BEIJING – In a sweltering room on the second floor of Tsinghua's
recently refurbished Communications and Media Studies Department,
nearly 50 future journalists, public relations flacks and censors
watched an hour-and-a-half presentation by one of television's most
recognizable reporters, Peter Arnett.
Arnett is spending the semester teaching at Shantou University, a few
hundred miles southeast of here in Guangdong Province. He never said
why he accepted the position, but the tone of the presentation made it
sound as if he wanted a different, low-key experience after four years
covering the second Gulf War.
His lecture went roughly chronology, taking ground-breaking work
during the early days of the Vietnam War, then onto his experiences in
diplomatic circles in the 1970s, his widely influential coverage of
the Persian Gulf War as a CNN correspondent, and then his role as
mentor and hero of the anti-war movement during the age of Global
Terrorism.
Arnett gave the lecture in English, and seemed only occasionally to
remember that his audience spoke it as a second language (a friend and
I were the only non-Chinese students in the room), delivering
sentences like this one, "I challenged Castro to a boxing match,
because he liked Ali at the time. Thankfully he didn't put up his
dukes. America didn't like Cuba at the time."
He also seemed incredibly hot, dabbing his mostly bald head with a
dripping wet sweat rag every two minutes. But despite looking
uncomfortable, he didn't give these students a cop-out presentation,
lingering over certain stories, pointing out other Pultizer-Prize
winners in old photos from Siagon, laughing while talking about his
firing from NBC in 2003 for giving an interview to the Iraqi press
agency and his subsequent hiring by the Daily Mirror.
The most interesting part of the lecture came when Arnett briefly
discussed China, which he first visited in 1972 right after Nixon's
visit. "Beijing was not a busy city then," he said, but he couldn't
illustrate that point because cameras were not allowed on this trip. A
trip seven years later, soon after the rise of Deng Xiaoping, was much
more relaxed: eight nights of dining in the Great Hall of the People,
a trip to the Great Wall and many, many pictures of a fascinatingly
deserted Beijing.
What does he think of China today? He didn't give much away in the
lecture, perhaps constrained by time or not wanting to wade into
sensitive political waters at China's best university. He did discuss
the issue with the French news agency AFP in a recent interview,
implying that he's been given more freedom than he expected:
"I thought there would be real limitations in what we would be able to
talk about but that is not the case," he said. "In other places I have
been I have encountered a sense of pessimism but I don't get that
sense here. I'm privileged to be giving young people some of my
insights."
