“THE MASSES MIGHT EVEN STONE YOU…”
AS OUR TRAIN APPROACHED the Hong Kong-China border, a loudspeaker boomed out a warning. "Anyone without a permit must leave the train at the next stop. You are about to enter a restricted area." John Penlington, the ABC’s Hong Kong correspondent and, until then, our China watcher, gave me a final handshake and climbed down on to the platform. He waved goodbye as the train pulled out again on the short run to the border at Lo Wu.
I was excited to become one of the rare foreign correspondents resident in the People’s Republic of China, and the first ever journalist from Australia based in Mao’s China. But, I was apprehensive at being cut off in Peking (now Beijing) from the outside world. On that October day in 1973, only six of us had visas to enter the Middle Kingdom. The other five were African diplomats.
At Lo Wu, I stepped down from the train, passed beneath a Union Jack flapping in the breeze, and by a stern-eyed British soldier on guard. There was no direct train link or air connection from Hong Kong to anywhere in China, just once a week flights to Peking from Tehran and Islamabad. The vast country was very much cut off from the rest of the world with virtually no tourism.
So, carrying my luggage, I began the one hundred step journey across the covered bridge into the Middle Kingdom. It felt like a John le Carré spy novel. At the far end, a baggy-green-uniformed Chinese soldier hugged an AK-47 rifle to his chest. Above him loomed a huge red poster, emblazoned in gold with a revolutionary saying of the then demi-god, Mao Zedong: "We Have Friends All Over The World." I wondered if that was a welcome, or a warning, or both.
As I reached the end of the bridge, a polite, but unsmiling immigration official noted
