China Watchers, Morley Safer during Post-McCarthyism

"The McCarthy Era influenced all media. No one wanted to be accused by the right wing fringe." - Rutherford Poats, United Press International

 Like American foreign service officers who worked in China during World War II, many American reporters lost their jobs and had their careers destroyed during the McCarthy Era. For the next generation of reporters in the 1960s, reporting on the People's Republic of China (PRC) was complicated by a State Department travel ban and China's unwillingness to issue visas. Moreover, the anti-Communist, pro-Taiwan China Lobby in Washington still held sway over US foreign policy, and many media owners like Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, were ardent supporters of Chiang Kai-shek.

Unable to travel to the PRC, American reporters remained stationed in British-controlled Hong Kong ("China Watchers"). Much of the news came by way of parsing official propaganda, analysis from Jesuit priest and China veteran László Ladány, and first-hand accounts from escapees. 

In 1964, the Chinese granted a visa to American journalist Edgar Snow. It was his second visit since the founding of the PRC in 1949. He visited again in 1965. Snow produced a documentary, "One Fourth of Humanity," which featured a rare interview with Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai. 

The first indication China Watchers had of a major policy shift in the PRC was an editorial in the Shanghai Liberation Daily criticizing the opera, "Hai Rui Dismissed From Office." The story is set in the Ming Dynasty, and it is about an official who is dismissed from office by the emperor after he criticizes the emperor for tolerating corruption. The editorial was a not-too-subtle swipe at Mao's critics, one of whom had been effectively dismissed, Liu Shaoqi. China Watchers knew that something was going to happen, but they had no idea that what would follow would become China's most devastating political and social upheaval following the Great Leap Forward: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

At the outset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Audrey Topping, a Canadian photographer, and wife of New York Times correspondent Seymour Topping, managed to get a tourist visa. Through luck and some assistance from a French military attaché, she photographed Red Guard demonstrations in Beijing and was able to get the photos published in the Times. A year later, Morley Safer, posing as a Canadian archeologist, obtained a tourist visa and  traveled to China with his cameraman, John Peters. Safer was no China Watcher, so it must have been frustrating for the Hong Kong-based reporters to see a non-China Watcher get a visa.

While Safer and Peters were in the PRC, Safer said on camera that some Chinese farm equipment was foreign-made. Rather promptly, he and Peters were arrested, taken to a makeshift court in a hotel lobby, and forced to apologize. Safer and Peters were released immediately afterward and spent a month in the PRC before returning to the US. Back in the States, the president of CBS News told Safer to change the title from "Morley Safer's China Diary" to "Morley Safer's Red China Diary." Anti-Communist sensitivity still ruled the media.

Two years before Safer's momentous trip to the PRC, he filed one of the most controversial reports from the Vietnam War. Safer and his cameraman, Ha Thuc Can, filmed US Marines firing rockets, grenades, and machine guns at a small hamlet near Da Nang, Cam Ne. The Vietcong had left the area well before the attack, and the military operation was exposed on national television as both a sham and typical of the fighting in Vietnam.

Outraged, President Johnson called CBS News president Frank Stanton and claimed Safer had "shat on the American flag." Then, according to the New York Times, Johnson demanded that Safer be investigated for being a Communist. Clearly, political baiting had become an established means of fighting dissent, even for Johnson. It was the same tactic used by the Red Guards, albeit from the opposite side of the political spectrum.