Witness Seminar: The Role and Functions of the British Embassy in Beijing

Witness Seminar: The Role and Functions of the British Embassy in Beijing

gov.uk/fco

The Role and Functions of the British Embassy in Beijing

Thursday, 7 June 2012, 13.30-17.00 India Office Council Chamber, Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Edited by M.D. Kandiah ICBH, King’s College London Additional editing assistance: Rebecca Korbet Transcribed by: Stephen Farrell

Contents

Introduction

2

Brief chronology

4

Panel 1: From the Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen Square

15

Chair: Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, KT, GCMG, PhD, FRSE: former Governor of Hong Kong, 1987-92.

Witnesses: Lord Hurd of Westwell, CH, CBE, PC: Peking, 1954-56; Sir John Boyd, KCMG: First Secretary, Peking, 1973-75; Roger Garside: First Secretary, Peking, 1976-79; Timothy George, CMG: Counsellor and Head of Chancery, 1978-80.

Panel 2: The rise of China as an economic superpower and its implications

39

Chair: Dr Judith Rowbotham: Nottingham Trent University.

Witnesses: Sir William Ehrman, KCMG: Ambassador, 2006-10; Sir Christopher Hum, KCMG: Ambassador, 2002-05; David Coates: Political Counsellor, 19891992; Nigel Cox: Minister, 2000-02.

Appendix I Additional note by Timothy George, 12 June 2012.

1

62

Introduction

This witness seminar examined the role and functions of the UK Embassy in Beijing, principally from the testimonies and perspectives those who served there.

It was the second in a series of six witness seminar sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and part of the Witness Seminar Programme of the Institute of Contemporary British History (ICBH), King’s College London. The first focused on the British High Commission in New Delhi and was held on 17 November 2011.

Over the past 26 years the ICBH Witness Seminar Programme has conducted nearly 100 witness seminars on a variety of subjects: two in particular have related to the functions of UK Embassies: in Washington (held in 1997)1 and in Moscow (held in 1999).2 Both of these witness seminars were chaired by Lord Wright of Richmond and both have been published.

A recent volume (2009) on The Washington Embassy, edited by Michael Hopkins, Saul Kelly and John Young, demonstrated precisely why it was necessary to know more about how UK Embassies operate and have suggested why Embassies will continue to be important for those who study diplomacy. The volume, as the introduction suggested, offered ‘valuable insights into change and continuity in British diplomatic practice’ over the period; it also showed ‘how the balance of attention … varied according to the pressure of circumstances, the current priorities of the government in London and the preferences of individual ambassadors’; and, importantly, confirmed ‘the pivotal role’ played by the Embassy and the Ambassadors in maintaining healthy bilateral relations.

However, the editors have also pointed out that ‘there are real difficulties in studying the broad work of the embassy’ – how it interacted with local staff; precisely how it performed day-to-day necessary social tasks; and so forth.3 The significance of history and the importance of gathering and utilising oral history interviews have also been identified in the report of the Foreign Affairs Committee, The Role of the FCO in UK Government (published 29 April 2011). In oral evidence Foreign Secretary William Hague stated: ‘history is vitally important in knowledge and practice of foreign policy’. He further stated, ‘One of the things that I have asked to be worked up is a better approach to how we use the alumni of the Foreign Office, [and] … continue to connect them more systematically to the Foreign Office.’ He went on to say: ‘these people who are really at the peak of their knowledge of the world, with immense diplomatic experience, then walk out of the door, never to be seen again in the Foreign Office.’

1

Gillian Staerck (ed), ‘The Role of the British Embassy in Washington: Witness Seminar’, Contemporary British History, Vol.12 No. 3 (1998), pp. 115-38.

2 Gillian Staerck (ed), ‘The Role of HM Embassy in Moscow: Witness Seminar’, Contemporary British History, Vol.14 No.3 (2001), pp. 149-61.

3 Michael F. Hopkins, Saul Kelly and John W. Young, The Washington Embassy: British Ambassadors to the United States, 1939-77 (Palgrave, 2009), p. 2.

2

There have been historical studies of British Embassy in Beijing. J.L. CranmerByng’s The Old British Legation at Peking, 1860-1959,4 is an invaluable resource detailing a century of British representation in the city. More recently, J. Hoare and Lord Hurd’s, Embassies in the East: The Story of the British and their Embassies in China, Japan and Korea from 1859 to the present,5 took the story to the end of the twentieth century.

The British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, based at the Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, contains a number of important interviews of those who served at the Embassy. To name just four: Sir Percy Craddock; Sir Nicholas Fenn, Sir Robin Maclaren and Lord Wilson of Tillyorne.6 However, testimony relating to the more recent period has been absent and needed to be collected. For these reasons, it was important to gather the memories of those FCO alumni who have worked at the Beijing Embassy over a period that has seen China growing in importance as a power on the international stage and as a trading partner.

The seminar was divided chronologically into two panels. The first focused on the period until the events of Tiananmen Square; the second examined the period from 1990 onwards, which has seen China emerging as a major global power.

There was an audience consisting of FCO alumni and current staff, academics and students of foreign policy. All participants were told that the witness seminar would be recorded, edited, transcribed and an agreed version published.

The transcript of the witness seminar is not meant to be a verbatim account of the discussion and it has been edited for sense by the participant and the editor. If participants have indicated that they wished to add corrections, these have been indicated and are found in the footnotes. Footnotes have also been provided to identify individuals, events and other information that might need clarification for the reader.

Dr M.D. Kandiah Director, Witness Seminar Programme Institute of Contemporary British History King’s College London

4

J.L. Cranmer-Byng, The Old British Legation at Peking, 1860-1959 (Royal Asiatic Society, 1962).

J. Hoare and Lord Hurd of Westwell, Embassies in the East: The Story of the British and their Embassies in China, Japan and Korea from 1859 to the present (Routledge, 1999).

6 http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/BDOHP/ 5

3

Brief Chronology7

NOTE: The following was intended to help refresh participants’ memories by covering significant events and milestones in the history of the People’s Republic of China, focusing more closely after 1949, with reference, where relevant, to the UK and to significant world events.

1841

Hong Kong occupied by British.

1842

Hong Kong ceded to Britain under Treaty of Nanking (an ‘Unequal Treaty’).

1856-60

Second Anglo-Chinese war.

1860

Peking8 occupied by British and French; Kowloon Peninsular ceded to Britain under first Convention of Peking;

1898

New Territories leased to Britain for 99 years under second Convention of Peking.

1898-1901

Boxer Rebellion.

1920

Communist Party of China formed.

1926

Civil war began in China between the Nationalist Party of China (Kuomintang), which was the governing party of the Republic of China, and the Communist Party of China.

1930

British withdrew from the Yellow River Port of Weihaiwei.9 Hong Kong Governor Sir Cecil Clementi suggested that the UK government should also

7

Prepared by M.D. Kandiah from the following internet and published sources: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13017882 [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]; http://www.cap.lmu.de/download/2007/2007_eu-china_eisel.pdf - Reinhard Eisel, Britain’s China policy from 1949 to 2005: From an Idealistic Approach to Return to a Focus on the Economic Factor (EU-China European Studies Centres Programme, 2007); http://www.indiana.edu/~e232/Time2.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]; http://www.zakkeith.com/articles,blogs,forums/chinese-in-britain-history-timeline.htm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]; http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~amduckwo/janice/Timeline1.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]; J.E. Hoare and Lord Hurd, Embassies in the East: The Stories of British Embassies in China, Japan and Korea from 1859 to the present (Routledge, 1999); http://www.cbbc.org/who_we_are/about_us/history [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]; Backgrounder: China and the United Kingdom Xinhuanet 2003-07-16 00:18, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2003-07/16/content_977034.htm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013], http://www.sacu.org/histchart.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]; Luo Weihong, Christianity in China (Chinese Intercontinental Press, 2004). Where additional internet resources relating to events are known to be available, they have been indicated in footnotes.

8 The spelling Peking was usual until around 1980, when the PRC Government began to insist on the use of Beijing and the former spelling has now fallen into desuetude when referring to the Chinese capital.

9 http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=moore – facsimile of Treaty [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

4

consider re-negotiating the 99-year lease on the New Territories, transforming it into a permanent cession: this was rejected in London.

1937-45

Sino-Japanese War.

1941

Fall of Hong Kong: Japanese occupation.

1943

Teheran Conference: Churchill stated the UK’s determination that, after the defeat of Germany and Japan, ‘nothing would be taken away from Britain without a war’— specially ... Hong Kong’.10

1945

Hong Kong restored to the British; End of Second World War.

1946

British Embassy’s annual report: Ambassador Ralph Stevenson indicated that Hong Kong was the only major potential source of friction between Britain and the Republic of China led by Chiang Kai-shek.11

1949

The People’s Liberation Army attacked HMS Amethyst travelling to the British Embassy in Nanjing (20 April).

Founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)12 under Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China (1 October).

Colonial Office estimated British capital in Hong Kong to be circa £156m, and believed that it would be act as a bulwark against the future dominance of Japanese commerce in the Far East. Therefore Hong Kong’s loss would prove to be ‘a serious blow’ to the British economy.13

1950

UK recognised the PRC as the government of China and posted a chargé d’affaires ad interim in Peking—the first major Western country to do so (6 January).14 The Group of 48 (subsequently China-Britain Business Council) established

by British companies to promote trade.

Korean War: UK was part of a United Nations force defending South Korea.

China intervened on the side of North Korea.

Tibet incorporated into PRC. Battle of Pakchon: Commonwealth Forces in Korea defended Hill 282 against North Korean and Chinese forces.

Battle of Chosin Reservoir: Commonwealth Forces defeated.

1951

The Battle of Imjin River: Commonwealth Forced defeated.

The Battle of Kapyong: Commonwealth forces hold back Chinese forces.

The First Battle of the Hook: Commonwealth forces captured Hill 317 from Chinese.

10

Foreign Relations of the United States, The Conferences at Cairo and Teheran, p 554 http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS1943CairoTehran [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] 11 http://www.cui-zy.cn/Recommended/Landissue/HKJamesTang1945.pdf [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] 12 Throughout this chronology, PRC and China will be used interchangeably, indicating the same. The Republic of China will be referred to as Taiwan.

13 TNA PRO CAB 129/35 CP(49)120.

14 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/china-until-1950.htm#Recognition%20of%20 Communist%20China [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] – list of items at The National Archives of the UK related to the recognition of PRC.

5

1951 Census recorded Britain’s Chinese population 12,523; nearly 100 Chinese restaurants operated in Britain 1953

The Second Battle of the Hook: Commonwealth forces successfully defended Yong Dong.

The PRC stated that British activities during and after the Korean War ‘revealed its determination to be the enemy of China.’

1954

Geneva talks: PRC agreed to station a chargé d’affaires in London; a British office reopened in Shanghai. British businessmen stranded in mainland China since 1951 were granted exit visas (17 June).

The Sino-British Trade Committee established: a semi-official trade body (later merged with the Group of 48).15 Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai invited Labour Party delegation to visit.

Delegation led by former Prime Minister and Labour leader Clement Attlee.

1954-55

Taiwan Straits Crisis: UK attempted to mediate between USA and PRC.16

1958

‘Great Leap Forward’ launched by Chairman Mao.

1959

Rebellion in Tibet suppressed by Chinese forces.

1960-89

Sino-Soviet split.

1961

The UK voted in the General Assembly of the United Nations in favour of PRC membership.

1961 Census indicated UK population of ethnic Chinese origin was 38,750.

1962

Sino-India border conflict.

1964

Test of China’s first nuclear bomb (16 October).

1966-76

‘Cultural Revolution’ initiated by Chairman Mao.

1967

Hong Kong Riots (June-August).

Following arrest of Communist agents in Hong Kong, PRC’s Red Guard stormed the British Embassy in Peking (23 August).17 PRC authorities attempted to close British representation in Shanghai.

Reuters correspondent, Anthony Grey, detained by the PRC authorities (until 1969) and engineer George Watt.18 Armed Chinese diplomats attacked police guarding the PRC Legation in London. (29 August)

15

http://www.cbbc.org/who_we_are/about_us/history [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]. http://www.cui-zy.cn/Recommended/Landissue/HKJamesTang1945.pdf, p.333 [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

17 TNA FCO 78/13. UK Embassy, Peking: burning of British Legation during Cultural Revolution (1967 Jan 011968 Dec 31).

18 See Anthony Grey, Hostage in Peking (Michael Joseph, 1970) and George Watt, China ‘Spy’ (Johnson, 1972).

16

6

1971

Census indicated that UK’s population of Chinese origin was 96,030. Chinese restaurants in Britain had become commonplace: of the 4,000 Chinese-owned businesses, approximately 1,400 were restaurants.

1972

US President Richard Nixon visited PRC. Joint UK-China Communiqué on the Agreement of the Exchange of Ambassadors (13 March).19 Sino-British bilateral trade registered around US$300 million.20

1974

Prime Minister Edward Heath visited PRC. Subsequently the UK received a gift of pandas: Chia-Chia and Ching-Ching, who were housed in London Zoo.21

1976

The death of Mao.

1977

Emergence of Deng Xiaoping as leader of PRC and the beginnings of economic reforms.

Leader of the Opposition Conservative Party Margaret Thatcher visited China (April).

1978

Agreement on Scientific and Technological Co-operation between the two governments signed (November).

Chief of the Defence Staff Nell Cameron visited PRC (April).

1979

Governor of Hong Kong Murray MacLehose (plus a deputation) visited PRC to discuss the future of Hong Kong (March): New Territories lease would end in 1997 and it was believed that post-1982, investment in New Territories property would become impossible.22 Premier Hua Guofeng visited UK (October).

Agreement on Economic Co-operation between PRC and UK Governments.

Agreement between PRC and UK Governments relating to Civil Air Transport.

Agreement on Educational and Cultural Co-operation between PRC and UK Governments.

Cancellation of sale of Harrier jump-jets following PRC invasion of Vietnam.23 Formal diplomatic relations established between PRC and USA. Imposition of one-child policy in China in effort to curb population growth.

1981

Census figures indicated 154,363 ethnic Chinese origin were living in the UK, with some 30,000 children in schools, of whom75 per cent were British born.

1982

Edward Heath sent as UK Special Envoy to Beijing to discuss the future of Hong Kong.

19

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1972/mar/13/china-exchange-of-ambassadors http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/681594/Sino-UK-trade-set-to-grow-despite-current-economicgloom.aspx 21 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8251089/A-history-of-Panda-Diplomacy.html 22 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3577/is_n3_30/ai_n28688265/pg_9/?tag=content;col1 23 http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/17/newsid_2547000/2547811.stm 20

7

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited PRC to discuss negotiations relating to the future of Hong Kong (September). She urged for the extension of the British presence in Hong Kong, which was rejected.

At the Chinese 5th National People’s Congress it was indicated that PRC would be willing to establish a special administrative region (SAR).24 Half of PRC’s exports passed through Hong Kong.25 1983

Prime Minister Thatcher assured the House of Commons that the ‘views of the people of Hong Kong will continue to be taken fully into account at all stages’ of negotiations with PRC (4 July).26 Nevertheless, she later indicated to the House that the New Territories reversion ‘to China in 1997 [was] causing great problems in the sense that most of the people of Hong Kong would wish to preserve the status quo.

Nevertheless, that treaty exists’ (17 November).

1984

Special Envoy Edward Heath visited Beijing and was told that PRC would not accept British administration in Hong Kong post-1997.27 Prime Minister Thatcher visited PRC and signed The Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong (December). Articulation of the ‘One Nation Two System’ idea.28 Prime Minister Thatcher claimed that Britain had been able to obtain ‘basic rights and freedoms’ for the people of Hong Kong.29 Agreement between the two governments for Reciprocal Avoidance of Double Taxation and the Prevention of Fiscal Evasion with respect to Tax on Income and Capital Gains.

1986

The Chinese Minister of Defence Zhang Aiping visited UK and signed Memorandum of Understanding on Co-operation on Defence (September).

HM Queen Elizabeth II paid state visit to PRC (12-18 October).

1986-90

‘Open-Door Policy’ initiated, which allowed foreign investment into China and encouraged the development of a market economy and private sector.

1987

Agreement between UK and PRC concerning the Settlement of Mutual Historical Property Claims.

1988

Prime Minister Thatcher told the House of Commons ‘The relationship between Her Majesty’s Government and China is very good … Trade is

24

See Michael B. Yahuda, Hong Kong: China’s Challenge (Routledge, 1996). http://www.nber.org/papers/w8088.pdf , p.3. [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] 26 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1983/jul/04/hong-kong#S6CV0045P0_19830704_ CWA_57 [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] 27 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/how-mrs-thatcher-lost-hong-kong-ten-years-ago-fired-upby-her-triumph-in-the-falklands-war-margaret-thatcher-flew-to-peking-for-a-lastditch-attempt-to-keep-hongkong-under-british-rule--only-to-meet-her-match-in-deng-xiaoping-two-years-later-she-signed-the-agreementhanding-the-territory-to-china-1543375.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] 28 Also see Roger Buckley, Hong Kong: The Road to 1997 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

29 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/sir-percy-cradock-diplomat-who-played-a-crucial-role-innegotiating-the-handover-of-hong-kong-to-china-1903926.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] 25

8

increasing and we wish to increase contacts between the Chinese people and this country. Cultural contacts are also increasing’ (May).30 1989

Tiananmen Square: Chinese troops fired on protestors. The official death toll: 200; unofficial several times that figure (4 June).

International outrage led to sanctions from many countries, including the UK. Massive protests in Hong Kong.

Prime Minister Thatcher told the House of Commons that ‘Everyone who witnessed those scenes on television was afflicted with utter revulsion and outrage at what had happened and at the indiscriminate firing on people who were asking only for democratic rights. It shows that Communism stands ready to impose its will by force on innocent people’ (6 June).31 Sir Percy Craddock secretly visited China to continue discussions into the future of Hong Kong.32 Jiang Zemin took over as Chinese Communist Party General Secretary.

Fall of the Berlin Wall—the beginning of the end of the Cold War (November).

Stockmarkets opened in Shanghai and Shenzhen (December).

1990

Prime Minister Thatcher told the House of Commons that it was ‘our duty to the people of Hong Kong …, when the lease terminates in 1997, to hand over the colony of Hong Kong to China in a good and prosperous state. That will be most valuable to China and most likely to enable the people in the colony to continue their present way of life as under the Anglo-Chinese agreement’ (1 March).33

1991

Prime Minister John Major visited PRC and signed the Memorandum of Understanding Concerning the Construction of the New Airport in Hong Kong and Related Questions with China (3 September).34 Major told the House of Commons that he had met with the Dalai Lama to discuss ‘human rights – most notably, though not exclusively, in Tibet. We discussed the present situation and the representations that we had made to the People’s Republic of China, and I reaffirmed the fact that I would continue to make such representations’ (3 December).35

1992

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) ranked China’s economy as third largest in the world after the USA and Japan.

Chris Patten appointed Governor of Hong Kong (July): announced proposals for greater democracy without prior agreement with PRC, which were to be a source of friction in Sino-British relations but were popular in Hong Kong.

1993

Jiang Zemin became President.

30

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/may/10/engagements#S6CV0133P0_19880510_HOC_ 170 [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

31 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/jun/06/engagements#S6CV0154P0_19890606_HOC_ 112 [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

32 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/politics-obituaries/7096109/Sir-Percy-Cradock.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] and see Yahuda, Hong Kong: China’s Challenge, p.67.

33 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/mar/01/engagements#S6CV0168P0_19900301_HOC _162 [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

34 Steve Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 1999), p.253.

35 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1991/dec/03/engagements#S6CV0200P0_19911203_HOC_ 128 [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

9

1994

Renminbi official fixed exchange rate abolished.

1995

Missiles tests and military exercises in the Taiwan Strait.

Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten made a plea that the UK should extend residency rights for 3 million Hong Kong residents, which was rejected both by the government and Labour opposition.36

1996

Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine visited PRC (May).

Sino-British Economic and Trade Joint Committee established.

Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Securities and Futures Regulatory Cooperation between China Securities Regulatory Commission and HM Treasury, Securities and Investment Board.

Chief of the Defence Staff Field Marshal Peter Inge visited PRC.

1997

General Fu Quanyou, China’s Chief of General Staff, paid reciprocal visit to UK (March).37 Hong Kong transferred to PRC (30 June-1 July).

