Beating a Path to Peking

Everybody wants a bureau in the Middle Kingdom

Among his other talents, China's Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing is demonstrating an adeptness in the care and feeding of American newsmen. As part of its celebration of the New Year's Day normalization of relations with Washington, the Peking regime invited 27 U.S. reporters to the Middle Kingdom for a two-week tour. A high point was meeting with Teng in the Great Hall of the People, the first such session for American newsmen with a leader of the People's Republic. Teng fielded questions with ease and even showed a touch for one-liners. When a newsman complimented him on his crisp replies, Teng cracked, "Since I have no parliamentary experience, I don't know how to make long speeches."

Taking advantage of a rare freedom to pursue stories on their own, TV crews trudged across fields to film peasants at work, invaded a long-closed public park to get shots of young people courting, and barged into a beauty parlor to record post-Mao women getting their hair done; an ABC crew solemnly documented the progress of a plump Peking duck from barnyard to dinner plate. For the newsmen, reported TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark, who joined the tour, the trip was "like sitting down to a huge Chinese banquet. News was everywhere."

Their reports made editors back home even more eager for a permanent place at the banquet table. More than 25 American outfits have applied to set up shop in Peking, and about 15 are likely to be approved, about doubling the number of non-Communist news groups there. The Associated Press and United Press International will be the first to move in, probably by March 1; the major newspapers, the newsmagazines and the three networks will follow.

Leonard Woodcock, chief of the U.S. liaison office in Peking, warns that the establishment of a U.S. press corps is "going to be a long, difficult process." Apartments and office space are virtually unavailable in Peking, and most of the news organizations will end up scrambling for long-term leases on some of the city's 5,000 suitable hotel rooms. If necessary, quips CBS News President Richard S. Salant, "we'll put our correspondents up in a tent." The cost of maintaining a Peking bureau can be high (upwards of $100,000 a year for print journalists, even more for the larger TV crews), partly because so much equipment must be imported; old Peking hands say that newcomers should plan to bring not only their own cars but also a year's supply of parts and motor oil. Nonetheless, a bureau in China is less expensive than in places such as Tokyo, Paris and London.

Most of the U.S. bureaus will be one-man operations, staffed in many cases by correspondents, like U.P.I.'s Robert Crabbe and A.P.'s John Roderick, who were part of the knothole gang of journalists in Hong Kong and Tokyo. How much better newsmen will be able to report developments in China from Peking remains to be seen. Though the Chinese have lowered many journalistic barriers over the past year, reporters in the capital are generally kept under tight rein by the Foreign Ministry's Information Department, which must clear all travel outside the city as well as interviews with important officials. Indeed, the visiting U.S. reporters were startled last week when ministry staffers, who rarely went out of their way to be accessible in the past, knocked on hotel doors at midnight to distribute press releases to the Americans.

That is not the only Western journalistic custom the Chinese seem to be adopting. When Teng arrives in Washington on Jan. 29 for his week-long U.S. visit, he will have no fewer than 30 Chinese reporters in his entourage. That could be a measure of China's eagerness to publicize its Great Leap Outward. Then again, it may be just partial retaliation for Richard Nixon's pilgrimage to Peking in 1972; he arrived with 87 journalists in tow.

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