Category Archives: publishing

by | 4 July 2024 · 12:24 pm

Pinpointing the SARS Outbreak, 2003

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 45-48, 50-51:

I wanted to go back to People’s Hospital [in Beijing], because I couldn’t stop thinking about the “courtyard problem.” By then, it’d become the site of one of the biggest and most difficult battles against SARS. Starting on April 5, about 222 people had been infected at the hospital, including ninety-three hospital staff across nearly half the departments. The emergency ward north of the outpatient wing was the most severely affected; that was where the courtyard was. On April 22, I had seen patients covered in white cloth being rolled out of there. Two days later, when our van passed by once more, the eighty-five-year-old hospital had just announced a full quarantine. Beyond the yellow quarantine tape, three nurses sat on the empty steps, holding their blue nurse’s caps. Their long wet hair was drying in the sun. As they sat in silence, one would occasionally comb her fingers through the hair hanging in front of her chest. Our van parked in front of the hospital for over ten minutes. Xiao Peng pointed his camcorder at them from a distance.

I felt that there must be a correlation between the twenty-nine patients I’d witnessed being transferred without proper protection and the high rate of infection now sweeping the hospital. I wanted to know more about what had happened. No one asked me to work on the story. I wasn’t even sure if I could make it at all, let alone get it on the air, but my team was willing to work with me….

I ended up getting an interview with Zhu Jihong, the director of the emergency ward. He confessed to me that, at the time of transfer, the twenty-nine patients I’d counted were all in fact infected with SARS. In fact, the emergency ward had already been battling known cases since April 5. But rather than report the cases, the real numbers were hidden from the World Health Organization when they came to inspect the hospital. The patients had been transferred to ambulances that drove around Beijing in circles until the inspectors left.

I’d spent a long time convincing Zhu Jihong to accept the interview. I said, “You don’t need to make any judgments or draw any conclusions, just describe what you saw, heard, and felt, that’s all.”

After a long pause on the phone, he said, “The memory is too painful.”

“Of course,” I said, “but pain can be cathartic, consolation for one’s sacrifices.”

Zhu Jihong led me through the emergency ward corridor. He leaned over, undid the heavy chain lock, and pushed the door open. He reached for the wall with his left hand and after some flickering the lights turned on. In the ashen light, the classroom-sized space was filled with blue IV chairs tagged with white labels that read: April 17, Thursday; April 17, Thursday …

The beds were littered with rumpled blankets, some of which had fallen to the ground. Chairs were upturned, four feet in the air, left there by people fleeing for their lives.

This was the courtyard I had been hearing so much about. It was a space wedged between four buildings. With the addition of a roof, it had become an indoor space, sealed off from traffic in the rest of the hospital. They’d used it as the IV room, where all the patients with fevers came to receive their drips. Twenty-seven beds sat shoulder to shoulder with only the space of a fist between them. Every day, almost sixty people had sat tightly together on the beds and among a few chairs. Even during the daytime, the room completely depended on artificial lighting. There was no airflow, no windows, only a ventilation panel connected to the central air conditioning system, which spread the germs across the whole hospital.

The patient files that piled up in a mound on a desk were yellowing with age. I hesitated for a second. Zhu Xuhong said with a dismal smile, “Allow me.” He opened the files, which said pneumonia. He pointed toward a blackboard. Next to the twenty-two names written in white chalk, nineteen read: pneumonia, pneumonia, pneumonia …

“In fact, it was SARS,” he said.

Even the patients had not known. It was like a taboo. No one in the hospital had even called SARS by its name. They’d called it “that thing.” The first patient had come in on April 5. The doctors suspected she was a SARS patient after seeing her chest radiograph. But the government announced that all cases were from outside Beijing. All public hospitals are managed by the government. And according to the standards for diagnosis and treatment in Beijing, the doctors could only diagnose someone who had a history of direct contact with a confirmed infected person.

…

On April 22, Zeng Guang, the chief scientist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention examined this hospital. He said, “When buildings are about to collapse, escaping is the only choice.” Two days later, People’s Hospital quarantined. Zhang Wenkang, the minister of health, was fired, and within one week, the army built the biggest field medical hospital in Beijing. There were 686 SARS cases there, almost one-tenth of all global cases.

