Читать книгу CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir - Nicholas MD Platt - Страница 36

After the message was sent off, I departed with the whole family on two months of home leave, our first since 1965. Having always flown to Asia, transiting from one almost identical airport to another, we were determined to return home on the surface of the earth and get a sense of the real size of our planet. It took five weeks just to reach New York, via boat from Japan to the Soviet Union, trans-Siberian Railway across Russia (with Soviet expert and Hong Kong colleague Kurt Kamman as our guide), and the final leg from Europe aboard the SS United States from England.

While we were in America acquainting our three tigers with their grandparents, Chairman Mao called on the People’s Liberation Army to restore order throughout China. The violent stage of the Cultural Revolution came to an end that summer of 1967. Military men, all party members to begin with, took over the key positions in the provincial governments and party committees and ran the country for more than a decade. The Red Guards and their contemporaries were sent down to factories and farms, most of them far from home, where they were to spend the next ten years. The political tensions of the Cultural Revolution would last until Mao’s death in 1976 and his wife’s arrest immediately thereafter, but the killing and chaos were over.

We returned to Hong Kong months after the PLA crackdown, time enough to spare superiors the sheepish discomfort of “I told you so” encounters. We spent our final months in Garden Road reporting the militarization of the Chinese government, the rustication of the Red Guards, the suppression of the fighting factions, and the return to a nervous, inconclusive calm.