Assignment: China - China Watching

China Watching is the term practitioners and outsiders used to describe the effort that reporters, diplomats, and others excluded from China engaged in in order to understand what was happening in China and what it meant for the U.S. and the world. After Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist came to power on October 1, 1949 most American journalists and others working for U.S. news organizations left China. The U.S. did not recognize the new government and U.S. diplomatic posts were closed. By fall 1950, soldiers from the two countries were facing each other on Korean battlefields. China generally did not welcome journalists from countries with which it did not have diplomatic relations and the U.S. State Department ordered that U.S. passports were not valid for travel to China. These restrictions eased a bit by 1960s, but over the next two decades few journalists were able to report from China for U.S. news organizations. Those who did get in, by virtue of not being U.S. citizens or through special invitation were closely monitored. Most American reporting on China was done from the “listening post” of Hong Kong.