UK joint manoeuvres with Navies of USA and Australia in the Pacific during handover.38 PRC rebuked Chris Patten for his pro-democracy activities while Governor of Hong Kong.39 Sino-British Conference of University Vice-Chancellors and Principals began holding yearly meetings in Beijing or London.40

1998

Prime Minister Tony Blair and Premier Zhu Rongji exchanged visits; the two countries issued the Joint Statement, announcing the establishment of a comprehensive partnership.

President Jiang Zemin paid state visit to the UK (October).

Premier Zhu Rongji announced major reforms in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. This included the restructuring, amalgamation and flotation of many stateowned enterprises.

The artists from Royal National Theatre and Royal Academy of Music visited China.

JANET (Britain’s Joint Academic Network) and CERNET (China Educational Research Network) linked.41 Memorandum of Understanding on Environmental Protection and Memorandum of Understanding between the Chinese and British Aeronautical Authorities agreed between UK and PRC governments.

Joint Statement of China-UK Financial Dialogue.

36

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/pattens-hong-kong-plea-is-rejected-1602773.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] 37 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/chinas-army-chief-shown-latest-british-weaponry-1274936. html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] 38 According to Major General Brian Dutton, Head of British Garrison, Hong Kong, 1994-6, BBC Radio4, Reunion, ‘Hong Kong Handover’, Sunday, 29 April 2012, 11.15 a.m.

39 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1910600.stm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

40 www.britishcouncil.org/china-education-hemou-english.doc [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

41 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100202100434/http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/1998/pr10 -98.htm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

10

1999

Chinese Embassy in Belgrade bombed by NATO (7 May).

Falun Gong, a spiritual movement, outlawed in PRC (July).

Portuguese transfer Macao to PRC. British Museum exhibition of ‘Buried Treasures, Masterpieces from Shanxi Province Museum’ (October).

The Royal Ballet visited PRC (May).42 Chinese Minister of Education Chen Zhili visited UK and signed the Joint Statement on Educational Co-operation (July).

2000

Execution of former Deputy Chairman of the Chinese National People’s Congress Cheng Kejie for taking bribes: part of intensification of crackdown on official corruption.43 Sculptor Henry Moore exhibition held in Beijing.

Secretary of State for Education and Employment David Blunkett visited China and signed the China-UK Framework Agreement on Educational Co-operation (June).

HMS Cornwall, HMS Newcastle, RFA Fort Victoria and FS Aconit (French) visited Hong Kong, Shanghai and Qingdao.44 Signing of Framework Agreement on Educational Co-operation between China and the UK. Agreement on Co-operation between China Import and Export Bank and UK Export Credit Guarantee Bureau.

2001

PRC undertook military exercises simulating an invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan responded by testing anti-missile capabilities (June).45 Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott visited PRC for talks relating to global climate changes (July).

The Chinese Navy fleet visited the UK (September).46 China joined the World Trade Organisation (November).

China-UK Investment Partnership established.

Second Session of China-UK Financial Dialogue held in Beijing (November).

Sino-British trade volume US$10.31 billion, 4.1 per cent higher than that of the same period a year before.

2002

US President George W Bush visited PRC (February).

Chairman of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Li Ruihuan visited UK at the invitation of Lord Irvine of Lairg, the Lord Chancellor (May).

Sino-British trade volume trade volume approximately US$6.17 billion in July, 8.2 per cent higher than that of the same period of the previous year.

2003

Outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China and Hong Kong (March-June).

Sino-Indian de facto agreement over status of Tibet and Sikkim (June).47

42

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3555587/A-leap-into-the-unknown-The-Royal-Ballet-inChina.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

43 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1366945/Communist-official-faces-death-over-3mbribes.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

44 http://british.e-consulate.org/english/press/pr000731.htm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

45 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1287416.stm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

46 http://www.chinese-embassy.org.uk/eng/gdxw/t377941.htm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

11

PRC government shelves the anti-subversion bill after large-scale protests in Hong Kong (July-August).

First manned spacecraft launched by PRC (October).48 2004

Premier Wen Jiabao paid an official visit to the UK and issued joint declaration (May).

Royal Navy visited the port of Qingdao, China.49 Landmark trade agreement between PRC and ten South-East Asian countries (November).50

2005

Expansion of UK-China air travel market. Intergovernmental agreement allowed selected Chinese tour operators to sell UK leisure tours to Chinese citizens (January).51 In addition to Beijing, British Airways was given permission by Chinese civil aviation authorities to fly (daily) to Shanghai (previously only Virgin was allowed to provide a service).52 China and Russia joint military exercises (August).53 Prime Minister Tony Blair visited PRC (September).

Second manned space flight: the Shenzhou VI capsule (October).

President Hu Jintao state visit to the UK (November).

2006

Premier Wen Jiabao visited the UK (September).

African Heads of State visit Beijing for a China-Africa summit. Business deals worth nearly US$2bn are signed and China promised billions of dollars in loans and credits (November).54

2007

PRC shot down an old weather satellite using a missile: this prompted international concerns regarding the growth and exercise of PRC’s military strength (January).55 The former head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, was executed for taking bribes.56 Food and drug scandals sparked international fears about the safety of Chinese exports (July).

Roman Catholic Bishop of Beijing consecrated (September).57 China launched moon orbiter (October).58

2008

Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited PRC (January).

47

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3015840.stm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/15/newsid_3699000/3699842.stm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

49 http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200406/18/eng20040618_146745.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

50 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4051653.stm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

51 http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/1923262/www.britishairways.com/press [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

52 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-350794/BA-touches-Shanghai.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

53 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17803624 ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=y5e8v23Np3Q [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

54 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6112360.stm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

55 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6289519.stm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

56 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6286698.stm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

57 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/letters/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_let_20070527_china _en.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013] 58 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7059356.stm [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

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Chinese President Hu Jintao called for more Sino-British exchanges and cooperation: ‘The Sino-British exchanges and co-operation conform to the trend of globalisation and the self-development of the two countries, and China has always been handling Sino-British relations from a strategic and global perspective …

‘Chinese side appreciated the British side’s adherence to the one-China policy, clear opposition to the Taiwan authorities’ planned “referendum” on UN membership, and support for China’s peaceful reunification.’59 Sino-UK International Entrepreneurship Educators Programme launched jointly by the Shanghai Technology Entrepreneurship Foundation for Graduates and the UK National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE).

Anti-China protests in Tibet (March).60 Olympic Games held in Beijing (August).

Foreign Secretary David Miliband issued a Written Ministerial Statement on Tibet: ‘we [Britain] regard Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China’. (29 October).61 2009

Execution of British national Akmal Shaikh for drug smuggling despite pleas from the UK government for clemency (29 December). Sino-British Relations strained.62

2010

Prime Minister David Cameron visited Beijing for talks (26 June).

Both countries pledge closer military co-operation (5 July).

HRH Duke of York visited PRC (September).63 Talks between Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang and UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne for greater co-operation (8 November).

Senior military officials met in Beijing to discuss military co-operation, including the Deputy Chief of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army and the Chief of the General Staff Sir David Richards64 (25 November).

2011

China overtook Japan as the world’s second-largest economy (February).65 Arrest of Artist and activist Ai Weiwei for ‘economic crimes’ sparked international furore and a campaign for his release. He was freed after more than two months’ detention (April).66 Prime Minister Wen Jaibao visited London in order to plan out trade between the two countries, worth billions of pounds (26 June).

Sino-British bilateral trade estimated US$42.27 billion, a rise of 18.3 per cent year-on-year between January-September.67

59

http://www.chinese-embassy.org.uk/eng/gdxw/t401887.htm3333 [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1581629/Tibets-anti-China-protest-monks-gassed.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

61 http://www.economist.com/node/12570571 [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

62 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/29/akmal-shaikh-execution-china [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

63 http://www.thedukeofyork.org/Home/Features/ChinaMay2011.aspx [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

64 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/14/uk-military-alliances-africa-defence [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

65 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/china-overtakes-japan-as-worlds-secondlargest-economicpower-2054412.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

66 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2011/apr/05/ai-weiwei-china-eu-dialogue [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

60

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Growth of air travel between the UK and PRC: London (combined airports) 92 flights a week or an average of 13 a day (Cf Paris 73; Frankfurt 69).68 Flights to Hong Kong dominated: Cathay Pacific 4xdaily; British Airways 2xdaily: Virgin daily and Qantas daily.

Luxury British motor car manufacturer Bentley reported that sales volumes to China had outstripped USA.69 Rolls Royce sales in China had jumped by 67 per cent during the year and the company reported that China had overtaken the USA as it largest market.70 2012

Growth of London as an overseas renminbi centre, promoted by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.71 China Southern Airways opened the ‘Canton Route’ between London Heathrow, Guangzhou (formerly Canton) and Australia (March).72 Chongqing chief Bo Xilai dismissal was a major political scandal. His wife was placed under investigation over the death of British businessman Neil Heywood (March).

China enhanced the limit within which renminbi can fluctuate to 1 per cent in trading against the US dollar, from 0.5 per cent (April).

67

http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/681594/Sino-UK-trade-set-to-grow-despite-current-economicgloom.aspx [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

68 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewgilligan/100072490/boris-johnson-gets-his-facts-wrong-on-airtravel/ [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

69 http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2012/04/bentley-sales-in-china-beat-us.html [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

70 http://shanghaiist.com/2012/01/12/rolls_royce_sales_in_china_grow_who.php [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

71 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/252f933e-88aa-11e1-9b8d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1t0dO4ojf [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

72 http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/09/rolls-royce-sales-record-asian-demand [accessed 1 Mar. 2013].

14

The Role and Functions of the British Embassy in Beijing Panel 1 – From the Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen Square 7 June 2012, 13.30-15.00 India Office Council Chamber, Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Chair: Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, KT, GCMG, PhD, FRSE: former Governor of Hong Kong, 1987-92 Witnesses: Lord Hurd of Westwell, CH, CBE, PC: Peking, 1954-56 Sir John Boyd, KCMG: First Secretary, Peking, 1973-75 Roger Garside: First Secretary, Peking, 1976-79 Timothy George, CMG: Counsellor and Head of Chancery, 1978-80 Other participants: Gordon Barrass: London School of Economics Hugh Davies: Foreign and Commonwealth Office Sir William Ehrman, KCMG: Ambassador, 2006-10 Anthony Grey: Reuters correspondent, detained by the PRC authorities between 1967 and 1969.

Dr Ian Lyne: Arts and Humanities Research Council Professor Patrick Salmon: Foreign and Commonwealth Office Historians PROFESSOR PATRICK SALMON: My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to this session at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office which will look at the work of the British Embassy in Beijing. It is the second in a series of seminars that we have been running on the role and functions of British embassies and high commissions, organised in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Research Council—the AHRC—and the Institute of Contemporary British History at King’s College London.

I will make a few introductory remarks, and then we will get going as quickly as we can. First, the seminar will consist of two sessions, each lasting 90 minutes, and we will have a half-hour break for tea and coffee between 3.00 and 3.30. The aim of the seminar is to discover more about how the Embassy worked and how Britain has promoted its presence and its interests in China over recent decades. Looking at the accumulated experience embodied in our panellists, and also in many members of the audience, I do not think that we will be disappointed.

I have some housekeeping points. First, please note that the witness seminar will be recorded and transcribed. The subsequent edited and corrected transcript will be published.

Speakers and members of the audience who wish to speak should therefore keep in mind that they are on the record; there is no Chatham House rule. It would therefore also be very helpful if all speakers, including those from the floor, identified themselves before making

15

any comments or asking questions. This is to ensure correct transcription and attribution.

Finally, before the transcript of the witness seminar is published, the draft manuscript will be sent to each contributor—whether panellist or from the floor—who will each have the opportunity to make amendments, corrections or deletions. Very importantly, there is also a consent form, and we would very much like everybody who is speaking as a panellist or from the floor to sign the consent form. It is just a formality, but it is very important.

We have two chairpersons today. The first is Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, who served in Peking from 1963 to 1965. He was Political Adviser in Hong Kong from 1977 to 1981 and, finally, served as Governor of Hong Kong from 1987 to 1992. The chair of our second panel is Dr Judith Rowbotham, who is Reader in Historical Criminal Justice Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is a leading interdisciplinary scholar, researching and publishing across the disciplines of law, criminology and history. I think I should add that she is a very experienced chairperson of witness seminars, so she will keep all our panellists in order when the time comes.

Before I hand over to Lord Wilson, Dr Ian Lyne, our partner at the AHRC, would just like to say a few words. Thank you.

DR IAN LYNE: Thank you, Patrick. Good afternoon, everyone. I would like very briefly to extend words of welcome on behalf of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For those of you who do not know the body, we are one of seven UK research councils. We are the primary public funder of academic research in all academic humanities disciplines— philosophy, history, law, modern languages, as well as art, music and the performance arts.

We are very keen to promote connections between academia and government and policy makers, and we very much champion the role that the humanities can play in good government and good policy making, so we are very pleased to be able to support this seminar with the FCO and King’s College.

Thank you all very much again for coming. I hope you have a very interesting and stimulating afternoon—I am sure you will—and I will hand over to Lord Wilson.

LORD WILSON OF TILLYORN (Chair): Thank you very much. What I intend to do with the 90 minutes that we have with this group at the table is, first, to ask everybody here briefly to introduce themselves—most will be very well known—and to say when they were in Peking / Beijing. Then I will go along the row in date order, as it were, for people to say again—very briefly, please, if you would—what the atmospherics were like at the times when you were there. Perhaps, if there were two times—Lord Hurd was there once, but others twice at least—you could give a comparison between them.

I think what we are trying to get out of this is what you would not get out of the Public Record Office at Kew. The Public Record Office, as those who have dealt with it know, is the most astonishing place. It has a mass of detail on the formulation and execution of policy. What it does not have is the human element involved, and anybody doing research knows that it is that human element you want to get at. I think we can use the experience here to try to say something about what it was like to be in the British Mission in Peking in the times when the people here today were there: what the atmospherics were like; what it was like dealing with officials; to what extent you could deal with ordinary people; maybe even how you got your food—things that loom very large when you are there. That is what I want to try to draw out.

For the period which we are meant to be dealing with, which is the Great Leap Forward—let us say from 1958—to the Tiananmen Incident in 1989, there are certain large issues and we will try to bring those out. Actually, because for such things as important events as the Tiananmen Incident we do not have anybody here at this table who was in the

16

Mission at that time, we will try to get views from those in the audience who were there at the time and give people in the audience also time to ask questions.

Let me give a little footnote. The title of today’s seminar talks about the Embassy in Peking. We are actually talking about a Mission in Peking. If I remember correctly it was referred to at first after the Communist victory in 1949, as the, Mission negotiating the establishment of diplomatic relations. At that stage we had not got full diplomatic relations. It went on to be a Chargé d’Affaires Office—which it was what it was when I was there—and then it later became an Embassy with an Ambassador at the head of it. Forgive us all, if we say Embassy, Mission or Chargé d’Affaires Office. Forgive us also please, those who are of a certain age, if we say Peking, as I did, and do not put it into Putonghua73 as Beijing, which all of us did of course when we spoke in Chinese.

Patrick has introduced me. I was in the Mission in Peking—then a Chargé d’Affaires Office—from 1963 to 1965 as the most junior diplomat you could be, Third Secretary, and then as Second Secretary. I was there for two years after language training in Hong Kong.

Now, may I go first to you, Lord Hurd?

LORD HURD OF WESTWELL: I was Third Secretary in Peking. I arrived in 1954 and I left in 1956, so I did just about two years, and I will be able to describe that perhaps in a few minutes’ time. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you. Timothy?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: I was in Beijing or Peking from 1963 to 1966, as Third and then as Second Secretary, just after doing language training, and then I went back in 1978 as Counsellor and Head of Chancery—number two in the mission—and was there for two years under Percy Cradock.74 My absence was neatly bracketed by that play, Hai Rui ba guan (Hai Rui Dismissed from Office),75 which sort of built up to the Cultural Revolution and, when I came back, they were just putting it on, saying, ‘That wasn’t a very good play, but we shouldn’t have used it like we did.’

WILSON (Chair): Thank you. Roger?

ROGER GARSIDE: I was there twice. The first time was from 1968 to 1970, the height of the Cultural Revolution, and the second from 1976 to 1979, perhaps the greatest—turning point in post-1949 China. You asked about our dealings with officialdom. Mine were virtually non-existent, because my jobs were primarily political analysis and reporting of China’s internal politics. With the populace at large, they were minimal, because everyone in China was under the strictest of instructions—in my time, as I think they were in my predecessor’s times—not to have any unauthorised dealings with foreigners.

WILSON (Chair): Okay, we will come back to that. John?

SIR JOHN BOYD: I had a rather similar experience. I was there, first, from 1965 to 1967, again—like Lord Hurd—starting as Third Secretary. It was perfection in some ways. It was like the Beijing/Peking of the 1920s. I primarily remember picnics, swimming in the Summer Palace lake, singing picnics at the Ming tombs—a wonderful life. We did very little work.

73

Modern standard Chinese.

Sir Percy Cradock (1923-2010), Charge D’Affaires, Peking, 1968–9; Ambassador to China, 1978–83.

75 Hai Rui ba guan (circa. 1961) was a Chinese opera written by Wu Han about a Hai Rui, an official during the Ming dynasty, who was persecuted for criticising the Emperor.

74

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There was not much work to be done: as you were saying, there were zero contacts, seriously, with officialdom; there was virtually zero travel; and—this is an important point to make—at that period, there were very few other foreign presences. With us, there were the Scandinavians, and the French had just arrived, but a China without Americans, Japanese and most big western powers, was a very different place. Perhaps later we can talk about the contrasts, which are incredible in my view.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you. Lord Hurd, may we start off with you? Technically, you were there before the Great Leap Forward, weren’t you? But you are in the unique position today of having served in the old Legation Quarter, in which the gate of our old Embassy is still there. You can still see some of those wonderful old houses behind the gate, but you cannot actually get inside. It would be fascinating to know what life was like then.

HURD: Well, it was an extraordinary life. I was quite unprepared for it. I was pitched into it.

I was not a language student, unlike Richard Evans76 and Alan Donald.77 I was more like John Fretwell.78 He and I shared a bungalow and we were, as it were, dogsbodies for the people who did the work which occasionally had to be done.

On the work side, I would simply say, we did a number of things which are very strange, but which had to be done by somebody. We had no commercial contact worth talking about. The fag-ends of the old system lingered on, and there were various people scattered around the country who belonged to the old regime and, on the whole, were not persecuted but, equally, they were ignored.

We undertook certain duties on behalf of these people. We represented the Americans, for example, inasmuch as anybody could. That meant coping with the deserters from the Korean War,79 who turned up and were used, of course, by the Chinese for getting information etc., but were then just cast out. I do not think they were given documents, and they wandered about the parks of Peking really lost, in every sense of the word. They dared not go back to the States, where they would be prosecuted, and yet they were not really making any home in China.

We did a number of things which are now, as it were, the back-end of consular life.

For example, White Russians would quite often turn up on their way, as they hoped, to Australia. Our job, representing the Commonwealth of Australia, was to give them a medical check-up, for which we were totally unqualified to do. I remember vividly the detail of that.

They had to produce a sketch map of their ribs. The unguided ones produced very blurred ones—clearly, if there was a cancer or a problem there, it was going to be revealed—but they quickly learned, and they came back a fortnight later with a spotless and beautiful X-ray of their chest in which no possible harm could be detected. We were frequently thanked, effusively, by Canberra for the skill with which we had performed these duties and, as far as I know, no one who we sent on their way with the necessary visa was turned back. There were no Catholic countries from Europe or from Latin America. There were no Americans and there were no Japanese.

Our job was to pick up such fragments of knowledge as we could, and that was a mixed business. Of course, we had a number of old residents or old hands—there were the Hansons; there were several couples—who lived outside. They were not persecuted and did

76

Sir Richard M. Evans (1928-2012), Ambassador, 1982-8.

Sir Alan Donald, Ambassador, 1988-91.

78 Sir John Fretwell, Third, then Second Secretary, Peking, 1955-6.

79 The Korean War, 1950-3, was the first major proxy war of the Cold War, which included combatants from a variety of countries, including the UK, and resulted in the partitioning of Korean peninsula at the thirty-eighth parallel.

77

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not get into trouble, but they led very precarious lives and did not know quite what their future would be. Eventually, they went home. But going home to Britain at that particular time, particularly if you had led as it were a semi-colonial life up to that time, was a fairly grisly business, and they did not really look forward to going home.