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Filed under China, disease, education, publishing

by | 3 July 2024 · 5:12 am

Journalism: Telling Whose Story?

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 4-5:

I never wanted to be a news reporter. Journalism remained a monopoly when I began building my career. For a long time all Chinese people watched the same program, Joint News, on CCTV, which contained countless political meetings and aired every night at seven P.M. For me, all it meant was the start of dinnertime. The only CCTV program I watched was Oriental Horizon. What impressed me was the candid state of people’s lives on screen, full of struggles in a rapidly changing society, conflicting desires that led to inevitable consequences. I watched it as a work of art, not just as news. The slogan of these stories was “Telling the ordinary people’s own story.” After being ignored for a long time, ordinary people in a fast-rising society became protagonists on a national television station.

Chen Meng, a man who had never been trained by any official news school, created a slogan in 1993 to express the goal of China’s journalism reform at the time: “Turning propaganda into communication.” In the beginning, CCTV asked the program to “serve people” by teaching them how to cook. But when Chen Meng became a producer, he said, “If we serve people, we serve their spiritual life.” He put life in a shell. Chen Meng invited me to join CCTV in 2000. Since I was a young girl who hadn’t studied any news textbooks, he asked me to learn the principles of journalism from life: from the pain, joy, struggle, and bloody lessons of people in general and myself in particular.

Fourteen years later, I quit my job, went back to freelancing. I used what I had learned, and used some royalties from the book I’d published (which you’re now holding in your hands) to make a nonprofit documentary about air pollution in China. On February 28, 2015, I put it online. It got over three hundred million views before being removed seven days later. I left China then, and have been living in Europe ever since.

For those fourteen years, working at CCTV gave me the opportunity to travel to different places over a hundred and fifty days a year, to see my country, which was changing dramatically, and understand the trajectory of that change. What I saw showed me that China’s development depends on its ability to free people’s creativity from unnecessary shackles. It can explain the country’s stagnation, and it can also explain the country’s success; it can explain the past, and it will explain the future.

Chen Meng never told me why he chose me until he became seriously ill. The last time we talked in the hospital, he told me that eight years prior he had seen a young girl talking on TV. He didn’t remember what she had said and didn’t check her background, but he thought, “This girl has many flaws, but there is one thing about her I value—she doesn’t follow blindly.”

That was when he called me.

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Filed under China, democracy, economics, nationalism, philosophy, publishing

by | 2 July 2024 · 11:37 am

Journalism in China & Taiwan, 1990s

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 1-4:

My mom bought a radio for me when I was sixteen. I found out I could hear broadcasts from Taiwan. Listening to “enemy radio” had been illegal for a long time. One of my father’s colleagues had been tortured as a spy in the 1960s, when there was hostility between Taiwan and mainland China, for breaking this law. He ended up cutting his own throat with a razor.

The way the hosts spoke surprised me. They didn’t read from a script or talk like official spokespeople. They shared literature, music, plays, and jokes. One time one of them even went out to her balcony and described how beautiful the sunset was. I’d never experienced such a thing in any media before. I learned to make my own tape, telling stories to myself, in my lonely girlhood.

In 1994, while studying at a railway college in Hunan Province, I took one of those tapes to Hunan People’s Broadcasting Station to look for a summer job. I was too naïve to know that there was no possibility for a student like me to work at a state-controlled media network. The state allocated jobs to everyone. My role was decided already, as an accountant working at the 17th Railway Bureau. The head of the station told me to leave. However, after listening to my tape, the radio host Shang Neng offered me a half hour in his program. He was famous enough to be able to fight against his boss’s disapproval. All state-controlled stations needed money to survive after the 1992 economic reforms—when China set the goal of establishing a socialist market system, opening the gate to the outside world—and Shang Neng attracted a lot of commercials for them.

