Somewhat paradoxically, we are told by Willy Lo-Lap Lam is his "China After Deng Xiaoping" that "Deng was an ardent admirer of the statecraft of Chiang Ching-kuo, at least until the last phase of the Taiwan President's life, when he began introducing political reform. The two briefly studied together in Moscow. For political reasons, of course, Beijing could not say it was learning from the Taiwan experience."
This interest in Chiang's work on the part of mainlanders perhaps explained the great pains Communist press and party official took to get copies of my interview. Upon arrival at Beijing to cover the visit of U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz a couple of months later, I was met by Xinhua reporters and Ministry of Foreign Affairs representatives who asked specifically for copies.
After several days of covering Shultz, I peeled off for a few private days in Shanghai. Nothing is "private" in Shanghai, I found. I had no sooner unpacked my bags at the Jin Jiang Hotel (scene of the President Richard Nixon-Premier Zhou Enlai signing of the Shanghai Communique in 1973) than I heard a knock on the paneled door.
A man in his 40s brandishing credentials of the Shanghai Municipal Government Department of Foreign Affairs introduced himself and requested "I would like to have a copy of your interview with Taiwan leader Chiang Ching-Kuo."
I understood the interest in the interview and I surmised that the penchant for getting an original copy derived from the great amount of disinformation, reading each others' mail and similar activities by the various factions and interests.
Suffice to say that in 1982, Hong Kong was regarded as a bastion of free of the press in Asia. Taiwan, if regarded at all, was a backwater of the category, only slightly ahead of the communist mainland.
Taiwan journalists of that era looked up to their Hong Kong counterparts as practitioner of a free press just as they disdained journalism on the mainland as controlled in a prison-like atmosphere. So Taiwan's progress from a "journalistic Siberia" in the late 1980s to one of the freest press climates in the region at the turn of the century is a spectacular democratic phenomenon.
Hong Kong, meanwhile, has been going steadily in the opposite direction since the handover-- toward less freedom.
Professor Lo Ven-Hwei of the Faculty of the Department of Journalism, College of Communications, National Chengchi University, in Taipei has written several books and academic papers on the significant parliamentary elections of 1994 - during which the entire media scene underwent a sea change, including people-backed underground cable television networks that virtually took over from mainstream television as the preferred suppliers of news. Loosening of media restrictions plus underground entrepreneurship had given Taiwan an unprecedented turnaround to a free press virtually overnight.
