Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Taiwan was such a place, when China threatened the island nation with live-fire military exercises, a policy of intimidation in advance of Taiwan’s first direct presidential election. Taiwan’s president, Lee Teng-hui, was trying to raise his nation’s profile, which is what infuriated the mainland in the first place. The situation appeared close to exploding when I arrived in Taipei in the spring of 1996, looking for a fresh way to convey this David and Goliath story. We found it on the island of Quemoy, in the middle of the Taiwan Strait.

  As my producer Mike Mosher and I started digging for some kind of new insight into the confrontation, we began to realize how heavily invested Taiwan was in the mainland, particularly in the southern Fujian Province directly across the Strait. The frontline Taiwanese islands of Quemoy and Matsu had been lightning rods in the 1950s for a heated debate over America’s commitment to defend Taiwan should the mainland attack. Their defense came to symbolize a firm stand against Communism during the 1960 campaign between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Vaguely remembering that history, we flew to Quemoy without a game plan but eager to discover some ground truth. Driving around the island, we found a fishing village that turned out to provide most of the fish eaten in the capital of Taipei. But on further inspection, we learned that the fishermen who ventured out into the Strait each day never cast a net. Instead, vastly outnumbered by the fleet of boats from the mainland, the islanders simply motored out to a point midway between Quemoy and the mainland to meet their counterparts and buy their catch. The fishermen from Taiwan had the money. The fishermen from mainland China provided the fish. Anchored side by side it was a simple exchange, reflecting their mutual codependence. Stunningly simple, this two-way trade in fish made me realize how unlikely it was that China and Taiwan would ever engage in a real firefight. It was the perfect metaphor to explain the story on Nightly News.

  In the next few years, I traveled to China several times, both accompanying Madeleine Albright when she became secretary of state and on my own. While I was in Hong Kong on vacation in 1997, attending World Bank meetings with Alan, NBC called and said I should go immediately to the mainland to prepare a story for the upcoming visit of China’s premier to Washington. Leaving Alan on a moment’s notice—which has become a pattern of our marriage—I headed to Beijing. True to character, Alan encouraged me, predicting it would be a great adventure.

  It was. During that visit, I got a chance to meet Chinese people more easily than on previous trips, in all sorts of settings. We went to food markets and factories, college campuses and housing projects. I discovered more and more people who spoke English and who were willing to talk on camera to an American television reporter. It was a fascinating contrast to the closed, suspicious society I’d first encountered when I’d gone to China with Ronald Reagan more than a decade earlier.

  China lurched forward, still groping for answers to its economic transformation. A visit to Beijing University captured how much progress the Chinese had made, and how far they still had to go. Business students flocked to hear a speech by Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin. They treated him like a rock star, hoping for clues to the American economic miracle. Those I talked to afterward wanted a road map to the way businesses grow and prosper in the United States, an easy way to adapt American rules to their system. Very few understood that the differences between our two economic models were a philosophical and moral gulf not easily bridged.

  To compare the life of Chinese steelworkers with their American counterparts we went to an enormous steel plant in the capital city. It was vast, but hopelessly outdated. Compared to the new technologies now utilized in American plants, the Chinese equipment was obsolete and dangerous. The plant had more than one hundred thousand workers, many of whom spent grueling hours in front of open furnaces. Some wore hard hats, but few had protective eye-wear. Iron shavings were everywhere. The air was so thick with smoke it was almost impossible to see even a few feet ahead of us.

  We were permitted to ride home with one of the workers, who came from three generations who had been assigned to that factory. All lived in the same three-room apartment in a company housing complex. Admittedly, it was a controlled setting, arranged through the local factory committee, but the visit was a perfect illustration of how dependent Chinese workers were on guaranteed jobs and cradle-to-grave benefits, including housing. It was going to be very difficult for the Communist Party’s Central Committee to lay off millions of workers from state jobs, as it believed it had to do over the next five years in order to reduce government subsidies and modernize the economy.

