Reed Irvine - Editor
On February 7, on ABC's "Good Morning, America," host David Hartman introduced an elderly gentleman, saying that he was "a well-known documentary-maker who's been shooting film in China since 1938." He added, "And in 1972, he spent a year and a half (sic) filming the everyday lives of the Chinese people. He has made a remarkable twelve-hour movie which will be shown in a series beginning today at the Museum of Modem Art in New York City, for those of you who are fortunate enough to be able to go and see it."
Mr. Hartman then raised the question of how it happened that this gentleman had been able "to go and extensively shoot film in China." His guest replied that he had gotten to know Chou En-lai when he was in China in 1938 and that he had managed to retain the confidence of the Chinese over the years. Chou En-lai was premier of Communist China when he went back in 1972, and he was therefore able to get permission to go where he wanted and film what- ever he wanted to film.
Hartman showed some brief sequences from his guest's film on China. The first sequence consisted of a rural scene from China in 1930, showing peasants engaged in hard labor. This was contrasted with a scene of the great city of Shanghai in 1972. The guest commented that people in China are better off today than they were previously, with "enough food, enough room and everything."
It was not clear whether the viewers were expected to conclude that the Communists had built the city of Shanghai, but that seemed to be the implication.
Another scene showed a man in a pharmacy complaining to the clerk that a gadget he had bought had not worked properly. The two engaged in a rather heated discussion, until the clerk looked in the box and pulled out a part that the customer had overlooked. He attached it, and the gadget functioned perfectly. The customer was happy. The moral seemed to be that consumers in China are free to complain about defective merchandise, but the merchandise isn't really defective.
One had to wonder about a documentary that would endeavor to show progress by contrasting a rural scene fifty years ago with a modem city. Why not compare two rural scenes, or two urban scenes?
One had to wonder about that uninhibited discussion in the pharmacy with such a happy ending, all in the presence of a foreign film crew. In his devastating new book, Chinese Shadows, Simon Leys, a Chinese-speaking scholar who was also in China in 1972, points out that the ordinary Chinese people were afraid to make any contact with foreigners. He details the elaborate measures taken by the authorities to insulate foreigners from the Chinese people, observing that the Maoist dream would be to isolate all the foreigners on a small island where they could be kept under constant sustenance. If Leys b right, the pharmacy scene enacted before those foreign cameras could hardly have been spontaneous.
Finally, one had to wonder what kind of background the documentary-maker had that made him so acceptable, so trusted in a land where most foreigners are treated with such suspicion. Is it possible that such trust could have developed merely from a meeting with Chou En-lai 34 years previously?
The documentary-maker whose Calm ABC News was plugging enthusiastically was Joris Ivens, an octogenarian whose undoubted artistry with the camera has been at the service of communist causes for nearly half a century. In 1932, he produced in the Soviet Union a film called "Song of Heroes," which was one of ten chosen to celebrate the successful conclusion of Stalin's first five-year plan.
During the Spanish Civil War, Ivens produced "Spanish Earth," with the hope of winning greater international support for the Loyalist cause. The reviewer for The New York Times labeled it "definitely a propagandist effort." Another reviewer said it was "too heavily colored with propaganda, too bitterly conceived, to be classified as art." Ivens, in his book, The Camera and I, (International Publishers, 1969) expresses surprise that many people thought that a documentary should be objective. 1 In a classic statement of the philosophy of agit-prop, he states that "a militant documentary film" should "agitate-mobilize"
International Publishers specializes in works of such authors as Marx. Lenin. Castro, and Kim II-sung.
After World War II, Ivens lived for ten years in Poland and East Germany. He has explained that he was interested in seeing these countries make the transition from capitalism to socialism. In 1955, he was awarded the World Peace Prize by the World Peace Council of Helsinki, a well-known Soviet front organization, as Ivens himself has acknowledged.
Ivens told AIM that he had not joined the Communist Party, but in an interview with the French weekly, Le Nouvei Observateur, reprinted in the June 1976 issue of Atlas, he said that he had been a Communist and a revolutionary since 1928.
He made a film called "People in Arms" in Castro's Cuba, and during the Vietnam war, he made several films in Hanoi. In his book, he said that "in filming the Vietnam people in their fight against American aggression, we have to find ways to express their wonderful revolutionary elan, their incredible moral force, their political consciousness and their resistance, with every fiber of their being, to an enormous military machine."
