Hard press

Paul French tells Toby Skinner that today’s hacks and stories are boring compared to the drugs and bombs of yesteryear

Everyone seems to be saying that today’s ‘China story’ is one of the most important and interesting of the 21st century.

But according to Paul French, who has just written Through The Looking Glass, a history of foreign journalists in China from the 1820s until 1949, the story of modern China is bland compared to what journalists covered here in days gone by.

‘The guys back then were in a much more interesting story,’ French tells Time Out. ‘If this was during the warlord period, our whole discussion would be about whether the country would still be here in five minutes time. In 1932, we’d be talking about how a third of the country’s just been taken over by Japan. In 1937, I’d be watching out for Japanese planes dropping bombs on me. It’s a bigger story than 6.1 per cent GDP growth in the first quarter. Journalists today think they’re gung-ho, but in the 1930s you had journalists with bodyguards and people getting their heads chopped off by warlords.’

And what might surprise many people in modern Beijing is that, for much of the period French covers, China was a bigger story than it is today.

‘China was more important. In 1820, for example, it had 32 per cent of global trade compared to 11 per cent today. And newspapers were covering a lot more of China: in 1936, The New York Times was doing eight columns a day on it; and between 1930 and 1945, the number of books coming out of the country was vastly more than it is now, when we all think there’s a glut of China books.’

The fascinating historical backdrop is central to Through The Looking Glass, but it is primarily a gloriously gossipy look at the oddball characters who populated the foreign press corps in China, working both for foreign newspapers and local English-language papers, which were relatively abundant before 1949.

French, the founder of research consultancy Access Asia and author of three previous books on China, says he was attracted to journalists partly because ‘journalism attracts a fairly odd bunch of people.’

The book introduces an amazing cast of characters, including Edmund Backhouse, the ‘bonkers’ (London) Times correspondent of the early 20th century, who claimed to have bedded the Empress Dowager at one of her many orgies; and Peter Fleming, Bond author Ian’s brother, who’d ‘wander around with Auden and Isherwood in a safari suit, not having a clue what the hell was going on, then write a brilliant bestseller about it’.

One of the highlights of the book is the debunking of the myth of legendary Times correspondent George Morrison (at the paper from 1897-1912), who French argues was hired largely for his unstinting support of the British Empire.

‘What most people don’t realise is that he wasn’t doing most of the reporting. Fellow Times journalists like Backhouse and J.O.P. Bland [both of whom, unlike Morrison, could speak and read Chinese] would feed him information all the time, and then he would add his name anda pro-Empire twist to the story. He was an arch-publicist, and the only Times foreign correspondent to have his name in block capitals, but when you dig around on him, there are a lot of references to “bloody Morrison”.

There was an open row at The Times between Bland and Morrison; everyone at the paper knew that Bland was doing all the work, but decided that it was good to have the Morrison legend ticking over.’

Morrison is similar to many of the journalists in the book in that his work went beyond the usual remits of the trade.

Morrison became an advisor to Yuan Shikai, at the time the second president of the new republic – ‘backing a loser’, according to French – while many of the other journalists became spies and political activists, such as Freda Utley, who carried messages for the Comintern while reporting, and Agnes Smedley, who was winning converts to communism when not writing for The Manchester Guardian.

‘It is remarkable how many journalists decided to work for various factions,’ says French. ‘The argument is that there was something worth being involved in – there was a very real choice to be made; unlike today, the politics of journalists mattered.’

Paul French speaks at The Bookworm on Tuesday 16 and The Yin Yang Community Centre on Wednesday 17.

Through The Looking Glass is available at The Bookworm for around 300RMB.