  China was even beginning to think about legalizing some forms of property rights to facilitate the development of a market economy. But Beijing’s experiment with capitalism stopped when it came to individual rights. Despite astonishing changes in the years since Reagan first went to what he called Red China, Chinese leaders still had an iron grip on political reform. Successive American presidents focused on what they considered the more pressing concerns to the United States of China’s role as a military and economic power. They ignored China’s Laogai, its extensive system of forced-labor camps. In a diplomatic and political tap dance, Bill Clinton even managed to separate progress on human rights from Congress’s annual renewal of China’s trade privileges in 1994. But in the summer of 1995, China’s human rights abuses became impossible to overlook when China arrested a prominent Chinese-American activist, Harry Wu.

  Harry Wu was a naturalized U.S. citizen who had spent nineteen years in Chinese prisons before coming to the United States in 1985. He had previously returned to China to investigate prison abuses, without incident. In Xinjiang Province, he uncovered evidence of labor camps with thousands of prisoners toiling in the remote desert. Despite warnings that his forays were becoming too dangerous, on June 19, 1995, he tried to enter China once more, at a remote border crossing on China’s frontier with Kazakhstan. This time he was arrested and imprisoned at a secret location.

  Wu’s arrest created a convergence of events that instantly elevated the subject of China’s behavior to the front pages and lead stories on network news. Tension between China and Taiwan had already exacerbated relations between Beijing and Washington. The administration, bowing to Republican pressure from Congress, had offended the Chinese by granting a rare visa to Taiwanese president Lee Teng-Hui to attend a college reunion in the United States, contrary to decades of agreed-on policy to hold Taiwan’s leaders at arm’s length.

  Global communications made Wu’s story accessible to all of Beijing’s trading partners. He was well known to members of Congress and the news media because of his past writings and testimony at hearings. And Hillary Clinton was planning to attend a United Nations’ women’s conference in Beijing that September. When, during a visit to the White House, Wu’s wife, Ching Lee, said that the first lady would “certainly” boycott the conference if Wu were still in prison, one man’s story became an international political soap opera.

  The White House hadn’t planned on linking Hillary’s trip to Harry Wu’s release, but now the administration was boxed in. We were told the first lady would not go to China if Wu were still in prison. As the situation dragged on through the summer with no signal of Beijing’s intentions, I went ahead with a planned trip to California with Alan. We arrived at our favorite vacation retreat in Carmel Valley on August 23. The very next day my beeper went off while we were on the tennis courts, midmatch. The Chinese were releasing Harry Wu, and Nightly News wanted me to go to San Francisco to meet him when he arrived. The other players, mostly vacationing Californians, thought I was nuts.

  I already knew from my years of covering Reagan’s western White House in Santa Barbara that there is a different rhythm to life in California than in Washington or New York. This time, even I couldn’t completely understand why I would agree to leave Alan on a tennis court during my only week of vacation for the entire year. I headed off to shower and change, telling Alan I’d be back in a day or two, and got the next commuter f
light to San Francisco.

  When I arrived at the San Francisco Airport, the first challenge was to find out when and where Wu would be arriving from China. I figured out that his fellow activists, especially in the U.S. labor movement, would be flying in from Washington to meet him. So I staked out every plane arriving from Dulles, hoping to intercept someone who would know his schedule. Finally, I spotted a union leader who knew what time Wu was arriving. From years of flying in and out of San Francisco, I also knew some of the local security officials. It wasn’t difficult to spot them and find my way to Harry Wu.

