China expert comes home

EMMY award-winning journalist Chito Sta. Romana led the first live telecast from Llasa, Tibet, for ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 2006. The famed Potala Palace, one of the “new seven wonders of the world,” is atop the hill behind him.

“I understand China more than the Philippines.”

That was the confession of Chito Sta. Romana, a 63-year-old Filipino Emmy-award winning journalist who returned home after 39 years in China.

“I’ve been giving talks about China,” Sta. Romana shared when we met up for an interview at in Fort Bonifacio recently. Earlier, he had addressed a forum organized by the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP) about “the most important Asian country now.”

“That is why I am considering teaching and consulting on the side,” added Sta. Romana, who holds a master’s degree in International Relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, Massachusetts. “But right now, I would just like to get to know the country [the Philippines] more.”

When asked to recount his China experience, Sta. Romana, the former Beijing bureau chief for ABC News, paused a while.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” Sta. Romana began. “It was supposed to be a three-week visit to China. I led the Philippine youth delegation of student leaders—15 of them—invited by the Chinese People’s Friendship Association in 1971.”

Stranded activists

But history would extend Sta. Romana’s three week tour to over three decades. While touring China, then president Ferdinand Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus following the Plaza Miranda bombing. Student leaders and dissident leaders were arrested. A year later martial law was declared throughout the Philippines.

“I was 23 years old,” he recalled.

Of the 15 students in the delegation, Sta. Romana and at least four other student activists in the group feared arrest. In the group were Ericson Baculinao, then president of the activist University of the Philippines Student Council, and Jaime Florcruz, of the Philippine College of Commerce (now PUP) and head of the League of Editors for a Democratic Society. Also associated with radical student groups were delegates Rey Tiquia and Grace Punongbayan.

The five of them decided to stay in China. Some of the others returned to Manila after three months or so.

“While I was away from the country, the authorities arrested my identical twin brother who lived in the house,” recalled Sta. Romana.

Sta. Romana said he thought martial law would not last long.

“Our youth delegation was invited by the Chinese People’s Friendship Association, so this group took care of us. We initially stayed in different guesthouses. We then moved to the university dormitories when we were studying, and to apartments provided by our work units when we were working,” Sta. Romana related.

Mandarin and media

He studied Mandarin for five to six years in Beijing. He also did editing work as a translation editor for a Chinese publishing house. He was even with the Washington Post for three years, part-time.

He eventually got a job as a reporter and producer for ABC News. Sta. Romana reported on major stories such as the Tiananmen protests in 1989, the emergence of China as a global economic power, and the Beijing Olympics in 2008. He has worked together with ABC anchors such as Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer. His team won an Emmy award in the News and Documentary category in 2000, and earned two other Emmy nominations in 2001 and 2006.

Life and love in Mao’s time

“I met my wife in China,” he shared. “She is a Filipino-Chinese who was active in the Association for Philippines-China Understanding (APCU) and later decided to work in China, where she initially worked as an English-language teacher.”

Sta. Romana retired in November 2010 after 21 years with ABC News. His wife, Nancy, returned with him.

His two sons, however, remain abroad. His eldest son, Norman, is a software engineer in Shanghai, and his youngest son, Christopher, is a sophomore studying at the State University of New York.

“Life in China was a different world. They were quite poor with very few cars. It was a bicycle city,” he recalled. “It wasn’t easy.”

“On the surface, everything was honky dory… But there were things happening,” he mused.  “Mao Tse Tung’s period was very secretive, less open, and very concerned about security.”

“I was with a small band of (Pinoy) brothers. And we were looking for people our age. But the universities were closed. Students were out in the countryside receiving their education from the peasants. It was Mao’s view of education back then.”

Learning from the masses

The idea was to combine study and labor. For Sta. Romana it meant pulling weeds inside the campus of the Beijing Language Institute (now known as the Beijing University of Language and Culture) where he studied Mandarin.

“I pulled grass and weeds inside the campus… about once or twice a week, for two or three hours a stretch.”

Also part of his education was joining the Chinese peasants in harvesting wheat in the suburbs of Beijing,” he said.

“I also recall a day spent working together with Chinese workers in a Beijing factory. At that time, all foreign students were involved in these activities. There were Africans, North Koreans, and Albanians studying Mandarin.”

High heels and lipstick

“The Iranians even had lipstick and high heels on while harvesting. It was a weird site,” Sta. Romana laughed.

“We also stayed in a state farm in Southern China’s Hunan province for several months in 1972. We participated in the socialist construction” (the term used then) and joined in farming activities in the morning (plowing, planting, harvesting rice), then studying basic Chinese in the afternoon,” he said.

“We studied intensive Mandarin in the university when it became clear we would stay for an extended period… and our own lawyers (the late Jose Diokno et al.) were themselves placed under arrest,” he disclosed.

Asked about what he liked most about China, Sta. Romana quipped: “That I was away from martial law.”

Winter and family blues

Sta. Romana again paused when asked about what he missed most about the Philippines. “My family,” he said, adding “it was harder on them than on me.”

“Winter was difficult,” he shared, “And there was always this feeling of uncertainty.”

On digital communications, Sta. Romana was quick to comment: “I wish I had that [internet] when I was young. It was tough. I was so hungry for news, for knowledge.”

After the people power revolution in 1986 that booted out the dictator Marcos, Sta. Romana and his Filipino friends finally were able to make regular visits home.

“I never expected the way it [people power] turned out. But at least, democracy was restored,” he observed.

“Now that I have retired and returned to the Philippines, only Florcruz and Baculinao, both also working with international news networks, are still in China,” he said.

Get to know the world

So what’s his take on Philippine-China relations?

The Spratly Islands conflicts  is “long and complicated,” he said.  “It is difficult to budge when it comes to national sovereignty.  Especially when the whole world is looking.”

“But Taiwan is not a problem,” he adds. “We have good relations. The takeover of Taiwan is a last resort. It was just a convoluted international issue. The Chinese are more cautious because they do not want to be portrayed as an international outlaw.”

“It is up to us to defend our national interest,” he stated, but added: “If we are willing to sell anything, China will buy it.”

Sta. Romana thinks the [Aquino’s] anticorruption campaign is welcome development, “a step forward.”

“Corruption is also a big problem in China,” he said.

His advise to young students: “English is an advantage. But learn a new language… Get to know yourself and the world.”