A Foreign Journalist in Peking
Covering trivia and terror in 1930s China
‘China used to be dirt cheap for foreigners. People used to come out to work in a very modest capacity for a bank, for instance, and the first thing they would do would be to buy a polo pony.’
The late Israel Epstein, brought up in Tiānjīn and resident in China for most of his life, was speaking of the 1930s, when as a young man he covered the doings of foreigners for two of the English-language papers of the day, the Peking and Tientsin Times, and then the Peiping Chronicle.
Epstein knew not only the polo-playing clerks, but the writers whose books are still required reading for all who come to China. Owen Lattimore, a Chinese specialist and later victim of the McCarthy witch-hunts, worked before him at the P and T Times as it was known, and Epstein reviewed the first edition of his Desert Road to Turkestan, still among the best China travel books ever written. He knew John Blofeld whose City of Lingering Splendour described the ways of the pleasure quarter of Qián Mén, and Juliet Bredon, whose Peking although not always accurate even then, remains one of the best guides to the capital yet written.
He even caught sight of the eccentric recluse Sir Edmund Backhouse who forged the diaries of a Manchu official and fooled a generation of China scholars with his apparently intimate knowledge of the Qīng imperial household.
‘I didn’t know Backhouse but I saw him once. He had a gibbon as a pet, and he had one of these Chinese courtyards with red gates with a little window through which you could look at anyone who knocked, and he used to send the gibbon to look through the window to give visitors a shock.’ Then, with a twinkle: ‘The gibbon didn’t take your card.’
Backhouse was far from the only oddity. The city had many ‘remittance men’ who had got into trouble at home either with the authorities or with their families; black sheep who had been sent to graze in Běijīng, where they were writing books which never appeared, or painting canvasses which were never completed, and living off allowances sent regularly from home.
‘Beijing was full of eccentrics,’ recalled Epstein. ‘But the newspaper people had to work every day, so they couldn’t be quite as eccentric as some of these other folk.’ At the sober and old-fashioned Peking and Tientsin Times, where he worked 1931–35, he nevertheless chronicled their comings and goings.
‘Most of the local news was not about China really but about the foreign communities in China. It was a paper substituting for a daily newspaper from abroad, since there was no airmail in those days.’
What the readers wanted — and with an editorial staff of only six or seven to produce a daily paper of 16 pages, what they got — was shipping news, the annual balance sheets of foreign companies, racing results from the Běijīng and Tiānjīn race courses, prices from the Shànghǎi exchange, and births, marriages, and deaths.
Under the principle of extra-territoriality forced on China during the Opium Wars foreigners were tried by their own officials under the laws of their own countries. The proceedings of these consular courts sometimes added slightly racier content to both the P and T Times and its rivals, but the whole front page was devoted to advertising. ‘It was not an entertaining paper.’ He smiled. ‘Although I sometimes wrote things which I thought were entertaining.’
He did more than that. The paper was privately owned by a British company, and rarely questioned British policies, although these were interpreted differently by different editors. Under editor H.G.W. Woodhead, the paper was thoroughly pro-monarchical, in favour of the restoration of the last emperor to the dragon throne, and of the maintenance of foreign influence and control in China. His successor, Wilfrid Pennell, had a greater sympathy for the forces of Chinese nationalism, and an understanding of the May Fourth movement, which had brought demonstrations to the gates of Běijīng’s Legation Quarter in protest at the handing over of formerly German-controlled territory in China to the Japanese at the end of the First World War.
But a move to the Peiping Chronicle, where Epstein worked from 1935–6, brought an opportunity for more serious journalism. The paper had a British editor, William Sheldon Ridge, but was owned by Chinese, supported the Guómíndǎng (国民党, Kuomintang, Nationalist Party), and resisted the ever-increasing Japanese occupation of northern China.
‘The only foreign correspondents who spoke Chinese in those days were the Japanese and the Russians. People writing in English generally didn’t speak Chinese, or they had an elementary knowledge of Chinese and couldn’t work professionally — couldn’t conduct an interview in Chinese.’ But with the assistance of Chinese colleagues, Epstein became a thorn in the side of the Japanese; or, perhaps, a needle.
‘I wrote a series on Japanese promotion of narcotics — of heroin actually. The Japanese were pushing heroin very hard, and they would give away cigarettes with heroin in them free, so as to get people hooked on the habit.’ The principle of extra-territoriality was used to protect the distribution outlets from the Chinese police. ‘They would characterise some company as a Japanese company, which might be selling bicycles, or repairing bicycles, but in the back room there’d be heroin and sometimes a place for heroin smokers.’
It was fortunate for Epstein that the by-line on this series was merely ‘Special Correspondent’, for in 1937 the Japanese took control of Běijīng and it became dangerous to be unpopular with them. Having been born in Poland, Epstein shortly became stateless, and particularly vulnerable. The Japanese terrorised the newsboys in order to drive the paper off the street and out of business, but the editor began to drive round in his car selling it to whoever wanted it, and delivering it to subscribers himself.
Epstein left Běijīng immediately after the Marco Polo Bridge incident which heralded the Japanese occupation of the the city, then saw the battle for control of Tiānjīn before retreating south ahead of Japanese control, and eventually to Hong Kong, where he worked on both the South China Morning Post, and the now-defunct Hong Kong Daily Press. When Japan finally declared war and occupied Hong Kong, Epstein was interned for a few months before taking part in an escape and finally ending up in the United States.
In 2000, when this interview was conducted, he was 85, and had been a resident of Běijīng since 1951. Travelling on the Second Ring Road still conjured up for him the now long-gone city walls whose route it follows.
He became one of the handful of foreign members of the Chinese Communist Party, and although he was imprisoned for five years during the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution remained an apologist for the Party. He was quietly working on a memoir of his life and times. The no doubt Party-approved My China Eye: Memoir of a Jew and a Journalist was published in 2005, the year of his death, and both President Hú Jǐntāo and Premier Wēn Jiābǎo attended his funeral.
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