Introduction

In April 1955, at the height of the Cold War, 29 Asian and African nation-states met in Bandung, Indonesia. As Indonesia's President Sukarno stated in his opening speech, it was ‘the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind’,Footnote ³ and symbolised the final death throes of European imperialism and the consolidation of Asian-African solidarity. For the duration of the conference, the international media was saturated with scrutiny and analysis of the Bandung gathering's motivations, its prospects for success, who was and was not invited and why, its attitudes, alliances and aspirations. Indeed, the media infatuation with the Bandung Conference was a phenomenon in its own right, as contending world powers vied to seize this defining moment and shape it around the contours of their own specific ideological outlook.

This paper explores the media's representation of one of the conference's most controversial and charismatic figures, China's Premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou's presence at the Asian-African Conference was, in Western minds, one of its most troubling aspects. As the world's most populous communist nation, China was destabilising to Western interests on two counts. First, its alliance with the Soviet Union set it unmistakably behind the Cold War's Iron Curtain and, second, as the most populous Asian nation with a large regional diaspora, its potential influence across the region was daunting. China went to Bandung both as a communist nation and as a fellow underdog of ‘the proletariat world’ of coloured peoples, a link it was prepared to exploit.Footnote ⁴ In diplomatic exchanges among English-speaking allies during the month the Conference was announced, the prospect of the meeting culminating in a ‘racial and anti-colonial manifesto’Footnote ⁵ was as concerning as ‘communist attempts to exploit the meeting’.Footnote ⁶ To the West, China (represented by the extraordinarily talented diplomat Zhou Enlai) was Bandung's bete noir. For the Asian-African Conference, the Western media obsession with Premier Zhou often clouded other significant aspects of the gathering, and certainly those that the Conference delegates wished to emphasize, steering it instead towards the Cold War rift. By 1955, the West's anti-communist rhetoric had become so shrill that it had all but drowned out the more restrained voices of historians and political analysts of the era who asserted more perceptive understandings of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The West's concerns about whether the motives of China at Bandung were legitimate were supplanted by two main fears: political and economic; and those ideas formed historically by the West about Chinese character, morality and culture. Through Premier Zhou, the PRC's first Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1958, the Anglosphere'sFootnote ⁷ vision of China changed from the fearful ‘Yellow Peril’ to the spectre of ‘Red China’. The intensity of the Anglosphere's (mis)representations of the Chinese, as exemplified by reports on Zhou Enlai's presence at the Conference, provides insights into the media's role in the Cold War. However, the media's effort to manufacture a sense of mistrust and suspicion was already well established across the Anglosphere through popular literary representations of the Chinese. The first half of this paper provides an overview of the historical origins of literary images of the Chinese over the two centuries of imperialism preceding the Asian-African Conference at Bandung. The second half examines how this literary template made its transition into the media machine of the Cold War era, throughout which China was viewed with deep suspicion, and will focus on the coverage by two major newspapers from America and Australia for the duration of the Conference from 18 to 25 April 1955.

As ideas of an inter-national community of states evolved in the eighteenth century, the Anglosphere's views of the Chinese were also being defined. From the earliest accounts of European missionaries, China and the Chinese were wrapped in a certain mystique that was often entangled in a sense of exasperation, and at times descended into crude hostility. Of early influence in the evolution of the Chinese in the European imagination were four volumes compiled by French Jesuit Jean du Halde. Description de l'Empire de la Chine published in 1735 was a collection of reports from French missionaries who had visited China and, like their predecessors, were largely complimentary about the Chinese, their modes of governance, civic organisation and culture. The ‘cult of “Chinoiserie”, a dreamy parody of aspects of Chinese art and culture’Footnote ⁸ reached its peak in the mid-eighteenth century with the proliferation of Chinese gardens, blue and white china popularised by Wedgwood, furniture, tapestries and paintings. The spell, however, was soon broken as English mercantilism overtook its interest in Chinese aesthetics, rendering its Orientalist infatuation obsolete by the mid-eighteenth century. Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century it was considered ‘politically incorrect’ to favour China and the Chinese.

Naval Commodore George Anson (1697–1762), the personification of ‘the newly assertive side of an expansionist Great Britain, self-confident, bellicose, swift to condemn the weak [and] impatient with delays’, introduced antagonism into England's relationship with China.Footnote ⁹ Writing of his experiences with the Chinese on his visit in 1743, Anson concluded that they were dishonest in trade, cowardly in warfare, and that their celebrated written language was evidence of their ‘obstinacy and absurdity’.Footnote ¹⁰ It may be that Anson had read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which had earlier set the tone for English impatience with European missionaries’ uncritically complimentary accounts of China and the Chinese. Published in 1719, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, is considered to be one of, if not the, foundational novel in English, and its author the first to write books for popular entertainment. Defoe (1660–1731) responded to a growing fascination with travel literature, which corresponded with a rise in international trade and Europe's expansionist ambitions. Prior to becoming a novelist, Defoe was a journalist closely connected to politics and highly attuned to the evolving ideologies in post-revolutionary England. His novels are recognised as exemplifying ‘the spirit of capitalism in a pure form’Footnote ¹¹ and, indeed, Karl Marx described Defoe's most famous character, Robinson Crusoe, as ‘the classic study of homo economus, the individualist ethic of capitalism’.Footnote ¹² The character Robinson Crusoe, who sailed around the world and became shipwrecked on an island off the coast of America, was a mouthpiece for Defoe, and is probably the Anglosphere's first literary rant against the Chinese:

