Announcer A:
Today and every day the American people must make decisions on which their whole survival may depend. To make sound decisions the people must be informed. For this they depend on the nation's free press. How well is the nation's press doing its essential job? The people have a right to know the truth. They have a responsibility to ask. The right to question.
Kimball:
What about Communist China? I'd have to say that when I went to school we didn't learn very much about China. Perhaps you had the same experience. We studied about the Greeks and about the Romans and the history of Western Europe, but China was just a big, vague, far-away place on the other side of the world.
And the idea that the United States and China would ever get into a shooting war with each other, a shooting war in which we might have trouble holding up our end, well, that idea was just unthinkable. That's why Korea came as such a shock, and it's still a shock to pick up a paper or tune in the radio and hear that we may be on the brink of war again with China. How did we get in such a fix? Mr. Louis Lyons, I am addressing that question to you and your guests on this program.
Lyons:
To explore these questions of such tremendous importance to us we have two of our leading authorities on
China. One is Mr. Theodore White, a correspondent in China, both before the war and during the war, and author of such books as Thunder Out of China and his recent novel on
China, The Mountain Road.
Announcer B:
Mr. White says, and I quote, "The greatest unreported revolution in modem times is taking place in Communist China and the American people are almost totally ignorant about what is taking place."
Lyons:
Our other guest is in charge of China studies at Harvard University and with him many of our leading China correspondents have studied. And he is the author of Modern China and The United States and China – Professor John K. Fairbank.
Announcer B:
Professor Fairbank has stated, quote, "Questions like the diplomatic recognition of Red China or its admission to the United Nations are completely overshadowed by the problem of getting American correspondents into Red China so we can get some news out."
Lyons:
Our two experts then are deeply concerned about our lack of information on China. We will question them in just a moment.
Announcer A:
The Press and the People.
Announcer B:
As moderator from Harvard University, the winner of the Peabody Award for television and radio journalism and the Lauterbach Award for outstanding contributions in the field of civil liberties, Mr. Louis Lyons.
Lyons:
Mr. White, you've said that the American people are not getting the real news about China. Well, that's pretty close to our key problem. What do we really know, as newspaper readers, about China? How good is what we feel we know? What has the press really been doing for us on this?
White:
We have keyhole information on China. It is as if we had our eye to a keyhole beyond which there was a furnace. The revolution in China after the war is one of the most monstrous events of the twentieth century. It is an upheaval, a Himalayan upheaval, in history. We look at this revolution and these events through this keyhole.
We hear a scrap from the
Peking radio, a scrap picked up by a radio in
Tokyo, a clipping that manages to reach
Hong Kong. Out of these fragments, out of these fragments we try to feel our way to a meeting with this new giant of the world, which may eventually come to war with us.
Lyons:
Thank you, Mr. White. Now Mr. Fairbank, you've said that we can't make the important policy decisions about China, such as recognition, until we have got reporters into China. Won't you explain this? Also, why is it we can't get reporters into China?
Fairbank:
The story seems to be pretty simple. And much as I am against knocking Mr. Dulles, just because he is in the focal spot of our problems, it really is his decision. He has fixed it so we can't exchange correspondents with Red China.
Lyons:
Just a word, as to the Dulles uh policy on reporters. After long pressure Mr. Dulles finally agreed, in a statement of August 22, 1957, as an experiment, he said, to let those twenty-four newspapers and services that had foreign services send a correspondent, one each, into China, provided each would stay at least six months. His passport would be renewed after seven months. In effect, then, he was there on a trial period to be reviewed by his government.
And Mr. Dulles added this in that statement: It's to be understood that the United States would not accord reciprocal visas to Chinese using passports of the Chinese Communist government. Well, the outcome was that the Chinese didn't admit American correspondents. Now we've just checked with the State Department and it's still the same policy. Mr. White, what do you say to this?
White:
Well I think there's a fundamental folly – or worse than that – in the State Department's policy is the way they have accepted the underlying philosophy of the Communists, that newspapermen are pawns or tools of government policy. That uh, where I believe, we desperately need every scrap of information we can get from Communist China right now.
The State Department for five years forbade anyone to go to Communist China, while the Communists kept inviting American newspapermen. As soon as the State Department reversed itself, the Communists then said, "No, you can't." So that now the issue of whether we shall or shall not go becomes a matter of uh, high policy between our government and the Communist government in
Peking. This is wrong.
