A pale figure tottered across the single-span Lowu Bridge last week and stepped onto the platform of the Hong Kong border railroad station. No Westerner had seen him since November 1969. No one knew precisely why the Chinese Communists had detained him or where he had been held. As he fainted before welcoming officials and was whisked away to a hospital, no one knew what strange new yarns Francis James, 54, would thread into an already bizarre journalistic career.
James had been a flamboyant and puckish personality in Sydney. He used an old Rolls-Royce with a typewriter mounted in the rear seat as a mobile office. In 1966 he created a stir by going to Hanoi under a false name and interviewing Ho Chi Minh for Oz and for his own publication, Anglican. He clashed with successive Conservative governments in Australia; they considered him too sympathetic to Peking and Hanoi, while he complained of harassment by government intelligence agents.
James left Australia in the spring of 1969 to visit London, traveling through China and the Soviet Union along the way. Upon his arrival, he sold the London Sunday Times a remarkable story; it told of his visit to secret Chinese nuclear and rocket installations in the remote western province of Sinkiang. With unheard-of garrulity, Chinese officials ostensibly had told James that they were concentrating on the production of hydrogen bombs and the development of a missile with a range of 6,000 miles-assuring their second-strike capacity against the U.S.
Publication of the article on June 15, 1969 brought denials from the Chinese and criticism from a number of professional China watchers, who claimed that James's colorful details frequently contradicted known facts. Returning home, James stopped off in Hong Kong and reentered China in October, where he was seen regaling a group of businessmen in a Canton hotel. Unaccountably, he does not seem to have been bothered by Chinese officials until he attempted to leave on Nov. 4. Just before he vanished, he was seen arguing with some Chinese in uniform 250 yards from the border that he finally crossed last week.
James owes his freedom to the budding cordiality between China and the Labor Government of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, an old schoolmate of James's who has been lobbying privately for his release for over a year. Too weak to offer more than cursory details of his imprisonment, James did tell a journalist friend that the Chinese had accused him of spying for Russia. "James signed five or six absurd, fairy-tale confessions," reported the Australian's Gregory Clark, who also characterized James's stay in China as "three years of constant interrogation and solitary confinement."
Whether James had actually penetrated secret Chinese installations or whether he was only punished for saying that he had may never be known for sure. At week's end, though, Australian and British papers were bidding up to $50,000 for his side of the story.