I Was Locked In A Cave On My First Trip to China — with Orville Schell
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Hello listeners, welcome to a new episode of Peking Hotel. I'm your host Leo. Thanks to your support, I've had some good responses so far with this new channel. And this time, I bring you another episode of Oval Shell's personal story with China.

In case you're not familiar, Oval Hsiao is currently the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. He first visited China in the 1970s with a special delegation invited by Premier Zhou Enlai, and he observed China in the 80s as the journalist for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books, and built deep connections with the Chinese civil society.

He helped produce the definitive Tiananmen documentary, Gates of Heavenly Peace, which influenced a whole generation of people in China. And after he left journalism, Orville served as the dean of School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

This episode touches on Orville's early life. It talks about how Orville's family influenced his China journey, how he studied with John Fairbank at Harvard and drank tea with Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei and got locked in a cave by CCP officials on his first trip to China and getting chased out of Indonesia by the Indonesian Communist Party. It shines a light on China and the world in the 1960s, a somewhat distant era from now.

In this day and age, many of us cannot travel so easily to China anymore, so it's worth remembering that there was a time when China was cut off from the world and how people dealt with it then. So, enjoy! So welcome Orville to our first recording of the podcast and of the oral history project. It's a pleasure to have you for our first session.

I wanted to trace your motivation of working on China, but first I would like you to share perhaps your most memorable memory about China. You've had a lot of dealing with China. It's your whole life. I think there's so many inflection points, but obviously I think when I married my wife,

That was the moment when what had been a scholarly, journalistic enterprise of a foreigner looking in, trying to make sense out of things from the outside became quite different. Because not only did I have a Chinese wife, lived in a Chinese family, but all of her friends and my friends, many who were Chinese, but with her and

the mix, the chemistry changed. So I think it's not a one specific moment, but it was a moment when my professional sort of public life came together with my private life to create a very different kind of composite life. But one thing I really want to get at is your motivation. Why? Why are you working on it? Why do you care about China? Why does this matter?

And for that, the obvious digging place is always the family, the upbringing, the starting place where it all began.

Could you help us trace your family? My father, his mother was a Canadian and his father was a doctor. Strangely, although I don't think this had a particularly profound effect on my own growing up in life, but when my grandfather graduated, he went to Yale, graduated from Johns Hopkins in medical school.

and then joined what was then called Yale and China and went with my grandmother. They went up the Yangtze River to Changsha, where Yale was establishing China's first medical college or Western supported medical college. So they went to Changsha and my grandmother got pregnant and she had such terrible morning sickness that they decided they better come home.

So they did. And they had your father in Changsha. The cradle of Chinese revolution. Well, they came home and he was then ultimately born here. Sure. But around our house there were bits of dishes and I still have some things, a nice Ming dynasty vase that we turned into a lamp and various other things. But that didn't obviously make a deep impression on me. But I think when I got to Harvard, I didn't quite know what to do.

With a freshman at a big university, you always feel a little bit lost and useless. But my sister was there too, she was older, and we wanted to take a course together. And the only course that fit both of our schedules was this epic course, Social Sciences 111, taught by John Fairbank and Benjamin Schwartz and Edwin Reischauer and all these amazing people.

And I didn't know much about China, but this met every day. And it was a lot of reading and it met in the Harvard Yenching Institute. So the books for the course were all on reserve in the Harvard Yenching Library. So I used to study there. And of course, all around me were books in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. And I used to study in the stacks and just wonder.

What were all these books saying? And then I went on and continued the next year doing some Chinese philosophy. And I can't remember what other courses I took. And then I thought I should do something really momentous. I should try to learn Chinese. I bought a hundred dollar Buick with some friends that had no floor. And we drove it out here to California. And I went to Stanford to start studying Chinese. But it was pretty useless.

We'd studied and I don't think I've learned anything. So I decided, all right, this isn't working. I had an uncle that had been in World War II and loved the South Pacific Islands, South Sea Islands, and he lived in Tahiti. So I thought, okay, I'm gonna drop out of college. I've discovered there was one Norwegian freighter company that had a ship that went from San Francisco to LA to Tahiti and then on out through Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea. So I had been an exchange student in Norway

as a teenager. And I made friends with the bar pilots in San Francisco. They told me when the ship was finally gonna come in. And I ran down to the dock,

Ran on the ship as soon as it docked and found the captain. And I said, will you take me on? A Norwegian captain? A Norwegian captain. How did you charm him? I said, I'd been an exchange student and he knew the town where I lived. He said, our third cook or galley boy is paying off here. So we'll take you on. I had to do all the hard work. Wow.

- Wow, what did you do? - You had to go down into the hole. There was a ladder that went down into the freezers in the refrigerator room and bring up all the potatoes and the frozen fish and the lamb and peel the turnips and whatever. I had to help prepare the meals for the whole crew.

- Oh wow. - And there was like 10 passengers, like there were five cabins and they took people on the ship. There was nothing for them to do, but that when they got to port, they could go ashore. It was very cheap. It wasn't like a cruise. It was some, I don't know. The people on the ship were pretty bored.