Lyons:
Well, Mr. White, suppose Mr. Dulles should lift his ban. How would we be fixed, then, to get information out of China? I recall that one of your old colleagues, Harold Isaacs, out of long experience as a Far Eastern correspondent, has said that we never did a really adequate job of reporting such a complicated place as China before the revolution. It's infinitely more complicated now. The real question is: Have we the qualifications to do the job?
White:
Qualifications means people. There're all sorts of things involved in that. I think that during the war we had the finest corps of correspondents in Asia of any country, men who had studied that country and studied it well. If their dispatches weren't printed in the USA, it was for other reasons which I can explain.
Right now, with the exception of two or three correspondents left in the Orient, there are none who can speak Chinese if they got in, who know the country as it was before the Communists took over. We would have two tremendous problems: one is, if we got in, to cover, to get beneath these veils of secrecy of the Communist government; the second would be to get our stuff published in the press back here at home if we did get in.
Lyons:
Well as to that second one, this really sticks in your mind as a barrier?
White:
Ah, yes, it is. Let's, let's face it. Well, let's take this. The AP chums out 20,000 words of news from overseas every day. That's about twenty-five columns in the daily newspaper. All the papers get it. They use about four columns. Of the four columns they use, 75 percent is spot news. The rest of the stuff they use is human-interest stuff. Ah, but the kind of stuff you need from a dictatorship is interpretive stuff.
I remember when I was in China, the Communists and the Kuomintang were negotiating in those final negotiations that led to the great Civil War. That week the famous cold-egg story broke. The Chinese had a way of chilling an egg and standing it on end so it stood up.
It caught the imagination of all the editors in the USA. Any correspondent who filed the story about the egg standing on end got by-lines, got pictures, got a play across the country. If you did the difficult, important stories of the negotiations that were to lead to civil war, you got maybe one paragraph down at the end. Our editors and our publishers have to sell papers and make money. The really important interpretive stuff does not pull circulation; or at least most editors feel that it doesn't.
They want canned, hard, spot news, or they want human-interest stuff like Mao Zedong telling people how to swim upstream. But they, our press has not yet learned the tremendous importance of that particular type of feature or interpretive story in a dictatorship where the government controls every channel of spot-news.
Lyons:
And at the moment, Mr. Fairbank, with no American reporters in China, the Chinese really have a monopoly, don't they, to tell the world, and especially the Asian world, just what they want?
Fairbank:
They not only have a monopoly but are using it very effectively, because our lack of any real view of what is going on in China leaves us subject to their propaganda in effect. And we are getting theft story and thinking about it as best we can without any way to check on it.
Kimball:
Well Mr. Fairbank, what are the things going on in China right now that we ought to be hearing about?
Fairbank:
Well the big story in my view, which ought to take precedence over recognition and all this stuff that we are talking about in this country which may not be possible, the big story is, is the Communes. Now these Communes are a process of taking, say, 20,000 people, maybe 30,000, maybe 40,000 people, and putting them into a single economic unit – a thing that's never been done in the world before. It is not a city, it's a combination in the countryside.
White:
Now, you see, I as a newspaperman, if I got in, would like to check whether that were entirely true. This is Potemkin Village stuff the dictatorship announces over the radio from Peking. The thing to do would be to go to those places. There are still only 18,000 miles of railway in China – we have 210,000 here – the thing to do would be to get on horseback, or walk on foot up to some of the hill villages. How different are these Communes from the Baojia system of Chiang Kai-shek?
Fairbank:
Well, you might get on a non-Communist horse, but you'd be talking to Communists all the time. You'd get out there in a Potemkin village, if you're a correspondent, too. This is a, this a many-fold problem.
Lyons:
Well, Mr. Fairbank, some other countries do have correspondents in China, of course, and I see among the many clips we've been gathering from forty newspapers over recent weeks about China - and getting a great dearth of information. An editorial, one of the very few we found, this in the Louisville Courier-Journal, and, "We learn about China from a Canadian," is the title of the editorial. This was after some articles by a Canadian correspondent.
And they say we're dependent on these foreign newsmen because the State Department refuses to let our newspapermen go into China; our dangerous lack of knowledge of China hurts us far more than it does the Chinese and their rulers. Well, let me ask you, do you feel that the American press has pressed as hard as they might against this Dulles thing?
Fairbank:
Certainly not. I would disagree with Mr. Fairbank. I don't think the American press has made any effort to try to get in, to break this thing.
White:
The Newspaper Publishers Association has protested officially. The Overseas Press Club, which represents American foreign correspondents, has protested officially.
