From the AP Blog:
Forty years ago, Chinese communist chairman Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It’s an unpleasant anniversary that official Beijing will not celebrate and most Chinese would rather forget.
Mao’s objective: to purge the party of its moderate, pragmatic faction, which he said was leading China away from Marxism and toward capitalism and to make himself unassailable leader.
The bloody, chaotic decade between 1966 and 1976 which ensued was among the most violent, divisive and shameful in China’s long, illustrious history. [Full text]
…American reporters were “China watchers” from a distance because Beijing, angry at U.S. refusal to recognize the People’s Republic in 1949, said we were no longer welcome. When Zhou Enlai invited Western reporters to return to Beijing in 1956 Washington refused to let us go.
With Europeans, Canadians and Australians in Beijing when the cultural purge broke, Americans were the odd man out.
Being excluded turned out surprisingly to be a plus. Unlike our Western colleagues in Beijing, we were free to write what we pleased without worrying about official displeasure and had ready access to the valuable consulate files and other information, which they did not.
It was a heady experience. We would write stories about purges of senior politicians and other unreported events three months old in China but new to the rest of the world and see them lead page one of American newspapers the next day. [Full text]
