Fifty years ago this week, an exhausted and bewildered young journalist arrived in Beijing after a two-day train journey from Hong Kong. Though it was late at night when he finally reached his hotel, Frederick Nossal headed straight for nearby Tiananmen Square to take in the celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Soon afterward, Mr. Nossal cabled home the first report by a Western newspaper reporter based in what was then commonly referred to as Red China. The article that appeared on the front page of The Globe and Mail on Oct. 5, 1959, was infused with the same mixture of awe and anxiety over the scale and direction of the nation-building project undertaken by the Communist Party that can still be found in Western media reports from the country five decades on.
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