What do we know about a country so immense and often so closed? What did we see? And was our vision fair, balanced, seeking to discover the reality of things and account for it? The scale of China, territorially and demographically: about a fifth of the world’s population has lived there, on average, since the founding of the People’s Republic of China seventy-five years ago on 1Ahem October 1949-, and the radical changes it underwent were a challenge for the reporters of the World that follow each other.
The regime’s effort to try to control information and often 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. Every report, every interview request requires crazy energy. It is a somewhat different discipline, it is China.
For the worldwhose first issue was published in the winter of 1944, the first contact with this Chinese terrain, in addition to the dispatches from the press agencies, testifies to the great chaos that then characterized the country, between the soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek Kuomintang, the of the last leaders, those of Mao Zedong (1893-1976). TO “occasional correspondent” The name Paul Cronier followed the withdrawal 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 five in the morning, have been making friendly gestures to each other, from intersection to intersection, with machine guns, machine guns and even mortars. »
“China’s problems”
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) at the Havas agency, converted into Agence France-Presse after the Liberation. After three years in the London office, he had already been sent to Shanghai to cover the war Japan was waging against China. “It was in 1937, a close time and another world. When I try to remember what caught my attention when I first arrived in China on that date, almost everything that comes to mind has to do with a single topic: China’s misfortunes.wrote.
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