What do we know about a country so immense and often so closed? What did we see? And was our view fair, balanced, seeking to discover the reality of things and to account for it? The size of China, territorial and demographic – about a fifth of the world’s population lives there, on average, since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, seventy-five years ago, on October 1, 1949 –, and the radical changes it is undergoing are a challenge for reporters Monde which follow one another.
The regime’s effort to try to control information, and often to suppress it, is another constant that makes this country so special. Without the dangers of war journalism inherent in certain corners of the Middle East or elsewhere, but without the open environment of Western capitals. Each report, each interview request requires crazy energy. It’s a somewhat different discipline, it’s China.
Pour The Worldthe first issue of which was published in the winter of 1944, the first contact with this Chinese terrain, in addition to the dispatches from press agencies, testifies to the great chaos which then characterized the country, between the soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang , those of the last warlords, those of Mao Zedong (1893-1976). A “casual correspondent” named Paul Cronier followed the retreat of French troops from Tonkin, after a coup d’état by Japanese forces, in March 1945. He thus found himself stranded in Kunming, in Yunnan (southwest of the country), and, On October 3, 1945, the day started early. “We are blocked in our “hotel 1” by the Chinese, who, since 5 o’clock this morning, have been making nice gestures at each other, from crossroads to crossroads, with machine guns, machine guns, even mortars. »
Former “Le Monde” reporter and Asia specialist Robert Guillain, in September 1950, in Paris. Having left for Japan in 1938, he was stranded there after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and was not able to return to France until 1946. AFP “The misfortunes of China”
For China, it is the twilight of an era. The victory of the soldiers of the Maoist People’s Liberation Army soon opened another, whose first years were recounted in the newspaper by almost a single man: Robert Guillain (1908-1998). The journalist has just spent thirteen years (1934-1947) within the Havas agency, which became Agence France-Presse after the Liberation. After three years in the London office, he had already been sent to Shanghai to cover the war that Japan was waging against China. “It was in 1937, a close time and yet another world. When I try to remember what struck me most when I arrived in China on that date for the first time, almost everything that comes to mind concerns a single subject: China’s misfortunes.he wrote.
