On 18 August 1967, Red Guards stormed the Peking (now Beijing) house of the Reuters journalist Anthony Grey, frogmarching him out in front of an angry mob. He was then ‘jet-planed’ – a stress position that forced his head down near to the ground, and his arms up in the air behind him – and his 26-month ordeal began (‘Anthony Grey: 777 days in Peking’, 23 August 1970).
One Red Guard read out his ‘crimes’: ‘You have drunk alcohol in your house.’ ‘You have sneaked around in your house!’ All very Monty Python were it not for the fact that they were so deadly serious. They killed his cat and left its corpse on his bed, about 200 thugs smashed his house up and Maoist propaganda was daubed everywhere. ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’, ‘Down with Grey’ – ‘a flattering juxtaposition,’ Grey wrote,. ‘The living legend and the unknown, insignificant foreign reporter.’
Not so insignificant to the Chinese authorities, though. They put him under house arrest in retaliation for the arrest by the Hong Kong authorities of a journalist with the New China News Agency – who, ominously, was jailed for two years.
Some of the things that helped to preserve his sanity were writing a diary in shorthand (which he published as Hostage in Peking) and the yoga book he was allowed to grab from his bookshelf. Also the Observer cryptic crossword, which had something even more valuable to his morale on the back – adverts for jobs that meant the western economy wasn’t in the chaos that the state propaganda was telling him.
The Observer had thought it a good idea to reconstruct his 8ft square cell for a photo shoot and, predictably, it brought back some very unpleasant memories. ‘Am I about to wake up in this room and find that my release was all a dream?’ asked Grey. His release was real enough, but sadly so were the previous two years of his life.
