Clare Hollingworth Examining a Rifle in Cultural Revolution Peking

The journalist Clare Hollingworth passed away last week at 105 in Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly there were so many obituaries and tributes to her long career. I slipped a small tribute into the Literary Hub focussing on her China experiences – you can read that here. In that tribute I refer to a photograph of the 62-year-old Hollingworth on assignment as the Daily Telegraph’s Peking correspondent around 1973 – she is in the Forbidden City examining a rifle belonging to a group of militiamen; boys really. For me it sums up Hollingworth’s great strength as a reporter in Cultural Revolution China; namely her ability to disarm anyone she was interviewing and show an interest in their lives so as they told her more than they might have intended.