My job, in particular, was to report on—to visit, if I could, and report on—the Consular property of HMG, which of course consisted of the most amazing series of buildings. They were all large, they were all cold and they were all inhabited, of course, by the caretaker. You had to employ a caretaker, and he had to be registered. He had cousins and nephews and nieces and so on, and these great buildings were gradually filled, until the word came that someone was coming from Peking to inspect them, when there was a rapid evacuation.

I was the first person to get permission to go down the Yangtze and to go to Kunming.

We went to Shanghai and Tientsin as matters of course, there was no particular bar on that.

We married and we buried expatriates—as seemed appropriate to their circumstances. All of these processes were, of course, deeply bureaucratic, and endless forms had to be filled in before any of these things could happen, but they did on the whole happen and we did on the whole look after this handful of people.

Shanghai was particularly bizarre, because Shanghai was really the tail-end of an era.

If you were in charge of Shell,80 you had to have a responsible person-and that responsible person was literally held responsible for anything that anybody did. Of course, any sensible firm would gradually lower the status of the responsible person, so that in the end it could be the gardener or anybody. Anybody could really do it: you just had to fill in a form and get it signed by Shell or whoever. They gradually lowered their status, but not actually their way of life. The cellars always seemed to be full of gin, and there were more ladies around than could readily be accounted for, so going there was always a revelation—I never quite knew what I was going to meet next. There were always great numbers of workers cutting the grass with scissors: the lawns were perfection. Allan Veitch81 was the Consul-General, and lived in the house where the British Consul had always lived.

The main aim of one’s life was to travel, to get permission to travel. Apart from Tientsin and Shanghai, and Peking and the Western Hills, we were debarred—you had to get permission. You had to invent some purpose for your travel, and you had to fill it all in correctly. You had to explain in great detail how you proposed to get there, where you proposed to stay and so on. The famous word, with which we all became familiar, was bu fang bian: inconvenient. ‘We are not going to prevent you, because this is a free country and people can go where they like, but, actually, you will find that it will be very difficult, because there is no hotel, the museums and the things you want to see are all shut and we would really not recommend or not at this time’—bu fang bian. Of course, many a trip was got rid of in that way.

I was lucky or skilful. I did manage to do a certain amount of travelling, as I mentioned, going round the consulates. In the end, it was a sort of minor triumph—the sort of thing which, in Peking life, became very important. Alan Donald and I got permission to climb Taishan in Shandong—Confucius’ holy mountain—and we did that. It was just before I left, and of course there was a perfectly good hotel; well, not perfectly good, but it was an adequate hotel. We climbed to the top, and we were very well received and it was very pleasant. That was the climax of my time there.

Our dealings with officials were virtually nil. They were concerned mainly with things like lime juice, razor blades—things that you could not actually buy in Peking, but

80 81

Established in 1907, Royal Dutch Shell is an Anglo-Dutch petrochemical company.

Allan Veitch (1900-71), Consul, and Consul-General, Shanghai, 1950–54.

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which you therefore had to import from Hong Kong. That again set in hand a whole bureaucratic process, which had to be scrupulously negotiated. We relied on the Lane Crawford markets82 and every now and then one of us, occasionally me, was sent to Hong Kong—it was a great relief, in a way, to get out—to negotiate these deals.

The other thing I did afterwards—these were re-visits—were two fascinating trips: one with Ted Heath83 on his first visit to China and one with Margaret Thatcher84 on her first visit to China. I watched the absolute opposite impressions which those two distinguished statesmen carried away with them. For Ted, it was all fascinating and praiseworthy. We were in the Cultural Revolution by then, and I had to say, ‘Look, that elderly gentleman we have just been talking to, who is the Professor on Spenser and on the Shakespearian plays, when he says that the height of his career has actually been cleaning the toilets in the Peking Hotel, he is not to be taken all that seriously.’ ‘Oh, you’re so cynical, you know,’ he said. With Margaret, on the other hand, it was exactly the other way around. She could not see any point or purpose or merit in the whole system, and she reduced a small girl virtually to tears by getting out of her the fact that she was at the university only because her father was the party boss in Hankow. She said, ‘You see, Douglas, you see!’ and she carried on like that. So I had two completely different—separate and opposite—jobs to do with these two people.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Peking. We did run out of things to do sometimes.

The carol service was a great event. The showing of Ealing comedies85 was a great event. We were not deprived. We were not harassed. We found ourselves in awkward positions, such as the war on the sparrows in which we were invited to take a prominent part. It was quite simple really, because the sparrows just wanted to rest—they were being chased about and they wanted to come to rest somewhere, and our spacious lawns were an ideal place for a sparrow in trouble to rest. We were not on the whole very co-operative in the war against the sparrows.

I am galloping, in a very impressionistic way, over a period which is at a long distance. It was enjoyable. We had no great problems, but then we had no great achievements. We waited for something to happen: we waited and we waited. Visitors came, and the arrival of Khrushchev86 and the arrival of Nehru87 were great events. We wrote long descriptions of the events, to be ticked off by someone in the third room—like some of those present.

Not a great deal happened, or not a great deal happened that we could see.

Occasionally, you travelled in the Western Hills88 and you got into conversation. I knew just enough Chinese by the end to handle a simple conversation about crops and the rain and so on. You got just glimmers of information and, occasionally, you got people who were a little indiscreet, who told you a lot more than you had otherwise got. We were not great providers of information to the powers that be. Two years was enough, but they were two years that I very much enjoyed.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you very much. Could you solve one thing? You mentioned occasional conversations in the Western Hill. But did you have any friends amongst the Chinese population who would have been in contact with the Legation before 1949?

82

Founded in 1850 in Hong Kong, Lane Crawford is luxury goods retailer.

Sir Edward Heath (1917-2005), Prime Minister, 1970-4.

84 Margaret Thatcher (Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, 1925-2013), Prime Minister, 1979-90.

85 Between 1947 and 1957, Ealing Studios in London produced a number of notable comedy films.

86 Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), Soviet leader, 1958-64, but was de facto leader from 1955.

87 Jawaharlal Nehru (1894-1964), Prime Minister of India, 1947-64.

88 Western Hills region in the west of Beijing.

83

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HURD: Yes, there were one or two. When I said that we knew about hotels, we got a certain amount of information from locally engaged staff who knew about hotels and could tell that it was perfectly possible to go, but these were a handful of people. Equally, there were a handful of Britons, who were lingering on, but it was very much the end of an era.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you very much. Timothy, you come next in the chronology— except for me. But, if I may, I will perhaps chip in after you.

GEORGE: My impressions are somewhere between John Boyd’s and Lord Hurd’s. The 1960s were in a way a magical time when we were there. It was all very much a cottage industry. We and the Dutch, I suspect, were the greatest allies at the time there, in social terms. Talking of the Dutch, they were just along from the old British Embassy. One of the two times I got myself collared in Peking was when I penetrated the old British Embassy— the door was open, so I walked in, and I had got in about 5 yards before I was hauled back.

The other time was in Chengdu, when I tried to visit a university where I had a family connection. Again, I got in about 5 yards. It was this land of bu fang bian.

On one occasion, I genuinely found a road where there was not a notice saying, ‘No foreigners beyond this point without permission’, and, in our little mini, we went about 20 miles around the countryside and came round behind a notice, on the other side of which it said, ‘No foreigners beyond this point without permission’, but we had not transgressed any rules. I got about 10 yards down the road, and I found that there was another security point.

The car was stopped, and I was asked, ‘Where have you been?’ The next day I had to explain myself to the Foreign Ministry, and I was able to say, ‘I have broken no rules. I didn’t pass anything.’

It was a magical, rather elegiac time, I think, the 1960s there. When you went back in the 1970s, I do not think a great deal more was happening, but somehow—well, the Americans had arrived—and it had got more normal. The balance between a normal diplomatic post and a rather elegiac time had been broken.

There were a few contacts. I remember there was a dentist we always used to attend.

He would have your mouth agape while he looked inside and, almost at the most painful point, he would say, ‘Are you able to get me some cartridges for my shotgun?’ Of course, one had to make some answer. Work-wise, it was a question of picking up atmosphere. There were a few contacts. We had one in the Christian church, who I think was not one actually, so one got little bits of atmosphere here and there. Particularly in the run-up to the Cultural Revolution, some of our translators were quite helpful, actually, in interpreting what was going on.

I mentioned the play Hai Rui Ba Guan. One got some of the sense of how, with this new thought-reform process going on, nobody really knew whether it was a loosening or a tightening up, until a chap called Guo Moruo89 put his head above the parapet and started saying, ‘This isn’t a bad play’. That was a signal that, ‘Ah, we can loosen up in our thinking’, and then—thump. That happened just after we left, actually, because we were not there for the terrible days of the Cultural Revolution. There we are—there are a few thoughts.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you. Timothy George and I coincided in the Mission in Peking from the latter part of 1963.

The role of the Embassy was, in a way, to spend a lot of time trying to analyse what was happening internally. All of us, I think, went through this exercise of every morning

89

Guo Moruo (1892-1978), Chinese writer.

21

sharing out the newspapers between ourselves—usually the People’s Daily,90 but any other newspapers we could get hold of. It is worth saying in parentheses that one of the difficulties was getting hold of newspapers. When we were travelling, one would go to great lengths to try to buy local newspapers, because you thought they would provide local news; you could not order them. Every morning, those of us in Chancery were looking through the Chinese press, and then we had a meeting of the Mission in which we would say what interesting things, if there were any, were coming out of the press. That was a regular part of the routine.

I have another one or two additional bits, if I may. The value of the small number of contacts or friends one could have among the Chinese community—you had to assume that they were, in some way, licensed—was very great, because you got a sense of what the place was really like, which it was otherwise very difficult indeed to get.

Another sense of what it was really like was this: I share with John Boyd the pleasure of having lived in the city—in other words, managing to get out of that awful diplomatic quarter. Once we had been obliged to leave the Legation Quarter and move the Mission to outside Jianguomen in Guanghualu, almost all the foreign diplomats—certainly all of our people—were in blocks of flats with all the other diplomats. It was a pretty miserable place, and certainly it was not China. I was very fortunate in managing to get a courtyard house right in the centre of Peking. I had to give it up to Alan Donald91—sadly, he is not with us today—because, first, he was more senior to me and, secondly, he had four children, while I had no children and no wife, so clearly he needed the house. But then, I found a second house also in the centre of Peking, and I had asked for it to have only one bedroom. John and I have shared the pleasure of living in that house, and the sense of living within the city of Peking and not being separated from it is indescribable. You get a feel of what the place is like.

One other thing, if I may, to get the record straight, as it were, for those who did not have to go through such problems. We have all talked about travelling and moving out of Peking. We were allowed to move about within a limited circle of, I think, a 20 kilometre radius—at the boundaries of that were the notices that Timothy George has just referred to, saying, ‘No foreigners beyond this point’. There was a permitted route going out to the nearest bit of the Great Wall and also to the valley of the Ming tombs. You could find little paths up the hills which had no notices, but we were very restricted. You could go to the major cities, but otherwise you could not travel in China, except for formal diplomatic tours.

They were very formal, but they nevertheless gave you a sense of what it was like being in that vast part of the countryside of China which we never normally see.

I have one last point on the mechanics of living there. Lord Hurd mentioned the value of going shopping in Hong Kong. That included things like having to import petrol. We all had our own petrol drums, because you could not use the local petrol, even in the slightly upmarket cars that we had—up-market in comparison with what you would get in China. We all had our individual petrol drums imported from Hong Kong and marked with our names. In addition, those who wanted to eat a lot of western food would be importing their own food. If you wanted to eat local food, you could go and get that, usually from a diplomatic shop because—in this period after the failure of the Great Leap Forward—life for ordinary people was pretty rough in Peking. Food was scarce and simple. There were hardly any shops selling food. There were some people selling cabbages on the side of the streets, but it was a pretty poor existence for the majority of the people there.

We, as it were, floated above it, and tried to get a sense of what really was happening.

How good were we? Probably, we picked up one or two things; but a real sense of what was happening under the surface we found it very, very difficult to find. You tended to get

90 91

Established in 1946, People’s Daily is the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China.

Sir Alan Donald, First Secretary, Peking, 1964-6.

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persuaded by the fact that people—whoever you were meeting and, if you were travelling, wherever—would say the same sort of politically correct things. Although you knew perfectly well that this was following a script, somehow, if people do that again and again, you almost begin to believe that they believe it. In that sense, the Cultural Revolution was a great revelation of what was really happening in China. But that was after my time.

John, you are next on the list I think; that was after your time, too.

BOYD: Right. In case I left an erroneous impression about the interests of the average diplomat, there was a sharp fissure between the life of dance parties and swimming and so on, and the onset of the Cultural Revolution. What struck me very much at the time was the behaviour of our two language teachers. These were among those who were licensed to have contacts with foreigners. There was one who did poetry a treat, and assured me that absolutely nothing was going to happen. The other one was slow to give up the habit—these people are long since dead, so I think I can speak safely of them—of coming in a long mandarin robe which would just neatly accommodate a bottle of whisky, at Christmas, in the sleeve. One always has to remember that there is an underlying pattern in China, which is neatly encapsulated in, ‘You can get away with what you can get away with.’

The Cultural Revolution was for real and was absolutely serious. These were friendships—and they were friendships—with our locally employed interpreters and so on. It was extremely painful to see them gradually being stripped out from the Missions. Some never came back; some came back, rather battered, many years later. I agree entirely with what David was saying. In a sense, we floated above this and found it incredibly interesting, but we were conscious that, down there, it was extremely unpleasant for Chinese of all sorts.

I will not attempt an authoritative analysis of the Cultural Revolution. We have at least two learned professors in the second row, plus at least one PhD candidate, so I shall stay away from that. The failure of the Great Leap has been mentioned, but obviously the criticism Mao92 was subjected to as a consequence of that by Peng Dehuai93 and others was one of the sparks: he wanted to have his revenge. The second thing was the message that ran right through my time in China which was the suspicion that the Russians really wanted to undo Mao’s revolution—Mao’s very personal reaction to that and his use of mood, of crude politics and of everything else to bring down people he did not trust. Again, read the books of the professors.

From a practical point of view—I will always give thanks to David for finding that little house—processions and truckloads of victims used to come down our hutong. I once found myself actually marching with the Red Guards; it was a complete oversight. But you could feel—you are quite right—what was going on.

Another important point to make is that, at last, the Chinese, which we had been drilled in and had digested as best we might in Hong Kong before we ever went to Beijing, came in incredibly useful. We suddenly realised that we could do a job. That was reading wall posters, but it was even more—it was analysing, again to pick up an earlier theme, in context.

I do not know whether I am allowed to tell this story, but I think it illustrates the point very well. My beloved boss Terence Garvey94 was a great judge of situations and character.

He wrote, against the stream, that the Cultural Revolution was powerful and horrible, but was essentially internally focused, and that there was no danger that it was going to spill out all over south-east Asia, as some people feared. He got a rebuke from the Foreign Office. Again, I hope I am allowed to quote this, but I remember that it came from the Under-Secretary of

92

Mao Zedong (1893-1976), Chinese leader, 1949-76.

Peng Dehuai (1898-1974), Chinese Minister of Defence, 1955-9.

94 Sir Terence Garvey (1915-86), Ambassador, 1971-3.

93

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the day with the most crushing rebuke the Foreign Office is capable of: ‘My dear Terence, your dispatch was controversial.’

I, too, enjoyed Beijing absolutely—arguably more than any other experience of my life—but I was absolutely obsessed with the horror for the Chinese. Standing back, one sees just what a totally destructive episode for China it was. It achieved nothing, whether internally or vis-à-vis the Russians or anything else; it just set them back and undermined the case for a modernising, technological China very powerfully—more than anything could.

WILSON (Chair): John, could I just pick up one bit there, if I may? You mentioned Terence Garvey, and we share him as being an absolutely wonderful Head of Mission. One of the roles of the Mission in Peking may have been commenting on how China related to the world from a different perspective. It was different, as were dispatches back to London from somebody like Terence Garvey, who was a very independent mind and an extraordinarily thoughtful man. I can remember another that was not circulated—not only was it controversial, but, my goodness, it was not going to be printed and circulated—because it was arguing that China was not in an expansionist mood. It was going counter-current and counter-domino theory, and that sort of news was not particularly popular, but to comment in that way was something that the Mission sitting in Peking could do.

Roger, you come next in our chronological order.

GARSIDE: For me, the Cultural Revolution began in Hong Kong, as a language student there from 1965 to 1967, when John [Boyd] was in Beijing. It was fascinating and very instructive to follow the Cultural Revolution from Hong Kong. In some ways, it was the best observation post in the world, because one was living surrounded by a free society of Chinese, and one’s teachers, many of whom were émigrés from the Mainland, were agonising over this on a day-by-day basis as it unfolded. We could therefore see what it meant to contemporary Chinese. The Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong were gathering travellers’ tales from people across the border. We had bodies floating into the harbour. We knew about the terrible sufferings of people on the Mainland.

One of the most horrific moments for me personally was the following. I went every evening to eat supper with a Chinese family. I got there early one evening and, as I walked in, they asked me not to speak because they were listening to the radio. They did not tell me what it was, but there was a high-pitched voice screeching to a crowd, which was baying in response, and it was absolutely delirious. I thought: I have heard nothing like this since I heard a recording of the Nuremburg rallies. It turned out that it was Lin Biao95 at the first of the Red Guard rallies. China was plunging into madness, and one could feel it there from Hong Kong.

I arrived in Beijing in May 1968, when they began to let out those of my colleagues who had been held hostage for a year before that. It seemed at that point that, although the streets were full of drums and gongs and people getting up in the middle of the night to hail the latest directive from Mao, there was not the same degree of overt Red Guard violence that there had been on the streets previously. By that stage, the civil war that Mao had launched was more out in the provinces, and people were hijacking trains taking arms to Vietnam and distributing them to their own factions. There was fighting going on all over the place, and we picked up bits of that and tried to piece things together, as one always does as a China watcher.

As John [Boyd] has said, one studied texts. I had read English at Cambridge, where

95

Lin Biao (1907-71), Chinese military leader who played a prominent role in the first years of the Cultural Revolution.

24

close attention to the text was an extremely important part of one’s training, and I found that that was a skill which came in very handy. You looked at the most anodyne or the most banal propaganda in the People’s Daily and you said, ‘Well, how has this changed since yesterday?

What have they put in? What have they taken out? What does that mean?’

Then there were the bigger problems and the bigger mysteries. What was the nature of the Chinese communist revolution, what were its implications for the rest of the world? Did the concepts of freedom, democracy and the rule of law have any validity in China? Were they universal values, or just Western constructs? Here we were in China, which seemed to have suffered a lobotomy. During the Cultural Revolution, it was as if nothing existed before 1949: there was no history; there was no culture. Yet you knew that this country had, for 100 years, been the greatest field of missionary endeavour the world has ever seen. We knew that that missionary endeavour had created the schools, the universities—as well as the hospitals—which had educated China’s elite. What had happened to all that? They had been participants in world art movements in the 1930s. They had had somebody on the International Court in The Hague. Where had all that gone?

One knew from the book on the Hundred Flowers Campaign by Professor Rod Macfarquhar96, who is here today, that during the Hundred Flowers people had spoken out.

People who had had that liberal education had not forgotten what democracy was, and they wanted it. We learned, too, from that that young students at Beida,97 who had grown up under Communism and were the sons and daughters of high Communist officials, were going on to the Triangle and putting up wall posters and a democracy wall in 1958. How could one reconcile that with the constant propagandistic outpourings and these great theatrical displays of loyalty going on every day?

I have a tiny anecdote to finish with. I went, as part of my consular duties, to Shanghai one day. I was walking along the Bund, and there were a whole series of panels, on which activists could paste wall-posters. The theme of the posters that week or that month was attacking leading intellectuals in the theatre and the arts in Shanghai. I deciphered that one of the targets of attack had been a director of Ibsen’s plays in Chinese with a wholly Chinese cast in the 1950s. Then I came across another portrait of a bearded man. I looked at him, and I said, ‘I know your face? Who are you?—You’re Bernard Shaw.’98 Yes, somebody was attacking Bernard Shaw. It was a wonderful moment, because I said to myself that if anybody can draw a caricature of Bernard Shaw that I can instantly recognise, they understand and appreciate something about Bernard Shaw—they have not been brainwashed into a rejection of all that is bourgeois culture.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you. I wonder whether it might be helpful if this group looked at, let us say, three rather key things that happened during the period that we are meant to be covering: one is the burning of the British Mission in Peking in August 1967; the next might be the question, as seen in the Embassy in Peking, of negotiations about Hong Kong; and the third would be the end of the period we are meant to be looking at, which is the Tiananmen Incident of 1989.