But there was one guy, and he used to come down to the galley where I worked, and there was a Dutch door on the galley on the Aft Hold. He opened the door up, and he'd stand there, and he'd talk to me, and he knew I was...

kid from college. And he started saying to me, "You really should, you're going to all these interesting places. You should write." And I said, "How would I do that?" And he said, "Just start writing." And then he said, "You can send it into magazines or newspapers and see if they'll publish it." So when I got to Tahiti, I went and found my uncle and we went down to this lovely little village at the very end of the main island.

opposite Papieti. And that's when I wrote that first piece about this little theater they had. There was a little two posts up in the air with a grass roof. Yeah, and then with four sides of the theater, three sides all open. All in and pigs coming in and dogs and kids and it was very charming. Lovely little place and they were just

showed pieces of French films. They just chop up pieces and there was no story. So that was the beginning of my writing. I was a terrible writer. When I was in school, even in college, I didn't know how to write.

I didn't actually begin to learn how to write until I was writing for someone, not just some stupid professor. And I think 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. You have to learn how to think, how to write, and to write well, you have to know how to 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. Nobody wants to read it, not even your professor. They will, but they don't want to. And that's quite challenging. I think so. And 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. You were basically filling in the outline for the editor.

Yeah, they have a certain need. You write for the Wall Street Journal or if you write something for the New York Times, particularly if it's an op-ed or an essay or something, it has to fit into what they've done before or after or the moment. You need a hook. All of these conventions, which I think

I understand it and there's some wonderful writing that does happen in that context but I think the greater pleasure is to be able to write yourself into something that has its own logic. I think one thing that you haven't written so much about is your early part of your life.

Your upbringing, your household, the influence of not just your father, who's obviously a prominent New York lawyer, who was founder of the Helsinki Watch, which later became the Human Rights Watch, a globally renowned human rights organization. His influence is hard to miss, but

But I wanted to first touch on the influence of your mother, the maternal side of the family. I actually went through records of US Census from 1940, 1950, 1960. Your father was registered as a lawyer, whereas on the census, your mother never had a work. It's always in the house.

But obviously she was also active in the social scene on the board of various schools and charities. Could you talk about the influence of your mother on you? What kind of person she was and how did she influence you? Whereas my father was a very understated man, not at all self-promotional or flamboyant, but had deep convictions, not the world's most flamboyant or demonstrative person.

But my mother, on the other hand, was very deeply entranced by global issues, political issues.

And one of the things that early on really got her attention was the, at that point, there was atmospheric testing of H-bombs that were putting massive amounts of radioactivity up into the atmosphere. That's in the 50s. Yeah. So she got really involved in things like that. But she also got very interested in the modern art scene in New York that just was coming alive. And she got very interested in progressive education because she'd

three kids, I had a brother, younger brother, older sister, and we were all in school. So she became very involved in that. And then she started to write herself, went to Columbia and she started to write and that was her aspiration to actually write. So I think there was a lot of quiet

transference of those aspirations that she had to be politically actively involved and to write. And ultimately, she even produced a pretty amazing film on Vietnam with a quite famous director. It was a documentary.

called the Year of the Pig. So she was doing all kinds of things like that. And she organized once even a kind of effort to embargo Pan American airways for flying military cargo and soldiers to Vietnam to fight. She was very much opposed to the war.

There was all of that going on in our household at the same time that we were growing up. And I think it opened the door for the world. What we're doing here is tracing the subconsciousness rather than just the active consciousness. And do you think the fact that your mother picked up writing and doing documentary, I mean, I hear a lot of recalls, a lot of echoes between

between her and your work? My brother, of course, was also a really wonderful writer, wrote for The New Yorker for years and years. I did too, but he even longer covered Vietnam War, then wrote all of the stuff on Watergate and

most of the columns he wrote were unsigned. I think our whole household was deeply steeped in things like that. The whole family got kind of radioactively inoculated with global issues early on. And somehow with

China too, it seems. Your mother was friend with Edmund Club, the last US consul general in Beijing before the communists took over in 1949. I dug up their letters in the Hoover archive last year when your mother was inviting them over to her vineyard and

actually seeking for investment advice from Edmund Club on whether gold prices will rise. You've probably never seen those letters yourself. I do remember Edmund Club. By that time, I had started to get interested in China. So these people suddenly lit up for me. And also, my parents had been friends with the Hinton family. Grandmother Carmelita Hinton started Putney School.

It was a very progressive school. And my brother and sister went there. And it's actually founded on the principles of Jiang Duwei, who was the supervisor of Hu Shi, who was the famous Chinese liberal. That's right. Although I think in the case of the grandmother who founded it, she was also a little more of a fellow traveler of,

certainly socialism and even communism. And her son, Bill Hinton, who wrote "Fanshen" and a number of other books. He was the few Americans that could stay in China after the communist takeover. Well, he went there with the United States Relief Administration in the '40s, stayed on. He left China, I think, in the mid-'50s and came back here. But he kept his ties open and was one of 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. These are fascinating backgrounds that had been going on with or without people's knowledge. And obviously the Hinton family is distinguished in its history. One of their ancestors was the guy that invented the Boolean logic, which every single logician in the world nowadays studies about the little poem, if we could call it that, and the Twinkle Little Stars. That's written by one of the Hinton family.

ancestors. I didn't know that. Bill Hinton, obviously, was one of the few Americans that stayed in China. So did his...

