Chaff is loaded onto a cart manned by Globe correspondent Ross Munro, who volunteered, along with his wife, to work in a commune, near Peking (now known as Beijing), during the harvest in August, 1976.The Globe and Mail
Ross H. Munro had the mild-mannered look of a stereotypical high-school teacher and a gap-toothed resemblance to British film comedian Terry-Thomas, both of which masked a journalist’s fearless sense of adventure and exemplary, analytical curiosity.
As The Globe and Mail’s seventh staff correspondent in China in the mid-1970s, he found himself more than once on the knuckle-rapping end of rebukes from Chinese government authorities for his reporting and was told eventually that his visa to work in the country would not be renewed (a straw-dog reprimand because Mr. Munro’s replacement in China, dance critic John Fraser, had already been dispatched from Canada in 1977 by Globe editors).
He was frequently fun to read and almost always instructive, such as when he and his wife, Julie Munro (whom he later divorced), sought and received permission to go to a commune (Huang Tu Kang, meaning “Yellow Soil Dune”). There they joined a peasant work gang harvesting winter wheat in Beijing’s southern rural suburbs.
Mr. Munro in Tiananmen Square in June, 1975.The Globe and Mail
“When we arrived at the threshing ground, I soon realized it was going to be difficult to convince the peasants that I was willing and able to work hard,” Mr. Munro wrote. His pride, he said, was “slightly hurt” when he was assigned to a team of mostly women. “A few hours later I would concede that they were probably capable of much more onerous physical labour than me.” That was when Mr. Munro found himself profusely perspiring.
After describing his labours in detail and the inefficiencies of the work tools he had been given, Mr. Munro shifted his narrative to what he called “a Marxist-Leninist prism through which to view reality,” quoting Chairman Mao Zedong’s thoughts on physical labour and why he sent millions of high-school graduates to the countryside to help transform rural life.
“It is Chairman Mao’s hope,” wrote Mr. Munro primly, “that young people with a basic grasp of logic and the scientific method will help jolt the peasants of China out of their traditional work habits. I had read about this, in the abstract, countless times. But it was only when I felt a mild, but undeniable, ache in my back muscles that I really understood it.”
Ross H. Munro (his byline included his middle initial to avoid confusion with the celebrated Canadian Press Second World War correspondent Ross Munro) died Sept. 1 in New Orleans, at the age of 84. He was predeceased by his son, Paradon, and leaves his brothers, Ian and Garth, in Vancouver, as well as two nieces and a nephew.
Ross Howard Munro was born in Vancouver on June 23, 1941, to Margaret Munro (née Barnes) and Alastair Munro. He received a degree in political science from the University of British Columbia and later did graduate studies at California’s Stanford University.
He was hired by The Globe and Mail, initially as an education reporter, then as Ontario legislative bureau chief, then posted to The Globe’s bureau in Washington. In the summer of 1975, at age 34, he took over The Globe’s bureau in Beijing (then known as Peking).
Mr. Munro in October, 1977.The Globe and Mail
He became the first Globe correspondent to visit Inner Mongolia, where he wrote about how to determine the age of yurt construction by pastureland herdsmen – he examined the state of the earth around the yurts and concluded they had been put in place more recently than when the herdsman told him they were constructed. He also explored on his own what brought about the destruction of Inner Mongolia’s Tibetan-like lamasery religion – “[I]t was obvious that [Mao’s] Cultural Revolution had killed it.”
He meticulously recorded his efforts to make conversation with ordinary Chinese on the street, often not successful and interfered with by minor Chinese officials.
He declared in his writing that food was “the Chinese revolution’s unarguable triumph,” and described in detail the ingredients, including “a hoard of vegetables,” that he saw carted through covered market stalls with plates of beans, noodles and cubes of red meat. Customers would select the food combinations they wanted, which the stall owners then would toss into a frying pan: “China’s equivalent of a TV dinner.”
He described the delicacy of roasted duck heads – with beaks and eyes still intact – that old people gathered to companionably pick clean in the evenings.
After eating at a restaurant well known for serving dog meat, Mr. Munro asked his wife to write out a recipe for one of the dishes they ate, a version of Kung Pao chicken, a famous Sichuan stir fry dish with chilies and peanuts. The recipe was published in The Washington Post. The Globe declined to print it.
He wrote with a camera eye focused on what he saw – describing in detail the differences in elegant calligraphy on public political posters that he saw in Tiananmen Square and the “aristocratic jaws and cheekbones that betray the survivors and descendants of [Beijing’s] centuries-old upper class of bureaucrats, scholars and artists.”
He reported in detail on the 1976 deaths of Mao and Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, and the first contemporary student unrest and protests in Tiananmen Square.
Mr. Munro photographed primary-school students in China practising their letters in October, 1977.Ross Munro/The Globe and Mail
That year, he also wrote a celebrated (outside China, at any rate) series of articles on Chinese human rights that was widely republished on the front pages of major North American and European newspapers, filled with explicit examples from his own contacts and observations, as well as material from the Chinese press, briefings and interviews, wall posters and official court notices.
Mr. Munro reported that China, in many ways, was the most tightly controlled nation on Earth and that rule under the Chinese Communist Party combined the conformist and anti-individualist tradition of the Chinese past with the techniques and organization of modern totalitarianism.
He wrote that everyone in China was affiliated to a “unit” based on the workplace, often an integrated living and working community, and that people had little freedom to choose – or leave – their unit. They could travel in China only with official permission and could not choose to leave their jobs for another job. Mr. Munro wrote that Chinese people were being executed for their political beliefs and that China lacked a written code of law or any concept of an independent judiciary. According to Mr. Munro’s reporting, at least 30 million Chinese suffered open and systematic discrimination – including economic deprivation and social and political isolation – because of their “bad class backgrounds.”
After the massacre: Remembering Tiananmen Square, 30 years later
Shortly after Mr. Munro’s human-rights series was published, The Globe received a note from the Chinese embassy declaring that “due to obvious reasons,” his visa would not be renewed.
Asked for comment on the Chinese government’s decision, Mr. Munro declared that Communist countries never expel correspondents for telling lies.
China-based journalists – including those from The Globe – have reported that government controls over everyday life have become more relaxed since Mr. Munro’s time in the country.
The relationship between the Chinese government and its people can be said to have mellowed over the years, although elements of what Mr. Munro observed remain in place.
After turning over The Globe’s Beijing bureau to fellow correspondent John Fraser at Christmastime in 1977, Mr. Munro became Time magazine’s bureau chief in Hong Kong, New Delhi and Bangkok.
Mr. Munro photographed a rally in Peking in 1976 that denounced four radicals.Ross Munro/The Globe and Mail
Over the years, he interviewed an extensive list of political leaders and world personalities, including Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi.
In all, he spent 12 years living in and reporting from across Asia.
With the late Richard Bernstein of The New York Times, he co-authored the 1997 book The Coming Conflict with China, which forecast rising friction between the two global giants.
He became head of the Asia program with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and vice-president and director of Asian Studies at Washington’s Center for National Security Studies.
For Mr. Munro, it was a point of honour to communicate clearly, without jargon. He was adventurous with food and wine, and any kind of new music. He loved the students he came to know.
Globe and Mail senior news researcher Rick Cash contributed to this report.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.