We do not have anybody here who was actually in the mission, but is there anybody in the audience (I want to come back to Anthony Grey, who is here. I will explain why in a moment) who was in the Mission when it was burnt? I am not aware of anyone, but there may be someone sneaking in somewhere. No. We will try to deal with that episode, nevertheless.

Anthony Grey, Reuters correspondent in China at this time, was under house arrest, in

96

Roderick MacFarquhar, Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals (Praeger, 1960).

Colloquial name for Peking University.

98 George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright.

97

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circumstances that he will explain. I wanted to draw on him partly because it is a very poignant story, but partly because, for those of us who sit here, all that we may have gone through, and all the problems we may have had, were minor compared with what somebody like Anthony Grey went through as a direct foreign sufferer of the politics of the Cultural Revolution. We were diplomats. Some of those who were there in the Mission when it was burnt got injured, but that is not a story anything like that of the Reuters correspondent, Anthony Grey. Anthony, can we ask you to say a word about why you were arrested, for how long and what it was like?

ANTHONY GREY: Would you like me to stand, or shall I remain seated?

WILSON (Chair): You can be heard whether you are sitting, standing or on the floor.

GREY: I had a connection with the Embassy which was eventually burned, because for two or three days before I was put under house arrest in the middle of July 1967, Donald—later Sir Donald—Hobson99 invited me to stay in the residence with him. I had a call one day from Ray Whitney,100 who said, ‘We would like you to come to a toothbrush party’. I did not really know what he meant.

Things had been getting worse and worse for me. They were burning images outside my house at night, when I came home, and the whole of the walls, very close to the Forbidden City in Nan Xin Hua,101 were covered in slogans. Paper tigers were hanged on the gate, and an effigy of Harold Wilson was burned, so I was coming under increasing pressure.

Dare it be said, I was sending confidential reports to Gerald Long,102 the General Manager of Reuters, via the diplomatic bag, I think, or via the Embassy communications. I was under pressure, and the toothbrush party was an invitation to go and stay with Donald for a night or two.

When I eventually got a call from the Foreign Ministry to go there, it came through to the Embassy—or the office of the Chargé d’Affaires, as it was then—and I left my briefcase, my passport and all that in my bedroom in the residence. That was later transferred into the Embassy building itself, so my briefcase, my passport and my diary of that time all went up in flames on the night it was burned down.

I wrote a book called Hostage in Peking,103 when I came home, in six weeks, in October 1969. Of course, I saw people such as John Weston,104 who became a lifelong friend, and his wife Sally, and they gave me typescripts of their experience. Without naming them, I did a whole chapter in my book Hostage in Peking called ‘Sacking’. The Embassy was sacked in old-fashioned terms, so I had 20-odd pages on that. I put it together from other people as well, including some journalists who were there at the time. In that sense, there is a little bit of history in Hostage in Peking which applies directly to this afternoon’s seminar.

WILSON (Chair): You were under house arrest for two and a half years, were you not?

GREY: I was there two and a half years, and under house arrest for two years and two months.

99

Sir Donald Hobson, Chargé D’Affaires, Peking, until 1968.

Sir Raymond Whitney (1930-2012), First Secretary, 1966-8.

101 Forbidden City was the site of the Chinese Imperial Palace between the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth century (to the abdication of the last Emperor in 1912).

102 Gerald Long (1923-1998), Reuters General Manager, 1963-73.

103 Anthony Grey, Hostage in Peking (Michael Joseph, 1970).

104 Sir John Weston, Chinese language student, Peking, 1967-8.

100

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WILSON (Chair): And the proximate cause of your being in that position?

GREY: The riots in Hong Kong became quite violent. I believe that something like 52 people were killed in that period in the high summer of 1967, and emergency laws were introduced. They were quite swingeing from some points of view. Some press comments were that they were perhaps overdone. The rioting got worse, bombs were placed in the streets and the arrests included, from about the middle of July, a man called Hsueh Ping. He was a New China News Agency105 journalist. I do not think he had been sent from the Mainland; I think he was a locally born Chinese, but he was working for the New China News Agency. I think he had been seen waving his arm in the direction of a police inspector—that is my impression of what happened—and he was charged with inciting a riot.

He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

On the day that that happened, when I was staying at the residence with Sir Donald, I was called to the Foreign Ministry. John—John Weston, who was later the Ambassador to the UN and to NATO—and I were at the swimming pool at the time, and he offered to drive me down. He drove me there, but he was not allowed to come in and was turned away.

I went in to be addressed by a man called Chi Min-tsung, who was the main spokesman of the Foreign Ministry at that time. David and I were recalling that he was a rather officious gentleman, to say the least, although quite likeable. When I went back in 1988, he actually agreed to be interviewed in a film I made for the BBC—bless him. Foreign correspondents and diplomats there, in a kind of vengefulness for his hauteur and his difficulty to deal with, put around this story. When I was invaded by the Red Guards, they famously hanged my cat, Ming Ming—I had inherited a cat from my predecessor, Vergil Berger, and his wife—and quite maliciously, to get a little bit back on Chi Min-tsung’s hauteur and so on, foreign correspondents alleged that he had personally been there on that night, when 200 Red Guards hanged the cat, and that he had hanged and strangled it himself, so his nickname became ‘Cat-Strangler Chi’.

When I arrived in Hong Kong on my way into China in 1988, I was kindly invited to see David, and he said, ‘Are you going to see Cat-Strangler Chi?’ That was the first time I had ever heard that epithet. I said, ‘Well, I have no idea, but I will try.’ To my amazement and delight, I suppose, when I arrived in Beijing—I was certainly not allowed to do everything I wanted in the way of filming—I was given a banquet by the Foreign Ministry at the Number One Peking Duck Restaurant and next to me was Mr Chi. As he sat down, he leaned over quietly and said, ‘Do you know, Mr Grey, it’s not true. I never did anything to your cat. I was never at your house.’ I had never remotely thought he was, because I knew him well enough from the completely blank replies he would give to my questions on the phone and in person that, if he had been in the courtyard the night the 200 Red Guards came in and put me through a struggle meeting and hanged my cat in my face, I think I somehow would have sensed his presence. Bless his heart, he has had to live since that time with that epithet, which I believe is totally untrue.

When I went back in 1988, he was by then head of the equivalent of the Institute of Foreign Affairs or some kind of higher body, and he very bravely agreed to be interviewed on film in the garden of the institute. I said, ‘What did you feel about what was done to me?’ He had put me under house arrest; he was later sent down to the countryside, so he suffered as well. His answer, which was about a minute and a half long, included the word ‘personally’ 10 or 15 times. He said, ‘Of course, it was not really personal to you. You were representing your country, and so personally we weren’t really angry with you. Personally, it did not mean

105

New China News Agency is the official press agency for the People’s Republic of China.

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anything. Yes, of course, personally you very personally felt what you experienced personally’. I quite admired him for agreeing to be interviewed on camera for a film to be shown in Britain and around the world, and I took a bottle of Chivas Regal whisky up to his flat before I left, after the filming. That was a very interesting relationship.

I have recently applied to the Embassy here in London to go to make another film.

That one was in 1988, and it would be roughly the same period of time between my first and second visits. I would love to go back and look at China today, and maybe try to interview some of the Red Guards who invaded my house, try to interview some of my Public Security Bureau guards and see what their lives have been like since then and maybe try to interview Hsueh Ping in Hong Kong, if I can, or some of the other people. There were 13 different news workers, as they called them, who were eventually held, and for whom I was held. I would love to get hold of some of them, and then maybe talk to those three groups of people as a core to a film about how China has, again, changed. It had changed enormously between 1968 and 1988, and it has changed even more enormously between 1988 and the present.

That is still an ambition I hope I might accomplish.

There are many, many things I could say about being in Beijing at that time, but I have written about that. I have recently published a new book called The Hostage Handbook.106 It is a transcript of my secret shorthand diaries, which I managed to keep in the little cell that I was held in. I managed to keep them hidden—heaven knows how they survived—and I have recently published them verbatim with interleaving commentaries and reflections on how I see that experience now.

One of the conclusions I make is that, in a strange sort of way and in a funny sort of sense, it was a delayed-action privilege, because it turned me in on myself in a way that I would not otherwise have done probably ever in my life. It changed my whole mindset. It changed me to doing many of the things I have done since. I have become an historical novelist. I have set up a publishing company. I have recently set up a charity called Planet of Forgiveness,107 which I am hoping to do things internationally with—ceremonies and so on— and maybe even in China. In a strange sort of way, I feel that, although I did not feel it at the time, there was perhaps something very good about the experience of being on my own and being turned into a more metaphysical and philosophical, reflective individual.

One thing I heard only very recently— WILSON (Chair): Anthony, sorry. We have to keep an eye on the clock. May I ask you to wrap up your last point, if you would?

GREY: Can I just say this? A friend of mine went back to China—maybe it was when the Reuters bureau was re-opened—and he was complaining to the Foreign Ministry about the fact that they had treated me rather badly. The official concerned—it was not Chi Min-tsung, as far as I know—looked very askance at the man and said, ‘Well, we made him famous, you know.’

WILSON (Chair): Thank you very much. You personally suffered in a way that the rest of us did not. May I go on from that? The episode was all connected with the riots in Hong Kong in May 1967 and the arrest and sentencing of journalists and people who had been inciting riots and other things. A number of people were killed in bomb attacks, so it was pretty serious stuff in Hong Kong. The demonstrations in Peking in the summer of 1967 were in protest against the arrest and imprisonment of Communist journalists in Hong Kong. The

106 107

Anthony Grey, The Hostage Handbook: The Secret Diary of a Two-Year Ordeal in China (Tagman, 2009). http://www.planet-forgiveness.org/

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British Embassy—the Mission; it was not yet an Embassy—was invaded. The Mission was burnt and the Residence was trashed. Sadly we have nobody here who was actually in the Mission at that time. Roger, you were the next person back, as it were.

Before asking you to speak Roger, could I just put in a footnote? I was not there—I had left in 1965—but I was on the China desk in the Foreign Office at the time. Let me give some of the atmospherics—although we are not meant to be dealing with this end, I was at a meeting in the Cabinet Office of the Assessment Staff who were looking at China and at what might happen at the end of the ultimatum that China had given, threatening unspecified consequences if Britain did not agree to their demands, which included the release of the imprisoned Communist journalists in Hong Kong. Frankly, we were quite used to ultimata from China, and did not necessarily think there would be anything dramatic. I was called back to the Foreign Office here by my Head of Department, the Head of the Far Eastern Department, who said that we had just had a message from the wireless operator—we were operating a wireless system which went down into Australia and then back to here—and the operator on the net at that time simply said, ‘They’re coming in’. After that, the wireless went blank. At this end, we knew nothing of what had happened to the people in our Mission for at least, I think, about another 12 hours or maybe slightly longer, after which we got a message through the French Embassy that everybody was alive.

That was just this end. The part that really matters is the other end. We can pick this up now with you, Roger, if we may, and then deal with the other episodes in the time we still have left till 3 o’clock. What matters is what the effect was all that had on life in the Mission when you went back there. That was just about the time, if I remember rightly—but you tell us, please—that things were easing up to the extent that we were getting people home from our Mission: first, one person who was injured and then another who had been injured, and then getting back into semi-normal exchanges of people. Presumably, the effect on the way that people behaved and the way they saw their surroundings must, by the time you got there, still have been pretty dramatic.

GARSIDE: Yes, it was. I have to pay tribute to those who had been held there for so many months, not knowing when it would end. They were amazingly stoic and self-disciplined, and one was very proud to be their colleagues. I do not think there is a lot more to add beyond that, really. After they left, we were one Mission among others. I feel I should leave it there.

WILSON (Chair): At what point does one begin, in the work of the Mission, to get back to a sort of normality?

GARSIDE: I think, very quickly. As soon as I arrived there in May 1968, there was the daily routine of the reading of the newspapers, the writing of the analysis and the sending off of one’s notes to the Foreign Ministry—reminding them how many British subjects were under detention like Anthony [Grey]. The return to normality owed much to the outstanding leadership of Percy Cradock, who was in charge after Donald Hopson’s departure.

Perhaps one postscript from the Mission’s side on Anthony’s story would be interesting, because I think to some extent it is still relevant in dealing with China today.

During Anthony’s long incarceration, he was allowed two consular visits—John Weston and Donald Hopson the first time; Percy Cradock, my Head of Mission, and I, as the man with consular duties, the second time. I think we had 24 hours’ notice that we were going to be allowed to see him. The previous visit had lasted 25 minutes; we did not know how long this one was going to last. He had been in solitary confinement for 18 months or something. We did not know how long we had to assess his state of health and to get across to him, if we could, something of the enormous amount of manpower that was being put into putting

29

pressure on the Chinese to release him.

Percy and I had discussed, before we went in, how we should deal with it when we came out. We agreed that the strategy of ‘quiet diplomacy’ had achieved nothing, and that it was time to mobilise public opinion around the world. It was a time when China was beginning to put out feelers to countries that had not already recognised it to establish diplomatic relations. We felt that there was now going to be a sensitivity towards outside reaction to the fate of the Reuters’ correspondent, which there might not have been before.

The FCO agreed that we should hold a press conference after visiting Grey. So western news correspondents were invited to meet us after what turned out to be 25 minutes with Anthony. Then, and I claim credit for this one, we invited our posts around the world in all those countries where we knew the Chinese wanted to establish diplomatic relations, such as Canada and Sri Lanka —to report local press reaction, if any, to the FCO, copied to us through the open telegraph system, so that the Chinese regime could read what was being said about them around the world.

We had a superb response from our posts around the world—giving us verbatim editorials from newspapers ranging from the Colombo Times to The Medicine Hat News in Alberta—and we would be called down, at hourly intervals it seemed, to the post office which was located in the Jianguomenwai Diplomatic Residential Compound to receive the latest batch of telegrams through the open postal telegraphs. I remember going down there, and I expected to be treated with a Red Guard type of ‘You have offended China’ manner, but not at all—the young postal clerk was smiling and beaming as she handed over these things to me. Eventually, we were officially informed that we were overloading the system and that we had to stop. The system was not overloaded, but the embarrassment was too great.

The serious point about that story is that we discerned an impact on a regime that, pretended it did not care what the world thought of it.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you. In the time remaining to us, let us, if we may, deal with two other things. One is Hong Kong as seen from the Mission in Peking, and the other is the Tiananmen Incident of 1989. Timothy, you were there at, in a sense, the beginning of the process of negotiations about the future of Hong Kong—Sir Murray MacLehose’s108 visit to Peking in 1979. Sir William Ehrman is in the audience and will come in Panel 2. But, if I may, I will borrow you, William, for Panel 1 for a bit on the Peking view of the negotiations.

GEORGE: I was there very much at the beginning, before it began, and for the dialogue about whether there should be a negotiation. In a way, it all turned on land leases—a feeling that after land leases in the New Territories dropped below 30 years, because of the situation there, legal problems would arise. There was enormous caution in Hong Kong about negotiations. Probably, Percy Cradock was a little more ready to accept realities, but there was also a sense that once the genie was out of the bottle, it could not be put back in, so once negotiations began they would have to go on, wherever they led.

On the detail, Murray came up to Peking and was extraordinarily well received, I think. It was extremely courteous. There was some disappointment at the end of the visit that there had not been a reaction, but it would have been surprising, in a way, if we had had one.

I think the Chinese technique is to get you to reveal as much of your case as they possibly can before they respond. This was, after all, the opening bid, and things went rather silent after the initial thing. Then the negotiations picked up later, of course.

I remember one anecdote. I cannot remember if it was at the banquet or just

108

Sir Murray MacLehose (Lord MacLehose of Beoch, 1917-2000), Governor of Hong Kong, 1971-82.

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informally. Deng Xiaoping109—this high—looked up at Murray MacLehose—that high—and said, ‘You know, Governor, I’ll let you into a secret: governing China is much more complicated than governing Hong Kong.’

WILSON (Chair): Thank you very much. I would like to go to Sir William in a moment. As Murray MacLehose’s Political Adviser, I was part of that group for the 1979 visit, with Sir YK Kan,110 the senior member of the Executive Council. For those who do not want it in detail, and we are not dealing with policy now, the idea was put to Deng Xiaoping that we could somehow deal with the particular question of land leases in the New Territories—they were due to end three days before the end of June after the 99-year lease was up—and avoid the bigger question of the whole future of Hong Kong by saying that, at some point, China would resume sovereignty and control over Hong Kong but that there was no need to deal with it now. The answer on extending individual land leases in the New Territories beyond 1997 came back later in the year: ‘No, you cannot do that.’ Later on we moved on to full negotiations on the whole future of the territory.

Getting into the negotiations—as seen from the Peking mission, William, because you were there at the heart of it— tell us please about what were the atmospherics and the handling of the whole issue.

SIR WILLIAM EHRMAN: In between when Timothy’s talking about and when I arrived, the Chinese—Deng Xiaoping—had produced the theory of one country, two systems. It was designed for Taiwan, but it was equally applicable to Hong Kong. Indeed, one of the great guarantees of the Hong Kong agreement is that the Chinese will want to honour it in order not to reduce the chances of an eventual deal with Taiwan.

We had been skirmishing for some while about how to get into proper negotiations.

The Chinese said, ‘You must accept the principle, first, that Hong Kong is coming back to us’; and we were saying, ‘No. British administration is necessary to preserve prosperity and stability there.’ Eventually, we managed to find a formula that allowed us to move forward without either side giving up its position of principle.

The points I remember about being up in Peking at the time were that the Embassy needed to advise on the art of the possible and on how much we could get into the agreement.

In a sense, the Chinese gave us a very general proposition of 10 points, and we then had to fill in the detail. Although it says in the final agreement that all the details were Chinese policies elaborated on the basis of the 10 points for Hong Kong, they in fact looked very much to us to help them fill in the detail.

People in Hong Kong naturally wanted the maximum amount of detail—right the way down to the harbour master wanting maps of the buoying system, and that that should be preserved for 50 years—and you and I were always trying to boil that down a bit. I remember that I, personally, got into terrible trouble because you gave me the task, in a break in the negotiations, to boil down the very long text. Deng Xiaoping had set a limit on the number of characters in the eventual agreement. We in fact exceeded it, but Hong Kong would have had us exceed it many, many times. I did my holiday work, and I made the terrible mistake of not only sending it to you, where you were having a break back in the UK, but of copying it to Hong Kong, and there was the most immense explosion at my having reduced a perfectly decent 50,000-word document down to about 10,000 words. Eventually, we got an agreement.

The trilateral mechanics were fun. It worked very well time-wise. London would send

109

Deng Xiaoping (1904-97), Chinese leader, various positions, 1978-92.

Sir Yuet-keung Kan (1913-2012), Senior Unofficial Member of Hong Kong’s Executive Council (Exco), 1974-80.

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their overall instructions, which would arrive overnight in Beijing. We would wake up early, get our instructions and go in and negotiate in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, we would send our telegrams to Hong Kong, where they would deliberate all evening and send their views to London. London would then adjudicate and send instructions back to us for the next morning. Although spread all over the world, we managed to co-ordinate quite well.

Another glory of that system was that we always had time for a good lunch after the morning’s discussions. We would go off and eat Chinese dumplings in the Ritan Park every day, so the Hong Kong Agreement was negotiated on the basis of a bowlful of dumplings for each of us each day.

WILSON (Chair): You, William, were a very good précis writer. You must have had very good training. That comment relates to the last stage of a so-called Joint Working Group set up by the summer of 1984 to agree the text of the Joint Declaration and its annexes. It just so happens that I was head of the British side, and William was an extremely effective member of it. What we were trying to do was put down on paper the detail of what had earlier been negotiated in broad terms at a higher level and to pin it down in annexes of details about the future as it related to the institutions that really mattered for Hong Kong.

I have one footnote on what William says, because it is quite interesting about the way a mission operates. As William says, all this traffic was going backwards and forwards—the time scale was very tight, indeed—from Peking to Hong Kong, with the Hong Kong Government commenting, staying up late at night and sending their views off to London, and London then, because of the time lag, being able to deal with all this material and send instructions back to us in Peking.

