More Interesting Fellows

Yao Wei accompanied Deng Xiaoping on the Chinese premier's historic visit to the United States in 1979. It was "the first time China sent a true leader to the United States," Yao says proudly of the trip for which he handled press relations. That trip, he believes, was important for his country because China and the U.S. have had "more years of friendship" than antagonism. And it was important for Yao, Chief of the Press Division for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, because most of his life has been dominated by the bitter conflict between the two nations.

Yao was a student at an American school in Peking when he joined the Communist Revolution in 1948. Like "80 per cent of the students and intellectuals," says Yao, he "did not join because of any Marxist orientation, or because we were Russophiles," but because of the ruling government of Chian Kai-Shek--a regime he considered full of "the most corrupt animals, I won't even say humans."

In the early fifties, shortly after finishing an "orientation school," Yao enlisted to help the North Koreans fight the American-backed South Koreans. He did so under "no pressure" from the government, but rather out of a "great deal of nationalistic patriotism on my part." The rallying cry that stirred him and his compatriots was "Resist the United States and aid Korea; Protect your home and defend your country." "After half a century we finally had peace," he says of post-revolutionary China, and they felt threatened by U.S. connections with the hated Chiang.

Immediately after the war, Yao entered the Foreign Ministry, where he still works. He joined not out of any special interest but because that was where people were needed. Yao warns against comparing the way he found his job to anything in the American experience. "You can't think in terms of your country," he says.

In the years since his employment, China has gone through severe changes--the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. Yao prefers not to talk of these phases, acknowledging that he "had some very unpleasant experiences," and aditting that "in retrospect, many of those policies were wrong." But he is concerned that people "will not understand the situation." Mao, he says, was a "man of integrity." "I'm not defending the Chairman's mistakes, he explains, "but China was too long behind the mainstream of the world. We were crying, wanting to change."

Yao, who will spend a full year in this country, likes to talk about the currently blossoming relationship between his country and the United States. Before coming to the IOP, he was a Fellow at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson International Center, and next semester, he will go to Stanford.

Yao holds no grudge against the Americans he meets. "I don't come here, see every American, and see the Korean war," he says. He has several friends and relatives in the United States--one, in fact, who fought on the other side in the Korean War. Yao notes that while "the British, the Russians, the Japanese, have given China hell" over the past few centuries, the U.S. has been more friendly--except, of course, for the period which has spanned most of his life. That period, though, Yao is willing to dismiss: "an unfortunate episode," he calls it, but one which he hopes will not impede future friendly relations between the U.S. and his homeland.