"Good Morning, America" did not do Mr. Ivens justice in ignoring all of these interesting facets of his career and film- making philosophy. These certainly help clear up the question of why the Chinese Communists were so trusting of him. Evidently their confideme was not misplaced. Ivens says that they liked his film and are showing it to audiences in China. In view of their hypersensitivity to criticism, this tells us something about the content and message of the film. We asked Ivens if it contained anything smacking of criticism. The scene with the dissatisfied customer in the pharmacy was the only example he cited-and there the customer was wrong!
Accuracy in Media has protested to ABC the failure to provide its viewers with an accurate, factual introduction of Joris Ivens. The facts that we have cited are no secret. They are taken mainly from his own autobiography. They not only help answer the question Mr. Hartman asked about why he was able to film so extensively in China, but they also provide the viewer with a proper perspective from which they can evaluate the films that ABC was recommending they go see.
We have criticized The New York Times for identifying Wilfred Burchett, a journalist who has been identified as a KGB agent, only as "a leftwing journalist." ABC News certainly has an obligation to tell its viewers the facts when it serves up to them a specialist in leftwing agit-prop.
The agent that is handling Mr. Ivens' film is eager to sell it to the Public Broadcasting Service. He informed us that the film had been enthusiastically endorsed by the Department of State. We checked that out with USIA and were told that this was a considerable exaggeration. We were told that the film had been classified as "educational" for import purposes, but that was the extent of the "endorsement."
Since we have not seen the film ourselves, we cannot really pass judgment on it, except to note that if it is acceptable to Peking it can hardly be a truthful, objective picture of conditions in Mainland China. Communist Chinese officials do not look with favor on that which does not flatter them and their revolution. One official, discussing books about China with Simon Leys, dismissed the idea that China's image would be improved if foreign writers were given better access to the country. He said: "If the intention of the author is to hurt China, then the better his documentation, the more evil his book will be."
As we shall point out in the article that follows, ABC has given the Communist Chinese enough flattery. They owe their viewers a little truth about China.
1. It would be useful to remind ABC that Confucius was right in stressing the importance of calling things by their right names. It was unfair to the viewers and to Mr. Ivens to conceal the true dimensions of his interests and accomplishments. It might also be useful to make the same point to the Public Broadcasting Service, just in case they purchase Mr. Ivens' films.
Who Is Simon Leys? Simon Leys is the pen name used by Pierre Rychmans, a Belgian scholar who has specialized in the study of China for over twenty years. Ten of those years were spent in the Far East. His wife is Chinese and he is a master of the Chinese language. His interest in China was triggered by a trip that he made to the People's Republic when he was nineteen. He was sympathetic to the Maoist regime until 1966. Watching the "Cultural Revolution" from the vantage point of Hong Kong, he had his eyes opened. He published a critical book, The Chairman's New Clothes, using a pen name in order to keep open the possibility of being permitted to make visits to Communist China. However, after the publication of Chinese Shadows in France in 1974, the Maoist faithful in Europe found out who he was and denounced him to Peking.
After Richard Nixon opened the door to Mainland China in 1972, we were flooded with articles, books and television documentaries that purported to inform us about how the Chinese people had fared under the rule of Mao Tse-tung.
A great deal of this material was produced by wide-eyed visitors who knew nothing of pre-Mao China and who were in no position to learn much during their carefully guided tours.
One journalist wrote a report on his travels in Communist China, but it turned out that he had never set foot inside the country, and he was fired. Simon Leys in his new book, Chinese Shadows, comments wryly that it is surprising that this hoax was ever found out. 2 He says it should be easy to write a lively, colorful and convincing report on China without leaving one's desk. He argues that the person who actually makes the trip has little chance of seeing, hearing or experiencing anything that thousands of other visitors have not already seen, heard and experienced.
He points out that the Maoist authorities have succeeded in confining foreign visitors to an incredibly constricted area. Of hundreds of cities, only about a dozen are open to ordinary foreigners. They are always put up in the same hotels, where they are carefully protected from contacts with ordinary Chinese. Guards at the gates check the identities of all Chinese visitors. The hotels provide all necessary services. The visitors are driven to selected factories or hospitals that they are to tour. That is virtually their only contact with the towns they visit.
When it comes to the rural areas, they see even less. They are permitted to visit fewer than a dozen of the tens of thousands of Chinese villages-and always the same ones. Leys compares these to agricultural pavilions at an international fair.