Not only that, but it was being done in both Chinese and in English. This must surely have been the first time that any foreign country had negotiated treaty texts with China simultaneously in Chinese and in English. It was vital to us that the Hong Kong population should see the Chinese text, so there was no question of having an English text and then translating it. We were sending material off in cipher to Hong Kong with the Chinese text, and we had far more efficient ways of printing out a Chinese text at high speed from our computers than, it has to be said, the Chinese Foreign Ministry had. They often had to make do with handwritten characters.

As an example of high-speed work in a small mission, probably then exchanging more telegrams than any other mission in the world, except Washington, at that time, it was a very interesting exercise in mechanics. That was the Peking end of it, and the Hong Kong story is another bit.

Another last thing, which affected Hong Kong as well, was the Tiananmen Incident of 1989. If I may, I will also ask Lord Hurd briefly to comment on how the Hong Kong negotiations and then this next episode were seen in Britain. An agreement on the future of Hong Kong, as it were the major issue between Britain and China at that point, had been dealt with, and dealt with, I would argue, very satisfactorily. There was then a long period of time—13 years—before it came into effect In the middle of this comes the Tiananmen Incident, which had an appalling effect, in terms of morale, on Hong Kong. Again, we have nobody who was in China at the time of the Tiananmen incident, or do we? I would like to ask you, if I may—I know we are meant to be dealing with Peking, but you are in a unique position, and we need to take advantage of that—about the politics of dealing with the Hong Kong issue and transferring sovereignty back to China. You have mentioned Margaret Thatcher’s views, and the politics of how that all looked here would be very interesting to this audience.

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HURD: I was not particularly involved, but I kept an interest, obviously. The thing about Prime Minister Thatcher was that she always formed a view very early on and stated it, and this had its advantages and its disadvantages. The disadvantage was that she was on the record as having said X and Y. In this case, she very nearly came to the point of saying, ‘We are not going to give up Hong Kong.’ Anyway, that was her underlying instinct. The process of getting the Prime Minister away from what she had originally said was a very long and difficult process. I had several examples of it later on, particularly as regards German unification and so on. She had handicapped herself: she had given herself minimum room for manoeuvre, probably quite deliberately. Therefore, actually edging her away from the precipice was a really difficult business.

But everyone involved in the Hong Kong negotiations—you did it, and I give you all credit for it. I think it was a very difficult thing to do.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you very much. I wish we had somebody who was in Peking at the time of the Tiananmen Incident, but we do not.

I will make one comment, if I may, and then I want to ask the views of people in the audience. The comment is this. Looked at from a Hong Kong point of view, and I was in Hong Kong at the time, the Tiananmen Incident had an absolutely appalling effect on morale in Hong Kong. It took several months to get back to a more normal state of mind and a slightly less pessimistic way of looking at the future. Then, when time moved on and the transfer of sovereignty took place in 1997, the reality turned out, to be a great deal better than the critics had anticipated.

For the Mission in Peking, one of the difficulties, quite apart from anything else, was that quite a significant number of people from Hong Kong were in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As I think is well known, a certain amount of money and things like tents were being provided by people from Hong Kong to those who were demonstrating in Tiananmen Square.

A number of Hong Kong people got caught up in it. The Embassy had to deal with trying to get them out and back to Hong Kong. They did an extraordinarily good job in doing that. It must have been extremely hard, but they did a terrific job.

Tiananmen is the end of the period of time that this little panel is meant to be dealing with. We have in this audience an astonishing number of highly informed people on all of these things. It would be very nice, if anybody has questions or comments, if we could use our remaining time. Patrick, you took five minutes at the beginning and, if I may, I will take five minutes at the end. Is that all right? We will go on until 3.05, and tea will last for 25 minutes instead of 30 minutes—tough.

Are there any comments or questions from people who have been listening to all of this? Hugh Davies. I should say that you should announce yourself.

HUGH DAVIES: I am Hugh Davies. I was in the Embassy first more or less at the same time as Roger Garside—one year behind him—so we overlapped.

Beyond the question of Anthony Grey, it should really be recognised that there were I think 13, 15 or more British citizens held in various stages or states of incarceration for a very long time. I know that Roger was involved in trying to get as many of these out as possible.

In my second year, I took over the consular functions, and we used to send notes to the Foreign Ministry every month saying, ‘X, Y and Z: we have not heard from them, and their family want to know, etc. Kindly let us know.’ Nothing ever came back.

Then gradually they were dripped out one by one. Their circumstances, in many cases, were not ones that we necessarily sympathised very much with, because many of them were what we called fellow travellers. They had chosen to work for the Chinese in various functions. They had been on the wrong side during the Red Guard ructions and they were

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then incarcerated. There was, for example, one family, we discovered later, who had spent I think three years in the upper floors of the Xinqiao Hotel, and they had been shut in there for three years with children, but they came out eventually. That was the sort of thing that was going on.

The other thing I wanted to mention that has not been mentioned is that, of course, between 1984, when the Hong Kong agreement was reached, and Tiananmen, there was a slightly golden period in our relationship. Given that this is the Jubilee Year,111 we should just mention that it was possible, in 1986, for Her Majesty the Queen to pay a visit to China, and I think that that was the only time she could possibly have done it. I just wanted to put that on the record, too.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you very much. Are there other comments or questions? Gordon Barrass. Can you take the microphone?

GORDON BARRASS: I was the First Secretary, dealing with foreign affairs, in the Embassy, from the beginning of 1970 through to May 1972. As some of you have mentioned, this was when China once again became more involved with foreign affairs. There were some extraordinary events.

One afternoon in late March/early April 1971 John Denson,112 the Chargé, received an invitation to have dinner a couple of hours later with Guo Moruo. This was most unusual as during this phase of the Cultural Revolution Guo was the most senior member of the Chinese government after Premier Zhou Enlai to meet foreigners.

When Denson and I arrived Guo introduced us to the guest of honour—the bewildered British chairman of the International Table Tennis Federation, who was on his way to the championship tournament in Tokyo. During his stop-over in Hong Kong the Chinese had persuaded him to pay a brief visit to China. He was rushed to Guangzhou airport, where a plane was waiting to bring him to meet Guo. This was the most intimate official Chinese dinner that either Denson or I had ever been to. There were only four others present--the guest of honour—whose name I have forgotten—an official, an interpreter and Guo. With charm Guo sought to persuade his guest that the PRC, not Taiwan, should represent China in the International Table Tennis Federation. The significance of this meeting became clear a couple of weeks when at the Tokyo championships the Chinese team invited the American team to visit Beijing. Ping-Pong diplomacy had begun.

Then in October 1971, when the Emperor Haile Selassie113 arrived in Beijing there was a rather surreal display of the cross-currents in Chinese diplomacy. As he drove along Changan Avenue he passed beneath banners that read ‘Long live His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia! Down with Imperialism!’ This visit provided another indication that the Cultural Revolution was, for a while at least, entering a calmer phase. One evening Chinese television not only showed Premier Zhou Enlai114 and the Emperor attending a performance by acrobats and dancers, but the cameras paid particular attention to the ladies sitting near to them who were wearing blouses made of pattered fabrics. The next day, shops in Wangfujing115 were stocked with these materials. It was the first return of colour to the streets of Beijing, in terms of personal costume, since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

111

The year 2012 marked the sixtieth anniversary of HM Queen Elizabeth II accession to the throne.

John Denson, Ambassador, 1969-71.

113 Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia (1892-1975).

114 Zhou Enlai (1899-1976), Premier, People’s Republic of China, 1949-76 115 Wangfujing is the central shopping district in Beijing.

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After the agreement was reached on the exchange of Ambassadors,116 John Addis,117 the Charge d’Affaires became Ambassador. At about 1 o’clock one morning I was woken by a phone call from the Protocol Department of the Foreign Ministry to say that Zhou Enlai wished to see the Ambassador. The official said that he had not only been unable to contact anyone at the Residence—which came as no surprise to me as Chinese staff did not stay there at night and the Ambassador did not have a telephone in his bedroom—but they had failed to rouse any senior member of Chancery.

I quickly dressed and rushed to the Residence in my car. As Addis did not respond to the doorbell I started throwing small stones at his bedroom window, which did the trick. Soon Addis and I were roaring through the empty streets of Beijing to the Great Hall of the People, where Zhou Enlai was present with a British trade delegation, headed by Sir John Keswick.118 When it came to having the picture taken, Keswick tried to stand on Zhou Enlai’s right, but Zhou very gently turned him around and put the Ambassador in the appropriate place. However, when the picture was printed in a magazine connected with Keswick, everyone else was cut out of the picture and the picture was reversed.

WILSON (Chair): Can you say a couple of words on whether it made a difference when we exchanged ambassadors. You mentioned John Addis going, and he was our first Ambassador after the Communist victory.

BARRASS: I doubt that at the political level much changed, just because so many other things were changing at that time. It was not that our relations did not improve; they did in many ways. For example, 200 Chinese students came to Britain. That did not happen quite as planned. Sir Alec Douglas-Home119 was going to pay his first visit to Beijing at the end of 1972, and this subject had been under discussion with the British Council. The Chinese said that they were going to pay, but the British Council still said that they were only willing to look after 20 Chinese students. I took a great act of courage: I allowed a typographical error to occur in a telegram. Before I had ‘spotted’ it, the telegram went off and I received one from Sir Alec Douglas-Home saying that it was wonderful that we had now agreed to take 200 Chinese students, which we did. Initially, the British Council was furious, but soon welcomed the increasing links with Britain.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you very much. Are there other comments or questions?

DR JUDITH ROWBOTHAM: At the beginning of the session, we heard a great deal about the atmosphere in the 1960s. I was very much wondering what the sense was of change. You talked, Roger, about the way in which the daily business got back to normal very quickly but, post-1968, how had the atmospherics changed, if at all?

GARSIDE: The huge change was with the death of Zhou Enlai. From then on, there was tremendous value in being a direct observer in Beijing. Zhou Enlai died—nine months before Mao Tse Tung—in January 1976, and it was a terrible shock for many, many Chinese who had hoped that Zhou would outlive Mao. Now he was dead, Mao’s allies, who had been fighting a coded war against Zhou Enlai and reformers like Deng Xiaoping for several years,

116

The UK and the People’s Republic of China formally exchanged Ambassadors in 1972.

Sir John Addis (1914-83), Ambassador, 1972-4.

118 Sir John Keswick (1906–1982), President of the Sino-British Trade Council, 1961-73.

119 Sir Alec Douglas-Home (the 13th Earl of Home, disclaimed; later Lord Home of the Hirshel, 1903-95), Foreign Secretary, 1970-4 (previously 1960-3).

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might now feel themselves free to re-launch some new political storm. We could see around us that people were absolutely distraught. In his last major public speech Zhou had set China a goal of Four Modernisations, which made no reference to communism or even socialism; it was a nationalist goal. Sitting in my office in Beijing, I read low-level intelligence reports from Hong Kong, based on interviews with legal travellers crossing into the colony, and those provided a wealth of evidence of the widespread popularity of Zhou’s nationalist goal, and the fear that Mao’s cronies wanted to tilt China to the left and relaunch a Cultural Revolution type of movement.

Four months after Zhou’s death, at Qingming, the festival when Chinese traditionally venerated their ancestors, which had been turned into veneration of revolutionary heroes, for a week every work unit in Beijing sent a delegation—a column of people—marching through Tiananmen Square to bring wreaths for Zhou Enlai. Dedicated to him, they stood there, they made speeches swearing even to the death to defend the political legacy of Zhou Enlai. A few put up posters warning against a political storm being whipped up by certain people—leftists, as we would say. I spent four days on the Square observing what was the first true popular mass expression of opinion since 1949. I even took my two infant daughters to the Square because we were witnessing a historic event, and I wanted them to be able to say in later years that they were there.

I remember standing, on the Sunday evening, on the edge of Tiananmen Square and looking out over the vast space. There on the Gate of Heavenly Peace was the portrait of Mao Tse Tung facing out across the Square. Only a few isolated individuals were walking around on the square, Tiananmen was crowded: there were row upon row of wreaths standing on easels facing Mao Tse Tung, and at the heart of many of those wreaths was a portrait of Zhou Enlai composed of flowers. So there was an army of Zhou Enlais facing Mao Tse Tung— Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane.120 I stood there at midnight, and I said to myself, ‘How is this going to end? The Politburo cannot leave the political heart of China occupied by a hostile army, but if they remove these wreaths, there could be an explosion of popular anger.’ I went back the next morning—this illustrates the point that we could now work as observers and did not just have to be confined to reading the People’s Daily every morning—and at breakfast time the wreaths had all gone. There were thousands of young Chinese on the square, rushing up to the side wall of the Great Hall of the People, shouting, ‘Give us back our wreaths!’ There were 200 young men with shaven heads who, when they spotted a tiny little police car with a megaphone on top, which was going around appealing to them to leave the square, they rushed towards it, got the policeman and the policewoman out and turned the car over. By the end of the day, the square was filled again. There was fighting on the square. That night, the army and the militia were sent in to clear the square, and there was bloodshed and whatever.

Those were some of the atmospherics. We had begun to observe Chinese politics happening on the street.

When Mao died in September, I remembered that before leaving the UK I had been told that Jiang Qing,121 now Mao’s widow, had said to her American biographer in confidence: ‘When he dies, they will come for me within one month.’ I watched and waited.

Then one day, my wife and I took our only Chinese contacts of any standing out to lunch.

Before lunch began, the wife took me aside and told me in terms that were guarded but unmistakable, that Jiang Qing would not appear in public again, and nor would the other three members of what we later learnt to call the ‘Gang of Four’.122 I reported that

120

From Macbeth: “Fear not, till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane”.

Jiang Qing (1914-91).

122 Political faction: Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao (1917-2005), Yao Wenyuan (1931-2005), and Wang Hongwen (1932-95).

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conversation to London that afternoon. It was probably the first such report to reach the British government. We shared it with the Americans and a few others who had not yet heard it. This is another small piece of evidence of the value of an embassy.

Of course, two years’ later we had the democracy wall. We were able to meet the young democracy activists—people such as Wei Jingsheng123—and hear from them why they had dared to speak out when they knew that they were going to be arrested. I remember Wei Jingsheng sitting in my sitting room with me, saying, ‘If I speak now, I can get the words out of my mouth; if I had done this a year ago, before I had spoken they would have cut my tongue off. Because I can say this now, I can hope to advance the days when the Chinese people will know democracy.’

I had spent four of the six years between my two Beijing postings in the US. I had gone from a country that did not know the rule of law, to one that is ruled by the finest constitution ever written by man, a country in which immigrants from all over the globe are bound together by respect for that constitution, by obedience to law and by participation in an elective democracy, making a daily reality of a phrase on the national seal, ‘E pluribus unum’.124 I had witnessed the Supreme Court uphold the right of the press to publish the Pentagon Papers. I had watched the interaction of a free press and the elected legislature bring down the President of the most powerful country in the world over Watergate. When I returned to Beijing, I was confident that the rule of law, freedom and democracy are universal values, and that I would base my work on that belief and on the premise that the similarities between ourselves and the Chinese as regards political instincts are primary and the differences secondary; that helped me make sense of what was going on. When my posting ended, I spent a year on unpaid leave writing a book to tell the story of the struggle for the succession to Zhou and Mao, and how and why it was won by Deng Xiaoping.125 Some of those who have read it, including eminent Sinologists, have told me it helped them understand China better. I wrote it because I believe that our diplomats accumulate considerable expertise which they should share with the public.

WILSON (Chair): Thank you. John, do you want to say a word about the return of Deng Xiaoping? Then we must conclude at that point.

BOYD: I will be very brief, but it seems a pity not to mention the great man, who had such impact on the Hong Kong solution and China’s economic orientation. Just to say that, in my second tour, from 1973 to 1975, he was, according to some people—including me—in the foreign community, coming back; according to others, he was not. We tried to resolve this by reading Red Flag in bed, and seeing what the historical references added up to.

I took a rather extreme position, which caused the Australians to come round and call on my Ambassador, and say, ‘John Boyd has normally been quite sensible, but he’s out on a limb on this one and we worry if he’s been overworking.’ So I am claiming real pride of authorship here. Deng did come back: I was lucky to take the note when Ted Heath came in 1974—it must have been 1974—and that is the only strong personal impression I had of Deng, but I was very struck at the time. Sir Edward Heath was no longer Prime Minister, but he had an excellent briefing pack and so on. Deng seemed to do it all just out of his head. He was extraordinarily bright, thoughtful, capable and determined and a very rough politician.

But one cannot let this go by without noting what he did for China.

123

Wei Jingsheng, Chinese human rights activist.

Out of many, one.

125 See Roger Garside, Coming Alive: China After Mao (André Deutsch , 1981).

124

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Â

WILSON (Chair): Thank you very much. I think that is an extraordinarily good point on which to finish.

I thank all of those who have sat at this table. Thank you very much, indeed, for all your contributions. Thank you all for contributing and for listening. My apologies for shortening your tea break to 24 minutes. Thank you all very much, indeed.

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Â

The Role and Functions of the British Embassy in Beijing Panel 2 – The rise of China as an economic superpower and its implications 7 June 2012, 15.30-17.00 India Office Council Chamber, Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Chair: Dr Judith Rowbotham: Nottingham Trent University Witnesses: Sir William Ehrman, KCMG: Ambassador, 2006-10 Sir Christopher Hum, KCMG: Ambassador, 2002-05 David Coates: Political Counsellor, 1989-1992 Nigel Cox: Minister, 2000-02 Other participants: Niki Alsford: Centre of Taiwan Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies Dr Antony Best: London School of Economics Tim Dowse: FCO Dr Michael F. Hopkins: University of Liverpool Lord Hurd of Westwell, CH, CBE, PC: Beijing, 1954-56 Dr Richard Smith: FCO Historians Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, KT, GCMG, PhD, FRSE: former Governor of Hong Kong, 1987-92

DR JUDITH ROWBOTHAM (Chair): I hope you are all suitably refreshed with tea and cake. I would like to welcome you back to the second panel this afternoon—looking at the rise of China as an economic superpower and its implications.

I remind you that this is not under Chatham House rules; you are on the record when and if you speak. Equally, I remind you that before anything is published you will be sent a copy of the transcript, so that you can check it for accuracy and—okay—for libel. Please also make sure, members of the audience, that when you speak, if you are invited so to do, you identify yourselves. Unlike our previous distinguished chair, Lord Wilson, I do not know you by sight. My qualification, apart from being a historian who has chaired such witness seminars before, is a childhood as an RAF brat in Singapore and Hong Kong in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so while I have a very clear interest in this, I do not have the expertise of Lord Wilson. Please remember to identify yourselves when you speak.

I would like to invite the panel to talk very briefly, first, about themselves and their time at the Embassy in Beijing—I, too, grew up calling it Peking, and we have Pekingese at home. May I invite, first, David Coates to describe briefly his period and also his expectations when he went there?

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DAVID COATES: Thank you very much. I was first in the ‘real’ China from 1978 to 1981 as First Sec. Commercial. Before I joined the Foreign Office, I had had a spell as a language student from the University of Hawaii at the Stanford Center in Taiwan. I next went back in 1989, just after Tiananmen, to 1992. I was also the head of the Far Eastern Department in the later 1990s.

Very much continuing the idea of giving an atmosphere and what it felt like to be operating there, rather than looking at pure historical events, the thing that struck me going back in 1989 were the quite serious divisions—interesting and sometimes rather lively divisions—inside the Embassy about the attitude to what had just happened. The people who had been posted to Beijing for the first time before 1989 had all sorts of expectations of what was happening in Eastern Europe happening in some sort of shape or form in China, and those expectations had been frustrated in the most brutal fashion possible. Those like me who had been there before and were coming after the event, but even some who had lived through it, actually thought, ‘Well, it’s not all bad overall compared with the late seventies, although it’s a tragedy and it’s very bitter for the families of those who were killed and injured.’ The real bitterness, came from Tiananmen, frustrating the prospects of some sort of political evolution in China.

The other thing to remember about that period is that, from the Chinese leadership’s position, they had read it wrong in Europe. I think it was Qiao Shi,126 the Politburo Standing Committee member responsible for national security and intelligence, who had been sent off to Romania by his senior colleagues to give a view on whether or not the situation was serious. He came back, and said Ceauşescu127 had been under a little local difficulty but thought he would see it through and be all right, with just a bit of toughness. Then about six weeks later, there were those pictures of Ceauşescu and his wife in open coffins. That concentrated Chinese minds on how near they had been to the brink in Tiananmen, and how much priority they ought to give to keeping control of things, rather than being adventurous with political reform.