Sister, Zhou En. So she stayed with a guy called Sid Engst, and they ran a dairy commune. I think it was the evergreen dairy commune outside of Beijing. And they never came home. They were total hardliners and Maoist true believers. There were a few of those sort of left behind American leftists who stayed in China. Sidney Shapiro, a whole bunch of people. But of course,

It's a very interesting story because the price of being able to stay was you had to agree. Which they did. They did in Spain. Joanne, yeah, Joanne was a... Total true believer. Yeah. She was a nuclear physicist and worked on a Manhattan Project and believed in internationalism for nuclear weapons. She went...

out of idealism. I think she ultimately didn't work in nuclear physics. I think what she knew quickly got out of data. I don't know the whole story. But when I first went there, I did meet her and her sister was another person that my family knew, Jean Hinton. It was through her that I joined that first trip. So there were a lot of people like that in and around our family that not only in the business world, but sort of

university intellectual world and artistic world. So we grew up in a kind of very, I suppose you would say, open-minded family.

And I can't say we were always right, but we were interested in things. And you wrote a three-part series for The New Yorker on your first trip to China. It's interestingly intimate and refreshing to my eyes. That trip was when you visited the Dazhai commune in Beijing and Shanghai Electrical Factory. And I'm sure a lot of it was interesting.

Potemkin Village where the communist officials put Americans on official trips trying to show them maybe 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.

And they did not know. They did know. Oh, they didn't know. Because I didn't want to be dishonest. No. So when I got there, I don't know, somehow it got out. And this is where our hosts, American hosts, they were all leftists.

Then when they heard, they got all upset. Oh, the Chinese were fine, but the Americans... No, the Chinese weren't fine either. Okay. Because suddenly I was in another category. And so even some of the leftists that were organizing the trips then started accusing me of even being a CIA spy because I worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia. It was really unpleasant. I really saw... Because they wanted to please the Chinese. So in Dajiai,

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 clearly had been beichadued. He was, or it wasn't a zhuzhi qingyan, he was just xiafanged.

a very intelligent man. And I asked him, he took care of the fruit trees. And I asked him if I could go with him. And I was interested in how he pruned them and cared for them and whatnot. And he said, yeah, you could come. And then the next thing I know, I was told, no, you cannot go with him. And you have to stay in your cave. They didn't say I was insubordinate, but they said, want me freebooting around like that, getting to know people and going off with some intellectual who had been

shipped out to rusticate in Dajai. And someone who could speak Chinese. Were you the first Western journalist to be put under house arrest by the communists? No, I'm sure not. But it wasn't exactly arrest. But I do recall being really frightened. So frightened. Because I thought, I don't know what's going to happen here. And even my American so-called comrades...

weren't defending me. And so I started to write postcards to people who didn't exist to say, "Oh, it's wonderful here. The revolution is so successful," and put them in the mailbox to be mailed because I knew the party officials at Dodge, I would read everything that went out.

But not yet hostile foreign influence.

When they started saying that, I can't remember exact context of it, but that maybe 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. And actually, I stayed in the same cave with Joan Hinton's husband, Sid Angst, who was a real... I mean, he read...

chapter of Lenin every night before he went to bed. I mean, he was that kind of... He was a believer. These things were the first sort of experiences I'd had. And I thought that I had some sense of how to interact with Chinese because I'd been in Taiwan for two years. I'd had a girlfriend and I felt utterly unabsorbable. Mm-hmm.

And how did you feel when you were accused of being a CIA spy because you were working for the Ford Foundation before? They knew I wasn't a spy, but I think they felt I asked embarrassing questions sometimes, like I would be out working in the fields and with these kids and then after work, I'd

walk over to the next village. And immediately a car would come and pick me up and take me home and chastise me. Of course, the American friends wanted everybody to shut up, be nice. They wanted to have another trip. And they didn't want to antagonize the party. They wanted to make nice, do whatever the people wanted. And I wasn't not nice, but I would...

but you ask questions i would ask questions i try to meet people i try to go places i don't know what i wanted but i didn't want to just sit there and study long home wine whatever his name was who was that yeah we had to go to these goddamn study sessions

setting the gang of four and all their it was painful but your american fellow travelers took them very seriously and they wanted to show their true friendship by taking it seriously and going through this ritual i was more interested in seeing what happened so we'd go to one place after another and you have this jindan the jisho like brief introductions oh my god

They go on and on, how many Jin of Galiang from how many Mu of land. Which later we knew were all fabricated and inflated figures and China had a huge famine and still reported record level grain production. I think we even knew it then. It was meaningless. It was talking to the party, talking to the party. For me, that trip was a bit of a wake-up call because I came away feeling, what happened?

happened. Why couldn't I connect in any way with these people? Did you manage to connect with anyone? No. Not a single person? One or two of the guides from the Friendship Association, who I think were the overlords, we'd have some nice conversations occasionally. But in terms of actually meeting people and connecting with people, no. And even in the factory, the guy I worked with was opaque. He was also from Zhejiang and it's hard to understand.

