China on my mind - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Ellingsen
BY 1991, MY TIME IN CHINA WAS COMING TO AN END. The West, which with one hand imposed sanctions against the regime for the massacre, had with the other sent its old men – Gough Whitlam, Willy Brandt, Richard Nixon and Ted Heath – to patch things up with the Communist Party. I was told to move on; the story was different now. But I could not forget. Nor could I feel vindicated. My overriding sense as I boarded the plane in Beijing for the last time wasn't that I had nailed it, but rather that I had got away with it.
In fact, I was not as certain as some of the sentences I wrote. I am not talking about facts in the sense of what can be known. The death toll, for instance, is a number. No one could be sure about it, but only because the army refused to reveal how many bodies it scooped up with the blood it scrubbed from the Square. I put the figure at three thousand – the estimate of the Red Cross – rather than the three hundred claimed by the government. What troubled me was what can't be known but can be explored. Because journalists can tend to see themselves as in the know, rather than just plain curious, this can be hard to find. I think it is because journalism encourages accounts that simulate reality rather than interrogate it. This disguises the disjointed nature of what we witness. The rough seams are smoothed out.
I didn't know it then, but it is the confusing moments that actually reveal the most. If I was doing it again, I would try to stay with the loose ends, the details that did not make sense. To some extent, this is a literary device. What I most remember from a book I loved as a teenager, Catcher in the Rye, is not the plot or the resolution, but the enigmatic question Salinger poses throughout the novel, ‘Where do the ducks go in winter?' Where did the young man in the white shirt who stopped a column of tanks on June 5, 1989 go? A British tabloid named him as Wang Weilin, and said he was nineteen, but this is not verified. Almost nobody knows his name. Nobody knows what happened to him. And yet his bailing up of seventeen tanks while carrying what looked to be his shopping was history.
My account of the massacre aspired to be eyewitness history without understanding enough about the subject who does the witnessing. I did not rely exclusively on journalism's formula – who, why, what, when and how – but I leant heavily upon it and that let it down. A better starting point would have been to question the authority of the observer; this would have avoided the terrifying sense I had later that journalism had explained it all. It would have opened up gaps that may have allowed the often haphazard horror to be rethought, and ultimately more equivocal and interesting questions to emerge. Admitting that being there does not equate with being across it was beyond me at the time, and perhaps it is still beyond journalism. I now think the best we can hope for is a story that doesn't hide its subjectivity or assume certainty. Journalism could do it, but it would mean exchanging power for doubt, swapping echo chamber assertions for good writing.
Janet Malcolm says a journalist is someone who'll betray you without remorse. In part, this is a reference to the journalistic ‘I', which Malcolm says parades as ‘the dispassionate observer' without revealing that he or she is not in fact the writer, but an invention. Better in my view to declare where you stand – which is, inevitably, on shifting ground. Some of the difficulty with this is structural – a shortage of time and resources means foreign correspondents often rewrite other reports – and some of it is psychological. What was romantically called ‘sniffing the East wind' boiled down to Western journalists summarising the Hong Kong newspapers. And there is a sense of expectation that goes with the role. We need to believe that someone understands what is happening. Journalists appear to fill the gap. It is hard for a journalist to say they do not know the reason why something happened. They always have something to say. It was a role I eagerly embraced, as it seemed to diminish my own uncertainty. Maybe this is because, at the time, the act of writing plugged gaps – rather than, as I now think is the case, discovering them.
LAST YEAR, ROBERT THOMSON, WHOM I REPLACED as China correspondent for The Age, The Financial Times and The Sydney Morning Herald, was back in Melbourne. He addressed journalism students at his old university, RMIT. Thomson is now the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and one of most powerful journalists in the world. He had a message: ‘If you are haunted by history you will be history. That is one of contemporary life's certainties.' The line has a ring to it. But is it the ring of truth or the sound of something hollow?
I have come to think that being haunted by history is unavoidable. I am haunted by what happened in China. This was not the case for Thomson's boss, Rupert Murdoch. He was so eager to forget the massacre that he agreed to remove the only outlet on his Star satellite over China that would have mentioned it, the BBC. This is a symbolic act for a newsman like Murdoch, and suggests power is his first priority. And then there is our own history. We see with eyes informed by what has gone before. To deny this is self-delusion, and results in precisely what Thomson warns against: you become history – that is, you repeat the past because you ignore it. The past needs to become history, but this only happens with an act of recollection, not forgetting. The past can't be forgotten; we are a kind of palimpsest – forever re-remembering and rewriting our memories.
This is perhaps a flaw in journalism that now seems intent not so much on erasing history as on failing to construct it. In place of Hugh Cudlip's definition of journalism as that which comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, lifestyle-leaning media outlets now seem intent on eliding the distinction. Before I left The Age three years ago, an editor told me I had to find a new way of writing about poverty. The old way – where the role of the journalist was to question those in power – was suddenly passé. What was it Dr Johnson said? ‘A newspaper writer is a man without virtue, who lies, at home for his profit.'
I am not a China specialist or a China historian. I admit only to being a fledgling historian of my own life. That is where my memory of the event resides; not in any particular social or cultural context, but simply within me. It has the opacity that marks any historical record but precisely because of that, it permits a mental re-enactment of the past. Whether I like it or not, this is the past that I draw on – and which, in a sense, draws upon me. When I got back to Australia, there were people who wanted a piece of the big event, digested and preferably delivered in person. I gave them that. It reminded me of the fairy stories we are told as children. China had it all – life and death, good and evil, a morality tale for our times. And, like a fairytale, we need to keep telling it and rediscovering it over and over and over again. ♦