Related Post: Working at Bei Jing-Washington, Inc.
Related Post: April 1982 Beijing-Shanghai-Hong Kong
After years of looking at China from Hong Kong and dreaming of entering the country, I finally got my first chance in February 1982 on a business trip for Bei Jing-Washington, Inc. The primary purpose of the trip was to take part in a 10-day US Department of Commerce exhibition in Beijing.
It was still a big deal to get into China in 1982. The nation was in the early stages of opening to the West. China had been a completely closed communist society since 1949, as isolated then as North Korea is in 2018. Nixon visited China in 1972, Mao died in 1976, Deng Xiaoping took power in 1977 and started economic reforms in 1978. The US officially recognized China in 1979 but China was still very cautious in dealing with Westerners and starting to loosen their economy. China started to decollectivize agriculture and allow some small businesses to open in the early 1980s, but larger scale manufacturing and production was entirely owned by the state and operated through state and local ministries.
It’s hard to convey how much being in China in 1982 felt like stepping back 50 years or more in time. The Communists had done very little to modernize China as the nation staggered through the Japanese occupation and WWII, the Civil War and 1949 Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. China was doing well by 1982 to mostly be self-sufficient, avoiding famine and war, though it was still recovering from the self-inflicted hemorrhage of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s death.
We had to go through a lengthy process to gain a visa to enter China, involving visits to the embassy and weeks of waiting to see if we would be approved. I got my first visa stamped on January 6, 1982 and it felt like I’d won the lottery.
Beijing
I flew to Beijing on January 30, going from Dulles to San Francisco on United, then on to Beijing on CAAC, China’s state-run airline. I traveled with my Bei Jing-Washington boss, Neal Weigel, and I have a dim recollection of us staying overnight at a hotel near Tokyo’s Narita airport; there was no non-stop service from the US to China at that point.
There were very few hotels ready to serve westerners in Beijing. There were two main hotels, the venerable Beijing Hotel just off Tiananmen Square where many diplomats were housed, and the Jianguo Hotel which opened in April 1982 with a design ostensibly copied from a Holiday Inn in Buffalo. We weren’t at either of those. I’m not sure of our hotel’s name (Fuxing, maybe?) but it was an older, Soviet-designed spartan building to the west of Tiananmen.
Here are some photos from my room of the brown city. The photos might have browned a little with age, but not much…everything was a sort of dusty brown.
Here’s a decent article by Gilbert Van Kerckhove (another profile), a Belgian businessman in Beijing since the early 1980s, giving a sense of the city that is pretty close to what I recall.
We didn’t have a lot of time to be tourists. The trade show was a long, rigorous 10 days, with more than 80,000 attendees clamoring for any scrap of information or giveaway. We were basically transported each day from our hotel to the Beijing Exhibition Center, another Soviet-era relic. We had two translator/minders assigned to us through the exhibition who also helped organize transportation or anything else, and who were clearly watching and reporting on our activities. Neal and I had time to walk to Tiananmen Square on our own and snap some photos, but I don’t recall being able to go into the Forbidden City or see much else of Beijing. There were no restaurants to go to other than at the exhibition hall, at the hotels, or an arranged dinner/banquet. It was a combination of being very busy and tightly controlled. You simply weren’t able to wander around on your own at that point; foreigners were very conspicuous and a novelty on the streets.
We did get one arranged day off from the exhibition to take a tour of the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall. This was tremendously exciting. We went as a group on buses first to the Ming Tombs. This site is about 25 miles north of the city, which got us out on the roads in the city and countryside. The roads in the countryside were largely single-lane and many were just plain tarmac, no lanes or markings. The vehicles in the city and even more so in the country were largely bicycles and horse-drawn carts, some trucks and not very many cars. The few cars were either Soviet-built Ladas or Chinese knockoffs of the same. The people were largely still in either blue Mao jackets or green Army coats. Seeing a girl in a pink coat was something rare.
We approached the Ming Tombs over the “Sacred Way” lined with stone statues of animals. This is evidently a common feature of Chinese imperial mausoleums, but the statues here are reputedly among the best. It was irresistible to not climb on them. These Ming Tombs date to 1424 with the Changling Tomb of Yongle Emperor, Zhu Di, one of the most consequential emperors in Chinese history. It was under Zhu Di that Zheng He set out on his treasure voyages. Twelve successive emperors built their tombs in the complex through 1644, not that I knew much about any of that history at the time, and still know very little, really. As with so many things in China, it was hard to imagine that we were clambering among objects that were older than any of our colonial relics in North America.