Leys estimates that out of 800 million Chinese, the foreign visitor meets about 60 individuals. There are two or three writers who take care of visiting writers, two or three scholars who meet the visiting scholars, etc. Greeting foreigners is their full-time job. Your chances of meeting a true specialist in your own field are slim, and if you have a good command of Chinese and a list of names of people you would like to see, your case is virtually hopeless.
Extraordinary measures are taken to prevent foreigners from having unmonitored contacts with the Chinese people, Leys says. This applies not only to short-term visitors, but to foreigners living in China, including the personnel of foreign embassies. He observes that one of the worries of the Chinese-speaking diplomats assigned to Peking is that they will forget their Chinese for lack of use. For their information they read the reports of Peking's official news agency and eagerly read the mail from Hong Kong to find out what is going on under their noses.
The care and cultivation of the foreigners, both visitors and residents, has resulted in the revival of many special privileges and rights. Leys points out that the Chinese are not allowed, except on official business, to enter the luxury hotels and clubs reserved for foreigners only. Special lounges are reserved for foreigners in restaurants. There are special waiting rooms for them in railway stations, and the foreigner must always travel first class on the trains, with other foreigners or alone. If the train was crowded, the Chinese would be displaced to make room for the foreigner and would be kept at a respectful distance from him. Leys says: "And it is the same everywhere he goes. There will always be some officious lower-level bureaucrat representing the invisible, ever-present, omnipotent authorities and ready to create around the hapless foreigner a no man's land that nobody dares cross."
One has to marvel that this situation has been so little re- ported by the many visitors to China, including those representing the news media. For many years no article comparing the old and the new China was complete with. out a reminder that in the bad old days there was a park in Shanghai with signs at the entrances that allegedly said, "No Chinese or dogs allowed." Never mind that what the sign actually said was that the park was reserved for the exclusive use of the foreigners and that dogs were not allowed. Where are the articles indignantly describing the segregationist policies of the Maoist regime? (It is no longer necessary to put up signs advising people to keep out the dogs. Dogs have long since been virtually eliminated in China).
Mao's Manipulation of our Media
The conditions in China that Leys describes are designed to maximize the ability of the regime to control and manipulate what the outside world is told about the China that Mao built.
Leys is by no means the first author to expose the fraud, but because of his deep knowledge and love of China and his skill with the verbal rapier, no one that we know has equaled him in shaming the foreign reporters and writers who have happily gone along with this great con game.
Here is one sample of his uninhibited criticism of the press.
"Being effectively cut off from the only important reality- the daily life of the Chinese people-the foreigner who wants to talk about 'China' can do one of two things: he can copy down the official slogans (which he gets either in 'inter- views' or in propaganda leaflets distributed in twelve languages), or he can try desperately to glean the crumbs of the reality denied to him, and to patch together as best he can a series of unrelated vignettes. Since doing the first would have meant re-duplicating the work of Le Monde/New China or emulating famous living ideologues, I have chosen the second, frivolous as it seems."
Leys appends this footnote to his reference to Le Monde: "Le Monde used to be, many years ago, a prestigious French newspaper. Lately, however, it has been reduced to the status of a daily supplement to a monthly called La Nouvelle Chine (The New China), the informal organ of the Chinese Embassy in Paris, edited by the same journalists."
While Leys does not single them out for special mention, American journalists have been prominent participants in the Chinese con game.
Since ABC News undertook to promote Joris Ivens' new film on Communist China, without mentioning his long experience in "agit-prop," we decided to take another look at a previous ABC News documentary called "The People of People's China" to see how it looked in the light of Leys' description of Mao's media manipulation. This opus, narrated by Steve Bell, was aired on December 1, 1973.
"He can copy down the official slogans (which he gets either in Interviews' or in propaganda leaflets distributed freely in twelve languages)."... Simon Leys ABC's "The People of People's China" is probably as good an example of this as one can hope to find. Here are some examples of slogans transmitted by ABC, followed by some appropriate comments from Leys' Chinese Shadows.
ABC: By almost any conceivable index the worker in Mao's China has never had it so good. While the coolie was the symbol of scorn and misery, the worker is glorified as a hero. For the first time, food, clothing and shelter seem assured. There is even the prospect of becoming a person of responsibility in the new China. But only if-if the worker can translate ambition into the proper image of service to the people and at the same time somehow master the art of correct thinking in a society where ideological purity is in a constant process of redefinition."
