A Cold War Attaché’s Journey into an Opening China
- Christina DeSantis
- 2 days ago
- 15 min read
Updated: 21 hours ago
The Crossword of Cathay
A Cold War Attaché’s Journey into an Opening China
by Colonel James Reed, U.S. Air Force Academy Class of 1959
In the summer of 1955, a historic cohort of young men entered the gates of Lowry Air Force Base as the very first class of the newly established United States Air Force Academy. Among these First Class '59ers was James Reed.
Graduating into a world defined by the deep frost of the Cold War, Reed’s career would eventually position him at the crossroads of global diplomacy: serving as a de facto military attaché to China during its crucial period of initial opening to the West.
In this vivid and witty memoir, he chronicles his journey from monitoring shortwave Radio Peking broadcasts from a bunker in Da Nang to navigating the high-speed Hong Kong–Beijing Auto Rally. Through brilliant anecdotes, he offers a rare, firsthand look at a superpower in transition.
A High-Speed Crash in Central China
We were already late for our duties as marshals for the Hong Kong–Beijing Auto Rally and were pushing our Korean minivan hard to make up time. We were going far too fast when we flicked on the high beams, saw the hairpin turn, and the brick wall straight ahead.
Too fast! Hard on the brakes, hard left on the wheel, but we plowed straight into the wall—through it. Bricks went everywhere, bouncing on the hood, breaking the windshield, and tumbling over the roof. We shuddered to a halt, bricks still flying—and then all was quiet. At a dark 5 AM on an Asian morning somewhere in Central China, we had just demolished a public toilet.
Milestones En Route to Asia
The Air Force Academy sparked my interest in Asia, with a Far East visit during my final summer. A small group of us visited Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and several other locations. In Hong Kong, we did all the normal tourist things, but from that moment in 1958, I knew I wanted to live and work in Asia—if possible, in Hong Kong.
For me, there were other milestones en route to Asia. China’s Cultural Revolution in the ‘60s and early ‘70s was so foreign that I had to study it. During a Vietnam tour, I spent many evenings in Da Nang with the shortwave radio turned to English-language broadcasts from Radio Peking, trying to understand what was happening in China.
There was an R&R from Vietnam which I spent in Hong Kong, and then a year at the National Defense University (NDU) working with Stapleton Roy, a Foreign Service Officer friend and NDU classmate who had been born in China and later became the U.S. Ambassador to Beijing.
"Because there was no U.S. Embassy, only a liaison office in China at that time, Hong Kong was the de facto U.S. Embassy for China."
Finally, in 1978, everything pulled together. I needed a new assignment—and Hong Kong would need a new attaché the next year, 1979. The military attaché position in Hong Kong would not only be responsible for the usual sorts of attaché interests in the region but would also be closely involved in the early contacts with the Chinese military as the U.S. began the military-to-military dialogue.
The first step was intensive language training—not of the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong, but of Mandarin, the national language of China. One year at the State Department Foreign Service Institute was enough to create a base for further learning. Outside of the language training, there was additional cultural familiarization and stacks of reading and background material.
Cultural Awakening at the Peace Hotel
In July of 1979, I arrived in Hong Kong with more curiosity than trepidation. After all, with intensive language and cultural training under my belt, I felt I was well prepared and ready to travel. I knew a lot about China!
But in the fall of 1979, I made my first trip north, to Beijing, Shanghai, and other Chinese locations. I learned more of China, but especially I learned that what I already knew was fragmented, perishable, and a much smaller percentage of the overall picture than I had realized.
I was sitting in the Peace Hotel in Shanghai having lunch, feeling a little self-pleased about my progress. I had used the Chinese language in my travel, gone to the hotel’s dining room, studied the menu, ordered in Chinese, and now was eating a very pleasant meal in a well-presented Chinese hotel dining room.
But then, partway through the meal, the waiter approached me, leaned over, and said (in Chinese): “Use your RIGHT hand.”
"The waiter again returned, grabbed the chopsticks from my left hand... and in Chinese said, '...AND THAT’S THE WAY YOU USE CHOPSTICKS!'"
I’m left-handed and had been eating using chopsticks in my left hand. I tried to explain to the waiter that I was left-handed and continued eating lunch. A few minutes later he returned, leaned over, and said: “I said, USE YOUR RIGHT HAND!”
