I Was Locked In A Cave On My First Trip to China - with Orville Schell

My first piece on Orville’s experience in the 80s had received great reader reception, thanks to the support from readers like you! This new installment shifts focus to the 60s, focusing less on China itself and more on Orville ‘s experiences navigating the challenges of not being able to freely visit China as a sinologist, an issue that rings particularly relevant as travel into China becomes increasingly restricted.

For those who are here for the first time – Orville is an esteemed writer on China and currently serves as the Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. Having been immersed in China’s elite political and intellectual scene from its early days of its opening and witnessing its tumultuous years firsthand, Orville possesses a profound grasp of the country’s evolution. His background includes studying Chinese history with John Fairbank during undergraduate years, visiting Taiwan in his gap year and even sharing tea with the KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek.

He first visited China in the 1970s on a special delegation sponsored by Zhou Enlai and spent the 1980s documenting China’s changes as a writer for The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, building deep connections with the Chinese civil society. The 1980s impressed upon him that, beneath the ironclad surface of Chinese politics, a latent, conflict-laden energy was simmering. He went on to co-produce the definitive Tiananmen documentary Gates of Heavenly Peace, which shaped a generation of Chinese thought. After he left the frontline of journalism, Orville served as dean of the School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

In this issue, you will read about Orville’s familial ties to China, his encounters with important historical figures, and his often-perilous experiences interacting with the CCP. These stories are from decades ago, but I certainly heard striking echoes of our current time.

Enjoy!

If you want to jump to bits:

• Changsha, Tahiti, and Taiwan

• First trip to China and a wake-up call

• Living in Taiwan, dreaming of Beijing

• John Fairbank and Edgar Snow

• ‘Ganyang America!’ (‘Crush America’ in Indonesian)

Changsha, Tahiti, and Taiwan

Welcome, Orville. You've dealt with China your whole life. What's the most significant moment in your China journey? 

That would be when I married my wife, Baifang. That was when a scholarly, journalistic enterprise of a foreigner looking in, trying to make sense of things from the outside, became entirely different. Not only did I have a Chinese wife who lived in a Chinese family, but while many of my friends were Chinese, the chemistry changed with her in the mix. It was a moment when my professional and public life came together with my private life to create a different composition.

Baifang, Orville and late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo on Tiananmen Square, spring 1989.

I really want to get at your motivation: Why China? Why do you care? And for that, the family and upbringing are the prominent digging places.

My father's mother was Canadian, and his father was a doctor. And strangely, although I don't think this had a particularly profound effect on my own growing up. My grandfather went to Yale and graduated from Johns Hopkins in medical school in 1906 and joined the 'Yale in China' program, and went to China with my grandmother, whose chest is in the next room; a beautiful cedar chest from Changsha. They went up the Yangtze River to Changsha where Yale was establishing China's first Western-supported medical college. My grandmother got pregnant there. She had such terrible morning sickness that they decided they better come home. So they did. That was a curious little footnote about my grandfather before the last dynasty fell.

I didn't know much about China, but this class met daily at the Harvard-Yenching Institute… Of course, all around me were Chinese, Japanese, and Korean books. I used to study in the stacks and wonder what all the books were saying.

So your father was conceived in Hunan, the cradle of the Chinese revolution. 

They came home, and my father was ultimately born here. But around our house, there were bits: dishes, a lovely Ming dynasty vase that turned into a lamp, and various other things. 

When I got to Harvard, I didn't know what to do. But my sister was there. She was older, and we wanted to take a course together. The only course that fit our schedules was this epic course, Social Sciences 101, taught by John Fairbank, Benjamin Schwartz, Edwin Reischauer, and all these fantastic people. I didn't know much about China, but this class met daily at the Harvard-Yenching Institute. The course books were all on reserve in the Harvard-Yenching Library. Of course, all around me were Chinese, Japanese, and Korean books. I used to study in the stacks and wonder what all the books were saying.