Significantly, through the device of a narrator such as Robinson Crusoe, Defoe's fiction introduced the integration of ‘idea and fictional form’ in order to develop a particular political point of view: ‘. . . in Defoe's hands, ideology and fiction were related and interdependent forms of knowledge . . . a way of knowing and, finally, changing the world’.Footnote ¹⁴ In Defoe's century, ideology was itself a new term, coined by French philosopher Destutt de Tracy to describe the

As the cultural apparatus of imperialism, literature—and later the print media—systematically created an undeserving, brutish and devious ‘other’ in the Chinese. The accounts of Anson and Defoe were just the beginning of China's fall from grace in the English imagination. By the end of the eighteenth century the Chinese had been reduced to a collection of unfortunate physical attributes as ‘a people endowed by nature with small eyes, a short nose, a flat forehead, little beard, large ears and protuberant belly’,Footnote ¹⁶ with an amalgam of flaws in their character. Along with disparaging literary representations, the Chinese were found to be defective in several other areas being analysed by eighteenth-century thinkers: international legal and economic systems; forms of governance; and the increasingly influential realms of science. Though information about China continued to be filtered mainly through the mostly complimentary impressions of missionaries, increasingly it was their negative views that were selected for magnification. For example, Montesquieu's wide-ranging opinions about the Chinese in The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, were heavily drawn from the works of du Halde. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) asserts none of the French missionaries’ positive impressions of the Chinese. Rather, he leans towards ‘the harsher critiques of Defoe's fiction’Footnote ¹⁷ dwelling upon the brutal punishments they used to govern, the fecundity of their women, and hence their unstoppable growth in population which, when driven by starvation, formed gangs of bandits which, in turn, made the government even more despotic. Set against these observations was China's disinterest in interacting with the world beyond its own borders, its overt expression of cultural superiority, and its condescending attitude towards European trade emissaries. This was interpreted as self-satisfied, cultural arrogance, an irritant that Defoe, Anson, and now Montesquieu, appeared determined to debunk, and later generations would resolve to subjugate.

Montesquieu's writings nurtured themes of mistrust, dishonesty, and the ‘swarming masses’ of China when he claimed that: ‘The precariousness of their lives makes them so prodigiously active and so excessively desirous of gain that no commercial nation can trust them’.Footnote ¹⁸ Montesquieu, prescient of the ‘scientification’ of race that would follow in the next century, also deduced that those of the northern and southern hemispheres belonged to superior and inferior groups. ‘The cowardice of the peoples of hot climates’ he suggested, ‘has almost always made them slaves and . . . the courage of the peoples of cold climates has kept them free’.Footnote ¹⁹ In the case of China he therefore concluded that the Chinese from the north were more courageous than those from the south. It was this proximity of the weak and the strong in Asia more widely that set it apart from Europe where ‘adjacent states had similar levels of courage’ whereas ‘liberty never increases in Asia’.Footnote ²⁰ Against the military aggression of European imperialism this became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The list of China's defects in eighteenth-century literature was further compounded by Adam Smith's hugely influential Wealth of Nations. Similar to Montesquieu, Adam Smith (1723–1790) drew comparisons between Europe and China and, in doing so, relied upon the collected impressions of French missionaries in China compiled by du Halde.Footnote ²¹ Though Smith, like the French missionaries, found much to praise from ‘the wonderful accounts of the wealth and cultivation of China’,Footnote ²² he fell more heavily on the side of Defoe in his denunciation of the quality of their character. Whether or not he intended to more deeply insinuate that the Chinese were barbaric and inhuman, his account of the people living on the rivers and canals of Canton must have had that effect on his readers when he described their eagerness to

More abhorrent still was the complete disregard for life that Smith observed in the way the Chinese disposed of their children. He explained that while marriage was encouraged in China, this was not for the enjoyment of having children but rather to enjoy ‘the liberty of destroying them’.Footnote ²⁴ Reinforcing the idea of the seething Chinese masses, too numerous to hold any sensitivity towards life, Smith explained that

By the nineteenth century these diabolical tendencies of the Chinese appear to have permeated the English psyche. Probably the earliest example of what would become a phobic dread emerged from Thomas De Quincey's biographical work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater published in 1821. De Quincey (1785–1859) was a well known English essayist commenting on literature, philosophy, economics and the politics of the day. His prodigious consumption of opium in his thirties produced his first diatribe of abhorrence for Asia, which would be followed by further tirades recorded in his essays of the 1840s and 1850s. Writing in May 1818, De Quincey confessed that,

De Quincey is recognised, well before Freud was even born, for his psychoanalysis of his childhood experiences and insights into dreams. His later writings on the Sino-British relationship in the mid-nineteenth century have been called a ‘psychopathology of imperialism’,Footnote ²⁷ and they certainly represent a growing neurosis in the West towards the Chinese. De Quincey's first essay concerning British engagement with China, published at the beginning of the Opium Wars (1839–1860) came well after he had abandoned his own addiction. In it he claimed the Chinese to be ‘incurably savage in the moral sense’Footnote ²⁸ and the Chinese Government's refusal to allow opium imports was interpreted as ‘evidence of an appalling moral turpitude’.Footnote ²⁹ By 1857, De Quincey's Sinophobia had reached a ‘new and dangerously apoplectic level’Footnote ³⁰ when he exploded: ‘In the case of China . . . The Nations hate thee!’.Footnote ³¹ Coinciding with the escalation of De Quincey's xenophobic rantings in defence of the Old World, were rumblings in the New World where the discovery of gold and the building of infrastructure with Chinese labour was perilously tilting the racial balance. Those labelled ‘Asiatics’ were imported into the New World as a cheap labour force of ‘coolies’, but any participation in these white societies beyond the servile was disallowed: ‘“Rice eating men”, declared Australians and Californians in chorus, had neither the rights nor the responsibilities of masculine “beef-eating” men’.Footnote ³²

