist, Munro, 36, has reported on a Potemkin village in Inner Mongolia that he suspected was set up to mislead visiting foreigners, pieced together detailed accounts of Peking's struggle with trade deficits, and chronicled the attempts of Mao's successors to revise the Chairman's teachings. For his enterprise, Munro was pointedly dropped from a government press trip to Tibet this summer. Two months ago, he received a rare official reprimand for "maliciously slandering Chairman Mao and the Central Committee headed by Chairman Hua"--though he was never told exactly how he had offended.

Munro may now be in line for another reprimand. The cause: a stinging seven-part series on human rights in China--or the lack of them--that has run in the Globe and seven U.S. dailies. In this series, Munro's China appears as an Orwellian hell where a citizen can still be executed merely for "preaching counterrevolutionary slogans," where freedom of movement and career choice are all but nonexistent, and where authorities discriminate against relatives of former petty landowners. In one telling vignette, Munro writes of a man who insists that local postal clerks read his letters to an overseas relative, lest he be accused later of being counterrevolutionary. China, observes Munro, "in many ways is the most tightly controlled nation on earth."

Raised in Vancouver, Munro studied political science at Stanford University and most recently covered politics for the Globe from Washington. There, as in other assignments, he became known for meticulous research. That has been both more imperative and more difficult for Munro in Peking, for he does not read or speak Chinese and often has to rely on interpreters. But as Globe Managing Editor Clark Davey notes, Munro remains "a student in every sense of the word."

Munro's own term for his reportorial style is "incrementalism"; typically, he squirrels away all sorts of documents, vignettes and conversations that he later weaves into stories. Thus, after months of observing coupon-carrying Chinese shoppers he is convinced that rationing has been far more extensive than the Peking regime admits. His report of death sentences being handed out for nothing more than the use of dissident slogans was based on a careful compilation of the court notices that occasionally appear throughout China. Says Munro: "Incrementalism is the only way I know of overcoming the problem of limited access to Chinese life."

Many of Munro's dispatches are accompanied by pictures taken by his wife Julie. They have not experienced the intimidation that is sometimes inflicted upon Western correspondents in Moscow, where the government has been known to harass foreign reporters (it expelled an American journalist on currency-violation charges earlier this year). When the Chinese want to express their displeasure with a correspondent they do so simply by ignoring him--and living in Peking without access to the bureaucracy or permission to travel can be like being stranded on some barren planet.

Munro is concerned that "in general, we resident correspondents worry too much about getting our next trip, just as outside journalists worry about getting their next visas. This sometimes leads to an almost unconscious self-censorship." Munro's own reports have not all been critical of China. He marveled last year at a grain harvest he was allowed to join, and even his human rights series contains kind words for the leniency with which the Chinese sometimes handle people accused of nonpolitical crimes. As for his stories about the less engaging aspects of Chinese life, Munro claims no bias other than his commitment to objectivity. "I wasn't looking for that sort of thing," he says. "It just hit me in the eye."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.