I continued studying Chinese philosophy for the following year. Then I thought I should do something meaningful: try to learn Chinese. So I bought a $100 Buick with friends that had no floor. We drove to California, and I went to Stanford to study Chinese. But it could have been more helpful. I got little of anything, so I decided this wasn't working. 

So I thought, OK, I will drop out of college and go to Taiwan. I discovered a Norwegian freight company with a ship from San Francisco to Tahiti. I ran down to the boat when it docked and found the captain. I asked, 'Will you take me on?' I said I had been an exchange student in Norway, and he knew the town where I lived. He said, OK. So, I started working on the ship, making about $50 a month.

It was an old-style freighter, but there were about ten passengers. One guy used to come down to the galley and talk to me. He said, you were going to all these exciting places, you should write. And I said, well, how would I do that? And he said, 'Just start writing. You can send it to magazines or newspapers and see if they'll publish it.' 

I had an uncle that lived in Tahiti after WW2. So I got to Tahiti, found my uncle, and went to this lovely little village opposite Tahiti, which looked like the very end of the main island. I wrote my first piece there about this little theatre. It was two little posts up in the air with a grass roof. Among the four sides of the theatre, three sides were all open.  A very charming, lovely little place. And they were showing pieces of chopped-up French films, and there was no sound. So that was the beginning of my writing.

Were you a good writer?

I was a terrible writer. I had no idea how to write when I was in school or even in college. I didn't actually begin to learn to write until I was writing for someone, not just some random professors. I'm living proof that the craft of writing is like any craft. Some people are just naturally gifted, but very few. You have to learn how to think, write, edit well, and just keep at it. But I think the added awareness of writing for an audience always made it different than academic writing, where you're basically writing for no one; not even your professor wants to read it. They will, but they don't want to.

It's why I write for the New York Review of Books. And I liked writing for the New Yorker because I could write what I wanted. They had some wonderful editors, but you didn't feel you had to write to fit some framework that pre-existed.

Often, a writer just fills in the gaps in the editor’s outlines.

Some editors have specific needs. If you write for the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, particularly if it's an op-ed, it has to fit into what they've done before or after the moment. You need a hook and all of those other conventions, which I think understand. And there's some wonderful writing that does happen in that context. But the greater pleasure is to be able to write yourself into something and it has its own logic.

Your father was a prominent New York lawyer, founder of the Helsinki Watch, the predecesor to Human Rights Watch, and his influence on you was hard to miss. But your mother—while she never had to work—was active in the social scene and on the board of several schools and charities. Could you talk about your mother's influence on you? 

My father was very understated, not at all self-promotional or flamboyant. My mother, on the other hand, was profoundly entranced by global and political issues. One of the things that got her attention in the 50s was the atmospheric testing of H-bombs, which were putting massive amounts of radioactivity up into the atmosphere. 

She also became very interested in the modern art scene in New York that was coming alive, and she became very interested in progressive education because she had three kids, and we were all in school. He became very involved in that. Then she went to Columbia and started to write. That was her aspiration.

There was a lot of quiet transference of those aspirations that she had to be politically actively involved in and write about. Ultimately, she produced a fantastic film on Vietnam with a famous director called The Year of the Pig. She even organized an effort to embargo Pan American Airways for flying military cargo. She was very much opposed to the war. 

When we were growing up, all of that happened in our household simultaneously, opening the door to the world. My brother was also an excellent writer who wrote for the New Yorker for years. So, our whole household was deeply steeped in things like that; the entire family had been radioactively inoculated with global issues early on.

First trip to China and a wake-up call

And somehow with China too — your parents were friends with people like Edmund Clubb, the last US consul general in Beijing before 1949.

I do remember Edmund Club. So, when I started to get interested in China, these people lit up for me. My parents had been friends with the Hinton family, too. The Grandmother Carmelita Hinton started Putney School, a very progressive school where my siblings went. She was also a fellow traveller of certain socialism and even communism. Her son, Bill Hinton, who wrote Fanshen and several other books, was one the few Americans who could stay in China after the communist takeover. He left China in the 50s, but he kept his ties open and was the Edgar Snow-type leftist bridge to China. In fact, when I first went to China, it was on a trip that he had helped arrange. His sister, Joan, stayed with a guy named Sid Engst and ran a dairy commune outside of Beijingthey never came home. They were total hardliners and Maoist true believers. There were a few of those leftists who stayed in China, like Sidney Shapiro.  It was a fascinating story because the price of being able to stay was you had to agree, which they did. 