Fairbank:
It's only very occasionally that you get anything in any newspaper or editorial that really tries to attack the problem.
White:
Well, I suppose we might as well have it all out. They protest, but they don't protest vigorously.
Lyons:
I must—Mr. White, recently I attended the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association, and one of their most distinguished and veteran editors, Roy Roberts, made the final speech to them. He said in effect that it's scandalous that the American press is denied a chance to report on this vast nation of more than half a billion people and all that's going on there. And he put it up to them that it's one of the most urgent pieces of business for the American press to change that situation. Well, they haven't changed it.
Fairbank:
Reporters may say that, but I don't think that publishers are concerned about it.
White:
The Cowles brothers, who publish some of the greatest papers in the USA, have protested as hard as they can. The NPA, the National Publishers Association has also protested. But there is this slight hangover of fear. The State Department can take reprisals against you.
Fairbank:
Well it is against Bill Worthy right now because he was there.
White:
It can take reprisals against much more eminent people, who appear much stronger. If you press too hard, you have to get yourself into all the various mechanisms the State Department has of ruining your career for years thereafter. But insofar as we can press, we have.
Fairbank:
Some people have.
Kimball:
Mr. White, do you feel that the reading public is pressing the newspapers to do something? Are they really wanting and demanding news out of China?
White:
No I don't. And I feel that if any politician took the lead in doing this, if someone protected by his position in Congress demanded that this be done—
Lyons:
Why not the Democratic Party?
White:
They should. If you agree with me that we cannot have a sound national policy without an electorate that understands, then it should be the, a cardinal political insistence that we get information out of China.
Fairbank:
This is just elementary. And yet we have some kind of fear – a refusal to face the problem we're up against which is going to get us if we don't face it; that's the one thing you can be sure of.
Lyons:
That's very interesting, Mr. Fairbanks, because the last Gallup poll I saw showed that only about twenty per cent of the American people were in favor of recognizing China, the great majority against. And yet, right up here in Vermont, the first Democrat ever to get elected in Vermont was stumping the state in favor of recognizing Red China and ending nuclear tests. There was very little news about that outside of Vermont.
Fairbank:
The problem is that you see recognizing it, isn't it? Not just a unilateral act, and it's no solution and no panacea. We can recognize unilaterally and it won't prove a thing possibly.
Lyons:
I just suggest that this man who was doing the unprecedented job of getting himself elected as a Democrat was campaigning on this issue and it wasn't fatal to him. Now the senior Democrats said apparently he assumed it would be.
White:
Mr. Lyons, I would not like to get the issue we are discussing here confused with the issue of recognition of Red China. That is a governmental matter and a State Department matter. The need of the US people for information is a social matter. Whether we recognize Red China or not, our kind of country can't operate unless we understand. I can give you an instance of that if you'd like.
White:
The most brilliant thing our State Department ever did was the Marshall Plan in
Europe. This is one of the glories of American statecraft in the post-war period. It was brilliantly reported. Our people understood what we were doing. They backed the government up. Congressmen could vote for Marshall Plan aid.
We won the only significant triumph over communism in the post-war period with the Marshall Plan. But where the people do not understand and do not know, then intelligent leadership cannot lead. And that's the situation in China.
Fairbank:
Well, for example, we can apply that right now to the
Taiwan situation. We've got these islands on the coast of
China. It's strategically a very difficult position. Personally, I think we should get out if we can, but I don't know how we can get out under fire.
But this whole thing has to be dealt with not item by item as it comes up in a crisis, but as a package, as a whole program, as a plan, including not only Taiwan but the mainland. What do you do about recognition? What do you do about maintaining an independent
Taiwan? What do you do about admission to the United Nations? What do you do about changing correspondents? All that has to be put into a general program which the public understands, like the Marshall Plan, I agree with you on that.
Lyons:
Well, let's...Well, Mr. Fairbanks, you've mentioned, uh,
Taiwan. Now, as you know, we were recently on the brink of war over Quemoy. Now things seem to have let up a little, recently. But where do we stand on that? What is the danger right now in this China policy?
Fairbank:
Well we still have our necks stuck out, in the sense that we are committed to support the offshore-island position. If there should be a shooting that we couldn't keep within limits, and we'd be in a larger war than we expect. We are already committed to the defense of
Taiwan, which I think we have to do, but the offshore islands are a different question.
Lyons:
Let me ask Mr. White, former correspondent in China, do you feel that the public really knew enough about the Quemoy situation and how we got into it to judge it, to bring any effective public opinion to bear when it was this dangerous issue a few months ago?
