The Press: China Coverage: Sweet and Sour

(3 of 4)

Polite Reminder. In the scramble, it seemed that old China hands might fare better than the majority of the press. On hand, for example, was Public Broadcasting's Theodore H. White (The Making of the President), who covered China for six years as a TIME-LIFE correspondent and impressed his colleagues at the first press luncheon by asking a waitress in Mandarin to bring him green tea. But the Chinese proved courteously unenlightening to everyone. "A question about what happened to Deputy Premier Lin Piao," wrote Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News, "produces a polite reminder to eat your spinach."

Analytical pieces, the so-called "thumb-suckers," were simply too risky to try on the basis of what was available. Even such an event as the two-page, seven-picture spread on the presidential visit in Peking's People's Daily, described by resident correspondents as "unprecedented," proved an enigma. The Washington Post's Stanley Karnow thought the display was "calculated to communicate to the Chinese population the advent of a new era in Sino-American relations." But A.P. Correspondent Frank Cormier cautioned that it might be aimed mainly at irritating the Russians.

Deprived of the customary briefings and backgrounders, correspondents were forced to fall back on color and trivia, including the length of Mao's handshake with Nixon and the width of Chou En-lai's grins as portents of how the talks were going. Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. fumed about the low-key reception and grumbled that the sole Chinese concession seemed to be that "they did not make President Nixon stop for red lights." Buckley eventually suggested in print that some slight was also intended because Chou drank "to the health" of President Nixon instead of toasting him directly. Of Nixon's performance he snapped, "I would not have been surprised if he had lurched into a toast of Alger Hiss."

Banner Headline. Proffered visits to nearly 40 industrial, cultural or historic sites proved interesting enough, but there was little room for individual enterprise. Detroit News Correspondent Jerry terHorst got a banner headline back home for his account of a visit to a Peking auto assembly plant. The New York Daily News made much of the observation by U.P.I.'s Norman Kempster that "Peking looks like a working-class neighborhood in The Bronx." Even when correspondents did make prolonged contact with responsive individual Chinese, as the Times's Frankel did with some students at Peking University, the results could be unnerving. One student said the bloodshed during the recent Cultural Revolution was necessary because it helped expose enemies of the people. Frankel: "Then why does Chairman Mao now say that violence is not the way?" Reply: "Because violence is not the way."