  The payoff was the first interview with Harry Wu for Nightly News, and the chance to get to know better one of those rare individuals willing to follow his ideals no matter how difficult the course. Harry and other activists are often dismissed or barely tolerated by official Washington. Their protests can be “inconvenient” when they disrupt the normal patterns of super power diplomacy. But Harry had been both toughened and inspired by his years in prison before coming to the United States. He was passionate about saving tens of thousands of fellow prisoners who were still being incarcerated. He wanted the Chinese prison system to become as well known to the world as the Soviet gulags that Ronald Reagan consistently elevated to the top of the U.S.-Soviet summit agendas. As often happens, Harry’s release produced a flurry of attention—international awards, testimony in Congress, an appearance on The Tonight Show—and just as quickly, he disappeared from our newscasts. But thanks to him, human rights would now have to be the centerpiece of the first lady’s trip to Beijing.

  I had returned to spend a few days with Alan playing tennis, but with Harry’s release, there was no longer any political obstacle to Hillary’s trip. Soon I was detouring to Hawaii to join her entourage. It turned out to be a much better story than any of us had expected. This was not going to be a “tea and cookies” visit. Harry Wu’s vivid account of conditions in China made it inevitable that the first lady do something rarely done by any of her predecessors with the possible exception of Eleanor Roosevelt——she was going to have to tackle the human rights issue head-on.

  Flying to Beijing, we were briefed on security issues. The White House assumed that our rooms would be bugged. Among other tips, we were told to turn on the shower and steam up the bathroom mirror. If there was a spot that did not fog over, that was likely the bug. It wasn’t the kind of information that made you feel warm and cozy about relaxing in your hotel room. Anticipating the focus of the conference, Hillary’s speech equating women’s rights and human rights, the Chinese were already tense.

  On the very first night, after flying for twenty-four hours, I wrote my story, recorded my voice track for New York, and prepared to go out and tape my on–camera stand-up. Unfortunately, the senior producer returned to the office late that day, and decided he wanted an entirely different approach. By the time we’d written a new version, it was four in the morning, local time. The streets were pitch-dark. There were no lights still on to illuminate a suitable backdrop for my on-camera appearance.

  The crew and I headed out in a van, looking for any kind of setting. The only place that was lit up was Tiananmen Square, off-limits to foreign journalists since the uprising in 1989. Desperate, and getting close to our deadline, we decided to chance it. It turned out to be a very bad idea. As soon as we set up, the police descended. I had only enough time to roll off one take, pop the tape out of the camera, and hide it under my jacket. As we tried to get another version taped at the last minute, the police moved in. When one put his hand in front of the camera, I started arguing and telling him he had no right to interfere with our camera. The resulting video is pretty funny. I’m doing my best imitation of an outraged schoolmarm, lecturing this Chinese police officer on the finer points of freedom of the press. Knowing we had at least one good take, my cameraman hustled me out of there before the police could examine my coat pockets, or worse.

  Only hours after I’d finished filing for Nightly News, and with barely a nap, I watched Mrs. Clinton open the conference with a dramatic challenge to the Chinese human rights record. Startling her hosts, she condemned China’s population control policies and equated women’s rights with human rights, declaring, “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights. And women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”

  Without mentioning China by name, her message was unambiguous. She was condemning Beijing’s policy of one child per family, a policy that led to widespread forced abortions and sterilizations. At the same time, she strongly criticized China’s decision to exile a parallel gathering of twenty thousand women from international nongovernmental women’s organizations to a suburb thirty-five miles outside Beijing. Hillary had been walking a political tightrope between antiabortion groups who were opposed to her even attending a conference that they viewed as “antifamily” and human rights leaders who feared she would soft-pedal their concerns. Both sides ended up applauding her speech. For a first lady, even one as outspoken as Hillary, to venture beyond traditional first lady diplomacy was unprecedented. The Chinese were braced for some criticism, but hardly expected Hillary Clinton’s blunt attack on their policies. Their leaders were furious. The best measure of how threatening her message was to the status quo? China’s official media devoted only two seconds to it—literally.

  For those of us covering her trip the real trial was the next day, when the first lady led the delegation to the unsanctioned women’s gathering in Huairou, an hour outside the capital. We arrived in a driving, monsoonlike rain, riding in a press bus along with several members of the official delegation: Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, State Department official and former senator Tim Wirth, and former New Jersey governor Tom Kean. The Chinese security men were waiting for us. Most likely because of her tough speech the previous day, Hillary’s delegation was going to get a very “special” welcome.

