‘A political hostage’: the British journalist detained in China for 27 months in reprisal for Hong Kong’s jailing of Chinese counterpart during 1967 riots

Fifty years ago this month Reuters reporter Anthony Grey was freed from house arrest in Beijing, which he survived by doing yoga and reading Mao Zedong books

Despite his ordeal, which included a brutal assault by Red Guards, he felt no bitterness towards the Chinese and in 1988 was declared ‘an old friend of China’

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The Post Herald report dated October 5, 1969, regarding the release of Anthony Grey, a British journalist for Reuters, who was imprisoned by the Chinese government for 27 months in China from 1967 to 1969.

Published: 7:45am, 15 Oct 2019Updated: 8:32pm, 15 Oct 2019

Imprisoned in the filthy boarded-up cellar of his house in Beijing and held in solitary confinement by the Chinese government for 27 months, British journalist Anthony Grey made international headlines when he was released 50 years ago this month.

“Peking Frees Grey,” was the front-page splash in the South China Sunday Post-Herald on October 5, 1969. The report linked his long detention to civil unrest and violence in Hong Kong as the so-called leftist riots of 1967 reduced much of the city to a battle zone and claimed the lives of 51 people.

“I was the first modern international hostage of this era,” Grey later told reporters. While apparent hostage-taking and detention of foreign journalists on specious charges to exert diplomatic pressure now sounds like nothing out of the ordinary, five decades ago, it was almost unheard of.

He kept a secret diary, written in shorthand, in detention, during which he suffered what he described as “vindictive and intentionally humiliating treatment”. It formed the nucleus of his book, Hostage in Peking, published in 1970.

SCMP cutting of a report on journalist Anthony Grey receiving an OBE. Photo: SCMP

When the Reuters news agency assigned Grey to be its man in Beijing in March 1967, he was 28 years old and one of only four Western journalists working in the city. Like most Westerners going to the Chinese capital, he travelled via Hong Kong.