White:
None whatsoever. Let me, for example, on August 10, of this year, our State Department made a statement which horrified me. It was tantamount to a declaration of war. I think I've got it here, I'll quote, it says, this is what we say: "The United States holds the view that communism's rule in China is not permanent and that one day it will pass. By withholding diplomatic recognition from Peking, it seeks to hasten that passing."
Therefore it is announced that our government seeks to hasten the passing of the Peking regime, or, in other words, that we seek to overthrow the present government of Communist China. I've gone through all the clippings in forty-five papers. Only four papers saw fit at all to comment that we had made any statement on China, none had noticed that we had issued what in Peking could be considered a declaration of permanent hostility. This is bad reporting.
Lyons:
Yes, it's not only bad reporting but it brings me to something else. Now, we say we have no reporters in China, but we have reporters in Washington and we have editorial writers trying to be informed on all our newspapers. To come back to our China policy, our, recently our Quemoy policy, to what extent did either of you gentlemen, who follow the score on China as much as anybody, find American editorial pages discussing this issue and bringing our policy under critical scrutiny about it?
White:
There I think we must give pretty strong credit to our papers across the country – papers like the Kansas City Star, the New York Times, Des Moines Register Tribune, these papers took a pretty firm—uh,
Charlotte Observer, Atlanta Constitution–
Fairbank:
Well, that's all very well for some of the papers, I was, during that Quemoy crisis out in Colorado and there was a paper came out one day, I won't bother to name it, which had a Red scare headline on it one day trying to mobilize us. And so I bought that paper, the next day I tried to find out what happened. There was no news of China in the paper, anywhere, because some boy had murdered his parents, or something. That was the end of the news from China.
Kimball:
Mr. White, what you have to do for me, you experts, is explain to me how China involves me. That I think is the critical question.
Fairbank:
I can tell you in very simple terms. Our western civilization has come up against something in Asia – a modernization of Asia – which is an entirely different civilization. And they are now modernizing, in this Commune system which I mentioned, where people are put to work in a way that we never have done in this country. They can outproduce us if they can make this thing work. We don't know if it's going to work then or not. But if it does work, they've got something which is more powerful than we've got in the end, if we don't look out.
White:
May I take a whack at answering that question too?
White:
If you've ever pulled a dollar bill out of your pocket, you are using a Chinese invention, they were the first to have paper currency. If you've ever used a fork, you've used something that was brought from China thousands of years ago.
Lyons:
How about gunpowder?
White:
If you have ever heated coal, if you have ever played cards, poker or bridge, you've been using a Chinese invention. There was something, over a millennium ago China that was brilliant, pragmatically brilliant, in a sense that left
China ages ahead of
Europe. We know of the Greek revolution of thought; there was a similar brilliance of thought in China a thousand years ago. And then suddenly it froze. It became moribund. It's one of the great mysteries of history, like the decline of the Roman Empire.
Fairbank:
It wasn't able to respond to the circumstances.
White:
And now, suddenly, this brilliant civilization like a sleeping volcano erupts again, and we have to face the fact that deep in the Chinese tradition is a power of mind and a power of muscle and bicep. We must reckon with a world in which China has slept for a thousand years, and there's years. And all these, all of the art—so many of the artifacts of our civilization are Chinese in origin that you cannot bring yourself to believe that the Chinese will again produce these same brilliant creations of mind and hand.
Lyons:
Mr. Fairbank you, I'm sure you must have read a recent book by our friend Harold Isaacs, called Scratches on Our Mind – it might just as well have been titled Images in Our Heads – and in this, he shows how our public image of
China and also
India has fluctuated with the change in our national policy and foreign relations toward them; that is, from black to white, or vice versa.
Well this suggests the forces that sway public opinion and put these images into our head. I am thinking primarily of the correspondent, and I suppose one might also think of the editorial writer. What are his chances of writing reality and keeping to it? How uphill is it against these kind of images?
Fairbank:
Well of course we have these big swings of feeling and opinion. The correspondent has to cater to these to some extent and then put in the information that can make a more realistic policy.
Lyons:
Well, let me suggest something else. Christopher Rand, one of our leading correspondents, wrote an article a little while ago about the problem of the foreign correspondent.
