Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao's China

614 Pages·2010·6.3 MB·English

by  Patrick Wright

PASSPORT TO PEKING
Frontispiece: Paul Hogarth, Man and Cart, China, 1954, conté.
Passport to
Peking
A VERY BRITISH MISSION
TO MAO’S CHINA
PATRICK WRIGHT
1
1
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My empire is made of the stuff of crystals, its molecules
arranged in a perfect pattern. Amid the surge of the
elements, a splendid hard diamond takes shape, an
immense, faceted, transparent mountain. Why do your
travel impressions stop at disappointing appearances,
never catching this implacable process? Why do you linger
over inessential melancholies? Why do you hide from the
emperor the grandeur of his destiny?’
Kublai Khan to Marco Polo, Italo Calvino,
Invisible Cities (1972)
In comparing an alien culture with one’s own, one is forced
to ask oneself questions more fundamental than any that
usually arise in regard to home affairs. One is forced to
ask: What are the things that I ultimately value? What
would make me judge one sort of society more desirable
than another sort? What sort of ends should I most wish to
see realized in the world?
Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (1922)
What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like
Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all
be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest
was concentrated in the soul.
E. M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909)
If you’ve ever been part of an offi cial delegation, you learn
less about a country than sitting in the British Museum
and reading about it.
Joe Slovo, New York Times, 4 December 1994
Say! When’s this guy going to get to China?
Stanley Spencer, speaking to
the Bourne End Parents Association, 1957
To Claire
Preface and Acknowledgements
Stanley Spencer was a peculiarly home-loving artist. So closely did
he cleave to the Berkshire village of Cookham that he once feared
he might have damaged his vision irreparably just by walking a
few miles along the Thames to fulfi l a commission in neigh-
bouring Bourne End. What, then, was he doing drawing and
painting in the People’s Republic of China?
I fi rst pondered this question in 2001, when working as a curator
of Tate Britain’s exhibition of Spencer’s paintings and drawings.1
Looking further into the matter, I found that Spencer had trav-
elled in September 1954 as an invited guest of the Communist-led
government in Peking. Far from being alone in his unexpected
journey to the Orient, he went along with several planeloads of
Britons gathered in from various sometimes very loosely defi ned
positions on the left of the political spectrum. A group from the
Labour Party leadership fl ew fi rst, including the former Prime
Minister Clement Attlee and his Minister of Health, Aneurin
Bevan. A party of dissenting ‘Bevanite’ Labour MPs departed
later, packed together, not always happily, with a clutch of their
more right-wing and pro-American colleagues. The fl ight over
Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia, and Mongolia was also undertaken
by a strangely mixed company of scientists and artists, architects
and writers. Various trade unionists and local councillors
embarked, and so too did the national secretary of the Women’s
Co-operative Guilds of Great Britain. There were liberal-minded
sceptics aboard the planes, as well as partisan admirers of the new
regime and some allegedly quite ignorant freeloaders too. And all
this took place nearly eighteen years before February 1972, when
President Richard Nixon and his wife Pat stepped down onto the
tarmac at Beijing to commence the visit that is now often assumed
to mark the opening of relations between the People’s Republic
of China and the West.
The occasion for these east-bound fl ights was provided by the
fi fth anniversary celebrations of the Communist ‘Liberation’,
proclaimed by Mao on 1 October 1949. The invitations, which
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
were not approved by the elderly Winston Churchill’s Conserva-
tive government, followed years of acute international tension.
The Iron Curtain, which was fi rst brought down around Commu-
nist Russia in 1919/20, had been lowered again very shortly after
the Second World War, this time dividing Europe from the Baltic
to the Adriatic, as Winston Churchill declared in his famous
Fulton oration of 5 March 1946. An Asian extension, a ‘cordon
sanitaire’ that was quickly dubbed the ‘Bamboo Curtain’, was
placed around Communist China a few years later. These largely
impenetrable barriers were never just closed frontiers. They were
shored up by opposed and contrary propagandas as well as by
censorship, trade embargos, blockading warships, and govern-
ments that were learning how to play the game of ‘brinkmanship’
with the threat of nuclear catastrophe.
If the post-war decade was a time of ‘containment’ and bloc-
building, in which there was much talk about monolithic centres of
power and their closely controlled ‘satellites’,2 it also saw new kinds
of confl ict. First named by George Orwell in 1945, the ‘Cold War’
had become a prevailing reality in Europe. In Asia, the wars had
been altogether hotter, and not just in Korea. As a colonial power,
Britain had also been faced with nationalist and Communist insur-
gencies in India, Indonesia, Malaya, Burma, and elsewhere.
By the summer of 1954, further tensions were being provoked
by more recent initiatives, two of which especially had combined
to divide the British Labour Party into feuding factions. One was
the proposed rearmament of West Germany. The other was the
formation of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization, promoted
as an Eastern consort to NATO by President Eisenhower’s fi ercely
anti-Communist Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and
brought into existence when its charter was signed on 8 September
1954. These initiatives were supported by the leadership of the
Labour Party, and opposed vigorously by the left of the party,
gathered as its Tribune reading members were around the charis-
matic fi gure of Aneurin Bevan. The defeat of the Bevanites on
both counts was confi rmed at the Labour Party’s annual confer-
ence, held in Scarborough at the end of September.
At the time of the fl ights to Peking, Britain’s political life was
being pressed into the ‘Natopolitan’ mould that would be
denounced at the end of the decade by the no longer Communist
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
historian E. P. Thompson.3 In his view, this forceful manoeuvre
had been successfully completed by the General Election of 26
May 1955, which was won by the Conservatives under Anthony
Eden after a campaign that was ‘conducted entirely within the
political and strategic premises of NATO’.4 Thompson attributed
the British people’s compliance with this redefi nition of their
possibilities to various causes: apathy, the persistence of attitudes
derived from ‘exhausted imperialism’, and the allure of capital-
ism’s promise of yet to be delivered ‘affl uence’. Disenchantment
with the idea of radical political transformation was also wide-
spread, thanks not least to the increasingly unmistakable horrors
of Stalinism, which, as Thompson suggested, had also worked to
discredit more native radical traditions, which actually had
nothing to do with Soviet Communism.
Through much of 1954, however, there were many Britons who
resisted the drift into ‘Natopolitan’ conformity. The year had
opened with encouraging signs of a thaw in the Cold War. Stalin
had died in March 1953, and a somewhat more conciliatory atti-
tude seemed to be emerging in Moscow. At the end of July an
armistice had brought the Korean War to the state of suspension
in which it still hangs to this day, and the year had opened with
new signs of a possible settlement in Indo-China, where French
forces were fi ghting a losing war against Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh.
Early in 1954, it emerged that the Chinese Premier Chou En-lai
would be leading a Chinese delegation to Geneva, where he would
take part in an international conference which, though shunned
by America, would consider ways of settling France’s continuing
war in Indo-China.
The Geneva Conference of 1954 may not feature as much more
than a footnote in the Cold War histories of our time. Yet to those
who looked on eagerly as the participants struggled their way
through various impasses, its fi nal resolution seemed a marvellous
return to sanity. Britain’s Conservative Foreign Secretary Anthony
Eden was widely praised for his diplomacy. For many, however, the
real hero was Chou En-lai, who had proved himself quite unlike
the manipulated Soviet puppet of anti-Communist expectation.
A mantle of Western admiration and hope settled over the shoul-
ders of this handsome Chinese leader, and the invitations to visit
China followed before the smiles had time to fade.