fredag 16. august 2024

Norman Pearlstine: "My Dinner with Jiang Zemin"

My first memories of China go back almost 50 years. Sitting in front of our 10-in. Philco television, over milk and peanut-butter sandwiches, my closest third-grade friends and I watched, with fascination and terror, the grainy news footage of Chinese soldiers crossing the Yalu River into Korea. It was 1950, the year after Mao Zedong and the communists had taken control of China, exiling General Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party to Taiwan. And now they were fighting us.

That fascination and terror would grow in the decade to come as I, and millions of other Americans, grew up reading Henry Luce’s TIME. It was Luce, born in China to Presbyterian missionaries, whose powerful newsweekly most demonized Mao and, by extension, all of what became known as Red China. Later, in the 1970s, I lived in Hong Kong, where, peering across the border, I had the chance to observe Mao’s last days, when the notorious Gang of Four reduced China to chaos and near anarchy.