It was a Potemkin tour. I suppose that would become one of your wake-up moments about China. I was confused then, though. I didn't really understand whether it was something I had done, something they had done, what was going on, but I knew there was something wrong. Because I could tell I'd had enough experience, but I was still young, that people don't normally act that way. No.

That is the system that we'll definitely explore and you had explored throughout your life. That was the first gleam of the knife in the water. You became interested in China at Harvard. Do you consider this an accident or do you feel destined to discover China?

I think it was very accidental and sometimes the smallest thing sends you off on a different track. Like Tahiti. But I think as soon as I got into that course, I still have the dynasty chart they gave me. It was bewildering. All those bloody dynasties. The little ones, the Miao and whatever. Yeah.

Then it got to me, and I think the thing that was most interesting to me was the fact that I couldn't go there. And I wrote a whole book about Tibet, because I made a couple trips to Tibet, and I was very interested by what it was that fascinated Westerners so much about Tibet, and it was its inaccessibility, and the fact that you couldn't go to Lhasa. And you couldn't go, I think it was 1904 when Sir Francis Younghusband

took a military expeditionary force from India up there and battled his way into Lhasa. So there was that idea of a place that you couldn't get to, that was the same motive that impelled explorers. But I felt that very deeply about China. And when I was in Taiwan and then covering the war in Indochina, I always used to go and try to find the Chinese embassy and try to knock on the door and get in, and dreaming that somehow I would get to China.

And I remember in Taiwan there were not very many foreign students. One of them was Canadian and he'd actually been to Beijing for three days and I felt like he had been to Mecca. I think I've told you that, or it's in some article I wrote about going out to the beach in Taiwan and sleeping at night with my roommates from Taida and listening

listening to the broadcasts come across the Taiwan Straits and China and just dreaming of someday that I would get there. Was Beijing your Mecca? I think so because it was such a redolent place historically and I could read books and I could see all the

I have some wonderful books of old Beijing. One that Adam Hochschild gave me because his father went in 1920. Oh he did. It's a beautiful big book of old Beijing. I didn't know really what was there but I wanted to go there precisely because I couldn't. I suppose for China it's easy to forget there was a time when Beijing and Shanghai they were almost global city or at least

as global as that era could be with all foreigners from all over the world mixing in all kinds of architecture. There's a whole whole shelves of books about all the missionaries. Oh yeah. All the 30s and 40s and my professor John Fairbank lived there with his wife and and deep friends of Yang Sicheng and and

people like that and what was his wife's name? Lee Hwa Ye? And Fairbank's wife wrote a book about her. Yeah she's an amazing person. Yeah and then I knew Liang Sung Jie, their son, very well. He's a really close friend and I remember going out to visit Liang Chi Chau's tomb with him. There was that whole sense of history and then when I was in Taiwan there were so few foreigners in Taiwan then. There's

students and there was a thing called the Qing Nian Fang Gong Da Lu Qing Nian Jiu Guo Tuan which is the youth league yeah to to conquer mainland essentially reconquer mainland the youth league well that's what its total name was I think they just called it the Qing Nian Tuan or something right right the youth league very nice guy and he arranged for me to go down to the presidential palace and I used to go down

A couple times I had tea with John Jasher. I could hardly understand him because he had this terrible accent. So you met John Jasher personally? Yes. I have a picture of him and me together. Oh wow. What was he like? Aloof. He wasn't

you know slap on the back hey how are you doing welcome to free china it was much more restrained yeah but he definitely felt a sense of loss oh huge face issues humiliation here he was on this little island and people like me dreaming of going to beijing and i suppose he does too yes and i used to i made very good friends with in those days in taipei the san lunchu fu

were all from Shandong. The guys peddling the... Yeah. They were all Lao Bing who'd come over with John Jasher. And I used to love them because I could understand them.

They spoke Northern Chinese and there was something about them that was very earnest. Shandong people of a certain kind and Baifeng was from Shandong. I suppose part of what we're doing here is to trace those lineage and see how they were preserved. The fact that you're, I think it's incredible that your mentor

John Fairbank was friend with Liang's family and so are you. Yeah, it really was amazing. And the whole story about Liang Sicheng trying to save Beijing. And of course, Liang Sicheng comes from a very distinguished family in the Lei Qing dynasty. His father was the reformer turned revolutionary who together with his

teacher, Kang Youwei, were passing through reform in the late Qing period only to be kicked out of the court and went into exile. I think all of those influences on any human being, your mentors, the people who you read, who you're with, and you imagine their life,

I think just imagining Fairbanks life in the 30s, living in a hutong in China and meeting with Edgar Snow and you know all of that, the whole whatever was happening. He was an incredibly nice man. He lived in this tiny little ancient house, right, near Lowell House, but it was a little wooden house.