Joan was a nuclear physicist and worked on the Manhattan Project. 

She went out of idealism. When I first went there, I met her and her sister, Jean Hinton, another person my family knew. It was through her that I joined that first trip. So, there were many people like that in and around our family, not only in the business world but also in the intellectual and artistic world. So, we grew up in a very open-minded family. And I can't say we were always right, but we were interested in things.

You wrote a three-part series for the New Yorker on your first trip to China. It is interestingly intimate and refreshing. That trip was when you visited the Dazhai commune, Beijing, and Shanghai. A lot of it is Potemkin village, where the Communist officials put Americans on official trips, trying to show them not even the best side of themselves but a side that they never were.

What was so interesting about that whole experience — both in Dazhai and also in the Shanghai electrical machinery factory — was that I was writing for the New Yorker, so when I got there, our American hosts, who were all leftists, got all upset. The Chinese weren't OK either. So some of the leftists organizing the trips started accusing me of even being a CIA spy for my work for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia because they wanted to please the Chinese. So, in Dazhai, when it all began to come out, I got locked up in my cave. They wouldn't let me out.

And I had met this wonderful doctor who had 'Beichadui' (被插队). He wasn't an intellectual but was sent down. He cared for the fruit trees, and I asked him if I could go with him. And he said yes. And then the next thing I knew, I was told, no, you cannot go with him; you have to stay in your cave. They didn't say I was insubordinate, but they didn't want me booting around getting to know people and going off with some intellectual who had been shipped out to rusticate in Dazhai. 

Orville working at the Shanghai Electrical Machinery Factory on his first trip to China, 1975

Would that make you the first Western journalist to be put under house arrest by the Chinese Communist Party? 

I'm sure not. But I do recall being frightened. I was so frightened because I didn't know what would happen. Even my American comrades weren't defending me. So I started to write postcards to fake people to say, oh, it's beautiful here; the revolution was so successful and put them in the mailbox because I knew the Party officials in Dazhai would read everything. I wanted to reassure them somehow. It was my first experience understanding how a Leninist state and the control mechanisms functioned. As a writer and journalist, I fell out of the friendship category and into the antagonistic contradiction category. When they started saying that I was a spy because I'd worked for the Ford Foundation, which they thought was a government organization or equivalent, that's when I got scared. I stayed in the same cave with Joan Hinton's husband, Sid Engst, who read a chapter of Lenin every night before he went to bed. 

These things were the first sort of experiences I'd had. I had some sense of how to interact with Chinese people because I've been in Taiwan for two years. I had a girlfriend. But I felt utterly — absolutely utterly — shut out.

That's one interesting thing about America: the openness of its institutions, not always to the outside but certainly to each other. That makes people mistake you as a Ford Foundation employee for a CIA spy. 

I wasn't a spy, but I asked embarrassing questions sometimes. I would be out working in the fields in Dazhai with these kids, and after work, I'd walk over to the next village. Immediately, a car from the communists would pick me up, take me home, and chastise me. 

Of course, the American friends wanted everybody to shut up and be nice; they wanted another trip and didn't want to antagonize the party. I wasn't 'not nice', but I would ask questions, try to meet people & go places. I mean, we had to go to these goddamn study sessions. You know, studying the Gang of Four and all their bullshit. I mean, it was painful. I didn't want to just sit there and study. 

But your American fellow travellers took them very seriously. 

Very seriously. And they wanted to show their true friendship by taking it seriously. I was more interested in seeing what happened. So we'd go to one place after another, and you know, you have this 简单的介绍 (brief introductions). They would go on and on about how many Jin of Gaoliang and Mu of land. 