Only a few of the tombs were (and still are) excavated and open for viewing. As I recall, there wasn’t much to see inside the tombs but we had a good walk through the complex and enjoyed actually being in an area with trees.
We bundled back into our buses and motored another 20 miles or so to the Great Wall at Badaling. At the time, this was the primary section of the Wall that was restored and suitable for tourists; Nixon visited here in 1972, for example.
The Great Wall is a mythic structure and I was eager to see it, though I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I remember being astonished to catch glimpses of the Wall from the road, snaking along hilltops, up and down nearly vertical ridges. It is built in some incredibly rugged terrain and you can’t help but marvel at the skill and brutality it must have taken to construct it. As we got closer to Badaling, it seemed like there were multiple sections of the Wall stretched across the landscape as far as the eye could see.
Our bus dropped us and parked right at the main gate of Badaling, a feat that is no longer possible, I believe. This section of the Wall was originally built in the 1500s, around the time of the Ming Tombs, and restored in the 1950s. Now there is a lot more tourist infrastructure, but in 1982 there were only a handful of stands selling simple souvenirs and snacks. The main activity was to get on the Wall and walk as far as possible. It was February but we were lucky it wasn’t too cold and not very crowded.
From the Badaling Gate, one side of the Wall was much steeper than the other, but we had time scramble up and down both directions. Some of the sections were amazingly steep; it was not easy for us to walk and we wondered how it would have been for running soldiers or horses.
On the upper sections of the Wall you got an even better sense of how vast a construction this was. The Wall literally stretched from horizon to horizon, as far as one could see. You could well imagine it being visible from space.
I was fascinated by the Chinese graffiti on the Wall, and especially surprised to see the restored section simply fade into unrestored rubble. It was very possible and tempting to take a piece of Great Wall rubble, but I think it was discouraged even then and I didn’t do it. It seemed like there might be something similar to Pele’s curse for taking volcano rocks from Hawaii.
In all, this was one of the peak travel days of my life. The memory of seeing the Great Wall for the first time has stayed with me through the years. I felt lucky and humbled to have seen it, in awe of the civilization that built it, and wondered whether the current nation of China could preserve it from further ruin.
Shanghai
We flew from Beijing to Shanghai for a few days of meetings. We stayed at the Jinjiang Hotel (website) which was originally built in the 1930s as part of the French Concession (there was also an International Settlement for the British, Americans and other nations). The Jinjiang was an impressive, high rise art deco hotel amid a complex of buildings. Nixon met with Zhou Enlai there in 1972 and signed the Shanghai Communique. It was a treat to be there and I returned later in the spring for a longer stay.
My impressions of Shanghai on this trip were mainly from driving places in cars. We visited several factories (no photos allowed, I believe, because I don’t have any) and had meetings in a few ministry offices.
Shanghai had a very different feel than Beijing. Shanghai was more densely crowded, the streets busier, more vibrant, and even a touch of western advertising. It was still pretty grimy and polluted, though.
There was the occasional Soviet building (another exhibition center quite like the one in Beijing), but most of the construction was left from the pre-war era of western concessions. Some of these shots are from Nanjing Road, the main shopping street and the 5th Avenue of China.
There was one new high-rise hotel going up — I think it became the Shanghai Hotel but I don’t know much more about it. Still, it stuck out on the skyline like a harbinger of what was to come.
We did get a little time to walk on the Bund and had one meal in the Peace Hotel, once the grandest spot in the city. I had been looking forward to seeing the Bund and was both amazed and shocked that it looked almost exactly like the old pictures from the 1930s, albeit dirtier and more run down. I didn’t take any pictures across the river toward Pudong because there was nothing much to see, mainly farms. Little could I imagine that in a few decades an entire new, futuristic city would rise on the opposite banks.
Here is a somewhat romanticized article from another 1982 traveler that describes Shanghai at the time reasonably well, but sadly, the author lost his camera and photos.
Hong Kong
Neal and I exited through Hong Kong and stayed long enough to have an afternoon getting a tour from Patricia Lee, my Dad’s Exxon colleague and our good family friend, seen here in front of the old Repulse Bay Hotel. I don’t have many other recollections of our short time there. We may have stayed at the Furama Hotel, but I’m not sure, and I can’t believe I don’t even remember where we ate.
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