The discovery of gold in California in 1848, followed by a strategy in the 1860s to attract an underclass of Chinese labourers to work on the Transcontinental Railroad, saw the Chinese population rise to 105,000 in just a few decades.Footnote ³³ By the 1880s, 75,000 Chinese were living in California, making up 10 per cent of its population, and, in an economic environment of diminishing jobs for white Americans, this resulted in an increase in racial tension. The Chinese in California were subjected to continuous violence which writers Mark Twain and Bret Harte wrote about with some sympathy. One of Harte's most famous poems, ‘Plain Language from Truthful James’, published in California's Overland Monthly in 1870, depicted two American cardsharps outrageously cheating the ‘heathen Chinese’ Ah Sin at cards. However to their astonishment Ah Sin, despite having confessed to being completely ignorant of the game, turned out to be the far more skilful cheat. Though Harte claimed his poem meant nothing against the Chinese, it caused a sensation and despite his protests the label ‘heathen Chinese’ stuck.Footnote ³⁴ Just as Europeans had seized upon their missionaries’ negative impressions, and allowed their positive observations to all but evaporate, Americans mined Twain and Harte's ‘Chinatown fiction’Footnote ³⁵ for its hostility, rather than its humour and affection for the Chinese. Writers moving between journalism, political commentary and fiction continued to shape public imagination, which seemed as receptive as ever to the demonisation of the Chinese ‘other’. In 1881, coinciding with the introduction of America's Chinese Exclusion Act, The Wasp, a magazine from San Francisco known for its ‘stinging’ editorials, published a cartoon ‘A Statue for our Harbor’. It depicted a Chinese Statue of Liberty with shafts of light forming a corona around the head emblazoned with the words ‘Labor–White–Ruin to–Diseases–Immorality–Filth’,Footnote ³⁶ evidence of the corruptibility that would follow if the domestication of the Chinese went unchecked. It was a very similar scenario in Australia where gold was discovered in 1851 in the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria. By 1859 around 50,000 Chinese were in Australia and, though pastoralists were keen to retain this cheap source of labour, by the 1880s each of the colonies, which were independently responsible for their own migration policies, had introduced legislation restricting immigration aimed at keeping these ‘gamblers, drug addicts and sexual deviants’Footnote ³⁷ out. Similar to The Wasp's Sinophobic Statue of Liberty, the Australian magazine, The Bulletin, established in 1880 with the masthead ‘Australia for the White Man’, printed a cartoon of a grotesque Mongolian octopus with the words ‘Cheap Labour–Pak Ah-pu (a card game)–Immortality–Small Pox–Typhoid–Opium–Bribery–Fan-Tan (another card game for gamblers)–Customs Robbery’Footnote ³⁸ stamped on each tentacle. These tentacles wound their way around the vulnerable white population: single women, fathers with a protective arm around their children, and law-enforcement officers.

Corresponding with this era of increased anxiety around the polluting qualities of Chinese in the New World was the establishment of an international communication and print media network to serve the interests of imperial expansion. In 1835 the first international news agency was created in Paris by Charles Havas, and in the late 1840s rival organisations, Paul Julius Reuter in London, and Bernard Wolff in Berlin, competed in the overseas expansion of the information business. In 1869, the rival groups signed the Agency Alliance Treaty whereby Reuter obtained the rights over the British Empire and the Far East, Havas acquired the French Empire, Italy, Spain and Portugal, and Wolff secured the exclusive rights over Germany, Austria, Scandinavia and Russia.Footnote ³⁹ Each operated in its own sphere of imperial influence, supporting and promoting its respective governments’ political and economic objectives. This consolidation of the Anglosphere's media network was made possible by a system of submarine cables laid in the 1860s and 1870s linking Britain with America, India, Southeast Asia, China and Australia. British firms owned 72 per cent of these cables,Footnote ⁴⁰ ensuring a growing Anglophone hegemony across Asia and the New World, not just in economic terms but in the control of information and cultural representation.

This confluence of events—the intensification of negative, more politicised, characterisations of the Chinese and the tightening of imperial Anglophonic media hegemony—also coincided with the increasing legitimacy ascribed to the scientification of race. Again, China fared rather poorly, and again it was a missionary, American Arthur H. Smith (1845–1932), who lent an authoritative voice to Western perceptions of the Chinese. Smith spent 54 years in China where he compiled his impressions in a volume, Chinese Characteristics, which was first published in 1890. Reprinted 15 times by 1894, it became the foundational text on the Chinese well into the twentieth century. The contents pages of Chinese Characteristics reveals a distillation of what evolved into archetypal Chinese attributes in the Western mind. On the one hand, Smith sentimentalises the Chinese in his chapters entitled: Industry; Politeness; Content and Cheerfulness; Filial Piety; Patience and Perseverance; and Benevolence. However his positive observations are somewhat diminished by the chapters entitled: The Disregard of Time; The Disregard of Accuracy; The Talent for Indirection; Intellectual Turbidity; The Absence of Nerves; The Absence of Sympathy, and so the list goes on.Footnote ⁴¹ The latter, more comprehensive, group of negative characteristics are difficult to locate on the ‘moral map’ of the Christian missionary. Indeed, ever since the ‘Western obsession with sending droves of missionaries to China’Footnote ⁴² had taken hold in the sixteenth century, they had found it impossible ‘to convert the Chinese to their own beliefs’.Footnote ⁴³ Smith acknowledges rather mildly that: ‘It is not assumed that the Chinese need Christianity at all, but if it appears that there are grave defects in their character, it is a fair question of how those defects may be remedied’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Chinese indifference to Christianity was interpreted as an incapacity for spiritual reflection, a deficit that made them susceptible to sinfulness and immorality, and entirely unpredictable. Thomas de Quincey's delirious ‘moral and spiritual terrors’Footnote ⁴⁵ reflect a complete surrender to this irrational fear and so would a new wave of popular fiction that exploited the ‘Asian invasion’ neurosis. The ‘Yellow Peril’ became a major fear, not only for the New World—America and Australia—but also for Europe whose ‘dominance was endangered by the rise of Asia’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Charles Pearson, an Englishman resident in Australia, published an enormously influential book National Life and Character in 1893: ‘It is doubtful’ Australian historian David Walker suggests, ‘that any book with an Australian inspiration has ever had a greater impact among the intellectuals of Britain or the United States’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Pearson predicted that the Chinese ‘lower races’ would overtake the ‘higher races’ to become a world power, a view that would resonate not only across the English-speaking world, but indeed it was Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm who coined the term ‘Yellow Peril’ after reading Pearson.Footnote ⁴⁸