The debate in the Embassy was between those who saw it all as terrible—‘Woe is me’ and ‘It’s the end of the world’—and those who, a bit like me but not just me, said, ‘Compared with when we were here 10 or 15 years ago, it’s a hell of lot better, even after Tiananmen.

You can go and talk to people, and they don’t get arrested. You can move around. There is still civil society. There is a variety of view, even among the Chinese officials.’ It was just a completely different world. That was a very interesting difference of opinion, and it reminds you that objectivity is rather hard to arrive at—it all depends where you are coming from.

The other point that I would like to dwell on a bit is that Hong Kong negotiations were still going on. From a Chinese perspective, it was all David Wilson’s fault really. I think the interpretation was that to help restore confidence in Hong Kong after Tiananmen and give it a different focus from worrying about the political consequences of Tiananmen for Hong Kong after 1997, he announced various construction projects. They needed doing, but they had always needed doing. They were accelerated, and chief among them was probably the airport.128 What was happening in discussions between Britain and China in the Joint Liaison Group, but also in special one-offs sent out from London, such as the Andrew Burns129

126

Qiao Shi, Member of the Communist Party of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, 1987-97.

Nicolae Ceau escu (1918-89), Romanian Head of State, 1967-89. He was executed on Christmas Day 1989.

128 ‘Although David [Wilson] maintained the timing of the airport announcement was a coincidence, that is not my memory of events. But as a former Governor and someone whom I respect enormously, I was not going to contradict him in public and think I said as much on the day.’ Comment by David Coates, via email 17 January 2013.

129 Sir Andrew Burns, Consul-General, Hong Kong, 1997-2000.

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mission, was really sterile debate. Looking sideways at the issues for discussion today, No. 5 is ‘How did the historic role played by Britain in Chinese affairs until 1949 affect both relations with and the attitude of the Embassy towards the PRC?’ Well, the discussions were sterile in the extreme.

The way I would characterise the relationships between people on either side of the table—I am just giving a few words in the hope that others present might pick up the theme — are elements of the following: First, of course, massive attention to detail—logical arguments did not win the debate, but it was essential not to lose, otherwise we were already on a bad footing. Another thing to avoid was ever agreeing to Chinese principles, because the principles were only abstract—we are British and we do not think about principles; we look at the detail—but once you had accepted the wrong principles, you really are in the jaws of the tiger. Struggle was very prominent, and struggle causes you to ask what your attitude is and what the Chinese attitude is. I think the long historical imperial period played quite a large part, and also the feeling that gradually the tables were now turning. There was also occasionally almost smugness on the Chinese side: ‘Well, you’re not grovelling around, but you’re finding it very hard with a poor set of cards to try to preserve something, and it’s not going to happen. We might grant you something in generous imperial fashion, but don’t kid yourselves.’

Suspicion was a very large element. The atmosphere in that period was quite mixed really. Lots of things were going right in China. Economic developments were moving forward. Other people can say something about that. But in terms of dealing with officials, it was quite difficult and quite hard line. Then, of course, the situation began to be ungummed, and it was ungummed in a very interesting fashion by the Sir Percy Cradock mission to resolve difficulties over the financing the proposed new Hong Kong airport. That was again a sign of how much British officials and British Ministers were prepared to put on the line— including some of their own self-respect, in a way—for Hong Kong and for trying to get it to come out right.

The key element, at least in Percy Cradock’s analysis in his Experiences of China,130 and probably rightly, is that what the Chinese wanted out of those discussions about the airport was not so much reassurance about the British not taking all the money from Hong Kong, Hong Kong overextending itself, giving all the contracts to British firms and all that sort of stuff—the suspicion element—but a bit of rehabilitation in terms of visits by senior political leaders. In Percy’s view, and probably quite rightly, that was the main element that emerged during those talks. Incidentally, they were quite interesting. Percy and Lu Ping,131 on the Chinese side, went off for a private conversation halfway through, and anyone who knew Percy Cradock knows what sort of person he was, with a quiet, calm temperament, and yet from this side room came the noise of Lu Ping and Percy Cradock shouting at each other, banging the table and all the rest of it. Eventually, they emerged with an agreement, which was quite interesting, too.

I have one light anecdote, in the spirit of all the other light anecdotes. In negotiations with the Chinese, there was an absolute rule in the Foreign Office that you take a complete verbatim record—no abridging or ‘almost complete, I think’ sort of thing—and they were certainly very long records of these detailed discussions. It was just in case, because the Chinese would keep their records, and if you ever got caught out forgetting something that happened three and a half years ago on a particular point, you were in deep trouble.

The poor first and second secretaries who were keeping these records played a sort of bullshit bingo. They chose five Chinese phrases or strings. These were sterile conversations

130

Sir Percy Cradock, Former Ambassador to China and the Special Advisor on Foreign Policy to both Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Author of Experiences of China (Jonathan Murray, 1994).

131 Lu Ping, Director of the Hong Kong and Macau Office of the State Council 1990-7.

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that were not going anywhere; they were all about will, not about actually resolving any issue at that stage, because the Chinese were cross about the British reaction to Tiananmen and Hong Kong’s reaction to it. They had large piles of fruit gums.. They took the records dutifully, and each time one of these words came up, they would transfer a fruit gum. To show that relations with the Chinese were not entirely bad, there would occasionally be a break—most of the time, you would huddle in your own room and sort your notes, or go and have a walk in the garden, or just get bored or whatever—and occasionally the junior officials on both sides met together and chatted about this and that. I think our juniors told the Chinese juniors about this system of staving off terminal boredom, and they laughed like drains.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Thank you very much, David. May I now turn to Nigel Cox? NIGEL COX: When Judith said to me that she wanted us each to start with a short introduction, my heart sank rather, because many of the China hands who have travelled round Chinese tractor factories and other places will remember that the first thing one’s briefing host always did was say, ‘We will start with a jianduanjieshao’—a short, simple introduction. That would usually take 55 minutes, allowing a minute for questions before the end.

My short introduction is that I was first based in Peking at the same time as David, from 1978 to 1981, but I then went back again to cover two periods of this second period— from 1992 to 1996 and, again, from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2002. Clearly, from China’s point of view, Chinese development went on steadily through those periods, but for the Embassy I think they were very different. For a lot of us, during 1992 to 1996 everything was still dominated by the Hong Kong negotiation, Chris Patten’s132 democracy proposals and the other big issues of the Hong Kong transition.

By the beginning of 2000, that was behind us, and the Embassy was moving on a growth agenda. We talk about the rise of China as an economic superpower, but I certainly remember Tony Galsworthy,133 who was my Ambassador when I went at the beginning of 2000, emphasising very strongly in his papers for the Foreign Office that the first priority for Britain in China was not our commercial interests; it was the strategic contribution to the integration of China in the international community in all senses.

We were acting on a very broad range of issues, and I think from the Embassy’s point of view, the core of the Embassy remained rather similar, but all round it extra bits grew.

Clearly, the commercial section developed very strongly. We had consulates by then—quite substantial consulates in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing. We had a very large British Council operation working under the Embassy’s aegis, and also a significant Department for International Development team. Things were rather different. The Visa Section became enormous, as travel by Chinese to Britain expanded very rapidly. So the nature of our work was rather different, and the co-ordination—I suppose, the minister’s job in the Embassy, as number two, involves a lot of the co-ordination—was a lot of my bread and butter.

I was going to make a couple of remarks about earlier points. I just wonder whether some of the audience, who may not have come across the China hands of the Foreign Office before, may feel that it is all rather cosy, that we all seem to know each other very well and that we must all be pretty homogeneous. I do not think we were that homogeneous or, indeed, are that homogeneous. There were some quite strong differences between us. David has pointed out some of the differences of opinion in the post-Tiananmen Embassy. I always noticed quite a strong difference, in my early days—as I said, I first went there in 1978—

132 133

Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes), Governor of Hong Kong, 1992-7.

Sir Anthony Galsworthy, Ambassador to China, 1997-2002.

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from the people who had some memory, possibly a collective memory, of what China had been like before 1949. Their view of the country was rather different from that of those of us who came to it with perhaps rather cynical views and without such a perspective.

I remember trying to tap into the expertise of the old China hands, not always very successfully. Once, in 1984, when I was working in the Political Adviser’s Office in Hong Kong, I had a very pleasant dinner with the political adviser, Sir Robin McLaren134—sadly, he is no longer with us. We had been having some discussions about some particularly difficult point of negotiations with China. After dinner, I relaxed with him over a whisky, thinking that this was my chance to get some really good advice. I said to him, ‘You know, the longer I deal with China, the harder I find it to see where the bottom line is going to be and the harder I find it to read them.’ I wondered how he would respond to this, and he said, ‘Oh, well that’s not very good then, is it?’ and we moved swiftly on.

I think that probably some of the older school tended to disapprove of me rather. I was always regarded as one of the more bumptious brats in the Embassy. I took a bit of a risk. We were talking about the normalisation of UK-China relations—the elevation to Ambassadorial status in 1972—and the thirtieth anniversary of that occasion was very properly marked with a great reception in Peking in 2002, when I was there. I think one of those Chinese foreign affairs institutes gave a big party.

Unfortunately, the thirtieth anniversary of the raising of UK-China diplomatic relations to ambassadorial level happened to occur at a time when we had no Ambassador in Peking—Tony Galsworthy had gone, and Christopher Hum had not yet arrived—so, as I was the British Chargé D’Affaires again, I had to address the group about the wonderful relationship we now had. It was a very pleasant occasion. I remember one point, though, which was that I had made the effort to give my speech in Chinese. As many of you will know, that would have been quite an ordeal for the Chinese, as well as for me, but I thought it did go pretty well and there was even some laughter from the Chinese at the jokes and so on, so I thought it was all right. As you know, speeches at Chinese banquets very often come early in proceedings, so having made my speech, I went to take my place at the table beside a very distinguished Chinese official, who had been a Minister and a senior man for many years. He was very complimentary to me—he did not speak any English—and he said, ‘Oh, yes, that’s a very good speech. Well done.’ So I thought that my Chinese had got through.

Then we started the meal, and I picked up chopsticks and he said, ‘Ah, you can use chopsticks.’ That touches on the point that comprehension on both sides of what we had invested about learning about each other was not always very clear.

We were just touching on the historical resonances. I happened to be there again, also as chargé, as it happens, in August 2000, for the hundredth anniversary of the relief of the legations—the end of the siege of the legations—and we decided that we would mark that with some very discreet activities, including a reception in the old Legation Quarter for Ambassadors of the countries that had taken part in the relieving force. I am glad to say that we did get away with it. I think something leaked into the Far Eastern Economic Review, but I was never called to the Foreign Ministry about it.

My final point—sorry; this is a very long introduction. One very short final point?

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): One very short final point.

COX: Okay. What has not really come up so far is how limited our sources of information really were about what was going on at top levels in the Chinese system. The Foreign

134

Sir Robin McLaren (1934-2010), Political Adviser, Hong Kong, 1981-5; later Ambassador to Beijing, 19914.

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Ministry was a weak ministry and it was extremely cautious, and we did not necessarily know our interlocutors very much. One of the great frustrations for British diplomats in Peking— certainly in my time; I do not know if it changed subsequently—was how difficult it was to have the kind of confidential discussions with senior opinion formers or decision makers that diplomats take for granted everywhere else they work, or almost everywhere else they work.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Thank you. May I now move on to your Ambassador—Sir Christopher?

SIR CHRISTOPHER HUM: Thank you very much. I went to China first in 1970. I served there in the commercial section in the early 1970s. I was back as Chinese Secretary—the Internal Political Analyst—in the late 1970s, at the beginning of reform and opening. From London, I then spent a lot of time handing over Hong Kong, and I went back as Ambassador in 2002.

Before I went to Beijing, I had one of the senior jobs in London. I was the Chief Clerk—a rather archaic title—or Operating Officer, which gave me access to the periodic discussions which would take place about twice a year, when the senior Foreign Office officials and the senior ambassadors from half a dozen countries would come back to London. They would meet in conclave for a day, generally at Chevening135—the very nice country home of the Foreign Secretary—and discuss the state of the world.

At that time, the Foreign Office was very strongly stocked in the upper echelons by people who had served in Brussels—understandably—and people who had worked in Washington. Our Permanent Secretary, John Kerr—now Lord Kerr136—had been Head of Mission of both. We had a day’s discussion on the state of the world, but it was divided so that the first half of the day was about Europe and the second half of the day was about transatlantic relations. I had been posted to Beijing—I was going in a month or two—and at about 5 o’clock that day, I lifted my pencil and said, ‘What about China?’ There was a sort of slight intake of breath, and everyone thought, ‘Well, yes, what about China? Should we be talking about China as well?’

In a sense, that rather sums things up about the period when I was in China as Ambassador. I think the period from 2002 to 2005 was when the nature of China’s rise and the potential of China’s role in the world finally dawned on people. It dawned, arguably a bit belatedly, on the Foreign Office, but on everyone else as well. This absolutely conditioned the work of the Embassy in Beijing when I was there. First, it meant, very gratifyingly, that we had a tremendous stream of visitors: all the senior politicians, including the Prime Minister twice and the Chancellor twice, company boards—it suddenly became terribly fashionable to bring your entire board to have a board meeting in Beijing or Shanghai— academics, scientists, artists and the rest. Everyone suddenly woke up to China and came to China. A very large part of our work in the Embassy was not about being a travel agent or an events manager, although it sometimes felt like that, but about trying to channel, guide and advise every one of these visits and every one of these visitors.

One of the results of this huge burst of activity was that the Embassy continued to grow, but also that it became a sort of Whitehall in miniature. It was not just that our range of Foreign Office activity was much wider; it meant that, as the transnational agenda became so important, we needed on the spot representatives of the Department for the Environment, of the Treasury, the military of course and a range of different Whitehall departments. As

135

Since 1980 Chevening, near Sevenoaks, Kent, has been used as the Foreign Secretary’s country house residence.

136 Sir John Kerr (Lord Kerr of Kinlochard), Permanent Under-Secretary of State, FCO, 1997-2002; Ambassador to Washington, 1995-7; UK Permanent Representative to the European Union, 1990-5.

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ambassador, you found that you were presiding over this mini-Whitehall.

Unlike, say, the French Foreign Service, where French Embassies are full, we are told, of people who report to their own ministries and never tell anyone else what they are doing, we had a relatively co-ordinated operation. The fact that the minister co-ordinated things was very important. There was not this tradition of jealousy and suspicion between government departments, which made some of my colleagues tear their hair out.

There was also a huge change, which was culminating at that time, in what we did away from analysis towards engagement. It was no longer, mercifully, about scanning the People’s Daily. The people who used to read these carefully crafted reports that we used to send had disappeared from the Foreign Office—there were not very many of them, and they had been thinned out mercilessly—and, of course, the Foreign Office had access to many, many other sources of information about China, apart from us. The market for our very detailed, rather erudite reporting had disappeared. People have spoken about diplomatic dispatches, which were wonderful creations. I can remember the time when none was complete without a few Greek tags and Latin tags scattered within in. There was no market for those at all. We were sent instructions discouraging us from sending any dispatch unless we really had to.

Instead, we were engaged, and personally I found that very much more congenial. It was possible to have a very wide range of contacts. I take Nigel’s point about the difficulty of getting information out of them, but over the time I was there things were beginning to change. People were beginning to loosen up. Academics and the people who worked in thinktanks were prepared to have sensible discussions and little conversations after dinner, and everyone had their little repertoire of these key public intellectuals that we could call on.

For the Ambassador—this is my last point—the whole notion of public diplomacy, which we had never heard of before, suddenly became a reality. It was what we were meant to do. We had instructions to engage in public diplomacy—very congenial I found it—so we were out much more than we were in. We were talking to people. For example, we had a huge amount of contact with young people, with meetings at universities and meetings with students. It was an Embassy that had entirely changed into a very busy, very engaged, rather purposeful place.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Thank you very much, Sir Christopher. Sir William?

SIR WILLIAM EHRMAN: Thank you. I was in Beijing first from 1976 to 1978 and then from 1983-1984. I was in Hong Kong under David Wilson from 1989-1993. I worked for Unilever in Shanghai from 1997-1998. I went back finally to Beijing from 2006-2010.

The first thing I would like to do is to contrast the world of John Boyd of no work and picnics at the Ming tombs—that, in my view, was true, when I first went in 1976—with the world of 2006. When I started learning Chinese at Cambridge in the late 1960s, I was one of three people in my year who were doing it. By the time I left China in 2010, the British Council reckoned that there were maybe 5,000 British students in China, which, in terms of our population, was equivalent to the number of Chinese students in Britain.

The growth of interest in China among British people, because increasingly there were jobs in China, was absolutely immense, and so was the growth, of course, in the size of the Embassy. When I went in 1976, I was the dogsbody third secretary and I did all sorts of work: economic, culture, education—the British Council was not back at that point—science, environment, trade and some political reporting; when I returned, there were seven large sections headed by seven councillors doing that work.

There about 30-odd British people living in China in 1976. Roger had got most of those detained out by then, but there were one or two still left. There was the Embassy, there

45

were a few journalists and there were 15 students, so the total British population was 30-odd.

When I returned in 2006, there were over 10,000 permanent British residents in China, so that was a vast change.

The Embassy, excluding the Consulate-General in Hong Kong, had grown to over 800 people, of whom two thirds were locally employed. The Foreign Office, as Christopher was saying, had become a minuscule part of that—about 40-odd people were from the Foreign Office personnel; the rest were not FCO-based. We were a mini-Whitehall. We had 15 or so government departments in the Embassy.

Something that has not been touched on at all this afternoon is what China thought of Britain, and it is perhaps worth saying a little about that. Deng Xiaoping said, ‘The agreement to return Hong Kong has removed the trauma that we suffered by Britain taking Hong Kong in the 19th century.’ I think, to a large extent, that that was true, and we were able to get on with subjects on their own merits. Hong Kong never really came up in my last four years.

Where did Britain sit in the spectrum of Chinese interests abroad? The overwhelming focus was on the United States, and it will remain so. After that came Japan, and then I would put equal Russia and the UK. You might say, ‘The UK—really? Why the UK, for goodness’ sake?’ Well, there were a number of reasons. We were going through a good period in relations; the French and Germans were having spats, with Sarkozy137 going this way and that. We were having quite a steady period of relations. They saw us as having the principal role, within the EU, in forming foreign policy positions and indeed many other positions.

When they wanted to discuss a foreign policy issue, they would call in the French, the Germans and us.

On financial and economic matters, we were also respected, partly because of the City of London and partly because of all that Gordon Brown138 did when he was chairman of the G20139 at the time of the financial crisis; he took a lot of interest in China. In that time, from 2008 onward, they called in three Ambassadors to discuss the global financial crisis—the Americans, the Japanese and the Brits - and not the French and Germans. Wen Jiabao140 summed it all up in 2009, when he said that ‘our ties now go beyond the bilateral and have increasing significance for the world’. We were the only country, other than America, to have an Annual Summit, a Strategic Dialogue and an Economic and Financial Dialogue at the top level—and we had about 35 ministerial and royal visits each year while I was there, so that was busy.

The style of discussion was different. You did, occasionally, get the short introduction, which Nigel has referred to, but you also got a completely different style. I went to see Li Keqiang141 up in Shenyang, when he was in the provinces. He was on his own—no note-taker—and he sat on the edge of an armchair and said, ‘Right, why have you come to see me?’ I went to see Wang Yang,142 who is now in Guangdong but was then in Chongqing.

He came in, and he had one or two other people with him but, instead of doing a brief introduction to Chongqing, he sat down and said, ‘I know why you’ve come. BP does not have enough supply of gas for its plant here in this city. I have just flown in from Xinjiang.

I’ve done a deal with them. It’s fixed. You’re going to have enough gas in the future. Now, have you come about anything else? I’m a busy man.’ The whole style of things was rather different. Christopher has mentioned public diplomacy. We were doing a mass on blogs and

137

Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, 2007-12 Gordon Brown, Prime Minister, 2007-10.

139 The Group of Twenty (G-20) Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, established in 1999.

140 Wen Jiabao, Chinese Premier, 2003-.

141 Li Keqiang, Chinese Vice-Premier, 2008-.

142 Wang Yang, Secretary of the CPC Chongqing Committee, 2005-7; Secretary of the CPC Guangdong Committee, since 2007.

138

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sending things round to ordinary people in China.