We later learned that these were all fabricated and inflated figures. China experienced an astronomical famine and still reported record-level grain production.

We even knew it then. It was meaningless. So, for me, that trip was a wake-up call. I came away feeling, what happened? Why couldn't I connect in any way with these people?

That would become one of your wake-up moments about China.

I was confused then, though. I didn't really understand what was happening, whether it was something I or they had done. But I knew there was something wrong. People don't usually act that way. That was the first gleam of the knife in the water.

‘They gave me a ticket to ride’

You became interested in China at Harvard. Do you consider this an accident, or do you feel destined to discover China? 

It was very accidental. Sometimes, the most minor thing sends you off on a different track. I still have the dynasty chart that they gave me. It was bewildering. All those bloody dynasties, the little ones, the Liao and Jin.

What was most interesting to me about China was the fact that I couldn't go there. I wrote a book about Tibet because I made a few trips there. What fascinated Westerners so much about Tibet was its inaccessibility and the fact that you couldn't go to Lhasa. It was 1904 when Sir Francis Younghusband took a military expeditionary force from India and battled his way into Lhasa. So there was that idea of a place you couldn't get to, the same motive that impelled explorers over the years. 

I felt that deeply about China. When I was in Taiwan and covering the war in Indochina, I tried to find the Chinese Embassy, knock on the door and get in, dreaming I would somehow get to China. In Taiwan, there were not very many international students. Still, one was a Canadian who had actually been to Beijing for three days, and I felt like he had been to Mecca. 

I have written about going to the beach in Jilong, Taiwan, sleeping at night with my roommates from Taiwan University, listening to the broadcasts coming across the Taiwan Straits in China, and just dreaming of someday getting there. 

Was Beijing your Mecca? 

I think so, because it was such a redolent place historically. I have some wonderful books of old Beijing, including one that Adam Hochschild gave me because his father went there in 1922. It's a beautiful, big book of old Beijing. So, I didn't know what was there, but I wanted to go there precisely because I couldn't. 

You were in and out of Harvard. How long did you study there before you went to Stanford? 

I had been there for three years and then went to Stanford. I didn't know what I was going to do, frankly. But my parents were terrified when I said I was dropping out and going to Tahiti. I was going to turn into a beach bum, you know, and never come back. It wouldn't be a bad life. But I didn't stay, and I'm glad I didn't.

But why Stanford? 

I wanted to go somewhere else. They had a summer language program, so I picked plums for a couple of weeks to make money and ended up there. 

I made good progress, but getting back to why I was interested in China was interesting. Still, it was also something of an enigma because it was inaccessible. You can easily get obsessed. 

So, Stanford one summer, off to Tahiti on a Norwegian freighter, charming your way across the Pacific, an article about a Tahitian cinema. Then, off to Taiwan, I drank tea with Chiang Kai-shek and listened to the radio off the coast of Taiwan across the strait from mainland China.

I remember flying to Kinmen. And it was at that point that I got hooked up with this editor of the Boston Globe who suggested most of the little columns I wrote for them, which is a wonderful invitation to have somebody want something you write. So when I asked for interviews or took trips, I could say, I'm writing columns for the Boston Globe. And then people talked to me. 

As a writer, suddenly, I could go around and be taken seriously. When I got to Indochina and Vietnam, once you got into the system, if you had credentials, there was this vast military network all over Laos and Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, in Cambodia, but certainly Thailand. And you could fly around anywhere, go out in helicopters, stay at military bases. Sometimes, with the Vietnamese, it would mostly be the Americans. And so I got put into a whole system that enabled me to cover the war. 

In Taiwan, you held the paper that said Orville Schell was a journalist for the Boston Globe. That paper even opened the door to the president, military bases, and countries. That's one thing many people need to realize, which is that journalists have access precisely in the way that you do when that piece of paper does knock open many doors.

Yes, I think so, and that was one of the great gifts that the Boston Globe extended to me without even knowing what they were doing: They gave me a ticket to ride, and they gave me something that allowed me to feel that I was entitled to ask people to spend time with me, to be interviewed, and to take me places. 