There's nothing like it at Harvard. Probably 300 years old. In Harvard or in Beijing? In Harvard. And he used to have tea parties and he would invite his graduate students over. But he would invite me over even though I was only an undergraduate. And it was a big impact to have somebody take... He was also a strict teacher with lots of reading. Lots of reading. But he was a very decent man, a very 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 because he was the progenitor of all China studies in America. An awful lot of the people who went on to do great work and writing came out through him. It was a very rare occasion where somebody who's so self-effacing produced such an incredible crop of

And many other people were at Harvard at that time. Perilink was at Harvard. Joe Eshrick was at Harvard. It was an amazing time. Was Andy Nathan there? Yeah. I don't think we knew. I keep telling my boys, remember now you're in history. Which we never understand what it means when we're in it. No, you don't. And I look back on it now and I realize all of these different periods, my time at Harvard, my time at Berkeley,

my time in China in the late 70s and 80s. We were in an amazing period of history and it just seemed like life. If we're just zooming in on Harvard because as you said, it is an incredible time. Ed Snow was there. Yeah, I heard Edgar Snow talk.

How was Edgar Snow like in person? I mean, he's one of the most celebrated Americans ever in China because he wrote the book about Mao. Actually, it's a very good biography. Nobody has done anything like it where he gets into the question of Mao's relation to his father and the relation to traditional culture personified by his father and his

rebellion against that. I think of all the things written about now, it's one of the most insightful. All right. Yeah. But Edgar Snow was a leftist long after I was at Berkeley. I set up a thing called Pacific News Service. Yeah. And I got Edgar Snow to be on our group. It was the idea to get more Europeans in. He was living in Switzerland then.

I think that there was a kind of a deep sense of a collegium at Harvard. And I think Fairbank was the center of it and presided over it very delicately.

and very nicely. It gave this world, some people were in politics, economics, philosophy, art, but everybody felt they were in some ongoing circle. You are now the director of the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society. I see you bringing in people from all walks of life working on China together constantly. Is he a role model that you wanted to follow consciously or unconsciously in your life?

I think very much. I didn't realize it while I was there, but I realized it later. And in a certain extent, we had it again at Berkeley, where there is a group of people who centered around some very prominent and brilliant senior faculty like Joseph Levinson, Frederick Wakeman, people like that. And I don't feel universities have that now. No. And I think it's a kind of a world that I've always wanted to try to recreate in some way.

And to some degree, I was able to do it when I was dean, just by bringing interesting people together that I wanted to be around and hiring them, letting them teach and do this, that and the other. And it in certain sense grows out of that sense of what universities can be and could be and should be, but very often aren't. No, I suppose that's part of the...

curse of specialization when people become so fixated on a narrow domain of subject, which is obviously to the credit of the whole field of China studies that

Even though there was an era when there were a number of people with major gravitas, with convening power, huge prestige, perhaps one at each university or even a few. Harvard had a few, Fairbank, McFarquhar. Yu Ying Shi later came to America. He was there in Princeton.

But now with just so much interest in China and people specializing in security and climate change and part of early party history in tea leaves, in pottery, it's hard to have that kind of

overarching convening power when there's so much specialism? I think that the generation that came out of World War II, they had real world experience. A lot of them had been diplomats or been in the army or the navy or something. And they had some contact with China or Japan in a very organic way. Edwin Reischauer was another one who was half Japanese. So I think those were real world people. And then as we moved along, then the whole academic process and

and, you know, does this person study Foucault or Derrida or whatever kind of nonsensical theoretical stuff started.

gripping all of the departments, you lost an awful lot of these people who'd come to their subjects not through academic life, but through real world life. And I think that's what I did experience at Harvard because it was early enough that the people who had been in China before the war and diplomatic service

They had some different feel about them. Yeah, I think that's a very good way of putting it. The overcrowding of the academic bureaucracy.

that captured academia. It really is, in my view, one of the great tragedies of American education. Not that there aren't some good things being written and some very interesting professors, but that if you look around now, there are no sort of figures that provide like the sun around which the planets. Now, maybe you can say that's an old-fashioned model, a patriarchal model. Or a centralized model. I think there's something I miss about it.