On the work of the Embassy in my time, I reversed one thing Christopher did. I completely went back to old-fashioned political reporting. I did think that there was an audience for it, and I greatly admired what Percy Cradock had done on that, so we did really deep think pieces on each area of Chinese life. I had a huge audience for it. I used to get questions, for example, from Mr Brown as Chancellor and Prime Minister, and from David Miliband.143 I did think it was worth it, because people did not understand China. Even though there was this enormous increase of interest in it, they did not understand it enough, and we went in for that a good deal.

Trade obviously grew a great deal. Perhaps I could make just two or three points, particularly on the role of the Embassy on that. How big will China grow? Forget all the problems that they have with their economy, of which there are lots—limited rule of law, environmental degradation, ageing population, too much government involvement. The latest World Bank report says that China will overtake America by 2030,144 with the increase between now and then of 15 North Koreas. Why? Because only 50 per cent are in the cities so far, and they have not really got spending on consumer goods going. That is one reason why we really have to treat it seriously. They will make millions of mistakes over the period ahead, but the Chinese economy will grow hugely, in my view.

Comparisons are often made between India and China. In 1978, their GDPs were the same. By the time I was back there, China’s was almost four times India’s. That is something worth remembering when those two countries are compared. The work ethic in China remains ferocious. A rather less exciting or promising comparison is between the UK and China. In 1975, Britain’s GDP was 46 per cent greater than that of China. When Christopher Hum left at the end of the 2005, Britain’s GDP was still greater than China’s—just. By the time I left four years later, China’s GDP was two and a half times that of Britain. That is the one astonishing statistic that I will always remember—of the paths absolutely crossing during that period. Our investment was obviously great and our trade was growing: fifteenth in the export market when I went; seventh nowadays.

The role of the Embassy is the important thing in all of this. It can play a much bigger role than in many other countries, because China is such a government-run place. When I worked for Unilever, they had 13,000 employees. The consulate in Shanghai was tiny, but the Consul-General got in to see the Mayor all the time and the Chairman of Unilever never could, so using the Embassy for commerce was important.

On foreign policy and security issues—I promise not to be long—the important thing is that, although we have to deal with many issues as permanent members of the Security Council, there are of course two huge differences: China is getting less reticent; and it fundamentally disagrees with us over whether external intervention is legitimate to solve a humanitarian catastrophe.

In many other areas, our work was growing hugely—climate change, education and culture. In 1976, when I was in charge in it, we had a chrysanthemum delegation and a goldfish delegation; now every orchestra, museum, ballet etc., were coming to China. In science, we were second only to the USA in terms of joint scientific publications between British and Chinese scientists. It is very important to make a point about human rights. As well as the immediate cases, which we raised on a regular basis, the long-term programmes were really important—Geoffrey Howe145 had started the training of lawyers, and prison management, death penalty reduction and all those sorts of things were really important.

I do not have an awful lot to say on defence, but I would make a point for the future

143

David Miliband, Foreign Secretary, 2007-10.

China 2030 (World Bank, 2012).

145 Sir Geoffrey Howe (Lord Howe of Aberavon), Foreign Secretary, 1983-90.

144

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about Britain’s security—the South China Sea. You may think that that is nothing to do with us, but 50 per cent of the world’s trade goes through it. It will matter to us, and we need to take an interest in it.

My very last point is that, with such different values, Britain and China will never be strategic allies, but we are strategic partners on a range of issues. We are forced to be such, and the challenge is to work together to promote our national interests, while having different values, something we have never before had to do on such a scale with such a country.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Thank you very much, all four of you. I would like to pick up on some of the things that particularly Sir Christopher and Sir William have said, and to reflect back on that by asking both David and Nigel to come in. On the expansion of the diplomatic remit—the public diplomacy—did either of you see what Sir Christopher and Sir William described as coming about? Was this something that you expected to happen, or was it something that, in a sense, came as a surprise to you?

COATES: Other things were happening when I was there the second time, but the wholesale engagement with the populace, rather than with government or state organisations or newly semi-independent commercial organisations, was growing part of the remit. I do not think, because the very rapid economic expansion had not then taken place, that we saw quite how large the Embassy would get.

The thing we did see already, and it is still a problem, is that basically the Embassy is operating out of a medium-sized house in the country. Although certain departments have moved out and got better equipped, even in the early 1990s—looking sideways at, say, the Australians, Canadians or people of equal weight to us; making no comparison with the Americans—it was always a bit of a nuisance or a cause of concern that the way we presented ourselves physically, through the building, was such a throwback. On the other hand, part of the reason was not just the difficulty of financing a much more suitable building, but that the Embassy was already quite busy and everybody was busy doing things, so it was difficult to stand back. Rather like Arsenal moving to a new stadium, it can do a lot of damage and take time to put together. Life just went on with a series of compromises.

EHRMAN: I do not think that we could have done anything different. There are more net citizens in China than in any other country in the world. If we had not tried to keep up with that and exploit that, we would have been completely failing in our duty. The organisation department of the Communist Party itself realised this at an early stage, and plugged into this.

Everyone was plugging into this in China, and we needed to do it.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Very often, the task of the historian is to identify why something happened when something else did not. That is why I was asking whether David and Nigel predicted what was going to happen and whether, in their earlier times, they saw it coming.

COX: I think through the late 1990s and the beginning of the century, it was clear that this was the direction we were moving in. The challenge was to get the resources to do the kind of public diplomacy effort that we wanted to do. As usual, there was a bit of a lag, and Christopher has talked about how people finally woke up in London to what was needed. I think a lot of things are still done on a shoestring, and they are done extremely well. The Shanghai Expo,146 which Christopher and William played a part in getting going—William

146

Expo 2010, Shanghai.

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saw it through—was a terrific success, and I do not think that in 1996 I would have guessed that that could have been possible.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Sir William, you mentioned the strategic dimension. In his time, my father was staff officer in charge of signals for the Far East, which was why we spent quite a long time out there. I remember being hoisted—my mother did not see any reason for leaving us behind—around the various areas. Certainly as a child, I was very conscious of the importance of that area strategically. That, of course, was the time of the Cold War. More recently, we have had the development of the war on terror.

How do you feel? Again, since we have done this chronologically, may I start with David and then move on to Nigel, to Sir Christopher and to Sir William to comment on the way in which these wider strategic considerations, against the background first of a Cold War and then of the war on terror, affected your reactions to how China was reacting to other countries, notably of course to Taiwan but also to other far eastern countries, including Russia?

COATES: Britain’s strategic role finished in East Asia in 1967, with Denis Healey’s147 Defence Review.148 That was necessary for economic reasons—the IMF crisis149 and all the rest of it—so I do not think any of us really thought in direct strategic terms. I think Mrs Thatcher actually asked around as to how defensible Hong Kong was, when the issue first came across her radar screen. It was explained that you could go back to the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and the heroic resistance by the local militia and regular forces, but the fact was that Hong Kong was indefensible—not only did it not have enough men, but if the water was cut off or refugees were let across the borders in large numbers, that would be it.

In terms of the wider picture, obviously the big development—perceived by all—was that China gradually, and then very rapidly, disassociated itself from Russia. It was a swing factor. China swung from the Soviet orbit for all sorts of reasons to America, to counterbalance in a way what it saw, probably inaccurately, as a disparity between the Soviet Union and America.

Another subtext, which was interesting of course and which was there all the time through the 1950s, was what difficulties America was going to get into with China because of Taiwan. The mid-1950s period is interesting—lots of very high-level concern, by British administrations, to try to stop the Americans getting into a nuclear war with China over some small offshore islands. Later, even in the 1990s, there would probably be the thought that it could become a feature of our relations with the US. At one stage, we might be asked, ‘Okay.

There’s real trouble with China. What are you going to put into the pot?’ That would be seen not in the context of any British concern for Taiwan, but more in terms of the overall relationship with the US. Very briefly, in terms of Taiwan itself, the interest was mainly commercial, and the expansion of the number of students and all the rest of it. There was a slow interest in the example that Taiwan provided of Chinese society moving from a Leninist authoritarian system, with an added bit of ethnic suppression of Fujian speakers by the Mainlanders, to

147

Denis Healey (Lord Healey), Defence Secretary, 1964-70.

The 1967 Defence Review. See Peter Catterall, MD Kandiah and Gillian Staerck, The Decision to Withdraw East of Suez: Witness Seminar, 16 Nov. 1990 (ICBH, 2002).

149 In 1976 the Labour Government was in a financial crisis and had to apply for an IMF loan, around US$4 billion. As part of the terms for the subsequent agreement, the UK was forced to accept IMF negotiators’ demands for severe cuts in public expenditure. See Kathleen Burk (ed.): ‘1976 IMF Crisis’, Witness Seminar, 29 April 1988, Contemporary Record, Vol.3 No.2 (1989).

148

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something which is a very democratic society. Of course, that is very small beer compared with the overwhelming strategic interest in China and getting on with it properly.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Thank you.

COX: The point I would pick up, Judith, is to underline how close ambassadors and number twos, particularly in Peking, worked with key allies. The European Union clearly had a lot of co-ordination meetings, but so did the Americans, Japanese, Australians, Canadians and so on. There were—not very frequent—confidential discussions about what was going on across the board, whether in bilateral relations or broader strategic issues. They were very interesting. We picked up some useful information, and we may have exercised some degree of influence through them.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Thank you. Sir Christopher, you came in, as you did in 2002, to a very interesting world.

HUM: Yes. China responded remarkably quickly to 9/11.150 For once, there was not this sort of pause and period of cogitation while the Chinese machine decided what line to take. I think it was Jiang Zemin151 himself who appreciated that this was a moment when China had to stand up and be counted and so, very swiftly, China came down on the right side.

There were probably two calculations in mind. One was related to relations with the United States. I think there was a quick appreciation of just how traumatic this had been for the United States and how unthinkable it would be that China, trying to nourish this relationship, should not align itself with the United States. But there was also of course a domestic side to this as well, in that China considered itself—considers itself—threatened by terrorism.

It is really that China considers itself threatened by separatism, and that the separatist urges of some of its ethnic minority populations are something that China has been quite incapable of coping with in any sort of rational way—not just Tibet, but also Xinjiang.152 In Xinjiang you have Uyghurs, including those who have links across the borders into central Asia and those who are represented in the West in some rather grandiose organisations which may or may not—they quite probably do not—have terrorist inclinations. China realised that, if it played its cards right, it could get these organisations prescribed internationally, in the same way as al-Qaeda153 and the ones about which the West was concerned.

China, for its own domestic reasons, joined rather vigorously in the war on terrorism.

It has been, I think, fairly co-operative in dealing with some of the aspects of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the fears that they might fall into terrorist hands. At the governmental level, China has reacted fairly well. There was—I am sure there still is—quite close co-operation between military and intelligence personnel. But a lot of private enterprise goes on, and there are still Chinese organisations that are ready to supply things that they go ahead and supply. People are persuaded to turn a blind eye locally, so quite a lot of this still goes on.

More generally, the Americans, who have far more stake in the game, have found it

150

On 11 Sept. 2001 four co-ordinated acts of terrorism were carried out by the Islamist group al-Qaeda in the USA: two commercial aircraft deliberately crashed into World Trade Center in New York; another was crashed into the Pentagon in Washington; and one failed to reach its target. Nearly 3000 people died as a result. This commenced the ‘War on Terror’ and is commonly referred to as 9/11.

151 Jiang Zemin, President of China, 1989-2003.

152 Xinjiang is China’s most Westerly province.

153 Al-Qaeda is an Islamic fundamentalist organisation who claimed responsibility for 9/11 in 2004.

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all very difficult getting any sort of sensible relationship with the Chinese military. We are not on the same level in terms of our interests in the bilateral defence relationship, but, as ambassador, I used to find this intensely frustrating. When I set foot in the Chinese Ministry of Defence, I used to feel that I was entering a sort of time warp. None of the openness and none of the relative sophistication had actually made it within the walls the Chinese Ministry of Defence, and everyone was very stiff. The upper echelons of the ministry, who would encounter people like our Secretary of State for Defence, were still leathery generals, whose idea of a lunchtime conversation was to try to drink their opposite number under the table. It was really very depressing, but all you could do was chip away and hope that generational change would eventually have its effect.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Thank you. Sir William?

EHRMAN: I do not have anything to add to what Christopher has said on terrorism and proliferation, or indeed on the Chinese Ministry of Defence. I remember one meeting where I sat there with our Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff—we had just agreed strategic talks at that level each year—who was talking about Afghanistan, and after 15 minutes the Chinese Chief of Staff asked if Britain had troops in Afghanistan, so it was hard going with those senior generals, some of whom were very old.

I would like to make just two other comments. One is on what China’s security interests are. They published a paper in 2006 or 2007, I think, and set out five interests. It has been interesting to see how they have progressed in implementing them. The first was internal security. The second was Taiwan. The third was defence out to the first island chain, which means the Straits of Lombok, through which so much of their energy comes. The fourth was out to the second island chain, the Straits of Malacca. And the fifth was to be a strong regional power—in other words, stronger than Japan, but not necessarily the United States.

Yet, they have interests, particularly in energy, around the world. You suddenly find that, despite this having been published relatively recently, they have forces off Somalia now.

That is interesting, but I would come back to the South China Sea, because so much trade passes through it—1967, maybe, but we are still part of the Five Power Defence Arrangements and we conduct exercises under those. I think we are going to have to take an interest in the security of that world. As American interest switches to the Pacific from the Atlantic, if we are going to remain part of a strong alliance, we are going to have to do more of what I think Nigel said, which is co-ordination and discussions with the big powers of the region—the Japanese, the Australians and so on.

The second point is cyber. It is a difficult issue, but one on which we need to engage.

We have started to engage through a conference here in London quite recently. We are working together on things such as cybercrime with our police forces. It is not an easy subject, but one on which we have to build up contacts.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Thank you very much. I think it would be interesting to use the last 35 minutes of this session to open the discussion to the floor, and to ask for a range of questions and comments. A reminder—please will you identify yourself when you lay hands on the microphone, and please speak into the microphone.

LORD WILSON OF TILLYORN: I just have one comment, if I may, on what David Coates said about Hong Kong, which is just to get a bit of the historical record straight. He referred to the airport project in Hong Kong in 1989. It is important to get right why that was done. Part of it, of course, as David said, was to give a reassurance to people in Hong Kong

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that we were thinking long-term. But the point I want to get across is that this was not suddenly dreamed up with that objective; it was the other way round, in a sense.

We had launched a research project in Hong Kong about two years earlier—the time I went to Hong Kong—about the future of the then airport at Kai Tak. Would it last into the future and, if it would not (it was pretty obvious that it would not) where could you build an alternative, and could you afford it and so on? All of this work ended, and was designed to end, in roughly July 1989 or, in other words, almost exactly the time of the Tiananmen Incident. The question, therefore, for the Hong Kong Government was not, ‘Do we think of a new project?’ It was, in this very difficult situation, ‘Do we cancel something that we’re on the point of deciding that we ought to do, that we’ve got to do, that we can afford to do and that we know where we’re going to do it?’

It led, and this is where David is absolutely right, to quite a lot of misunderstanding on the Chinese side, because they saw it as something designed to extract out of Hong Kong the wealth of Hong Kong and to pour it into the pockets of British businessmen. It was not that; it was to do something for the long-term future of Hong Kong. It was to demonstrate that the Hong Kong Government and Britain were thinking beyond 1997. They were putting huge resources into doing something that would benefit post-British-administered Hong Kong. Getting this straight will, I hope, be useful for clarifying the historical record.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): We have a question at the front, and then a question at the back and one over here.

DR RICHARD SMITH: I just wanted to ask you about dissidents. If you watch the Channel 4 News, for example, and they go round to interview a dissident, ten minutes later there is a knock on the door and the security police come in and end the interview. I was just wondering how easy it was to have relations with dissidents during the time period that you are covering.

COATES: I had that sort of experience, although not exactly with a dissident. I went on a long train journey from Peking to Urumqi —hard class—and it was a great opportunity, first time around, to talk to people. One of the group I got talking to invited me round their house—the only time, in my first period, that I went to a Chinese house. Being in China, it was not innocent; they wanted something. In fact, they were about twelve or sixteen White Russians, the descendants of White Russians who had fled Russia after the 1917 revolution and their subsequent Chinese partners, for whom the Australians had a scheme to provide visas to enter Australia. In the view of my contacts, the Australian Embassy had not been responding very well to their entreaties. I learned later, when I saw the person again in Beijing, that the Australians had responded to my neutral inquiry, saying, ‘Please note this; it’s up to you what you do about it’, and that their house in Urumqi had been entirely turned over by the security immediately after my visit.154 That was the first time around. People—possibly mad, possibly not—would talk to you outside the Friendship Store, once in a while, and immediately be picked up by the Public Security Bureau, so it was quite a well-controlled environment for everyone, apart from those licensed to have some sort of official contact with Embassy officials. The second time around, it was much more variable I should think, but other people will know more about that.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): I know that Nigel has a comment.

154

Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang.

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COX: Yes. During the mid-1990s and the early part of this century, we were in contact with a few dissidents. We would occasionally arrange very discreet meetings between them and members of visiting human rights delegations, for example, but it became increasingly difficult. Towards the end of my time, we were not doing that anymore. I do not know how it moved on.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Sir Christopher?

HUM: If we are taking it chronologically, during my time in Beijing I do not think the matter even arose, strange though it might sound. Nowadays, you read about dissidents and there is, I think, an identifiable group of people scattered around Beijing who are not quite dangerous enough to put in jail or have a degree of protection because they are famous, like the artist Ai Weiwei.155 When I was there, I could not have written a list of dissidents. I think that they had been quite successfully demoralised and marginalised, and so they did not really exist as a community. I think that they have emerged again since, but during that particular time, no.

Did the Embassy have contact with dissidents? I do not think we would have identified dissidents to have contact with. Journalists were perhaps slightly more adventurous, and had contacts with one or two people who might fall into that category. But I think embassies in general probably did not really do that.

While I have the floor, I just have one point about internal security, which is relevant.

When William mentioned the security priorities of the Chinese Government, internal security came first. I think it is very significant that, in published budgets, the internal security budget is larger than the external defence budget. That gives you some idea of just how all-pervasive the security is inside China and just what resources are devoted to keeping their own population, whom the authorities mistrust for a number of reasons, under control.

EHRMAN: We had regular contact with human rights activists, Nobel Prize winners, Ai Weiwei and, in particular, many of the lawyers who were doing human rights work. We were even able to run training courses in human rights reporting for reporters. They tried to stop it at the centre, but about 50 per cent of people turned up anyway in Beijing. In the provinces, the further we got from Beijing, the higher the turnout was.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): We had a question at the back. Can you identify yourself, please?

NIKI ALSFORD: I am Niki Alsford from the Centre of Taiwan Studies at SOAS. Just to go on and continue this point about British strategic commitment within the region, I am wondering whether or not anyone can talk about the role of, or the viewpoints from the Embassy on, the anti-secession law156 that was signed in March 2005. What was the response coming out of the Embassy at that period?

HUM: Well, that is a slightly specific question, so perhaps I could put it slightly more widely. If those who are practising in Beijing erect a list of the items that are most important, in the Chinese Government’s eyes, in communication from the Chinese Government to them, the things that cause most grief and most angst—they are, without doubt, at the head of the list—are Tibet and Taiwan. Both those subjects of course touch on the sovereignty and

155

Ai Weiwei, Chinese contemporary artist.

Chinese anti-secession law, 14 Mar. 2005. Full text: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asiapacific/4347555.stm

156

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territorial integrity of China.

There is nothing more important that the Chinese Government would want to talk to a western government about than Tibet and Taiwan. This might sound a bit bizarre, but it is the case. You would set up a ministerial encounter. You would have your checklist of things that you wanted to discuss—beginning, for example, with Iraq, Afghanistan or the situation in the Middle East and so on. You would go in and then you would be hijacked, because an invitation had been extended to the Dalai Lama157 or because some Taiwanese dignitary had been given more attention than the dignitary should have been given in London, and this would take over the meeting. This would be the point on which the Chinese Minister would major, almost to the exclusion of anything else.

I would, not very often, get summoned by the Chinese Foreign Minister—as opposed to the Vice-Minister, whose job it usually was to deal with me—but the only time I can remember being summoned both by the Chinese Foreign Minister and, just to underline their displeasure, late at night was indeed about a meeting with the Dalai Lama.

