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Chinese literature provided a crucial code to political expression and debate in the Mainland. Editorials were shot through with references to figures and stories from great classical novels of Chinese literature. The plots and characters of The Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, to name a few, were embedded in the upbringing of every educated Chinese, whatever his or her politics. In particular, The Three Kingdoms, a fourteenth-century novel of struggle and statecraft set around 200 AD, represented an encyclopedia of every political and military ploy in the Chinese lexicon, as well as many of the plots in Chinese opera. If you had not read this book, you simply could not decipher the editorials. Other classics, including Confucius’ Analects and Sun Zi’s Art of War, also helped. These had been assigned reading during our training years. The time we had spent in Taiwan acquiring and reading pirated English translations of these works—one could buy the entire Encyclopedia Britannica for $18—turned out to have been invaluable.

In this most closed of systems, all serious political attacks were masked in cultural allegory. As we will see later, the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution was fired in a Shanghai editorial panning the revival of an opera lionizing an official fearless enough to criticize his emperor. The reviewer was aiming at contemporary political leaders who had crossed Chairman Mao.

In 1964 and most of 1965, the China we were watching was quiet on the surface. I wrote learned dispatches, called “airgrams,” sent by diplomatic pouch to Washington each week on some aspect of the domestic political scene, from party politics to population control. I learned the traditional tools of the China-Watching trade and the names and histories of the leadership.