And at Harvard you were in and out. How long did you study at Harvard before you went to Stanford? I guess I had been there three years. Oh, you were there three years already? Yeah, and then I went to Stanford. So you just one summer drove across, thought I'm going to stay here and study Chinese. I didn't know what I was going to do, frankly. But why Stanford? They had a summer program. I just wanted to try the language, right? And so that's why I went there. I had no... And I went...

pick plums for a couple of weeks to make some money and then ended up there but i had a good progress but i think that to get back to the question of why was i interested in china strangely i think it was interesting but it was also something of an enigma because it was inaccessible you can easily get obsessed okay stanford one summer off to

Tahiti on a Norwegian freighter because you charmed your way across the Pacific and you got to Tahiti, you stayed with your uncle, you wrote an article about Tahitian

cinema and you went to Taiwan and met Jiang Diechi and listened to radio off the coast of Taiwan just next to mainland China. And it was at that point I got hooked up with this editor of the Boston Globe who suggested and those things that you saw in the Google Doc, most of the little columns I wrote for them, which is a wonderful invitation to have somebody want something you write

So when you go to ask for an interview or you want to take a trip or you want to do something, you can say, "I'm writing columns for the Boston Globe," and then people talk to you. So I think for me as a writer, the idea that I could go around and be taken seriously. And then when I got to Indochina in Vietnam, once you got into the system, if you had credentials,

There was this vast military network all over Laos and Vietnam and less extent in Cambodia, but certainly Thailand.

And you could fly around anywhere, go out in helicopters, stay at military bases. With the American military, right? Yeah. And sometimes the Vietnamese, but mostly it would be the American. And so I got put into a whole system that enabled me to cover the war. I wanted to throw back to Taiwan just a little bit before we touch on your first trip. Because we're building towards that moment, that final moment of...

both discovery and even more questions to come for the years later. In Taiwan, you were a journalist, you held the paper that said Ovo Xiao was a journalist for the Boston Globe that opened door even to the president himself, that opened door to military bases to different countries. I think that's one thing many people don't realize is that journalists have access

exactly in the way that you do when that piece of paper really does knock open many doors. Yes, I think that was one of the great gifts that the Boston Globe extended to me without even knowing what they were doing was 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, to take me places. I think the fact also that coming from a well-known American university helped.

but Taiwan needed America Taiwan needed America and yet in that time Taiwan was still under martial law and it was very much like China now and I remember I got very interested there was one guy who had a magazine that got closed down his name was Lei Chen I think it's 自由中國 but then of course the Mao died and Deng appeared miraculously and then everything changed oh some did some did it

But there was a new promise. As the communists are very good at, making new promises. Yes, but I think in this case, this is an interesting question, I know people don't all agree on it. Looking back on it, I don't think that reform would actually have transformed China. But it certainly softened it. And it certainly made life more interesting, more open, and interpersonal relations more possible and

transnational exchanges more likely. Even a friend yesterday was saying how as much as we chastise engagement nowadays thinking it got us to whatever the mess that we're in today, it did give two, three generations of Chinese

the sort of freedom that people have been lacking at least in the communist days I wouldn't be here without reform I wouldn't be here without engagement and so do many of my friends you could have another decade of flatlining famine and poverty and it's not clear that the communist would change in a sense North Korea hasn't changed with decades of sanction and the boycotting and we are all beneficiary of this whole

process of engagement. We still have our frustration, but it might have been too much to ask of the policy of engagement to change China completely.

I think it was, and I think we didn't know where it would lead, but in retrospect, I think it was clear that it probably wasn't going to lead to a complete reformation. But it certainly did lead to people being able to enjoy their lives and interact a little bit more openly and not so fearful. Yeah, that's still better than the old days. But if we still... Taiwan is a curious case of being a greater China.

It presents an alternative in so many senses of the world. Political system, culture, the way it interacts with the world, worldview. But how did you feel about Taiwan back then? You wrote some articles about being frustrated of Taiwan's autocracy, authoritarian control. It was very authoritarian.

I always had a kind of a deep, a gene coding against autocracy for some, I guess it must have come from my parents. And I was very much, I remember I wrote John F. Kennedy a letter saying, how could we possibly support Taiwan when it's an autocracy? Looking back at it now, it was autocracy light, but it was autocratic autocracy.

Because you didn't see a greater autocracy, because you couldn't go to greater autocracy. I couldn't go to China, so I only could imagine it. Or Soviet Union or North Korea. So I'm intrigued by the thought of, I wanted to find out whether China actually did have an alternative route to development. And you wrote books. You wrote a book with Joe Esherick talking about

Chinese history and... Yeah, I think that was the high tide of my hope that maybe some of the things that they had done were not worthless in the revolution. And I think that it hadn't started opening up yet.

but that it was at least worth looking at, which is what I wanted to do. But that, of course, was impossible to look at it in any objective way because you couldn't go there. And if you did, you were completely constrained by your handlers. So from the Taiwan experience, you met Jiang Jishi, you listened to radio from mainland China, you experienced a nationalist autocracy, you flew around Southeast Asia reporting for the Boston Globe.

When you returned to America, what do you feel that you've changed about following that experience? Well, I still felt when I came back from Indonesia and came to Berkeley, I think it was around 1964, I still felt that whatever China was, we should deal with it, try to interact with it. And I remember I was part of a group

in Berkeley, used to sit out in Sproul Plaza and hand out buttons. I think I still have one someplace that said, recognize China and Chinese. Because I thought I wasn't particularly in love with Taiwan. It hadn't turned into a democracy yet. But still under martial law, I suppose. And Jiang Jiechi was purging all kinds of liberal elements. He was. He was sending them off to Lantau or wherever. No, not Lantau. What was it?