Coming from a well-known American university helped. Taiwan needed America. At that time, Taiwan was still under martial law, and it was very much like China now. There was one guy who had a magazine called 自由中国 (Free China) that was closed down. His name was Lei Zhen. 

It's easy to forget there was a time when Beijing and Shanghai were global cities, or at least as international as that era could be, with all foreigners from all over the world mixing in all kinds of architecture. 

There were whole shelves of books about all the missionaries in the 30s and 40s. My professor, John Fairbank, lived there with his wife, and they were close friends of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin. I knew their son, Liang Congjie, very well. And I remember going out to Liang Qichao's tomb with him. There was that whole sense of history. 

There were so few foreigners in Taiwan then, and there was a thing called 反攻大陆救国团, the 'youth league to reconquer mainland'. A lovely guy arranged for me to go down to the presidential palace; I used to go and have tea with Chiang Kai-shek. I could hardly understand him because he had a terrible accent. I had a photo with him.

What was Chiang Kai-shek like?

He was very aloof. He was much more restrained. Face issues, humiliation, I mean, here he was on this little island, with people like me dreaming of going to Beijing. 

I made excellent friends with the 三轮师傅 (tricycle drivers) in Taipei, who were all from Shandong. They were 老兵 (veterans) who'd come over with Chiang Kai-shek. I used to love them because I could understand them since they spoke Northern Chinese. And there was something about them that was very earnest. 

Taiwan is a curious case of being a greater China. It presents an alternative in so many senses: political system, culture, the way it interacts with the world, and worldview. But how did you feel about Taiwan back then? You wrote some articles about being frustrated with Taiwan's autocracy. 

It was very authoritarian. I always had a deep and almost genetic coding against autocracy. I wrote John F. Kennedy a letter asking how we could possibly support Taiwan when it's an autocracy. I wasn't particularly in love with Taiwan; it hadn't turned into a democracy yet. Looking back at it now, it was autocracy-lite, but it wasn't democratic. 

John Fairbank and Edgar Snow

It's incredible that your mentor, John Fairbank, was friends with Liang's family, and so are you. 

Yeah, it was amazing. And the whole story about Liang Sicheng trying to save Beijing. Your mentors, whom you read, whom you are with — they have all the influences on a human being. And then you imagine their life. Just imagine Fairbank's life in the 30s, living in a hutong in China and meeting with Edgar Snow. He was an incredibly lovely man. He lived in this tiny little ancient house, a little wooden house, and there's nothing like it at Harvard. It's probably 300 years old. 

He used to have tea parties at Harvard and invite his graduate students. Still, he would invite me over even though I was only an undergraduate. It was a significant impact to have somebody take an interest. He was also a strict teacher who read a lot—lots of reading—but he was a decent, understated man, very much like my father, not full of himself. 

Did you find him almost a fatherly figure at Harvard?

He was everybody's father figure, the progenitor of all China studies in America. Many people who went on to do great work and writing came out through him. It was a rare occasion where somebody so self-effacing produced such an incredible crop. It was an amazing time. I keep telling my boys that, remember, now, you're in history. 

I look back on it now and realize that all of these different periods—my time at Harvard, my time at Berkeley, and my time in China in the late 1970s and 80s—were part of an amazing period of history. It just seemed like life back then. 

If we zoom in on Harvard, as you said, Edgar Snow was there. What was he like in person? He was one of the most celebrated Americans ever in China because he wrote a book about Mao. 

It's an excellent biography. Nobody has done anything like it, where he gets into the question of Mao's relation to his father, the relation to traditional culture personified by his father, and his rebellion against that. It's one of the most insightful of all things written about Mao. 

Long after I was at Berkeley, I set up a thing called Pacific News Service. I got Edgar Snow to join our group and write for us. I had the idea to attract more Europeans. He was living in Switzerland then.

There was a deep sense of a collegium at Harvard. Fairbank was the centre of it and delicately presided over it. It created a world where some people were in politics, economics, philosophy, and art. Still, everybody felt they were in some ongoing circle. 

