An Instinct for the Orient

Reporter Robert S. Elegant's job gives him eyestrain. It is also loaded, he says, with "frustrations" and "annoyances." It lacks "both glamour and definition." Worst of all, he never gets the chance for firsthand observation of the very. place he is covering. No matter.

Elegant would not trade his particular job for any other in journalism. As the Los Angeles Times's man in Hong Kong, he is one of the best of that hardy breed of second-hand news gatherers, the China watchers.

Though Red China will not permit him or any other U.S. reporter to enter the country, Elegant, at 38, has refined his skills to such an extent that he "sees" as much or more of China than the few journalists who get into the country on carefully conducted tours. He is as well versed in the Chinese language as he is in Chinese history. Without the aid of an interpreter, he wades through the vast abundance of official news emanating from China, and he monitors Chinese radio broadcasts. He collects letters from Red China's citizens to friends or relatives outside the country, culls much valuable information from their mundane accounts of everyday life. Above all, he has developed an instinct for what is really going on behind the Bamboo Curtain.

Dialectical Spirituality. Elegant was the first journalist to predict the present purges and to suggest that Defense Minister Lin Piao, a veteran of the Long March, was slated to succeed Mao Tse-tung. He was the first U.S. reporter to file a story on the setting up of the Chinese communes in 1958, the exodus of Russian technicians from China in 1960. More important than such scoops is his refusal to report merely surface events; invariably, he probes for some larger meaning. The latest attempt to restore ideological purity to the Chinese Communist Party, he writes, is essentially a "spiritual" movement. By condemning the growth of materialism and calling for the creation of a new kind of human being, the Chinese have replaced dialectical materialism with "dialectical spirituality." "Having cast out the devils of revisionism and slain the monsters of capitalism, the enormous revival meeting which is China today is reaching toward new exaltation."

Elegant expresses so many opinions so forthrightly on the subject of China that his exasperated friends often refer to him as "Mr. Arrogant." Yet Elegant has reason to be sure of himself. Born in The Bronx, he learned the habits of scholarship early from his father, who was a lawyer. As he puts it, "I was a newspaperman who took the trouble to prepare himself for his assignment." Preparation began in his senior year at the University of Pennsylvania when he decided to learn a foreign language. He settled on Chinese because the class met at the respectable hour of 4 p.m. Soon he was engrossed in the Orient. On graduating at 18, he joined the Army, studied and taught Japanese at the Army language school in Monterey, Calif. After his discharge, he attended Columbia University, where he turned his master's thesis into a book, China's Red Masters, which is still must reading among Sinologists.

Elegant set out for Asia in 1951, determined to become a foreign correspondent. "I was feeling: Boy, this is what I have been waiting for," he recalls. "I even had a trench coat. Nothing happened, of course, but, man, the feeling!" One thing did happen: he met an Australian girl named Moira Brady, whom he later married. In 1953, I.N.S. hired him to cover the Korean War, where he began his practice of scoring newsbeats. After joining Newsweek in 1956, he moved to its Bonn bureau, where he soon got bored and told the magazine it was running too much news from Germany. He took time off to write a novel about intrigue in Viet Nam, A Kind of Treason; that finished, he started another book set in central Asia in 100 B.C., for which, he says, "I've invented entire civilizations."

Hallucinatory Triumph. In 1965 Elegant returned to action in Asia as a Los Angeles Times staffer. Interested in broadening its foreign coverage, the Times decided that Elegant was just the man for the sort of careful, informed coverage it was seeking. Given plenty of space by the paper, Elegant brings a richness of analysis to his work that is rare in daily journalism. A sympathetic but unsentimental observer of Communist China, he stresses the fact that its rulers are not so very different from those of past regimes. Most of them, contends Elegant, have aspired to create a rigorously controlled Utopia in China, whatever the cost. Mao, he writes, is a "man drunk with the foretaste of Utopia." In his own mind, Mao "regularly triumphs over objective reality." In place of the lessons of the West and even of their own experience, the Communists have "substituted the hallucinatory thought of Mao Tse-tung, which insists that all things are possible to mass application of human labor guided by the infallible wisdom of the Communist Party of China."

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