The ‘Yellow Peril’ soon attached itself to the Western imagination in the form of the devious Orientals who began to appear in popular fiction. Arthur H. Smith's catalogue of characteristics, especially the most unfavourable such as the ‘absence of nerves’ and the ‘absence of sympathy’, joined forces with the earlier literary depictions of the previous century, and Pearson's spectre of an imminent Chinese world conquest, to create a twentieth-century phenomenon. A cast of characters, such as M.P. Shiel's Yen How ‘the leader of invading Chinese hordes’Footnote ⁴⁹ and Roland Daniel's Wu Fang, made their debut in books entitled The Yellow Danger and The Yellow Devil, but the most famous Chinese villain was Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu, ‘the depiction of the evil Chinese [who] took on an enduring and definitive international form’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Fu Manchu was the head of a secret society, the Si-Fan, which ‘aimed at upsetting the balance of the world’Footnote ⁵¹ and would stop at ‘nothing less than a giant Yellow Empire’.Footnote ⁵² The negative characteristics mapped out by a lineage of Western writers crystallised in Fu Manchu and it was not so much the inferiority of the ‘yellow race’ that unnerved Western readers, but its awesome ability and adaptability. In physical terms, Fu Manchu's ‘massive head’ contained a large brain which was, in the early twentieth century, scientific proof of his mental capacityFootnote ⁵³ and second, as a Manchu from northern China's colder climate, he had courage equal to his European rivals. In terms of his character, like Bret Harte's famous Ah Sin, Fu Manchu could easily outwit an American, but most frightening was his Chinese ‘nervelessness’. Adam Smith insinuated this trait in his account of the Chinese dredging putrid animal carcasses out of the river to eat, but the more contemporary images came from Arthur H. Smith who marvelled at the Chinese capacity for a freakish level of human endurance:

Sax Rohmer (born Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, 1883–1959) also started out as a journalist, though not a highly successful one, and began writing fiction in his early twenties. In his flights of Sinophobic fancy, he must surely have mined Smith's digest of Chinese characteristics, for Fu Manchu's iron will reached monstrous proportions. This is demonstrated in one episode when, completely paralysed down one side of the body, as beads of perspiration formed on his brow and despite his partially paralysed tongue, Fu Manchu gave perfectly lucid instructions to Dr Petrie and Sir Baldwin Frazer on how to surgically remove a bullet lodged in his skull.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rohmer packaged Fu Manchu's combination of nervelessness and sheer brilliance as a ‘wonderful Satanic countenance’Footnote ⁵⁶ that was as horrifying as it was impressive. It was a combination that transfixed his readers from the first Fu Manchu novel published in 1913 through to the last in 1959, the year of Rohmer's death.

In the first half of the twentieth century the stereotype of the Chinese male as evil genius came to override the more benevolent characterisations found in Pearl Buck's The Good Earth or the more cheerful but equally clever Charlie Chan, whose Oriental wisdom was condensed into one-liners prefaced by ‘Confucius say . . .’. Though Earl Derr Biggers’ cartoon creation Charlie Chan also became enormously popular through books and films, it was Fu Manchu who evolved into the archetypal Chinese male. Fu Manchu films appeared from the 1920s right up until 1969, not only in English but in several European languages. As the epitome of Chinese inscrutability, bent on world domination, he was ideally placed to make the transition into the Cold War imaginary. It is a quirky coincidence that in 1955, the year of the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, where all media eyes were on China's Premier Zhou Enlai, that the fame of Fu Manchu was also reaching new heights with the filming of a 13-part television series The Adventures of Fu Manchu. It was in April of that ‘bomb-threatened’ yearFootnote ⁵⁷ that the West's ambivalent fascination turned towards Premier Zhou. Coverage of Premier Zhou at the Bandung Conference appearing in America's New York Times and The Argus in Melbourne, Australia, will be the focus of the remainder of this discussion.