Did that have an impact on you? You are now the director of U.S.-China relations at Asia Society. I see you constantly bringing in people from all walks of life to work in China. Is he a role model that you want to follow consciously or unconsciously in your life? 

Very much. I didn't realize it while I was there. And to a certain extent, I had it again at Berkeley, where a group of people centred around prominent and brilliant senior faculty members like Joseph Levinson, Frederick Wakeman, and people like that. 

I don't feel universities have that now. It's a world I've always wanted to try to recreate somehow. To some degree, I was able to do it when I was dean at Berkeley by bringing exciting people together that I wanted to be around, hiring them, and letting them teach. That grows from that sense of what universities can be, could be, and should be, but often aren't.

That's part of the curse of specialization when people become so fixated on a narrow subject domain. Now, with so much interest in China and people specializing in things like security, climate change or part of early party history, it takes a lot of work to have that kind of overarching convening power. 

The generation that came out of World War II had real-world experience. Many of them had been diplomats or been in the Army or the Navy, and they had had some contact with China or Japan in a very organic way. Edwin Reischauer was half-Japanese. Those were real-world people. Then, as we moved along the whole academic tenure process, things like whether a person studies Foucault, Derrida, or other nonsensical theoretical stuff started gripping all the departments. You lost many of these people who'd come to their subjects not through academic life but through real-world life. That's what I experienced at Harvard. It was early enough that the people who had been in China before the war and in diplomatic service had different feelings about them.

In my view, it is one of the great tragedies of American education. Some good things are being written and some fascinating professors, but if you look around now, you will see no figures like the sun around which the planets rotate. Now, you can say that's an old-fashioned model, a patriarchal model, but there's something I miss about it.

‘Ganyang America’! (‘Crush America’ in Indonesian)

Did you go to Indonesia straight after Taiwan?

I went as soon as I graduated from Harvard. I had a roommate who lived in Indonesia. He was half French and half Chinese, but he lived in Indonesia. He was a lovely person. I went to Indonesia with him and had a fantastic time. I loved Indonesia, so I thought I would go back. 

I thought I had applied for a grant at the Ford Foundation. It turned out to be a job, and I got it. So, I spent the summer writing a history of the Ford Foundation's program in Indonesia and New York. Then I went to Jakarta. For the first year, I did nothing but study Indonesian. Then, I started working at the Ford Foundation. 

But it was the point when Sukarno was getting closer and closer to the communists. And he was very left-wing. And the communists were organizing movements against America to support him. That led to the year of living dangerously, you know, where the military took over and 100,000 Chinese were killed. 

Again, I was naive as hell. I went out. All these demonstrations were held in front of the American embassy in the city. Almost every day, there were anti-American demonstrations. So I went out, walked around, and talked to people. And I ran into the head of one of the two communist parties. He would come to my house, and we had these long, passionate discussions in Indonesian.On some days, he would come into my office at the Ford Foundation and bang on the desk, talking 'Ganyang Malaysia' and 'Ganyang America' on and on, and my boss would get very nervous.

I asked if you would take me out into Kampong and the villages and let me see how you're organizing. And he said, well, I will try. One day, he came in and said, OK, I've arranged for you to go to Kampong and see how the Communist Party organizes. You have to come down to the party headquarters to meet the leaders. But they've approved this.

I had a chauffeur and a car all my own, and went to this old Dutch colonial building in Jakarta. There was a room with a long table, a picture of Lenin at one end and Marx at the other. Twenty people were sitting around the table, all with dark looks. They were unpleasant-looking and not cheerful enough to see me. And the first thing they said was: who are you spying for? Who do you work for? And I thought, holy shit, I'm really in trouble here. And I said I'm not working for anybody. I work for the Ford Foundation, but I'm here as a private person interested in understanding how the party organizes peasants and whatnot. Finally, I just said I'm sorry to inconvenience you and ran out the door. 