A Leys' vignette: A foreign diplomat was leaving Peking and wanted to give his cook a present. He knew the man could not accept anything foreign, and so he gave him a good Chinese fountain pen. Just before he left, the usually laconic cook, very upset, came to see him. "They have taken my pen! They have taken my pen!" he cried. This had been the last straw. The poor man had many causes for grievance. His employer paid 120 yuan a month for his services, but he got only 40 yuan of that, barely enough to feed his wife and six children who lived in a village 40 miles away. He could visit them once a month, traveling by bicycle, and spending one night with them. His job was not of his choice. He had been a farmer. The government decided he should be a cook. What he would do next he did not know or care, since he was powerless to influence his own destiny. He had but one diversion in life-smoking.
ABC: "Since the advent of communism in China, the peasant does have new dignity. 'Our god.' Mao has written, 'is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.' China's people, all 650 million of them. are the primary focus of Mao's socialist vision."
Leys: Mao's bureaucracy has 30 hierarchical classes, each with its own special privileges. No sacrifice is too great to keep the classes and castes segregated. In the diplomatic quarter in Peking, the foreigners are segregated from their Chinese employees, but there are also two cafeterias for the employees-one for the intellectual aristocracy and one for the drivers, sweepers and domestics. The privilege of riding in an automobile is the most conspicuous mark of the members of the ruling class, with their importance clearly demarked by the color and length of the cars. One of the favorite amusements of the people in Peking is to watch the long processions of official cars, with drawn curtains, coming to the sites of the sumptuous official banquets on gala nights. They enjoy this glimpse of "the faraway magical world where their mysterious rulers live."
ABC: "She is the medium through which the party transmits its message. Kuo Fan Yeng sees her own life. The life of her family and the commune as a daily vindication of Marxism.
"Does she have any ambitions to become a provincial cadre, perhaps even one day a national leader? No, she says. We don't think about rank. Whatever advances the revolution."
Leys: "The cadres serve as transmission belts between the summit and the base. They have some privileges, of course, but before reproaching them for that, we should consider how marewarding and dangerous their job is. They are perpetually torn between the leaders and the led... They must set their compasses on the Thought of Mao Tse-tung- a very mobile, shifting and slippery pole.
"Judge for yourself. One should avoid leftism, neither should one fall into rightism (sometimes, as in the case of Lin Piao. leftism is a rightist error), but between those two pitfalls, the cadre will seek in vain for a "middle way"-this being a feudal-Confucian notion. Since the right, the left, and the center are equally fraught with danger, the cadre may be tempted to shut his eyes and follow the successive and contradictory' instructions of the Great Leader without a murmur. Another error, 'To obey blindly' is a poisonous error invented by Liu Shao-ch'i in pursuit of his unmentionable project of capitalist restoration."
It would be easy to carry on this demonstration at greater length. It could be done with material from CBS. NBC and PBS, as well as ABC. keys was in China during the same period that the networks were eagerly dispatching their film crews and reporters there to bring to the American people a "true" picture of China. Leys wrote most of his book in 1972-73. updating it later after a subsequent trip. He believes that the fundamental situation that he describes has not changed significantly and is unlikely to change because of the nature of the system.
His book has been widely and favorably reviewed-even by some of those he has criticized. Even the reviewer in Le Monde described it as "by far and away the best of its kind" among the recent books on China.
Our portrayal of the scope of this book is inadequate, because Leys deals heavily with the crushing of the spirit of the Chinese people and the demolition of their art, music, literature and intellectual life by the Communists. This is an area that programs such as "The People of People's China" deliberately avoided, it would have been difficult to portray in a favorable light the elimination of all books except the works of Mao and the elimination of all operas except those produced by Mao's wife.
For people who pretend any interest in civilization, culture. art, the human spirit and the dignity of man, the real news about the People's Republic of China is the success of the Communists in destroying so much of one of the world's great civilizations, in crushing the spirit of a great people. This is the real message of Chinese Shadows. It is the elephant in the living room that so many of our professional observers have somehow been unable to see.
Leys. by telling the truth, has deprived himself of the possibility of returning to China, which is a tremendous sacrifice for a man whose field is Sinology'. He could have remained silent, but he felt the truth had to be told.
The question is, why did ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and others in the news media allow themselves to be used so disgrace- fully? They had a greater obligation to tell the truth than did Leys. Telling the facts is supposed to be their business, the hallmark of their professionalism.
They all have an obligation to correct the record. AIM has recommended to ABC News that they make appropriate use of Simon Leys and his book. We will make the same suggestion to CBS, NBC and PBS.