Lü Songdao. Lü Dao. There was an island where they parked them all. Since I didn't know China, I wasn't writing so much about... I couldn't write firsthand. But I did the China readers. I have to go back and look at them, see what I wrote. I wrote all the introductions. Because this guy, Franz Schurmann, was absolutely brilliant. Completely disorganized. And he asked me, he wrote this wonderful book, Ideology and Organization in Communist China.

and he nailed it and he never been there but when it came to writing these other books i ended up having to do a lot of the work and to his great credit he said let's co-author it then i mean he was he was already a professor he was a big shot yeah so that was boost up for me and then that helped me ultimately get into publishing and being able to write books on my own i suppose that's that is

That is your lucky trait, that every step in your life, you had a major mentor that could really elevate and inspire you to the next level. I think that's really the most constructive, worthwhile thing a professor can do, is don't intimidate students. Try to help them and boost them. Take them in, work with them.

But I see an awful lot of professors not doing that, lording over their students with all of their unintelligible theoretical nonsense. I remember when I came to Berkeley, at Harvard, they didn't have political science, they had government. So I didn't know what political science was. And when I got kicked out of Indonesia,

The Ford Foundation called up Robert Scalapino and said, "We have this guy." Oh, so they recommended you to Berkeley. They said they'd continue my salary if I would go to grad school. All right. And I said, "I don't want to go back east." And Berkeley looked really interesting. So Scalapino said, "Okay." Who was this? Who was Scalapino? He was a very famous political science professor at Berkeley who did Japan, China,

and had a lot of programs in Southeast Asia. He was really involved, but he was also helping the CIA and various other things. Anyway, when I got here, I said, "All right, I'll do political science." And I went into this course. I remember the guy who taught it. He's probably not alive anymore, so it's okay. His name was Warren Ilchman, and he was supposed to be the hot new political science about, I don't know, development in third world countries, whatever the hell it was.

And I went into that course for two or three or four times. I couldn't understand a thing he was saying. And I'm not stupid. And I thought, this is not working. So I switched back into history, which I'd been in at Harvard, which is better. But even they were beginning to get bogged down in theory. So I think it's kind of a recognition really early on how the behavioral sciences had slid off into history.

a world of their own. It didn't have much relevance for the world that I had been living in in Asia. And if we dial back slightly to the Indonesian years, did you go to Indonesia straight after Taiwan? I went as soon as I graduated from Harvard. I'd had a roommate who lived in Indonesia. Oh. And he was half French, half Chinese, but lived in Indonesia. A lovely person.

And I went to Indonesia with him and we had just a fantastic time. I loved Indonesia. Where did you go? All over the place, flying all around the islands. It was really... Well, there were a thousand islands in Indonesia. We were going to Lombok and Bali and Sulawesi and all kinds of places.

So I thought, I want to go back to Indonesia. So I applied for what I thought was a grant to the Ford Foundation. It turned out I had applied for a job and I got it. What was the job about? To go to their office where they were, they had a Ford Foundation office that was doing all kinds of programs in Indonesia, like government administration and I don't know, health, whatever they were doing. So I...

I spent the summer writing a history of the Ford Foundation's program in Indonesia and New York. And then I went to Jakarta. And for the first year, I did nothing but study Indonesian eight hours a day with a tutor. Oh, Indonesian, interesting. And it wasn't a hard language. Do you still remember any? A little bit. I spoke pretty good. And then I started to work at the Ford Foundation. But it was the point when Sukarno,

was getting closer and closer to the communists. Sukarno was the president at the time. Yeah, and he was very left-wing. And the communists were organizing all kinds of movements against America and to support him.

And that led to the year of living dangerously, where the military took over and 100,000 Chinese were killed. But so I was, again, naive as hell. I went out. There were all these demonstrations in the city in front of the American embassy. Almost every day there were

anti-American demonstration. So I went out and walking around and talking to people and I ran into the head of, there were two communist parties and this guy, we got talking and then he would come over to my house. We had these long passionate discussions in Indonesia and I made the mistake of giving to him. I had a friend who

who had translated Chiang Kai-shek's biography, or was it China's Destiny, maybe it was, into Indonesian. And being a free speech guy, I said, "Listen, here's..." I think there were two books. "Read these." You were trying to influence him. Yeah. He was... and I also was... I said, "Will you take me out into the kampong, out into the villages, and let me see how you're organizing?" And he said, "I'll try."

So anyway, one day he comes into my office at the Ford Foundation and when he would come in, he'd be banging on the desk and my boss would get very nervous. One day he came in and he said, "Okay, I've arranged for you to go out to the Kampong and see how the Communist Party organizes." But he said, "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 of my own and everything was good colonial. Was this the Indonesian Communist Party? There were two. There was a Parti Komunis Indonesia and then the Partindo was another. They were both fellow traveling sort of communist parties. Did it have any impact in Indonesia at the time? Oh yeah, huge. They were about to take over and Sukarno was not resisting them.