I got to my car and drove away. They didn't block me, but I knew shit hit the fan. I stayed up all night waiting for the newspapers to come out. And when it did, I remember the paper, Bintang Timur, the Eastern Star, had a giant headline. And it said, 'Representatives of the Ford Foundation kicked out.' And I thought, boy, I'm in trouble now. 

I returned to the office the next morning, and my boss, who had a real empire there,  had a whole scene. This was his death knell because everybody was being kicked out. The UN got kicked out, too — massive demonstrations in the street every day. One of my jobs was to sit in front of the Ford Foundation and report whether any demonstrators came down the street to go in. One day, the demonstrators came down, and some trucks drove in. I ran inside and told my boss something was up. And he said, go back out there and sit on the street. And then the lights went out. They'd gone up on the roof, cut all the electrical cables, cut the Ford Foundation off. 

When that article came out, he said, I want you on a plane out of here tonight. I had a house, I had five servants, I had a whole world, you know. But I had to get out. That's how I ended up at Berkeley. 

Many American China specialists have a certain left-leaning political stance, sympathy for the East, and support for communism, partly based on mystery about the East and their frustration about the American government.

Remember, the Vietnam War was going on, and that alienated an awful lot of intellectuals from the American government. A whole generation. It alienated me because I was in the war watching it, and it was just savage. All these carpet bombings and defoliating millions of acres of jungle with 2,4,5,-T, and it was going nowhere. And people were lying about it. 

And instead of kicking out the perpetrators of the war, Indonesian communists and, I suppose, the Chinese communists, too, kicked out people like you. 

I wasn't sufficiently 'left' for them; I was 'sceptical left'. I wouldn't play the friendship boogie, go along, and just say everything's wonderful. I remember going to a prison in Shanghai, the Shanghai No.1 Prison, and looking at these guys working in the factories and thinking: How many of these people are counter-revolutionaries? 

So, I was considered a rude noise in a room that was supposed to be polite and subservient. I'd had some experience in these other countries, so I wasn't stupid. I'd seen a few things, whereas many left-wing scholars don't have real-world experience. 

The calibration can be entirely off from a purely academic, document-driven approach compared to when you have worked, interacted, heard stories, and had dinners. 

That was probably the one good part about Mao's 知识青年 (intellectual youth) and 插队 (sent-down), that they had Intellectuals going to the countryside. Many later recognized it as a wake-up experience. It was brutal, unnecessary, and autocratic, but it connected people more organically with their society. It wasn't justified. Mao always hated intellectuals whom Mao thought didn't know anything more than their books. That's why he said don't read too many books even though he read too many books. When he was in the PKU LIbrary, he got a big attitude against these intellectuals; they treated him like dirt. He had no standing, and yet he thought a lot himself. I think he felt humiliated; Chinese intellectuals of that era could be pretty arrogant. That gets at the heart of something fundamentally important about understanding China, its leaders, Mao, Xi, whoever.

You wrote a book with Joe Esherick talking about Chinese history. 

That was the high tide of my hope. Maybe some things were not entirely worthless in the revolution. Of course, you couldn't go there, and if you did, you were completely constrained by your handlers.

How did you change returning to America following that experience? 

Well, when I came back from Indonesia and came to Berkeley, it was around 1964. I still felt that whatever China was, we should deal with it and try to interact with it. I was part of a group in Berkeley that used to sit out in Sprout Plaza and hand out buttons that said, 'Recognize China and Chinese (承认中国)'.

Special shoutout to YW for editorial contributions.

Recommended Readings

Edgar Snow, 1937, Red Star Over China

Orville Schell, 1977, In The People’s Republic

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are bilingual online publications that take you down memory lane of recent history in China and narrate China’s reality through the personal tales of China experts. We present subjective, opinionated, and coloured views of veterans in the field based on their first-hand experience and direct observations. The project grew out of Leo’s research at Hoover Institution where he collects long oral history of China experts living in America. The stories here are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming. 

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. I hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!

Recruitment

I am recruiting a part-time editorial helpers for this Substack. Drop me an email with your CV and a short self-intro at heliu@stanford.edu if you are interested.