US gives Taiwan option of joining naval drill, risks angering China

BEIJING — A Chinese documentary about reformist leader Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 visit to the United States has triggered a wave of excitement over a scene depicting an attack at a hotel in Texas.

Mr Deng Goes to Washington, which includes interviews with then US President Jimmy Carter, opened last weekend in Beijing. For the first time in China, the documentary depicts an attack on Mr Deng by a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) member, which was not reported then by China’s heavily controlled press, but stops short of calling it an assassination attempt.

Reactions to the incident show the growing sense of the US as a menace and public hunger for previously suppressed incidents in Chinese history.

The documentary promotes a positive vision of engagement with the US, at a time of increasing friction between the two nations over the South China Sea.

Beijing’s propaganda apparatus is increasingly consumed with an ideological campaign against “hostile” foreign forces.

The trip to America was a momentous one for Deng, who had recently consolidated power in China in the wake of the tumultuous decade of political power struggles known as the Cultural Revolution.

He was pushing experiments with market pricing and family farms, against deep resistance from conservatives in the ruling Communist party.

The documentary Nine Days in the Whirlwind is unusually frank about the tensions over Taiwan that accompanied the visit.

“What exactly happened in those nine days? In particular, what dangers did Deng encounter? My job is to bring that to the screen, so people can know those nine heart-stopping days and that reform and opening up didn’t come easy,” said director Fu Hongxing.

But it is the KKK attack, previously reported in the US, that has consumed local media. “A KKK member rushed to the podium where Deng was speaking and pulled a knife out of his sleeve,” said one report, while another newspaper added that “a bag with a gun in it” was thrown at the leader.

Going a step further, the Beijing News described the movie as showing “details of Deng nearly being assassinated during his visit to the US”.

Yet, this was also the view of the Chinese delegation accompanying Deng, who was concerned it might have had the blessing of someone “higher up”, said Mr Victor Gao, who joined the Foreign Ministry a few years later and worked for people who were on the trip in 1979.

In fact, the Chinese leader was approached in a hotel lobby by a white supremacist, who planned to spray him with red paint. The would-be assailant was punched by a member of Deng’s secret service.

The Chinese leader’s attacker in Texas was Louis Beam, a Vietnam veteran and violent member of the Texas chapter of the KKK, who had also organised attacks on Vietnamese immigrants.

Charged with assault, he later became a leading figure among violent neo-Nazi groups.

China’s one-time paramount leader had survived several armed attacks during the Cultural Revolution, while he was in custody of a rival faction of the Communist Party, based on Chinese official histories.

After consolidating power, he was twice attacked by radical Maoists in the 1980s.

The inclusion of the incident in the documentary makes it a part of “official history”, said Mr Gao. “Real history in China is something the government officially reports. THE FINANCIAL TIMES