One year later, in 1995, I signed a contract with the radio station by winning an open competition. It was the first time the station had selected staff through an open market and fair competition. Thinking that a contract meant a job that was only temporary, my mother wrote a harsh letter to warn me of what I might lose if I gave up my state-allocated railway job: my house, hukou, social benefits, safety. In short, all she had had to struggle for her entire life. I didn’t write back to her. Living in a society with a long history of collectivism, we rarely talk about our personal feelings at home, and this was especially true after a period of excessive politicization where the idea of individual humanity was seen as “spiritual pollution.” It was hard to tell my mom that, for me, a job was a spiritual human bond. People wrote to me and I read their letters on the radio; it was a human bond. There were long-suppressed voices that wanted to be heard, and I was there. I did nothing but listen, yet the hole in my life was filled by strangers. More than making a living, I was alive.

In 1999, in order to survive, all the stations—radio and television alike—had to produce programs that spoke to people’s needs. New Youth, a program on Hunan TV, invited me to be their host, and my job was to interview young people who brought sharp ideas to different fields. This was during China’s explosive economic growth, and I realized these people had one thing in common: instead of destroying the old, they built the new where creativity was most unfettered. Life itself has to grow, and where there is a gap, there is a way out. I ended up writing their story as well, including the parts that the station cut, to provide a fuller picture for the magazines. The media market was expanding quickly and competitively around 2000, so it had been to my advantage to work freely, and not sign a contract with the TV station. As one of the first generation media freelancers, I got a taste of what it was like to be independent. Like the rock-and-roll star Cui Jian sang, “As long as I have a pen, no one can stop me.”

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by | 15 February 2024 · 4:56 pm

Australia’s “Foundational Orgy” Myth

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 155-157:

Paradoxically that first stormy night ashore for the females, February 6th, has been depicted in some early historical narratives as a drunken orgy. There is little evidence to support this description. There is no doubt that some males welcomed the females ashore, presumably, while the marine guards were sheltering in their tents from the storm. Whether these were convicts, marines or seamen, or some of each, is not known. A gathering took place and little else is reliably recorded.

A gathering took place and little else is reliably recorded. Surgeon Smyth, safe aboard the Lady Penrhyn in the harbour, later wrote about the female convicts on their first stormy night ashore.

…

Since Smyth was on his ship in the harbour, his account must have been second-hand scuttlebutt and is likely to be highly exaggerated. Nevertheless, some modern-day descriptions of this party, based on his diary entry, refer to it as a drunken orgy with convict couples rolling around in Sydney Cove’s red mud. Such accounts are bogus as there is no evidence of such behaviour, and no red mud exists anywhere near the cove. Moreover, the convict men had no access to alcohol. There were drunken sailors aboard Surgeon Smyth’s ship because they had been given extra grog to celebrate the offloading of the convicts. Significantly, no other diarist, except the remotely located Smyth, mentions bad behaviour that night. If anything as licentious as this had happened in the settlement, Ralph Clark would have recorded it. Clark’s diary entry on February 7th, details the storm and the farm animals ‘Kild six Sheep 2 Labms and one Pigg belonging to Major Ross’ but there is no mention of female misdemeanours on that day, or for several days thereafter.

Historian Grace Karskens, writing about the night of February 6th, claims ‘the orgy never happened’ and debunks the orgy myth:

… it turns out that the orgy story dates, not from 1788, but from 1963, when the historian Manning Clark included it as ‘a drunken spree’ fuelled by ‘extra rations of rum’ in his Short History of Australia. After he re-read the sources properly, he quickly recanted. But it was too late, the story was out. …… And with every retelling it just got raunchier. Robert Hughes was the originator of the modern version of the legend, for in The Fatal Shore (1987) he sites the action in the Rocks, with the lightning of a ferocious Sydney storm revealing couples bestially ‘rutting’ in the ‘red clay’ (there is no red clay in Sydney Cove). And in Hughes’s version the sex wasn’t consensual: ‘the women floundered to and fro, draggled as muddy chickens under a pump, pursued by male convicts intent on raping them’.