The founding of The Argus in 1846 and the New York Times in 1857 corresponded with the consolidation of the Anglosphere's imperial dominance over Asia, and Asians. In geo-political terms, the Anglo-Chinese, or Opium, Wars left the Chinese humiliated and territorially weakened, and concurrently in 1857, the British Crown assumed sovereignty over much of India after the Mutiny (or War of Independence). Asia's two most populous and culturally influential civilisations had been overwhelmed by British military and economic ambition and, as outlined earlier, the flow of information from Asia across an expanding global media network was increasingly monopolized by the English-speaking world. In the young nations of America and Australia, Sinophobia was well entrenched and would become a more imminent, present, and destabilising proposition in a post-war era marked by a specific set of Cold War anxieties. China, as a communist state, posed a threat to America's status as leader of the capitalist world. At the end of World War Two, having helped its allies to victory, America positioned itself as the economic architect and principal beneficiary of a new, restructured world economy.Footnote ⁵⁸ At Bretton Woods, in 1944 when the IMF and World Bank were established, America had quite openly positioned itself to ‘hold unquestioned power’ within the global free market.Footnote ⁵⁹ The rapidly decolonising states of Asia and Africa, which tilted unpredictably towards a socialist economic model at the time of the Bandung Conference, would threaten to disrupt this quest for global economic hegemony.

China's alliance with the Soviet Union, which had already permeated much of Eastern Europe, presented Australia with grave fears that a ‘domino effect’ would soon see communist expansion across decolonising Asia. Isolated from its Western allies in the northern hemisphere, and already resolute through the White Australia Policy that it would resist any ‘Asian invasion’, Australia was deeply concerned. SEATO (the South East Asia Treaty Organisation) had been signed the year before in Manila by Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand, with the express purpose of preventing Communist expansion in the region. SEATO encapsulated Australia's foreign policy of ‘forward defence’ to guard against ‘potential communist aggression from the north’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This was put into effect in September 1955 when Australia's Prime Minister Menzies sent troops to Malaya to fight communist insurgents alongside troops from Britain and New Zealand. Therefore, at the Bandung Conference, uppermost in Australian thinking was holding back any communist expansion to its north. Both America and Australia were deeply suspicious of the Bandung Conference generally—it was ‘referred to by some at the State Department as the “Darktown Strutters’ Ball”’Footnote ⁶¹ —and China's presence in particular. This suspicion stemmed mainly from the fact that the Anglosphere would be denied the influence it had come to assume in international affairs, and this would allow Premier Zhou to ‘have his own way’ according to one Australian government minister.Footnote ⁶² Indeed, American allies (Thailand, Turkey, Iran, the Philippines and Lebanon) only accepted their invitations to the Conference in the last weeks before it commenced, such was the pressure exerted by America for them to ignore the event on the grounds of China's presence. A change of heart came about in a tactical move that would ensure that, if America's allies attended, her ‘friends will outnumber her enemies and they will defend the United States when necessary. . . . These “friends” were listed as the Philippines, Japan, South Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Turkey, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Libya and the Central African Federation’Footnote ⁶³ all of whom initially hesitated in their acceptance of the Colombo Five'sFootnote ⁶⁴ invitation to Bandung.

The mid-twentieth century presented a similar set of circumstances to those one hundred years earlier, namely, the struggle for economic control of global markets. Once again, China was considered obstinate in its refusal to capitulate to the imposition of a global strategy of a non-negotiable foreign design. At the Bandung Conference, with a sense of déjà vu, we see the mobilisation of anti-Chinese rhetoric in the Western media which characterised Zhou Enlai as untrustworthy, insincere and manipulative. Indeed, the ‘psychopathology of imperialism’ exhibited by Thomas De Quincey would metamorphose into a psychopathology of capitalism that would reach ‘dangerously apoplectic levels’Footnote ⁶⁵ during the Cold War years. Those Old World anxieties were now firmly anchored in the New World and, as discussed, held a special historical place in America and Australia.

Before examining the New York Times and The Argus, some background is provided about the reputation Zhou Enlai established in the West in the decades leading up to the foundation of the PRC in 1949. In China's pre-revolution years, Zhou had lived and travelled in Europe and had contact with many Western diplomats and journalists, making him probably the most accessible, and worldly, of the Chinese Communist Party leaders. In the 1930s and 1940s, Zhou Enlai impressed almost every Western diplomat and journalist he met. The most famous among the latter were the China-friendly freelance American correspondents Edgar Snow, Anna Louise Strong and Agnes Smedley. Theodore White writing for Time/Life and the Durdins, Tillman and Peggy, both of whom wrote for the New York Times, were less overtly pro-Chinese or sympathetic towards socialist ideals. Many years later Peggy Durdin would recall: ‘I have never known a more magnetic personality than Chou En-lai . . . . There was nobody on the KMT side who could touch Chou En-lai in persuasiveness or in intellectual charm, which was a fascinating kind of charm’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Her husband, Tillman, who, after his years in mainland China, remained in Hong Kong ‘as “dean” of American reporters on China from [the] 1950s through 1972’Footnote ⁶⁷ remembered Zhou's friendliness towards America on his first encounters with him in the Civil War years. He recalled Zhou's attitude as ‘one of courting American goodwill and good relations’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Durdins’ New York Times colleague Henry Lieberman who was in China from 1945 to 1949 said that Zhou Enlai was ‘one of the greatest people I've ever encountered because of his charm, his skills, his mental and dramatic ability’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Possibly the most famous Western journalist and Sinophile through those revolutionary years was Edgar Snow who similarly observed: ‘Zhou was that rarest of all creatures, a pure intellectual in whom action was perfectly coordinated with knowledge and conviction’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Though Snow would later be denounced as a communist in the 1950s and would opt for voluntary exile in Switzerland, his most famous book, Red Star Over China, remained the most authoritative Western account of the Chinese Revolution. His interviews with leaders Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai in 1936 were the first to be published in the West. On his first meeting with Snow, Zhou is reported as welcoming him by saying: ‘It does not matter to us that you are not a Communist. We will welcome any journalist who comes to write about the soviet districts . . . . You can write about anything you see and you will be given every help . . .’Footnote ⁷¹ Agnes Smedley was equally impressed by Zhou, who she says was ‘the most realistic, able, efficient’ man. He was ‘a man of broad knowledge and culture . . . his judgment free from sectarianism’.Footnote ⁷² Of course not all reporters were enamoured with Zhou, and although these impressions were remarkably consistent, the pendulum quickly swung the other way once China committed to communism in 1949. By 1955, at the height of McCarthyism, no American journalist could afford to be smitten with communism or communists, as Edgar Snow knew well. The Durdins, for example, certainly demonstrated that Premier Zhou had lost his charm, presumbly corrupted by communism. On 17 April 1955, the day before the Bandung Conference opened, Peggy Durdin set the scene for Americans in an article ‘Behind the Façade of Asian Unity’ in the New York Times Magazine in which she articulated USA resentment that ‘the Communist Chinese hate us’Footnote ⁷³ and want to ‘eliminate every shred of democratic influence from the whole Far East’.Footnote ⁷⁴ She described Premier Zhou as ‘tough and supple-witted’,Footnote ⁷⁵ though he no doubt needed to be in the face of American hostility towards China. A year earlier at the Geneva Conference, convened to discuss the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea, American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles ‘told reporters just prior to the first session that the only way he could possibly meet with Chou En-lai was if their cars collided’.Footnote ⁷⁶