Again, I tried to explain that I was left-handed and not good with chopsticks in my right hand.
After another couple of minutes, the waiter again returned, grabbed the chopsticks from my left hand, put one, then the other, in my right hand, and in Chinese said, “This one goes here, that one goes there, AND THAT’S THE WAY YOU USE CHOPSTICKS!”
A cultural lesson learned—and an awakening to the fact that there were many day-to-day facets of Chinese life that I had yet to experience. Almost every day I gained a new experience or exposed a new area with which I was unfamiliar. When I started, I thought I knew a lot about China. As time progressed, my knowledge base expanded, but not as fast as my realization that there was a rapidly increasing number of areas of study available. I knew very little about an increasingly large number of categories.
Scenes from Colonel Jim and Sheila Reed's travels across China during his attaché assignment.
Encounters in Liuzhou and Kunming
Here’s another example. There’s a saying in China:
One should be born in Hangzhou, because Hangzhou has the most beautiful scenery in all of China.
One should marry a woman from Suzhou, because the Suzhou women are the most beautiful women in all of China.
One should hire a cook from Guangzhou, because the food from Guangzhou is the finest in all of China.
And when one dies, one should die in Liuzhou, because it has the finest wood for caskets in all of China.
Well, I wasn’t looking for a casket, but I had a few extra days while traveling in southern China, so I stopped in Liuzhou. As I usually do, I went for a walk in the early hours of the morning, going to the local park to learn some more about the city and its conditions.
While strolling through the park in the early dawn, an elderly man on a park bench saw me coming and called out, “Good Morning!”
Surprised at finding any English language in a place this remote, I returned the greeting. My new friend spoke very good English and was a lathe worker in a local factory. After a few bits of conversation, I complimented him on his English and asked how he had learned it.
“Oh,” he said, “I was Harvard, Class of 1924. This is the first time I’ve spoken English in 40 years!”
Another example: As with the U.S., World War II was an important part of China’s history, and the U.S. had a base in Kunming during that war. Kunming is a very pleasant city, with good weather almost year-round. As a result, its nickname is "Spring City", where the weather is always springlike.
The memories of the U.S. presence are still strong. In fact, walking around town I passed a local pharmacy with the English signage: “Spring City Pharmacy”. Curious, I went into the pharmacy, and at the rear of the sales floor, over the pharmacist’s area, was a large English sign: “Your Patronage is Cordially Invited”.
While in Kunming, I stayed at the Cui Hu (Green Lake) Hotel and was approached by the restaurant manager, who asked if I could train his chefs in how to prepare omelets. I then worked with the chefs explaining the omelet recipes, with the only problem being the need for cheese. We finally had to go ahead and make omelets without cheese, since at the time there was no reliable source for that ingredient.
The next morning, each of the cooks prepared an omelet, and we tasted each of them—very well prepared. (Later, the cooks visited Hong Kong, and we arranged a dinner for them at our apartment, where we served Southern Fried Chicken.)
Tragedy and Grace at the Great Wall
All my China travel helped put things in perspective, but one event sticks out.
Every tourist should visit the Great Wall. It epitomizes China and is the country’s greatest tourist attraction. On the wintry day of our first visit to the Wall, we happened to see the Chinese Army reacting to an emergency. Someone had fallen at the Wall and been injured, and the Army was constructing a pallet out of a few boards to move the injured person to safety. It was only later that day that we learned the full story:
A retired U.S. Air Force general who had served in China in World War II had returned, accompanied by his wife, as part of a tour group. The wife had stepped off an opening in the walkway floor and fallen heavily about five feet to the hard surface below, breaking her pelvis in five places. The Chinese had reacted to the emergency, building the pallet we had seen to move her out of the below-freezing, windy weather.
The only place available was a small room at the base of the Wall, used for drying laundry and heated by a small coal stove. It was in that smoky, humid, soot-filled room that the General discovered his wife, critically injured. Overtaken by the moment, he collapsed outside of congestive heart failure.
At this darkest moment, another member of the tour group learned what had happened. A physician and retired Air Force flight surgeon, he had brought along some medical supplies. Recognizing the criticality of the congestive heart failure, the flight surgeon stabilized the General’s condition, then looked after the wife.