But the military didn't like it. So anyway, dad and I went and there's this old Dutch colonial building where we walked in and there was a room maybe four times as big as this office with a long table, picture of Lenin at one end and Marx at the other. In Jakarta? Yeah. And there were like 20 people sitting around the table, all with very dark looks on their face. Yeah. In military suits? They had suits on. It's the tropics. No, there wasn't military.

But they were very unpleasant looking and not cheerful to see me. And the first thing they did was they said, "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."

And they kept going at me, and I knew I was in trouble. And finally, I just said, "I'm sorry to inconvenience you," and I ran out the door.

And they let you? Get out before they stopped me and got to my car and drove away. They didn't block you? No, they didn't block me. And I stayed up all that night waiting for the newspapers to come out. When it did, I remember the paper's name, Bintang Timur, the Eastern Star, had a giant headline and it said, "Representative of the Ford Foundation kicked out." And I thought, "Boy, I'm in trouble now."

And I went back to the office the next morning and my boss, who had a real empire there,

big house and I think he might have been gay. I don't know. It doesn't matter. But he had a whole scene and this was his death knell because everybody was being kicked out. The UN got kicked out. Oh, even the UN? Oh, the UN had been kicked out and there were massive demonstrations in the street every day. And in fact, one of my jobs was to sit in front of the Ford Foundation and if any demonstrators came down the street to come in and tell them.

And one day the demonstrators did come down and then some trucks drove in and I ran inside and told my boss something's 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, all the telephone cables, cut the Ford Foundation off. And then when that article came out, he said, "I want you on a plane out of here tonight." And I had a house, I had five servants.

I had a whole world. So I had to get out. So that's how I ended up at Berkeley. That's some story. It is. And that was that movie that Mel Gibson did, A Year of Living Dangerously. It's an incredible movie. It's all about that. He was a reporter in the movie in that period when all those tens of thousands of Chinese got massacred. Was that the same period? Yeah. That was the lead up to it.

and then the military Suharto took over then the communists got because they killed the Chinese oh yeah that's right because they thought they were communists and then the Indonesian communists killed the Chinese because they were richer they were capitalists they thought that even though they were richer and capitalists they thought they were fifth column Chinese communist party members undermining the Indonesian government yeah that they wanted to take over the foreign ministry

was a communist subunderal. I mean, it was quite a shit show. Yeah. So anyway, I had to get out. I think a lot of the American China specialists have a certain left-leaning political stance, sympathy to the East, to the cause of communism, partly based on a certain mystery about the place, but also partly based on their own frustration about America, of how they perceived the American government

government as yes i think that latter part and remember the vietnam war is going on and that alienated an awful lot of intellectuals from the american government a whole generation of you a whole generation and it alienated me because i was in the war watching it and it was just savage and these carpet bombings and defoliating millions of acres of jungle with

245T and it was going nowhere and people were lying about it. Well, instead of targeting the perpetrators of the war and the hostility and antagonism, Indonesian communists and I suppose the Chinese communists kicked out people like you. Yeah, because I wasn't sufficiently left. I was skeptical left. I wouldn't play the friendship boogie, go along and just say everything's wonderful.

and not ask any questions. I remember going to a prison in Shanghai. I think it was Shanghai's number one prison. God, I was looking at these guys who were working in the factories there and thinking, "How many of these people are counterrevolutionaries?" And I think I asked, but they didn't want that. So I was considered like a rude noise in a room that was supposed to be very polite and very subservient. But I'd had a little bit of experience in these other countries, so I wasn't stupid.

I'd seen a few things, whereas a lot of scholars or these left-wing people, they don't, a lot of them don't have a lot of real world experience. And I think the calibration can be quite off coming from

a purely academic document-driven approach compared to when you have worked and interacted and heard stories and had dinners and this and that. I think it's undeniably true. That was probably the one good part about Mao's 知识青年 and 茶对 ing everybody, is that they had... Intellectuals going to countryside. And they even recognize it in retrospect and in a certain way.

it was a wake-up experience for them. It was brutal, it was unnecessary, it was autocratic, all of those things. Squandered talents, they denied people of education. It was horrible, but it did connect people in some more organic way with their society. I don't think it was justified, but I think

Mao did have a, he always hated intellectuals who 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. And when he was in the Beijing Beida Library,

I think he got a big attitude against these intellectuals because they treated him like dirt. He didn't have a prestigious education background. He was just a librarian, wasn't even a student. No, so he had no standing and yet he thought a lot of himself and I think he felt humiliated. And I think Chinese intellectuals of that era could be pretty arrogant.

I think intellectuals of all era, that's one of their common traits. It's one thing to remember, if you're going to be an intellectual or a writer, try not to be arrogant. I think that gets at the heart of something fundamentally important about understanding China, its leaders, Mao, Xi, whoever. So that's the end of this episode. Thanks for listening. If you like what you just heard, do subscribe, comment, thumb up, wherever you listen to your podcast.

Peking Hotel also has a Substack newsletter where I publish written content. So I put links in show notes. Do check it out. And so take care and I'll talk to you next time.