The USA and the Anglosphere generally had difficulty seeing communism as a means of reunifying a politically and economically exhausted China. Zhou's commitment to communism from his student years was driven by a desire to redeem his humiliated homeland,Footnote ⁷⁷ regain autonomy and never allow China to be subjugated again. As he told Henry Lieberman when China's Civil War was nearing its end: ‘You're never sure of your own independence if you accept help from the outside’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Writer Han Suyin, when meeting Zhou Enlai in April 1956, commented,

Zhou deplored ‘great power chauvinism’Footnote ⁸⁰ and appeared to be genuinely lacking the sort of ideological dogmatism which would so characterize Chairman Mao. At Bandung, Zhou was at pains to repeat a consistent message of respect for sovereignty, disclaiming the significance of ideological difference, and urging his fellow delegates to come to China to see for themselves that communism posed no threat. This message was reported by Tillman Durdin in the first days of the Bandung Conference on the front page of the New York Times:

From the opening days of the Asian-African Conference, reporters expressed surprise at Premier Zhou Enlai's temperate demeanour, and singled him out for special, even obsessive, attention. While the arrival of many of the delegates from the 29 Asian and African nations attracted media attention, none were scrutinized with such intensity as Premier Zhou. Unlike other delegates, his mode of travel and his accommodation—in the ‘large house of a wealthy Chinese’Footnote ⁸² —were reported; his mood was monitored daily; the manner in which he greeted fellow delegates and the way that he was received by them was analysed. No other delegate was so comprehensively studied. Although this intense interest in a communist leader might be rationalised as ‘normal’ in the context of the Cold War, the irrational degree of observation and analysis of Premier Zhou was almost forensic in nature. The New York Times reported Zhou Enlai on the opening day of the Conference as ‘greeting each delegation chief warmly’,Footnote ⁸³ as appearing ‘in a jovial mood’Footnote ⁸⁴ and that he had ‘told newsmen that he had come to the gathering to make friends’.Footnote ⁸⁵ However it was simultaneously implied that his amicable disposition might be a sign of restraint. This interpretation of potential hostility was reinforced in the New York Times editorial which claimed that Zhou's opening speech expressing unity and friendship was directed to ‘all nations except the United States’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The American press's beleaguered tone was echoed in Time magazine which announced the impending conference in its 18 April edition by stating that ‘the Communist road show will be at Bandung this week’ after a preliminary meeting in New Delhi where ‘one by one, Communist speakers rode roughshod over the U.S.’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The gathering in New Delhi on April 6 was not a ‘preliminary meeting’ at all. Rather the ‘Asian Conference for the Easing of International Tension’ was an attempt by the Soviets, who were not invited to Bandung, to express their sympathy with the Afro-Asian movement and, in the process some suggest, sabotage the Bandung meeting.Footnote ⁸⁸ It received no support from the Government of India and, although China attended the meeting, Zhou Enlai was not present.Footnote ⁸⁹ The American media's failure, whether deliberate or not, to differentiate between communist hostility and Asian-African solidarity was echoed in the Australian press, and Melbourne's The Argus also prepared its readers for the worst. In its account of the opening day at Bandung it did not comment on Premier Zhou's countenance but quoted his ‘arrival statement that ‘“some people” are trying to wreck the Bandoeng meeting’ and concluded that Zhou's comment was ‘an open blast at the U.S., and possibly set the tone of his efforts’Footnote ⁹⁰ at the Conference. Unfortunately, The Argus failed to contextualise Premier Zhou's statement as referring to the sabotage of the Kashmir Princess, an Air India aircraft chartered for members of the Chinese delegation, in which all 19 passengers were killed on their way to Indonesia on 11 April. It had been believed that Premier Zhou would be on this flight, but the Chinese authorities changed plans at the last minute when their suspicions of a plot were roused. Chinese nationalists, with USA support, were believed to be the saboteurs,Footnote ⁹¹ a proposition asserted by the Chinese at the time. However Australian and American newspapers gave the incident only scant, rather dismissive, attention declaring that: ‘There is not the slightest foundation in the world for such an outrageous suggestion’.Footnote ⁹²