Soon both victims were loaded into a small van for the long, winding drive back to medical care in Beijing—the General in front, his injured wife in unremitting pain lying on a wooden pallet in the back. They were checked into adjoining rooms in Beijing’s Capital Hospital.
The story has a happy ending—the Chinese government quickly approved the use of a U.S. Air Force medical evacuation aircraft from the Philippines, which took both patients back to a U.S. hospital for medical care. This air operation was the first of several medical evacuations from China, demonstrating to China a peaceful use of U.S. military forces.
Later I learned that the Capital Hospital had been partially funded during its early years by the Rockefeller Foundation. The relationship between China and the U.S. had some roots that might keep the two countries closer than would initially seem likely.
A Mosaic of Experiences
I had other travel opportunities:
To Hainan Island when it was still undeveloped.
To the four corners of China—the national borders with Vietnam, Russia, North Korea, and Afghanistan.
To Inner Mongolia and the Gobi Desert.
Down the Yangtze River from Western China to the Pacific Ocean.
By train across the northern grasslands.
...and always, whenever possible, in ways that let me meet and mix with the people of China.
I remember:
Discussing world politics over a beer with an engineer from the auto plant in Changchun.
Visiting the tent of an itinerant beekeeper in the forests of Changbaishan near the Yalu River border with North Korea.
Being hosted by a Uighur family in a grapevine-covered hamlet in the Turfan Depression.
Receiving a white scarf for good luck from a monk at the Potala Palace in Tibet.
Being invited in for tea by a Dai family in China’s southwest.
Sharing a Sarah Vaughan tape with the bass player of the band at the Peace Hotel in Shanghai.
In geography, China is about the same size and shape as the U.S. mainland, and at approximately the same latitudes, but there is a broad diversity in the Chinese people and the way in which the average Chinese citizen viewed the world and its issues.
My learning process didn’t stop with the first few trips. The China experience was like carrying around a huge, unfinished crossword puzzle. Occasionally, you would have a chance to fill in a few more squares—only to discover that when you weren’t looking, the puzzle had gained even more questions to be answered.
Mapping the Forbidden Interior
It was with the intent of filling in a few more squares of the puzzle that I became involved in 1982 to run a world-class, FIA-sponsored car race between Hong Kong and Beijing: the Hong Kong–Beijing Auto Rally. This had never been done—in fact, we didn’t know whether the roads existed. What we were trying to do was the equivalent of driving from Miami to Detroit while conducting a series of races along 3,000 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway and county farm roads.
China had never allowed its interior to be this open to foreigners, with relative freedom to map out their route between the two cities. This would be a new test of China’s opening.
My curiosity was piqued by the chance to see some of the “forbidden” parts of China. I soon discovered that although the Rally trial run had been approved by the Chinese authorities, no maps were available. Chinese maps of their road system were still considered to be state secrets, and rally planning was at a standstill.
But maps were something to which I had access, and using USAF aeronautical charts, I made up a strip chart of the route and showed it to the rally organizers.
"Chinese maps of their road system were still considered to be state secrets, and rally planning was at a standstill. But maps were something to which I had access..."
These aeronautical charts not only solved their problem but also got me a spot on the organizing committee and a place on the rally’s trial run to Beijing, helping with the navigation. In August of 1982, a team of vehicles pulled away from Hong Kong to test the feasibility of holding a high-speed rally between Hong Kong and Beijing. It included two weeks of in-depth coverage of the center of China, through six of China’s most populous provinces.
During those two weeks, we proved the concept, mapped a preliminary route, and celebrated in Beijing in the Great Hall of the People. The first actual rally took place several years later, and the Hong Kong–Beijing Auto Rally became the longest rally on FIA’s professional rally calendar and a part of the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship series.
The rally was a high-speed test of cars and drivers, with both factory teams and private entrants. There were special stages—high-speed competitive sections in which the competitors raced for best times, hitting speeds of 140 kph or higher while on Chinese public roads. In between were travel stages as the vehicles moved from the end of one special stage to the beginning of another. Overall, about 3,000 miles were covered in less than six days, with 25 special stages for the rally drivers.
