Opinion: The long and tense history of American journalists trying to understand China

In the summer of 1973, just one year after then-US President Richard Nixon’s historic trip, I made my first visit to China. One of the places I was taken to was the Wusan People’s Commune outside Shenyang in northeast China. There, I met model Maoist peasant Yu Kexin and ate lunch at his modest home. It was the highlight of my visit.

In 1993, as CNN’s Beijing bureau chief, I decided to retrace that trip to see how the country had changed in the intervening 20 years. I managed to find Yu and discovered he was now running a tractor repair shop. He lived in a new flat with a TV. As a beneficiary of the market-oriented reforms introduced by then-senior leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, his life had clearly improved.

As soon as local officials were out of earshot, however, Yu confessed that almost everything I had seen during my first visit had been an illusion. He told me that in fact, conditions then were terrible, and that even the food I had so enjoyed had been trucked in from the city by local officials the day before — just to impress the foreigners.

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