Karskens points out that the Zoologist Tim Flannery retells the orgy myth in his book The Birth of Sydney and Peter FitzSimons gives it another spin in the Sydney Magazine in 2005. Many histories of Sydney and early colonial Australia routinely include the orgy story. It has even been re-enacted for television as the documentary drama The Floating Brothel, and as a collection of comically shaking tents at the Botanic Gardens in Tony Robertson Explores Australia.

The “foundational orgy” claim has no credibility, and it is absurdly unjust to label women as promiscuous sluts and men as rapists, when there is no written evidence of non-consensual sex. Only one aspect of that stormy night is certain: those who met up were celebrating their first taste of freedom in months and had probably sought out each other’s company. This would have been a natural thing to do. It is demeaning and absurdly high-handed to assume that the convicts were disrespectful of each other, or that they were unaware of social norms.

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by | 14 January 2024 · 5:10 am

World’s Oldest Bookbinding

From “World’s Oldest Book,” by Ilana Herzig, in Archaeology, Jan/Feb 2024:

A 10-by-6-inch piece of papyrus is, researchers now believe, part of the world’s first book. And, like many of the volumes that fill offices, libraries, and homes, it has had many lives. The papyrus fragment, which was unearthed along with hundreds of other pieces of papyrus at the site of El Hibeh in 1902, began as a bound document dating to 260 B.C. that recorded taxation rates for beer and oil scrawled in Greek letters using black ink.

…

The discovery pushes the origins of bookbinding back by centuries. “The oldest book previously known was from the first or second century A.D., so this predates anything by up to 400 years,” Zammit Lupi says. “The book could be indicative of how transactions happened, of how people lived, wrote, and passed information to each other. Most importantly, we learned that the structure of the book, as opposed to a scroll, existed well before we thought.”

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by | 10 January 2024 · 3:09 pm

Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 58-60:

The best impression of the Shahjehanabad of Hamida Sultan — of the city that was destroyed in 1947 – can be found not in photographs or pictures, nor even in the jaded memories of the survivors, but in a slim first novel published to some critical acclaim in 1940.

Although the brilliance of Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali was immediately recognized by both E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, most copies of the book were lost when the warehouse of the Hogarth Press was destroyed during the Blitz. There was no reprint, and the book was overlooked first during the trauma of the Second World War, then in the holocaust of Partition. Only now with the recent publication of a paperback has the book begun to receive the recognition it deserved. For although (until recently) forgotten even in the city it immortalized, Twilight in Delhi is not only a very fine novel, it is also an irreplaceable record of the vanished life and culture of pre-war Delhi. Written only seven years before the catastrophe of 1947, its gloomy tone and pessimistic title were more visionary than Ahmed Ali could ever have imagined.

The novel follows the fortunes of a traditional Muslim family living in a haveli very like Ali Manzil. At the opening of the book a cloud is looming over the house: the patriarch, an old Mughal named Mir Nihal, disapproves of his son courting a low-born girl named Bilqeece. As the love of Ashgar and Bilqeece first grows, blossoms, then decays, the whole dying world of Shahjehanabad is evoked: the pigeon-fliers and the poets, the alchemists and the Sufis, the beggars and the tradesmen.

Beyond Kashmiri Gate the British usurp the mantle of the Mughal emperors, enforcing their authority but rarely deigning to mix with the ordinary Delhi-wallahs. The First World War and the influenza epidemic strike down the young; vultures circle ominously overhead. Yet inside the walls of the havelis and the lattice screens of the zenana, life goes on as it always did. Births follow upon marriages, love affairs decay, middle age gives way to crumbling senility – but all the time the stories and traditions are passed on.

…

Twilight in Delhi survived Partition to represent the life of Old Delhi to a new readership today, but what, I wondered, had happened to its author? My edition of the book gave no clue; and I scanned the bookshops in vain to find other, later works by the same hand. It was a Delhi publisher friend who told me that Ali was in fact still alive, now an old man living in obscurity in Karachi. This only made it more intriguing: why would anyone who so obviously loved Delhi with a passion opt to leave it? And why had he not gone on to write other even better books? Karachi seemed to hold the key to many of the unanswered questions of 1947. Not only did the city contain some 200,000 refugees who had fled from Delhi to Pakistan in the upheavals of that year, it also contained their most distinguished chronicler. The moment had come for me to visit Karachi for myself.

