HI sTORY
Zhou made a principle for the hospitality – “seeking sameness but
keeping difference” and ordered that the guests’ requirements be satis-
fied as much as possible.
As honoured guests, the group was accommodated in various
first-class hotels in the eight cities they visited. “Since I was from a
working-class family with limited financial means, eating such things
as a three-course dinner in a first-class hotel was a very unusual and
pleasant experience,” Cohen told ChinaReport.
Despite having an MA, Cohen had never been required to take a
single course about China. He told our reporter that at that time he
was also a US Army soldier stationed at NATO Headquarters in Paris
and had seen some of the plans for military actions for the assumed
World War III.
“Even my limited knowledge (as a secondary school student I had
read the famous 1946 ‘Smyth Report’ on the development of the
atomic bomb) had led me to the realisation that nuclear war would
lead to the destruction of all life on the planet,” Cohen told Chin-
aReport. Thus, for the young director, becoming the first American
to film China since its founding in 1949 had a special purpose – he
hoped he could use his camera to make a small contribution to global
peace.
‘Joys and Sorrows’
During the 56 days, the group were shown a carefully controlled
set of various parts of the nation and lives of different classes. Not
only were they led to what would later be famous tourist spots such
as the Great Wall, the Temple of Heaven, and a Peking opera house,
they were also introduced to vital parts of Chinese society, including
its schools, hospitals, factories, fields, communes, prisons and even
slums.
“Having virtually no knowledge about China beforehand, I was
impressed by virtually everything,” Cohen said.
“It is a vast land of great contrasts,” he narrated in Inside Red China.
Modern machinery was employed in hospitals and factories. Co-
hen and his fellow travellers visited a children’s hospital in Beijing, and
saw the relatively new technology of X-rays, 50 years old in the West
but new in China. New machines and facilities supplied by the Soviet
Union were being operated in factories and ports. At that time, some
Western economists, as Cohen pointed out in the documentary, pre-
dicted that “within 10 years, China will become the third-biggest in-
dustrial power, right after the US and Russia.”
But in reality, as Cohen told ChinaReport, China was still tech-
nologically undeveloped, with most of the labour performed by pre-
modern animal and manpower. Through his lens, he captured the
rickshaw coolies on streets of Shanghai as still the primary source of
transport. He also filmed workers loaded with bricks on their backs
in the process of Great Wall reconstruction, and they were happy to
be paid more if they could carry more bricks.
In China, anti-American propaganda, undoubtedly, drew the en-
tire delegation’s attention. In the documentary, Cohen shows several
anti-American posters. A typical poster depicts a US military jeep
stuck in mud, with a caption saying “American militarists want war,
but they are stuck in the mud when all the other nations want peace.”
However, despite the anti-American propaganda, the group was
surprised by the hospitality of the Chinese. “What I found most
interesting was the friendly attitude of essentially everyone we met
towards the US. Other than official anti-US propaganda posters, no-
body said or did anything unfriendly towards us,” Cohen said.
As honoured guests, Cohen and other delegates were invited to
a reception given by the Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai,
who made a very positive impression on Cohen as a moderate, intelli-
gent and pragmatic realist. The young Cohen himself had the chance
to ask Zhou a question about China’s foreign policy towards anti-
communist former colonial and newly emerging nations.
Zhou answered him, saying that, “China will support all formerly
colonial and newly emerging nations regardless of their internal poli-
cies.” This answer, from Zhou’s perspective, was significant because it
implied the PRC’s readiness to interact with the US and other non-
Communist nations.
A surprising degree of freedom was given to the US delegates. They
were allowed to meet the 24-year-old American POW Morris Wills,
who was captured by China during the Korean War and chose to
stay in China at the end of the war. Subsidised by the Red Cross,
Wills studied Chinese literature in Peking University and became a
star player on the basketball team before returning to the US in 1965.
Ten out of the 41 were permitted to visit Shanghai Prison to inter-
view the two imprisoned CIA paramilitary officers John Downey and
Richard Fecteau, captured on a mission to Manchuria in 1952 and
eventually released in 1973.
In the Shanghai prison, Cohen filmed how political prisoners gath-
ered together to receive daily reeducation sessions, with fellow pris-
oners reading selections of Marxist publications. They concentrated27-year-old Robert Carl Cohen in China in 1957Photo by Edward Hochman