The Chinese [antikvár]

Prologue In the fall of 1976,1 was called into my editor's office at the Toronto Globe and Mail and asked if I would like to become the newspaper's resident correspondent in Peking. It was a journalist's dream come true, of course, and even had I been a more traditional newspaperman, rather than the Globe's current theater critic and former dance cridc, I could not have been more elated and excited. To begin with, China is not just China at the Globe and Mail. The only national daily in Canada, it operates the oldest-established Western newspaper bureau in the Communist capital, and the experiences and ordeals of previous correspondents have become part of the legend of the newsroom. When the Globe opened an office in Peking in 1959, for example, the first correspondent and the paper itself were viciously attacked for being "soft on Communism" in the columns of Time magazine. Later, Time wrote that the Globe was "a sycophantic admirer" of Mao Tsetung's "red hordes." On the subject of China the rhetoric was particularly virulent because Editor-in-Chief Henry Luce, who was born in China of missionary parents, had made a personal commitment to defend the cause of the defeated Guomindang Government of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. In those days, Chiang was still convinced he could retake the Communist-controlled Mainland from his island redoubt