Taiwan is a very, very sensitive issue, to get to your question. During this whole period China was kind of cranking up a mechanism to incorporate into law the notion of the inseparability of Taiwan and the fact that Taiwan is part of the territory of China. In any kind of sane world this would have been overkill, and we regarded it as such. We did not go along and tell the Chinese that that was the case. They were trying to put pressure on the Taiwanese authorities in a way which could quite well have turned out to be counterproductive, as it was counterproductive at an earlier stage—at a very sensitive election—when they had fired off missiles in the general direction of Taiwan and, of course, it caused great solidarity among the Taiwanese people. We regarded it as very heavy-handed and rather counterproductive diplomacy, but we did not go out of our way to give the Chinese Government the benefit of our views.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): I think we have a comment on this from one of our earlier panellists. Roger Garside?

GARSIDE: Yes, I have a broad question: 34 years after the launching of the reform era by Deng Xiaoping, the Deng model for the development of China—economic liberalisation without political reform—is still in place. The contradictions inherent in that model seem to me to be becoming more and more acute. I would like to ask the panel whether they think that this model is sustainable, and if it is, when China becomes the number one economy in the world—in 2030 or whenever—what implications will that have for the defence of our own political values and are we doing enough now to defend our own political values?

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Any comment from the panel?

EHRMAN: I always used to make the point that Karl Marx made—that the political superstructure needs to keep up with the economic base. Has it kept up sufficiently in China?

In the early 2000s, businessmen were allowed into the party, so maybe you could argue that that brought in a section of society that had not been in the ruling party before. As your question implies, there are now more smaller-scale businessmen and so on, who are maybe not in it, but who are getting rich and are interested in the sorts of issues you raise. I always used to go back to Karl Marx and ask them about that.

157

Dalai Lama is the title given to the spiritual leader of Tibet.

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ROWBOTHAM (Chair): We have a question in the middle, and then another one at the back.

GARSIDE: Would anyone else like to reply to my question?

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): I am so sorry; I looked around earlier, and there did not seem to be anything. Do you have something to say?

COATES: I do, indirectly. I have been back to Taiwan quite a few times since I retired from the Foreign Office, and now of course there are Chinese tourists coming through Taiwan.

They are very careful about what they say about their impressions of Taiwan when they are tackled by the local media, who are very lively. The Chinese visitors tend to find very interesting the talking head programmes that litter Taiwanese TV, on just about all current affairs channels every evening, with instant analysis of every political event, scandal or whatever. But their reaction is not necessarily positive. They are worried by the uncertainty of it all as a process, and they are worried about the lack of respect shown to existing authority and various other things.

Obviously, you cannot generalise about a whole wedge of people coming through, but I have grave doubts, actually, about the overall theory that as countries get more prosperous, inevitably they become more democratic. I really do wonder, partly because the Chinese leadership’s analysis of and the broad conclusion about developments in Russia was, ‘Don’t let political developments wreck the economy’, and ‘Keep the politics under control.’ More widely, there are deep historical associations of a period of liveliness in politics with pretty unpleasant personal effects. I do not know: I am not quite as optimistic as possibly William is about this inevitable development.

I think Roger’s question really means something else. It means: do we limit our own expressions of concerns from a democratic society out of the economic interest of getting on well with China, and how far does that process go as China’s relative strength increases and ours diminishes relatively, if not absolutely? It is a very good question to ask, but there are no easy answers.

HUM: Obviously, a very wide range of personal views are expressed on this issue. My own feeling is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum—not the China collapse theory or the indefinite rise of China theory, but a sense that there are stresses building up within the system of governance which, over time, will cause quite serious instability if some way is not found of resolving some of those pressures through greater openness, a greater tolerance of opposing views, the introduction of some sorts of checks to untrammelled authority or ways of dealing with corruption. There are quite serious flaws in the system as it has evolved, and some of those flaws have to be corrected, else we will get a sort of gradual disfunctionality. I do not think that things are going to collapse, partly because, in security terms, the authorities have the situation pretty well under control, but they see manifestations of instability, they log them and they note that the graph is going up. They wonder what to do, and I think we all have to be a bit concerned about that ourselves.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Nigel?

COX: I will just say one word on how I feel about this from the point of view of the role of the Embassy during the periods when I was there. I must say that I felt that the line that we were given in the Embassy—the instructions that we were getting on the whole democracy and human rights message from London—were coherent. We were pursuing an advocacy

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policy—we were pursuing advocacy for people whose rights were denied—but we were also engaging, in the concrete ways that William was talking about, in helping to build legal reform, better prison management and so forth, to help build up, as much as we could, a culture in which human rights would be better respected. I thought that the role of the Embassy in that was reasonably coherent.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): We have a question in the middle. Could you identify yourself?

DR ANTONY BEST: I am Antony Best. I have been doing research on the beginning of the twentieth century, and I was surprised to find a discourse existing about ‘When China rises, the world will shake’. I was not expecting to find something as early as that. I was wondering when it was that those in the Beijing Embassy were able to say to the Foreign Office in London, ‘This isn’t a great power; this is a superpower on the rise’, and whether there was any resistance in Whitehall to that belief.

HUM: Hmm! We all started off in China at more or less the same time, and Cultural Revolution China did seem a pretty hopeless case. It was just about rock bottom. I was posted to learn Chinese a couple of months after the sack of the British Mission, and I wondered what I was letting myself in for.

I think it was something that dawned gradually. I do not think there was a moment of great revelation. We all knew that China was a country which, simply by virtue of the size of the population, had the potential to be a very significant force in the world. Clearly, for a period that potential was seriously suppressed, but I would have thought you would date reform and opening from 1979, or late 1978. During the 1980s, you got the sense that things were moving in a sensible direction and they never really stopped, except with the big hiatus of Tiananmen, which was a political hiatus rather than an economic hiatus. Things just went on, and at some point we realised that the twenty-first century really was going to a century in which China played a very major role; I do not think there was a sort of ‘Ah!’ moment.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): We have first Hugh Davies and then Lord Hurd—the two side by side, please.

DAVIES: I was just going to comment slightly on that subject and also to ask the panel what they think about how China is now, as it were, asserting itself in the world and how this is going to affect us. It is asserting itself diplomatically and politically and becoming more stringent, for example, in its criticism of policies on the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama has just paid another visit to London. It was interesting for me the other day, because I was at a dinner shortly after that at which the Chinese Ambassador was expected to be talking in a very friendly fashion about the fact that we were celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the exchange of ambassadors. I think it really surprised and shook the audience when he stood up and gave us a long and very severe lecture on the fact that there had been some very short-sighted decisions by politicians who were beginning to think only about small minority groups and not taking the broader interests of this country and of China into account, etc. We got a very strong lecture on the Dalai Lama.

There again, it struck me that this was very much in the sort of traditions of Chinese opera, where they shout loudly and it in fact does not necessarily mean so much. As soon as he had sat down, he apparently said to his neighbour, ‘Never mind, although we’ve cancelled the visit of the number three in the Chinese hierarchy, by the time of the Olympics everything’s going to be fine.’ The same message was delivered to me across the table by the

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man who had written the speech. You get this loud shouting, but does it actually amount to anything.

EHRMAN: I would like to make one comment on China being more assertive internationally, which I mentioned in relation to the UN, on climate change for example.

Another broader issue is the role of popular opinion in foreign policy in China. It does have an influence on the government now, which I do not think it had 20 or 30 years ago. An example is that Wen Jiabao concluded an agreement with Japan on joint exploration of resources in the East China Sea, but it has never been implemented because there was such popular opposition.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Sir Christopher?

HUM: I just want to add to that point, if I may. I am always interested by the circularity involved in this question, because it is the Chinese Government itself which has fostered this discourse—I suppose that that is the fancy word—of victimhood followed by China reasserting the place in the world to which it is entitled, with very strong nationalist overtones. Of course, Japan plays its role in that as one of the baddies.

There is the extent to which this is played through a system of patriotic education, which influences every single schoolchild and every single student in China—or they are subject to it, at least—and is then played back into the blogosphere and into the sort of pressures which the Chinese Foreign Ministry feel from public opinion. The whole thing is kind of circular, in that it is actually the result of a policy of the Chinese Government itself, and it has the effect of painting it into the corner, for example in some of the more tricky areas of policy towards Japan or Taiwan.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): David has a comment, and then Nigel.

COATES: I think the thing not to forget is that the relatively careful approach of China to international policy manifestations of its rising power is basically the security equation in the Western Pacific. As that changes, one would expect that China would be tempted, at least, to change. The restraints on that are traditional views, but China is a very realistic assessor, I think, of its own relative military strength, and so far it is not yet there.

In terms of Taiwan, the story is rather better. Mainland scholars frequently take part in gatherings which are largely of scholars from Taiwan, North America and Western Europe, including Britain. The most recent visiting scholar from Tsing Hua University saw things as relatively steady state for the next four years, provided, and it is quite a big ‘provided’, that the DPP—the Democratic Progressive Party—did not get back into power and immediately declare either a referendum or independence. Indeed, the Chinese government was contemplating engaging with the DPP, which is the opposition party at the moment, but again, the price for that was that the DPP had formally to accept the idea of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan at some sort of distant stage in the future.

The scholar was talking about change in maybe the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, so, from that particular Chinese perspective, satellite Taiwan is almost in a steady-state orbit round planet China, and they have other things to think about for the time being. That will not always necessarily be the case, and everything is a hostage to any tensions or weaknesses inside China’s political leadership and also to the extent to which America gets involved in other armed interventions abroad with weakening forces.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Nigel.

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COX: Very briefly, on the previous question about when the penny dropped in the Embassy about China’s emerging role, I think that in the late 1970s many of us—perhaps everyone— in the Embassy was very sceptical about some of the pronouncements that Deng Xiaoping was making, such as quadrupling GDP by the year 2000. One had heard a lot of those sorts of targets before, so there was some scepticism about whether that could be done.

In the same way, there was scepticism about the wider opening. I remember that I was particularly keen as the junior person in the Embassy to travel to as many open cities as I possibly could, to have a look before they might close down again. It is worth bearing in mind that, even as the economic message came, right up to the end of the Cold War there was a recognition of China’s strategic importance. Percy Cradock is quoted as saying—I do not know if it is true or not—that, ‘Whatever happens to Hong Kong, Britain will still be there, China will still be there and you will still need to talk to each other.’ I think that that was possibly more about China’s strategic role than anything else.

I would say that, even at the end of the 1990s, people were sometimes frustrated in the Embassy in Peking/Beijing, that we could not get the message through to top levels of government: ‘You need to come to see these people. You need to find time to talk to them.’

Eventually, we did—eventually, we got the annual summits—but it took quite a lot of pushing from the Embassy and from those at this end who were following the story.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Lord Hurd.

LORD HURD OF WESTWELL: I think that wherever and whenever the penny started to drop, it has now dropped. There is now just about total recognition of the great and growing importance of China in the world. But what there is not is the next debate, which is between the containment lobby and the conciliation lobby. I imagine most people in this room probably belong to the conciliation lobby. That debate is at the mercy of events, and we do not know what the events will be—things like Tiananmen Square or some Chinese intervention in an international dispute—so the world as a whole has to debate a bit more intensively than we have between those alternatives. One day fairly soon, we are going to have to make a choice between those two—between conciliation and containment.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Any comment from the panel on that point?

HUM: I think it is the State Department which has a nice term, which is ‘hedged engagement’—have I got it right?

HURD: Very Foreign Office.

HUM: It is actually from the State Department. That is obviously an attempt to reconcile those two, and an attempt not to see them as total opposites.

HURD: Can you explain what it means?

HUM: It means that you engage, but you hedge against the possibility that the sort of events you are referring to do actually occur—that China takes a turn for more belligerence or that internal events make it politically very difficult to continue engagement.

HURD: Do you have a plan B?

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HUM: You kind of have a plan A and a plan B simultaneously. You are not trying to contain China, but you are trying to remain vigilant against China, while engaging or trying to conduct constructive engagement. It sounds slightly ‘Alice in Wonderland’—you are thinking of two things before breakfast—but I think you can do that.158 HURD: I understand it; I am pretty sure Margaret Thatcher would not.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): David has a comment.

COATES: One example of exactly what Christopher [Hum] is talking about is the regular American practice of taking senior Chinese military figures to visit the UC Commander in Chief Pacific in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The point is to demonstrate friendship, but also just to remind the Chinese of how awesome the technological power controlled from that centre is.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): We have a question at the back. I think the microphone is already there.

TIM DOWSE: To pursue this a little, it strikes me that in the containment versus conciliation or engagement debate—however you phrase it—the pressures are not all on our side. As China becomes a greater international player and, more particularly, as Chinese people have a greater worldwide presence, the Chinese Government’s appreciation of its interests may change as well. I am just thinking of examples—China has now had oil workers who were taken hostage in the Sudan, and China has had to send aeroplanes to evacuate its workers from Libya. These sorts of things, which are actually quite familiar to most Western countries, are beginning to become more of an issue for the Chinese. I just wondered whether the experts have a view about the prospect for that sort of pressure changing the way in which China deals with the rest of the world.

EHRMAN: I think that I would agree with that. I can give one example, which is in Africa.

Our aid programme was stopped while I was there, because China was getting richer, but we started to discuss co-ordinating on aid projects in African countries and to discuss international policy on aid. To start with, China said, ‘We don’t want to talk to you, because you’re old colonialists; we are not, and we deal with aid in a different way.’ But then some of these experiences happened—people were captured, people did not like industries being displaced in Africa or there were too many Chinese workers and not enough local workers— so a dialogue began to develop on just these sorts of issues.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): We have time just for one more quick question, if anyone wishes to bring up anything else. Can we have the microphone at the back?

DR MICHAEL F HOPKINS: In the first session, we heard a little about the connections between diplomats in different missions, and we have not really heard much about that in this second half. I wonder if you could say what, connecting with this position of China in the future—as a strategic power and so on—the relationship with the Americans has been, given the way in which the Americans are now thinking strategically about having forces in the Pacific and so on. How have things worked with the various American diplomats?

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Cheong Wai Yuen, ‘America New China Policy: The Hedgagement Approach’, MPhil dissertation, Lingnan University, http://commons.ln.edu.hk/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=pol_etd [accessed 1 Mar. 2013]

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EHRMAN: As in the past, we had close relations with the American Embassy and with some others, including the Japanese. There is one area where I hope we could do more—we are trying to do more slowly—and that is the trade policy area. The EU and the US do not, I think, co-ordinate well enough at the moment. They have pretty similar interests in China, in opening for the future, but it is an area in which we each tend to put our little proposal and it is easy to bat off one or the other. I think we need to do more work on that. Then there is what has already been mentioned, which is the broader strategic and security issues.

HUM: I think my favourite meeting of the round of meetings in Beijing—I hope William inherited it unchanged—was that every other Wednesday morning, I think it was, I would get in my car, with the little flag fluttering, and five Ambassadors—US, UK, Japan, France and Germany—would meet. We would go off to one of our Embassies, and you would see all the sentries taking notes as they saw all these cars go in, line astern and with flags fluttering. You would go into the Embassy safe speech room and the host would produce a spectacular cake and, for a couple of hours, we would talk pretty frankly about what had gone on in the last couple of weeks. I learnt more from that than from anything that happened. It was an interesting grouping—UK and US, and the Japanese, who have a terrific insight into how China operates—and it was a highlight of my working week.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): Did it continue?

EHRMAN: Yes, it did.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): And the spectacular cake?

EHRMAN: Yes—except at the British Embassy. We had some very good biscuits.

ROWBOTHAM (Chair): I think that is dreadful. Talk about letting the side down. We have a comment from David.

COATES: On cakes and biscuits, as long as there are chocolate biscuits, that is just about enough.

I do not dispute at all what Christopher said about analysis. I fully agree with him, and that system in collection was in operation in the early 1990s. There is a bit of a danger, though, of confusing analysis with influence. There is a danger that the Americans sometimes, get a bit tired of our having bright ideas—sometimes they want a sounding board and some political cover. If, realistically, there is not much in hard terms that you can put into the pot. I think that that should be remembered, too.

The other point is really a sour point made by an official, rather than a political figure, but I will make it anyway and I will try to make it not too sour. There is a danger in terms of projecting policy or of even suggesting policy to Ministers that the policy almost becomes an area itself—to look active or to reassure about what you are doing—rather than actually looking at it really hard to see if it is feasible or possible. I know that Lord Hurd will stare death daggers at me for that, but it is very tricky. It is part of a wider problem in Britain, I think, in gauging accurately—not too low and not too high—what you can do. I think that that sometimes comes into discussions, or one or two that I have seen anyway, of relations between the UK and China. I have not expressed it very well.

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ROWBOTHAM (Chair): That seems to me to be an interestingly provocative note on which to draw this final panel this afternoon to a close. We have worked our four panellists very hard. Thank you very much for a most illuminating session, and thank you for the questions from the floor which have aided in that illumination. Thank you.

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Appendix I Additional Note by Timothy George, 12 June 2012: Undoubtedly the Democracy Movement was important in preventing a relapse following the autistic spasm that was the Cultural Revolution (CR). But it was a sub theme. The 1970s, as I recall them, were a rather subdued time for most people, a sort of period of convalescence.

There was a continuity with the pre-Cultural Revolution time (Hai Rui and all that, as I mentioned), and some freeing up. Contacts were better. I recall managing to eat in ‘masses’ restaurants’ with ordinary people, which was simply impossible earlier. More places were open to visit (but even more were still bu fang-bian); and travelling ‘hard class’ allowed rather stilted contact with unselected people. One could even go with Chinese friends, including our Embassy translators, to restaurants. This sometimes caused Gilbertian episodes over the bill, as its size depended on who was paying. But on the one hand the elegiac quality of earlier had gone, because people were still hurting (us too in the face of friends’ problems); and on the other it was all rather tentative until, I suspect, the trial of the Gang of Four a couple of years later really allowed Deng to have a free hand.

For me one of the best commentaries on the period was a film From Mao to Mozart,159 made by the violinist Isaac Stern, who visited in about 1979 and gave some master classes. We caught up with it some years later in Paris. It showed how musicians who had managed to train during the CR continued technically fine but totally without that musical spark that younger musicians had and which is evident on concert platforms today. On a slightly different tack we found that (schooled earlier by Andrew Yu, who worked in the Embassy) we knew more about the conventions of classical Peking Opera than our younger translators on whom I at least relied for linguistic understanding of what was going on.

I am sad that I can no longer speak of Cat-Strangler Qi. I always thought that there was an unspoken apology for the events of 1967 in the Foreign Ministry. The Chinese would have been the first to condemn an attack on their premises under any circumstances. The restoration of the Embassy was complete and the repairs invisible, even down to a totally redundant bath room on the first floor. We kept the tub filled as a fire precaution. Too bad about the library and the Teichmann160 collection that my wife painstakingly catalogued.

At a personal level I think the greatest satisfaction came in the founding of the International School161 by the Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders and ourselves. The primary school run by nuns had been an early and cruel CR casualty, and the only available schooling was provided by wives in flats (half a dozen little ventures none of them much more than a dozen children strong.) The International School, American dominated but with the British wife of the Rolls Royce agent as its head, opened in a couple of garages just as we left. Now, I believe, it is enormous.

Finally a bit of gossip. Reference was made to Terence Garvey, Chargé in the 1960s.

A really lovely man. He wrote three despatches called, if I remember rightly, ‘China: Is she dangerous?’ They were controversial, as was mentioned and might have been totally suppressed if his PA had not included some misprints that required a follow up telegram of corrections, which told some puzzled people that there was something to read. The reception showed how stuck the Office was in Cold War politics (even though China was on total non 159

From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China (1981).

Sir Eric Teichman (Erik Teichmann, 1884-1944), various posts British Embassy, Peking, 1907-37; Adviser to the British Embassy at Chungking, 1942-4.

161 www.isb.bj.edu.cn/ 160

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speaks with the Russians), and haunted by Korea and the Sino-Indian War162 (which was as much the Indians own fault as anything). Rumour had it the PUS (probably Gore-Booth163 but it could have been Caccia164) commented ‘Garvey’s gone mad. Send him to Washington and let the Americans sort him out!’

162

Sino-Indian War, 1962.

Sir Paul Gore-Booth (Lord Gore-Booth of Maltby, 1909-84) Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Foreign Office, 1965-9.

164 Sir Harold Caccia (Lord Caccia, 1905-90), Permanent Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office, 1961-5.

163

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