A few days later, piecing together feeds from international press agencies, The Argus announced ‘Chou Gags Critics in Bandoeng’. Ingeniously weaving together both the provocative and the conciliatory the report went on to explain:

It was the ‘Behind the News’ column by foreign affairs analyst Dr Peter Russo that made The Argus an influential newspaper. Reporting on the opening of the Conference, Russo announced that ‘the inscrutable East and darkest Africa’ were ‘plotting in Bandoeng in Indonesia’ and asked facetiously: ‘What devilish work is afoot?’Footnote ⁹⁴ Russo was one of Australia's best known foreign correspondents who also had first-hand experience of China in the 1940s. Fluent in Japanese, Russo had taught in Japanese universities, and like his American counterparts had strong sympathies towards Asia generally. However left-leaning Sinophiles such as Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley and the New Zealander, Rewi Alley, rebuffed Russo because of his strong ties with Japan whose imperial aggression towards China placed Russo on the wrong side of the ideological divide.Footnote ⁹⁵ Russo had seen his posting to China in 1946 as an opportunity to prove that he was ‘China friendly’,Footnote ⁹⁶ though he soon drifted into an ideological void as he was also ‘repeatedly accused of anti-American bias and labelled a communist’Footnote ⁹⁷ by his readers at home. Although Australia, under the conservative Anglophile Prime Minister Menzies, had no sympathy for Asians or communists, it only briefly succumbed to the McCarthy-style paranoia seen in the USA. It was in April 1954 that Vladmir Petrov, Third Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, caused a media sensation when he defected. Placing himself in the hands of ASIO, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation which had been established in 1949 in response to the formation of the Soviet Bloc, Petrov revealed that he was part of a spy ring that had been operating in Australia since the 1940s. This gave Australia the political legitimacy it needed to claim an active role in the Cold War, but even so, McCarthy-like witch-hunts never gathered the sort of momentum seen in the USA. Russo's commentary was indicative of this more even-handed approach, telling his readership that communism was a transient phenomenon that ‘will be sublimated in the historical trends of Asian race and culture. . . . COMMUNISM’, he emphasized in capital letters ‘IS NOT THE PROBLEM’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Russo clearly advocated closer, less paranoiac, ties with Asia as the most effective means of reducing fear and hostility but his heavy-handed use of racist irony might well have undermined his attempts at reason.

From the opening day of the Conference, mentions of Premier Zhou Enlai overwhelmed those of any of the other delegates. For example, in the 29 New York Times articles analysed, Zhou's name appeared four times more frequently than even the second most prominent delegate, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.Footnote ⁹⁹ In addition, in 16 of the 29 articles, Premier Zhou Enlai was the first Conference delegate to be mentioned, adding to his prominence and importance as the primary delegate of interest. In terms of visual representation, of the six photographs of delegates appearing in the New York Times during the week of the Conference, Zhou Enlai was the only one to be pictured more than once; his image appeared three times. This fixation with the Chinese Premier at Bandung was matched by a preoccupation with the fact that he represented a communist state, a fact that was never allowed to stray from the reader's mind. For example, in the 29 articles studied ‘Communist China’ was mentioned 63 times; ‘Red China’ 15 times; and ‘China’ just eight times.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The People's Republic of China was never mentioned. Of course, the use of the term ‘Communist China’ might simply have been to differentiate the mainland, represented by Premier Zhou, from ‘Nationalist China’ which was limited to the island of Taiwan (Formosa at the time). However, this would be a rather naïve interpretation. The repetition of the term ‘Communist China’ had a dehumanising effect, essentializing the People's Republic of China, not as a sovereign nation which had chosen its mode of governance, but as representative of an illegitimate ideology and an abhorrent one in the eyes of the West. Despite this, the name ‘Communist China’ made its way into unquestioned use and this was clearly an irritant to Premier Zhou. In 1957 when he met with a group of American students visiting China, one of them asked him about ‘Communist China's’ chances of entering the United Nations. Zhou prefaced his response by explaining:

Examining the press coverage of Premier Zhou at Bandung revealed a juxtaposition of fascination and aversion reminiscent of the thrall in which Chinese fictional characters had held Western readers since the late-nineteenth century. In many ways, Zhou Enlai embodied the package of stereotypical characteristics of the Chinese male who was quite capable of taking over the world, whether or not that was his desire. As both Premier and Foreign Minister of the world's most populous country, Zhou fitted the blueprint of a leader of formidable reach. More disturbing was the fact that the massive population he administered had fallen to a heathen ideology that rejected God and was therefore feared to be devoid of moral conscience. As China drifted further into isolation in the 1950s and 1960s, it more closely resembled a mysterious secret society, not unlike the monstrous, unpredictable Si-Fan society. In terms of his mental ability Zhou Enlai's reputation seemed beyond doubt as French leader Pierre Mendes-France, who met him in Geneva in 1956, reaffirmed when he observed Zhou to be ‘one of the most intelligent men I have ever met. He has the calibre of a world statesman, the sharpest, finest mind one could wish for’.Footnote ¹⁰² In addition to this formidable collection of qualities, Zhou had a proven, extraordinary physical stamina, most famously demonstrated through his survival of the Long March. Thousands died from illness and exhaustion on the 6,000 mile march, but not only did Zhou survive the ordeal he worked incessantly throughout as its principal coordinator. This image was undiminished 20 years later as Zhou Enlai became both the architect and administrator of the PRC as Premier, while simultaneously initiating its foreign affairs policy which required constant travel. Zhou seemed to personify what in Western minds was that unfathomably, and consequently dangerously, superhuman ‘Chinaman’.