He himself had been chiefly in China. And he said, among other things, we Americans are really too self-centered to be detached in reporting on a foreign people, but he said that if a reporter really learned detachment and just reported the realities as he saw them, what was going on in this foreign country, then the man in the street would be the first to be disappointed, not being stirred up about something. And also he said that the correspondent's editors would be worried about him and would bring him home to be reindoctrinated. So Rand concludes that reporting probably isn't going to get much better until everything else does. Well what do you say about this, Mr. White?
White:
Ah, I'd agree with that conclusion. Chris is one of the great correspondents, but I have had to work this thing from both ends of the desk, from out in the field and as an editor in
New York. The American press is faced with a conundrum. It needs to give information to the people, without which the people cannot survive.
Yet it has to make a profit of dollars and cents - balance sheet profits - on selling this information. The natural compulsion of any editor is to publish that which gets circulation – that's his first duty to the balance sheet.
Lyons:
But would you say then that the disinterest of the public is basically the thing?
White:
That the public, since it wants to read more about elephants getting drunk on kegs of beer overseas, or wants to read more about Mao Zedong's fourth wife, who may or may not be true, the public determines what the, what goes into the news slots.
Lyons:
What chance has the public got to be interested in something it knows nothing about – these Communes of Professor Fairbank, for example – if nobody ever told them that there were any such things, what chance have they got to evince the kind of interest that would...?
White:
There is emerging from this the thought that we are all of us sort of mechanical cogs in a big wheel, and we can't act. Somebody in these wheels and cogs has to act, and that's the duty of the editor and the publisher.
Kimball:
Mr. White, why do you always blaming the public for the arguments that you reporters have with your editors?
Lyons:
Why don't we just blame the editor this time?
White:
Because the editors uh usually agree with us and say, "That's a wonderful story, and I wish we could print it, but you know it won't sell or it won't build circulation." Let me tell you a story. This is not about
China. I was sitting in Paris and I worked in
Paris for many years. A publisher of a big Midwestern newspaper came through, spent one week there, and discovered all sorts of stories about inflation,
Algeria, crisis.
He was having dinner with the AP correspondent and be chided him with never having sent these kinds of stories. The AP correspondent told him that his newspaper had had one such story – an interpretive story – every single week, and the only one the publisher had printed was the one of the new bikini bathing suit with the picture of the girl with the navel showing.
In other words, although the publisher felt that he should be publishing that, his editors knew better and realized that the paper needed circulation. I'm not blaming the editors. I insist the publisher is at fault. And the publisher must take leadership in giving our country what it needs to live by and understand.
Fairbank:
Actually, if you could get correspondents into China, you'd get a story that would capture the imagination of the American public, whether it's menace, or success, or whatever. Because something is going on there that is really epoch-making. And it's not just human interest and it's not just inflation or abstractions, there's, if you can get to it, you've got the human personality in
China.
White:
I want to say one more thing, because we have been criticizing the press. I honestly believe that our American press gives the best coverage of the foreign world of the press of any other country on the face of the globe. We have wonderful foreign correspondents; you can learn more about the rest of the world here than anywhere else.
Fairbank:
Except for China.
White:
And I say that the best isn't good enough for the kind of responsibilities that we, as leader of the free world, must face in the future. We need to be even better than the best.
Kimball:
Mr. White, I'd like to ask you one last question. If you did get into China today, what would be the first story you'd look for?
White:
I'd get on a bus or get on a horse. I'd not go to
Peking; I'd sleep at the country inns. And I'd try to find out whether these Communes that Mr. Fairbank is talking about are real or are phony. I would sleep in enough hovels by the wayside and eat in enough restaurants to make an opinion and then write the story.
Lyons:
Thank you very much, gentlemen. Well here is one of the greatest stories in the world largely unreported. And the tragedy is that we have, as we have been told, the finest corps of correspondents on China, and they just didn't have a chance to act for us. And our foreign policy on China that we've referred to all too briefly, that led us to the brink of war, that certainly is an unexplained riddle to most of us.
Well now, hasn't the press of the most literate society on earth, with its enormous system of communication, a responsibility to penetrate this enigma on behalf of the reading public – to keep under critical scrutiny a policy so fraught with danger as our Quemoy policy surely was under critical scrutiny.
Well, when China is back again on our map of the known world, as it is bound to be, then will we be any better informed? Indeed, can we afford not to be? It's a question for our public officials, who make the policy as we've seen, whether we have reporters there or not. It's a question for our publishers, who control what is printed. It's a policy for all of our educational institutions, to train and qualify men to do this exceedingly difficult job. But it is, of course, a policy for all of us. So, until next week at this time, for The Press and the People, this is Louis Lyons.