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Filed under Britain, India, language, literature, migration, nationalism, Pakistan, publishing, religion

by | 7 January 2024 · 5:13 am

Hinglish and Hobson-Jobson

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 73-75:

Perhaps it is language, the spoken word, which is the greatest indication of the distance travelled since 1947.

The English spoken by Indians – Hinglish – has of course followed its own idiosyncratic journey since the guardians of its purity returned home. Like American English, likewise emancipated by Britain’s colonial retreat, it has developed its own grammatical rules, its own syntax and its own vocabulary.

One of the great pleasures of our life in India has always been being woken on the dot of 7.30 every morning by Ladoo bearing ‘bed tea’ and the Times of India. The news is inevitably depressing stuff (’400 Killed in Tamil Train Crash‘, ’150 Garrotted by Assam Separatists’ and so on), yet somehow the jaunty Times of India prose always manages to raise the tone from one of grim tragedy. There may have been a train crash, but at least the Chief Minister has air-dashed to the scene. Ten convented (convent-educated) girls may have been gang-raped in the Punjab, but thousands of students have staged a bandh (strike) and a dharna (protest) against such eve-teasing (much nicer than the bland Americanese ‘sexual harassment’). And so what if the protesters were then lathi (truncheon) charged by police jawans (constables)? In the Times of India such miscreants are always charge-sheeted in the end.

…

Perhaps the most striking testament to the sea-change in Indian English in the forty years since Independence lies not in what has survived – and been strangely, wonderfully mutated – but in what has died and completely disappeared. The best guide to such linguistic dodos is Hobson Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases, originally published by John Murray in 1903. The book was written as a guide to those words which had passed from Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian and Arabic into English, and the list is certainly extraordinary: every time you wear pyjamas or a cummerbund; if ever you sit on the veranda of your bungalow reading the pundits in the newspapers or eat a stick of candy; indeed even if you are haunted by ghouls or have your cash stolen by thugs – then you are using a branch of English that could never have developed but for the trading and colonizing activities of the East India Company.

Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of Hobson Jobson is how many of its words and phrases are stone cold dead, now utterly incomprehensible to a modern reader. In 1903 an Englishman could praise a cheroot as ‘being the real cheese’ (from the Hindi chiz, meaning thing) or claim his horse was the ’best goont in Tibet’ (from the Hindi gunth, meaning a pony); and whether he was in the middle of some shikar (sport) relaxing with his friends in their chummery (bachelor quarters) or whoring with his rum-johny (mistress, from the Hindi ramjani, a dancing girl) he might reasonably expect to be understood.

Half of Hobson Jobson is filled with these dead phrases: linguistic relics of a world so distant and strange that it is difficult to believe that these words were still current in our own century. Yet clearly, in 1903, if a Jack (sepoy) did anything wrong he could expect to receive some pretty foul galee (abuse); if he were unlucky his chopper (thatched hut) might fall down in the mangoes (April showers); and if he forgot his goglet (water bottle) on parade he might well have been thrown out of the regiment for good.

To us, the vocabulary of the Raj now seems absurd, distant and comical…. Yet many who actually spoke this language [were] still alive in England [in 2003]. For them, the world of Hobson Jobson is less linguistic archaeology than the stuff of fraying memory.

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by | 19 October 2023 · 8:36 am

New Model Democracy Debates, 1647

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 229-231:

The most startling development … was the appearance around the end of September of new agitators, 16 in all, across five cavalry regiments. On 18 October, two of their number got an audience with Fairfax, where they presented him with a forceful, if rather convoluted, manifesto. Called The Case of the Army Truly Stated, it was probably written – at least in part – by a twenty-five-year-old ex-soldier named John Wildman. Fiercely bright and iron-cast in his convictions, he had the knowing sneer of exactly the kind one would expect of a man with the motto Nil Admirari – ‘Let nothing surprise you’. He was someone perpetually convinced that those in power would turn out to be hypocrites. And to be fair they frequently did.

