By Yu Fei and Nick Yates
BEIJING, Nov. 5 (Xinhua) -- When Mao Zedong declared to the world the establishment of the central government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the rostrum of Tian'anmen Square on Oct. 1, 1949, Li Pu, a journalist with the Xinhua News Agency, was standing just a few steps away from the leader.
The journalist recalled that day countless times during the latter part of his life. In one article, Li wrote that he was very composed when accepting the task of covering the ceremony. He was 31 years old at the time and had already reported on many important occasions.
However, "on the night of September 30, my previous calm disappeared totally," Li wrote. "I was so nervous that I had to take a sleeping pill for the first time in my life."
"During the ceremony, I observed seriously to capture the atmosphere at the scene." But he regretted that he failed to bag on-the-spot interviews with the founders of the new China.
Li Pu's copy filed on that famous day in 1949 has, like many Xinhua news bulletins since, become an important historical document for China. With the country celebrating the 80th anniversary of the news agency's founding, these reports have been given fresh prominence in the public eye. And the stories behind the stories -- the experiences of the journalists who recorded key events in Chinese history -- have great intrinsic value.
From Li Pu to contemporary Xinhua correspondents, there are many stories to tell. Let's begin with recollections from Li Naiyin.
When news about the founding of the PRC started to spread, over half of China's territory had not yet been liberated. More than two million members of the Kuomintang (KMT) remained scattered in the southern and eastern parts of China.
Li, a Xinhua war journalist, was reporting on a battle between the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and Kuomintang troops at the Zhoushan Islands in east China.
"It was raining when we got the news that the PRC had been founded. Everybody ran to the streets in the rain to celebrate. The PLA won the battle as a gift to the 'new China,'" Li says.
The war journalist, now 85 years old, witnessed the war of resistance against Japan, the war of liberation and the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea.
A branch of Xinhua was established in a deserted mine in Hoechang, Korea, in 1951. Li entered the country to cover the war in late November of that year. While crossing a mountain to reach a battlefront, he lost his shoes, but, ever the professional, managed to keep hold of his notebook and pen.
Another time, he and a colleague were caught in an air raid. "The bullets were flying over our heads. If we had taken two minutes longer to hide ourselves, we might have been dead," Li recalls.
Such experiences were not enough to deter Xinhua's reporters. Qian Sijie, a Xinhua journalist coming back from the Korean battlefield, accepted a new task: to cover the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia from April 18 to 24, 1955.
It was the first international conference held by Asian and African countries without the participation of any Western colonial power. Twenty-nine Asian and African countries, many of which were newly independent, participated in the conference, aiming to promote Asian-African economic and cultural cooperation and oppose colonialism. The Chinese delegation was led by Premier Zhou Enlai.
Photojournalist Qian and a colleague arrived in Bandung by ship in early April, waiting for more colleagues coming by plane. "But our colleagues never arrived. What we got was the news that the plane carrying three members of the Chinese delegation and eight journalists exploded after taking off from Hong Kong. Three Xinhua journalists were among the victims," Qian says.
It turned out that KMT agents had put a bomb on the plane, aiming to assassinate Zhou Enlai, who was not onboard the plane.
Drying his tears, Qian shouldered the task of covering the conference alone. "No matter how many journalists I was competing with, I tried my best to get the best place and best angle to record the historical conference," he explains. During the conference, Xinhua competed with large global media organizations like the Associated Press and Reuters.
The Bandung Conference promoted peaceful cooperation among Asian and African countries. But it wasn't until 1971 that friendly exchanges between the people of "new China" and the United States were triggered, through the unlikely medium of table tennis. And yet again, Xinhua was there to cover the proceedings.
After six years of interruption, China sent a team to participate in the 31st World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan in 1971.
During the championships, an American table tennis player named Glenn Cowan found himself on the Chinese team's bus. Chinese athlete Zhuang Zedong greeted him and presented him with a piece of silk. Later, Cowan gave Zhuang a T-shirt with an emblem of peace.
The 15-member U.S. table tennis team and four American journalists came to China on April 10, 1971, becoming the first American delegation to visit China's mainland since 1949. Zhou Enlai met with the American guests.
Li Qin, who covered the meeting, says, "I still remember Zhou Enlai said 'your visit to China has opened the door to friendly contacts between the people of the two countries. We believe that such friendly contacts will be favored and supported by the two peoples.' The news about the meeting evoked great responses."
Zhou Enlai, widely respected and beloved in China, passed away on Jan. 8, 1976. From late March of that year, Chinese citizens gathered at Tian'anmen Square to mourn for Zhou and denounce the misdeeds of the Gang of Four, a group of ultra-leftist ringleaders during the years of the Cultural Revolution. The memorial activity came to its climax on April 5 and was cracked down upon by the Gang of Four, who labeled it as counter-revolutionary.
Although the Gang was smashed by 1978, Chinese leaders continued to carry out the ideological guidelines of the Cultural Revolution. ` During a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the CPC in November 1978, Jia Tingsan, a Party leader from Beijing, went off -cript to read a note, which drew the attention of Xinhua journalist Zhou Hongshu.
"The main point of what the leader said was that the gathering at Tian'anmen in 1976 was Chinese people mourning their beloved Premier and denouncing the Gang of Four, which was completely revolutionary," says Li Niangui, former head of Xinhua's Institute of Journalism.
Zhou Hongshu realized it was greatly significant. He wrote two versions of the news: one was about the meeting and putting the Party leader's speech inside the long story; the other one was short and solely about the reversal of the verdict of the memorial activity.
The final decision was made by Mu Qing, vice president and editor-in-chief of Xinhua at the time. Mu chose the short version, but only after making many phone calls to Zeng Tao, Xinhua's president at the time.
On November 15, Xinhua released the news under the headline "Tian'anmen Square 1976 actions completely revolutionary, says Beijing Municipal Party Committee," a title which "highlights the political significance of the news," Li says.
In December of that year, the third plenary session of the eleventh Central Committee of the CPC was held in Beijing. Xinhua dedicated extensive coverage to the meeting, an important turning point for the CPC. With the arrival of the session, China finally entered an era of reform and opening up.
Amid this period of tremendous change, Hong Kong was returned to the motherland on July 1, 1997. Xinhua reported more on the event than any other media organization and was competitive in terms of timeliness.
The agency's photojournalists began to master the use of digital cameras while covering Hong Kong's historical moment. One of the photos captured the moment when former President Jiang Zemin arrived, the first time a top Chinese leader had set foot on Hong Kong.
When China sent its first manned spacecraft, Shenzhou V, into space on Oct. 15, 2003, Xinhua issued timely stories about the flight.
Some of Xinhua's most important stories have been less than uplifting.Just one hour after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit the city of Wenchuan in southwest China's Sichuan province on May 12, 2008, Xinhua journalists in Beijing caught a plane with a rescue team to the quake-devastated area, where they provided essential reporting on the tragedy.
"In the age of the Internet, Xinhua, like many other news agencies, is facing more challenges," says Yin Yungong, director of the Institute of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
China's news agency needs to maintain its competitiveness and provide timely and authoritative information about domestic and international events, he adds. Here's to Xinhua journalists meeting the challenge and witnessing many more moments in history.
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