It was not until the penultimate day of the Conference that niggling suspicions that the Chinese were untrustworthy and devious were allowed to bloom. On 24 April, Zhou Enlai dropped a bombshell by offering to engage in bilateral talks with America over the stand-off in the Taiwan Straits and, he added, issues concerning Asia more generally. Correspondent Tillman Durdin reported that Premier Zhou's offer was not made as a result of negotiations or discussion with other delegates; it was Zhou's independent decision. The announcement was made by the Chinese delegation that:

In its announcement of the proposal on its front page, the New York Times was quick to add the qualification ‘Washington Sets Terms’, meaning that it insisted that Nationalist leader Chiang Kaishek be included in any talks. As soon as the next day America's haste had backfired as it was reported that: ‘The Chinese Nationalists declared today through their Foreign Minister they would “never sit at the same table” with representatives of Communist China’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Although it was reported that the majority of Conference delegates supported Zhou's initiative and many deplored America's mishandling of his offer, this was deflected by cynicism over the ‘astute’ timing of the overture to America. This was nevertheless reported in a rather convoluted way:

In The Argus Peter Russo, in his inimitable style, summed up Premier Zhou Enlai's diplomatic efforts at the Bandung Conference by simultaneously ridiculing, and tacitly affirming, the West's irrational anxieties. In a piece entitled ‘Clean Fight at Bandoeng: No Broken Rice Bowls’, Russo invoked the Chinese villain who lingered in the Western psyche:

Russo's sarcasm asserts what the American press could only evade: a paranoiac vision of China that had evolved in the Anglosphere since the eighteenth century. Whether or not it was openly acknowledged, the embrace of communism in China, that most despised ideology among conservative Western leaders such as Eisenhower and Menzies, was seen as vindication of Western prejudices and that the Chinese were not to be trusted. In reporting Premier Zhou Enlai, the media followed a tradition among Western writers since Defoe, De Quincey and Harte, in that it ultimately allowed negative representations to invalidate the positive. This media strategy played a crucial role in the Cold War from the earliest days of USA antagonism with the PRC. In 1951 during the Korean conflict America's Saturday Evening Post reported on 19 American soldiers who had been held by the Chinese, but typically:

The desire of the Chinese to pass on their ‘revolutionary convictions’ was essentially no different to the desire of the West's ‘droves of missionaries’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ to pass on its theological convictions in the preceding centuries. However Western ‘scholarly articles and popular magazines would develop the theme of thought control, until China was widely perceived as a colony of mindless “blue ants” living in a “slave society”’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Again we see the recycling of eighteenth-century tropes such as Defoe's description of the Chinese as a ‘crowd of ignorant, sordid slaves’Footnote ¹¹⁰ or Montesquieu's conclusion that ‘liberty never increases in Asia’.Footnote ¹¹¹

Similar to the two distinct stereotypes identified by Arthur H. Smith and discussed above, Western representations of the Chinese in the mid-twentieth century fell into a binary categorisation. On the one hand, there was a fixation with the Chinese as an impenetrable ‘faceless mass’, an immense collective consciousness; and on the other, the Chinese as consummate schemers, deftly masking their intentions through an inscrutable façade. Either way, there seemed no hope of really knowing the Chinese. Harold Isaacs, who was Asia correspondent for Newsweek in the 1940s,Footnote ¹¹² later studied Western perceptions of the Chinese and Indians as professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published as Scratches on Our Minds in 1958, Isaacs found American responses to the Chinese to be ‘moving uncertainly somewhere between admiration and fear’, and that these contending feelings were made up of a ‘patchwork of images that fill our minds’.Footnote ¹¹³ This confusion, which settled into an opposing duality, was expressed by China journalist A.T. Steele between 1932 and 1950. He recalled that ‘people like Chou, and particularly Chou, manipulated the views of the correspondents in China’ making it difficult to get to the truth about anything.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Steele's reflections were recorded at a conference convened in 1982 which brought together all the surviving American reporters who had been in China in the 1930s and 1940s. At the conference they critically re-examined ‘the myth that led them astray’ however ‘most of the still “captivated” correspondents refused to look past the brilliant silk screen of Chou's performance’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ There appeared a sense of inevitability, ‘an uneasy awareness of Asia's power to beguile and charm the West into a state of false security’ that had remained a ‘prominent motif in our culture from the late nineteenth century’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This was exemplified by Zhou's ‘performance’ at Bandung, also represented as a ‘silk screen’ if America's discordant response to his offer of talks is any gauge.

At the time of the Bandung Conference, the West was still sensitive to what it saw as the ideological betrayal of the Chinese. Unlike other Asian nations that had broken ties with the West, China had rejected the West on both economic and political grounds, which seemed to affirm eighteenth and nineteenth-century tropes that found the Chinese incurably obstinate. Moreover, De Quincy's claim that ‘the nations hate thee’ seemed to echo across the centuries as the People's Republic of China remained ostracized from United Nations membership throughout the 1950s and 1960s, while even the West's darkest foe, the Soviet Union, retained its place among the permanent five of the United Nations Security Council. But perhaps lying beneath that sense of betrayal towards the Chinese was the even more galling fact that, since its earliest encounters some centuries ago, the Chinese had demonstrated that, quite frankly, it did not need the West. Not only would China prevail at Bandung, but also its prestige among the Afro-Asian movement would be enhanced by Zhou Enlai, who proved himself to be the shrewdest Asian diplomat of his time.