The Case had been signed by the New Agitators at Guildford a few days earlier. It castigated the grandees and the General Council for their political failures. Power, it claimed, was originally vested in the people and their representatives. The current Parliament should be dissolved within ten months, followed by a general election in which all Englishmen aged twenty-one and over – except Royalists – should have the vote. It also demanded liberty of conscience and drastic reform of the law.

Soon, The Case of the Army was available to buy on London’s streets. This was dangerous stuff, but Fairfax – perhaps against his better judgement – agreed to discuss it at the next General Council, due to sit on the 21st. At that Council, the Case was referred to a committee, expected to produce a stern rebuttal. Instead, it wrote to the New Agitators and asked them ‘in a friendly way’ to attend the next General Council, scheduled for Thursday 28 October. It was to be a monumental decision.

The day before this meeting was due to take place, one of Cromwell’s soldiers, Robert Everard, was at the Army headquarters at Putney. Here he presented yet another document. The leadership were expecting to discuss the Case, but what Everard brought was something completely different. It was a short pamphlet – just a few pages – approved the same day at a meeting between the New Agitators, Wildman and some other civilian radicals.

Its pages contained a strident statement of first principles. Parliament was sovereign – there was no mention of the king or the Lords – but it could not override certain basic rights: freedom of religion, freedom from conscription and equality before the law. These could never be given away by the people: they were inalienable. There should, meanwhile, be biennial Parliaments, inferior in authority only to the electorate itself. Crucially, it suggested that the franchise should be reformed so that constituencies reflected not tax contribution – as in the Heads – but the number of people. It was a document of quite fundamental radicalism: based on the premise that the defeat of the king – and the ‘Norman Yoke’ he represented – had left the people a blank slate on which to scrawl their own, new, rational and equitable laws. Even the document’s name conveyed its democratic character: it was an Agreement of the People, and its approval by the whole population, the authors hoped, would form the basis of a new English democracy.

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by | 30 September 2023 · 10:38 am

Nadia’s Well-timed Escape, 1989

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 225-226:

Nadia Comăneci never showed any intention to take advantage of a trip abroad in order to defect. It would have been too hard for her to be so far away from family and friends. Sometimes, when she returned from a trip, when her brother Adrian would half-jokingly ask why she hadn’t stayed abroad, she would answer that she felt happier at home, in the kitchen, with her pots and pans, at which everybody would laugh. Although she sometimes fell prey to emotion, she was otherwise highly practical. She refused to believe in foreigners, to allow them to inveigle her into projects that seemed unachievable at first sight. She was optimistic by nature, and only acted after making a thorough examination of the situation in which she found herself. In other words, Nadia was not one to daydream. Consequently, it is all the more obvious that it was the absurd restrictions imposed on her after 1985 that caused her to accept the proposal to flee the country, when the opportunity arose, even if it meant placing her life in danger. All the restrictions in her life convinced her that she should abandon caution and do something that was not in her nature, especially since she knew that if she left Romania, she would never see her family again.

The episode of her escape was rightly regarded as spectacular and captured the imagination of the West, as Le Figaro declared on 1 December 1989: ‘Dramas now come to us from Eastern Europe, rather than from Hollywood. In Romania the plots of films are happening in real life. The former champion escaped the country on Wednesday, after she had once been a heroine of the communist system. Real life beats fiction. Many episodes in Nadia’s life surpass the fictional.’

In the days after her escape, as the Western media debated all kinds of outlandish theories, there was uproar in Bucharest, too, not in the press, but in government cabinets, and the fury was the greatest at the headquarters of the secret police. As is often the case of intelligence services, the Department of State Security’s reputation was often exaggerated. The Nadia Comăneci Case is a good example, revealing as it does Securitate incompetence. Incapable of preventing Nadia’s escape and finding out about it only once it had actually happened, the Securitate was caught by surprise, an embarrassing and blameworthy situation for an intelligence service. Nadia Comăneci’s escape even created a genuine crisis within the Securitate, which was exacerbated from outside the country by massive international coverage of the event and inside the country by the fury of Nicolae Ceauşescu, in despair at having lost the gymnast who had been the country’s ‘best advertisement’, as The Independent aptly put it at the time.

