Anthony Grey: The Reporter Beijing Tried to Break

A young British correspondent sent to decode Mao’s China instead became one of the earliest symbols of hostage diplomacy.

Anthony Grey was held hostage in Peking during Mao's 'Cultural Revolution.'

Anthony Grey, who passed away last month aged 87, first learned what it meant to be a pawn of great-power politics long before the term ‘hostage diplomacy’ came into vogue.

‘In view of the illegal persecution and the fascist atrocities in Hong Kong against Chinese correspondents, the Chinese government deems it necessary to adopt measures to restrict the freedom of Grey of Reuters in Peking [Beijing].’

This was spoken to Grey, then a young British correspondent, at the Foreign Ministry in Beijing in July 1967. He was to be confined to his house. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a two-year nightmare.

Perilous Posting

Grey had been sent by Reuters to Beijing in March of that year to report on the Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong felt marginalised after the failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the resulting famine that had killed upwards of 30 million people. Mao was also convinced that the Communist Party of China was moving toward economic liberalism and the political right, and that all his enemies were far too entrenched within the Party bureaucracy. So, to gather power back to himself and to reassert his own political vision upon China, Mao had decided to look outside of the Party for his ‘revolution within the revolution’, especially to students and young people, soon to become known as the ‘Red Guards’. Mao launched the ‘Cultural Revolution’ in May 1966 – and thereby cast China into complete chaos.

It was into this febrile, violent, and lawless environment – between 500,000 and two million people lost their lives during the Cultural Revolution – that Anthony Grey was sent. So little was known of what was going on in China at the time that, while travelling by train to Beijing, Grey was told to ‘Look out and see if the factory chimneys are smoking in Wuhan’ and ‘Keep your eyes skinned to see if there are rice shoots coming through the water in the fields,’ so as to gauge the effects of the Cultural Revolution and the strength of the Chinese economy. Grey was assigned a two-storey house on the edge of the Forbidden Palace and got to work, surprised at first by how much freedom he was allowed, able to walk among the crowds of people on the streets including many Red Guards, and even being within a couple of feet of Mao himself as the Great Leader passed by in a jeep during the May Day celebrations. But trouble was already brewing abroad, the massive social tensions generated by the Cultural Revolution about to spill over.

In September 1966, Mao had called for all Chinese foreign affairs offices to go through a process of ‘revolutionization’. What this meant was anyone’s guess – Mao as purposely ambiguous as ever. Diplomats were recalled. Lower ranking functionaries were left in charge of embassies and consulates, all of them desperate to prove their loyalty to Mao. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing was subject to numerous attacks by Red Guards determined to propagate the Cultural Revolution throughout the whole foreign affairs system. ‘British Imperialism’ became a prime target. In 1967, diplomats were assaulted at the British Legation in Beijing. There were astonishing scenes in London when Chinese legation staff emerged to attack police and members of the Press with bottles and iron bars – known since as the ‘Battle of Portland Street’. There was also Chinese inspired violent leftist agitation in what was then the British colony of Hong Kong. The authorities in Hong Kong cracked down severely on the agitators, culminating in the banning of three pro-Communist newspapers and the arrest of pro-Communist journalists, including Hsueh Ping of the Chinese Xinhua News Agency. The placing of Anthony Grey under house-arrest in Beijing was China’s immediate response to Hsueh Ping’s arrest.

House Arrest

Imprisoned in his house in Beijing, Grey was left very much to his own devices. He kept a diary, and continued writing about life in Beijing – maintaining the journalistic discipline. On August 18th he spent the day writing a ‘situationer’, ironically as it turned out, about the continuing demonstrations on the streets by Red Guards. That night, Red Guards burst in, subjected him to physical torture and verbal abuse, threatened him with death, making it very clear that this was very much about the arrest of Hsueh Ping in Hong Kong. They trashed the whole house, daubing it with Maoist slogans and posters. They even killed his cat Ming Ming– pets considered a bourgeois affectation by the Red Guards. Thereafter Grey would be confined to a single room. He would maintain his sanity, despite his guards’ constant hostility, by continuing to keep his diary, learning Chinese, and practicing yoga.

During the following two years, Grey became an international cause célèbre, his face kept in the papers by the many efforts of his journalist colleagues, the British government preferring quiet negotiations behind the scenes. However, Grey would not be freed until October 1969, when the last of the pro-Communist journalists had been released in Hong Kong. Chinese officials were never shy about stating the direct connection to him.

Grey was awarded the ‘Journalist of the Year’ prize at the IPC National Press Awards and given an OBE (Order of the British Empire). But the world had changed much during the two years of his captivity and he found adjustment hard. He wrote a superb book on his experiences, Hostage in Peking (1970), and then worked for a few years for the BBC World Service before turning his hand to writing novels. He began with thrillers but, disturbed by the mysterious murder of The Sunday Times journalist David Holden in in Cairo in 1977, perhaps feeling the violence a little too close to home, he soured on the genre.  He penned sweeping historical epics instead, such as Saigon and Tokyo Bay.

Grey developed strange fascinations and interests. In 1988 he wrote a book about Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt who disappeared while swimming in 1967, alleging he had been a spy and had been picked up by a Chinese submarine – a claim widely debunked. In 1992 his marriage broke down, though he would remain great friends with his former wife Shirley until her death from cancer in 1995. She had been his girlfriend during his time of captivity. He then associated himself with the Raëlian UFO religion, described by the French parliament as a cult. This association, after years of battling depression, undermined his mental health further. It was only after forty years after his release from captivity that he sought help for PTSD, finally realising that the experience had never really left him.

Grey continued to speak out against hostage diplomacy – especially in regards to China. The imprisonment in 2018 of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in China in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, as well as the ongoing detention of family members of Chinese dissidents living abroad who have angered Beijing, demonstrates China’s continuing belief in the efficacy of taking hostages for political purposes – to punish, to intimidate, and to use as leverage.

(The author is a novelist and retired investigator with an abiding passion for Chinese history. He is the creator of the Magistrate Zhu mysteries. Views personal.)