  The security men blanketing the conference let the first lady’s car enter, but then stopped the rest of the vehicles in her motorcade. With the barricades about to close, we jumped off the bus into the drenching rain and ran toward the entrance. Donna Shalala, all five feet of her, pushed forward like a miniature fullback. I tried to shelter her with my umbrella as we practically wrestled with the guards to get through the gate. The Chinese police pushed back. Tim Wirth tried to hold them off, but it was Tom Kean who emerged as the true hero of our predominantly female group.

  Kean, a usually laid-back college president—who later distinguished himself as the chairman of the 9/11 Commission—shoved the Chinese guards back while simultaneously dragging Shalala and me through the barricade. The gates then closed behind us, shutting out the rest of the group, including even Hillary’s press secretary, Lisa Caputo. Soaking wet, badly shaken, but giddy with our victory over the uniformed thugs, we arrived at a conference devoted to women’s rights. Hillary told the crowd, “I want to pay tribute to your perseverance,” applauding those who had overcome the phalanx of Chinese soldiers, as well as the local audience that had spent years resisting harassment and intimidation. The conference provided a rare opportunity for women to make connections with each other. Given China’s human rights policy, it was remarkable that the meeting was even being held.

  From Beijing we flew to the most exotic country of any previous White House itinerary, Mongolia. It was a strikingly gentle contrast to the authoritarian experience we’d had in Beijing. Aside from being tourists, there was a diplomatic reason for the stop: previously communist, Mongolia was holding its first democratic elections and the State Department wanted to reinforce its leaders’ commitment to reform. But especially after the tension of our visit to Beijing, it was simply exhilarating to see children racing their horses bareback across the steppes in displays of expert horsemanship. A nomadic family, a man named Zanabaatar and his wife, Haliun, invited the first lady into their domed canvas tent known as a yurt or ger. To avoid offending her hosts, Hillary step
ped gingerly over the pail of cow dung they used as fuel and politely sampled an offering of curdled mare’s milk and horse cheese. It smelled awful, and must have tasted worse. “It tastes like what we call yogurt,” she said with a wicked grin, as she tried to pass it along to us; she found no takers.

  There were a few other awkward moments, including a luncheon performance in the first lady’s honor featuring adolescent contortionists, girls whose bodies had been completely manipulated so that they could tie themselves in knots. For a woman who’d just been criticizing the abuse of girls, it was not a comfortable experience. There was little hard news, but a lot of color; however, getting anything on the air was going to be a big challenge for technical reasons. Mongolia was not exactly geared for a White House trip, and, understandably, the first lady’s press corps traveled with a lot less support than the president’s. I was on my own, without a producer. Most frustrating, the phone lines were not capable of transmitting computer data to upload the script, and because of the time difference, there was no way to talk to my producers in New York and tell them what I could offer. So to transmit my story, I commandeered the only dedicated telephone line I could find, which happened to be connected to the fax machine at the U.S. embassy.

  Some reports are not fated to get on. Just before airtime, word came from Washington that an embattled senator, Bob Packwood, had finally resigned in the face of long-standing sexual harassment accusations. The late-breaking Packwood story bumped all of us from the evening news. Wryly, I thought, “How fitting, Bob Packwood has screwed yet another group of women.” Not that it was the most important story I’ve ever offered, but I dearly wanted to be able to sign off with the exotic dateline, “Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Ulan Bator, Mongolia.”

  We were a ragtag bunch on the flight home. Hillary came to the back of the plane to visit us and her photographer took a class photo. We must have shared a private joke, because there is a picture of the two of us, with really bad hair from our Mongolian adventure, laughing our heads off. It was a rare moment in which she seemed completely at ease, without her usual wariness of the press corps.