Sheila and Jim Reed at the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet—once the residence of the Dalai Lama and one of Buddhism's most sacred sites.The Changing Face of a Superpower
The year-to-year changes in China were striking.
In 1982, the border crossing between Hong Kong and China had been a two-lane road, with border formalities in a small tin shed at the frontier. For the first rally in 1986 at the same site, there were about 40 customs portals for the truck traffic from China into Hong Kong, delivering goods to the port for shipment. By 1994, there were 85 customs portals used for export goods.
In 1982, the road north from Hong Kong had been a two-lane country road. By 1986, it was a four-lane limited-access highway, and in 1994, a six-lane highway with a speed limit of 100 kph.
In 1982, the first night’s stop was at the hotel at Cong Hua, well known for its hot mineral springs. By 1994, the Cong Hua Hotel included an entertainment complex, complete with a disco and a karaoke bar.
There were similar comparisons throughout the route. Guest houses had been replaced by neoned 4- or 5-star hotels. Road traffic of a few 5-ton trucks had been replaced by a flood of container trucks, buses, minivans, Volkswagens, Jeeps, and other vehicles—almost all made in China. One constant was the attractiveness of the countryside; another was the ongoing improvements in the Chinese way of life and standard of living—particularly in the cities. The final rally was the fifteenth, conducted in 2001—by then, the Chinese roads had become too crowded to allow the racing to continue.
Perspectives on the 21st Century
The years based in Hong Kong and traveling in China convinced me of the importance of China to U.S. economic, political, and security interests. Over the four years as an attaché, and subsequently as a private individual, I traveled to every region of the country and visited every province in China.
Along the way, I briefed former President Nixon before some of his post-presidential China travel, advised the Commander of U.S. Pacific Command on Chinese events, and spoke on numerous occasions to professional and private groups on the subject. Through much of that time, I have been able to watch the extraordinary development of Chinese life and society, moving at a pace so far beyond what most of us have experienced that it doesn’t seem possible.
Certainly, there are significant societal and cultural differences between the U.S. and China. At the same time, there are parallels that draw our countries together, and national security reasons that require each to know and respect the other. There is a longer history of friendly relations between our two countries than we may remember. American ships were in ports on China’s coast at the time of the American Revolution. Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, was educated in American schools.
In the 20th Century, the U.S. was the world leader both politically and economically, while China was recovering from decades of division, war, and inner turmoil—more comparable to Japan after WWII than to a typical developing third-world country. There are some who argue convincingly that the U.S. is losing its place as the world’s largest economy, to be replaced by China in the 21st Century, which many are now calling “The China Century.”
Ideas on China’s economic growth weren’t foremost on my mind when our marshal’s vehicle wound up in the middle of the Chinese public toilet on the 4th day of the 1994 rally. We backed out of the debris, repaired the clutch and brakes, taped up the shattered windshield, and continued, getting to our next special stage on time. Later, in the small town of Shijiazhuang, we had the windshield replaced at a local shop, getting back underway within half an hour of our arrival. Try getting THAT kind of service from your local U.S. dealer.
But it was on the return flight to Hong Kong, during the descent over southern China, that I got another insight into what is happening today in Asia. For a moment the clouds parted, and you could see the land below. I calculated that from that altitude, you could see an area perhaps 20 miles on a side—400 square miles. Of that area, easily half was being scraped clean, showing the dark red earth through the cover of trees and older buildings. New factories, new housing, new construction.
In that one look, in that one small part of southern China, there were at least 200 square miles of new factories and new houses being built, just as was also going on all over China—further justifying the 85 customs portals, the six-lane highways, and the extraordinary growth that will shape future political, military, and economic opportunities and perils for the U.S.
It’s going to be an interesting 21st Century.
About the Author
Colonel James Reed is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy’s historic "Forever First" Class of 1959. Throughout a distinguished military career spanning the height of the Cold War, Col. Reed served as a pilot, strategist, and military attaché. Notably, his expertise in Mandarin and East Asian socio-politics led to his deployment in Hong Kong in 1979, where he was deeply involved in early military-to-military diplomacy between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Following his military service, he continued to advise key global leaders, including former President Richard Nixon.
To explore his full military records, class achievements, and deep contributions to Academy heritage, view his Full Biography on the USAFA 59ers Site.
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