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
In the January, Part II, AIM Report, we wrote of the interest of the Soviet KGB in infiltrating and exploiting the American news media. On February 8, we sponsored an AIM luncheon in Washington, D.C., where John M. Maury, a retired CIA official and former assistant secretary of Defense, spoke on this subject.
Mr. Maury, who was with the CIA for 27 years, had testified before a House subcommittee in December. In his testimony he had pointed out that a Soviet intelligence manual entitled, "The Practice of Recruiting Americans in the USA and Third Countries," had placed members of the press no. 2 in a list of a dozen priority recruitment targets. They were preceded only by government employees with secret clearances.
Mr. Maury also emphasized that one of the top objectives of Soviet intelligence is to discredit and weaken U.S. intelligence agencies. He noted that our news media had been of inestimable help in achieving this objective. He cited a number of false and misleading news stories and headlines that contributed to this end.
Mr. Maury's testimony had been ignored by the news media. We were pleased to provide him with an opportunity to air his views. The luncheon was attended by a capacity crowd. CBS News was there with a camera crew. A few other members of the press attended, but no story appeared either on TV or in the papers. That did not surprise us. This is not a story that the news media are at all eager to investigate.
At the luncheon, Mr. Maury said in response to a question that the CIA files contained information about specific journalists who had KGB ties. However, Mr. Maury declined to name any names. He was not inclined to favor a Congressional investigation in this area, but if Congressional committees think that it is necessary and desirable to investigate CIA use of journalists, why would they not be even more interested in probing the activities of the KGB and other foreign intelligence services in this important area? You might raise that question with your senators and congressmen.
Another approach is to observe the appearance of material of the type that the Disinformation Department of the KGB or of other intelligence services seek to insinuate in our information media.
This issue of the AIM Report is devoted to some of the propaganda favorable to Communist China that has found its way into our media. We have focused mainly on ABC News. We don't mean to suggest that we think that ABC has one or more Chinese agents in its employ. But we do think that ABC News must have a very careless and naive staff if they really did not know why their "Good Morning, America" guest, Joris Ivens, had been permitted to spend a year and a half in Communist China shooting film. If motivated agents are not available, well-meaning naive types will do almost as well.
If the consumers of the product watch closely and complain effectively when they spot evidence of propaganda and disinformation activity, the naive types may wise up and the agents will have a tougher time. However, there is little that the news consumers can do about the stories that are not reported or that are written and then killed. It is hard to protest what you don't even hear about.
For example, may months ago, Prof. James Barros of the University of Toronto submitted to The New York Times Magazine an article which discussed evidence that the Canadian authorities had informed the U.S. government as early as 1945 that a Soviet defector had fingered as a Soviet spy an assistant to our Secretary of State. Prof. Barros has ascertained that this was Alger Hiss, and he discussed in his article the steps that were taken to quietly ease Hiss out of the government.
It has been found that this article was turned over to a young lady on the staff of The New York Times Magazine who has said that she has doubts about the guilt of Alger Hiss. She insists that this had nothing whatever to do with her judgment that Prof. Barros' article was poorly written and unconvincing. She recommend- ed against publishing it, and editor Max Frankel followed her recommendation.
In a letter to Prof. Barros explaining the rejection, the young lady said that while the reputation of Hiss would continue to be clouded, she did not think he should be condemned in the pages of The Times!
AIM WILL HOLD A CONFERENCE IN APRIL
Many of you have been asking when AIM is going to hold another conference. Our 1976 conference was an exciting success, and we think our next one will be even better.
We have scheduled it for April 21-22 at the Twin Bridges Marriott Motor Hotel in Washington, D.C. The program has yet to be firmed up, but I can tell you that we will be honoring Clare Boothe Luce, one of our distinguished National Advisory Board members, at a banquet on April 22. General William C. Westmoreland, who commanded our forces in Vietnam, will be one of the outstanding speakers we expect to have.
This is just a small taste of the interesting program that we have in mind for you. To make sure that you are kept fully informed about the conference, please fill out and return the coupon below.
Please note that you can also use this coupon to order a copy of Simon Leys' fine book, Chinese Shadows, at a 25% saving from the list price of $10. Enclose your check for $7.50 or charge it to your BankAmericard.
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1. People "to become active in connection with the problems shown in the film."
2 Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows. c Viking Press, 1977, $10. Passages quoted with permission.