But if the Securitate was incapable of preventing it, when and how did the authorities in Bucharest learn the news that Nadia Comăneci had defected? The information came in the next day, 28 November, at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was received by military counterintelligence officers from Department Four of the Securitate. It was not thanks to their own operational capacities, but sooner an accident – or maybe a deliberate act of defiance on the part of the Hungarians – since they obtained the information from other fugitives who had illegally crossed the frontier the day before and been sent back to the Romanian side surprisingly quickly. Alexandru Cinca, Maria Balea and Maria Ezias, the two women being accompanied by their sons, both minors, had escaped across the border on 27 November and at the Kiszombor border post they had met Nadia Comăneci and the other six members of her group the next morning. Maria Ezias, a Romanian citizen of Hungarian ethnicity, was asked by the Hungarian border guards to translate a part of their discussions with Nadia. Then, at around four o’clock in the afternoon, Alexandru Cinca and Maria Balea and her son had been surrendered to the Romanian authorities, while Maria Ezias and her son had been allowed to remain in Hungary.

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by | 28 September 2023 · 9:29 am

Romanian Delegation to LA Olympics

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 222-223:

Nadia Comăneci’s attendance of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, not as a competitor but as a special guest, was painstakingly negotiated by the Romanian authorities with their U.S. counterparts. Peter Ueberroth, the head of the organising committee, negotiated patiently, but accepted most of the Romanians’ demands in order to persuade them to take part, given that it was boycotted by the Communist countries, headed by the U.S.S.R. It was said that one of the conditions was that any sportspeople who attempted to defect would not be allowed to stay on U.S. soil but sent back to Romania. The Securitate was satisfied to note that Ueberroth showed a ‘receptive and favourable attitude’ and ‘in press conferences, official contacts with the Romanian delegation and in other circumstances, Peter Ueberroth expressed positive opinions of the Romanian S.R. During the press conference held for Nadia Comăneci, Peter Ueberroth interrupted to put Nicolae Munteanu, an editor for Radio Free Europe, in his place when he asked tendentious questions about the political conditions for our country’s presence at the Olympics. At the same time, through his intervention, hostile declarations made by Béla Károlyi about the social-political situation in the Romanian S.R. were prevented from being published in the Los Angeles Times daily.’

Nadia Comăneci remembers that she was shocked when she found out that she would be able to travel to the U.S.A.:

I did not think that the 1984 Olympics would involve me. There was no way I would be allowed to travel to the United States when I wasn’t even allowed to go to Europe. But I received a phone call from a government official saying that I would be part of the Romanian delegation. I remember staring at the phone I held in shock because I couldn’t believe the government was actually going to let me get on a plane! I was assigned a ‘chaperone’ for the trip, but I really didn’t care that I was going to be watched. I was travelling to America, and I planned to eat, shop, and meet as many fun people as possible. For a brief moment, I felt almost free.

In the Romanian delegation to the Los Angeles Olympics, among the sportspeople, trainers, judges, medical personnel and reporters, the Securitate had a network of ninety-eight agents: forty-six informers, forty-five officers with operational missions, and seven officers tasked with maintaining official relations. They were co-ordinated by three officers, under the usual cover of being advisers or sports instructors. Some had the mission of keeping Nadia under constant watch. The ‘chaperone’ referred to by Nadia must have been judge and teacher Elena Firea, who had been recruited as an informer as long ago as 1966, and who accompanied her everywhere. The only room into which she did not manage to follow her was the one where Ronald Reagan received her, welcoming her to Los Angeles.

Fo[u]r years later at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Nadia Comăneci was not part of the delegation. The decision was so aberrant that even the Securitate’s informers were surprised by it. On finding out, ‘Monica’ and ‘Cristian’ made inquiries at the N.C.P.E.S., where they were given the disarming answer that it was ‘an order from above’, while Nadia Comăneci herself said, ‘she was expecting it, she would have liked to have gone to Seoul, but “that’s the situation” ’. The Communist régime was not prepared to risk her defection, and from 1985 she was not allowed to travel abroad except to Communist countries.

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