Liberty In China - 16 June 1989

About – I was going to say a year or two ago but I’ve looked back and am shocked to discover that it was 17 years ago – I did a talk about China which was subsequently published under the title “The Charm of China”.

The title reflected accurately, I think, the tone of the talk which was, to say the least, ironical. February 1972 – if ever there was a time that demanded a talk from here about China that was it. It was the month in which the then-President Nixon amazed not only the allies but most people in Washington, including the Democrats and most of his own party, by suddenly announcing he was off to break the ice which like the Antarctic floes had for so long blocked off all official relations between the United States and the so-called People’s Republic.

Mr Nixon, whose political career since the 1940s had been built on hating Communism, bating Communists, seeing Communists under every liberal bed, Mr Nixon was to be the president who decided that the rulers of 800 million people, whatever their system, could no longer be quarantined.

His actual tour was, if anything, more amazing than the gesture that prompted it. For several days and nights we saw little else than Mr Nixon bowing and smiling and feasting and toasting the formerly proclaimed tyrants Mao Zedong and Mr Zhou Enlai.

We were taken on a tour of everything they wanted us to see – the happy, courteous people threshing rice, riding bicycles, even a major operation towards which the surgeons advanced with one skilled hand while the other hand clutched the little red book that collected the famous thoughts of Chairman Mao.

The official tour guides wherever we went were always the same, a jolly man, a handsome gaunt man, and two amiable faceless pals who nodded eager agreement at everything the official spokesman had to say. No question about the economy, working conditions, children’s education was beyond this jolly man. For instance, was it true that in the bad old days workers sweated 12 hours a day and now worked only seven? It was true.

And what, pray, did they do with the other five? “Ah,” the jolly man replied, “they used them to study the thoughts of Chairman Mao”, which was at the time about as believable as a Chinese interview with, say, George Best and the English Cup Final team in which the players lined up and said that whereas in the bad old days first-class footballers got £12 a week, they now got £100 a week, which left them £88 over to spend in buying up records of Sir Edward Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture as conducted by Prime Minister Edward Heath.

The official at one point didn’t so much let slip, he proudly announced, that more than 90% of the literature available to the Chinese people was either by or about Chairman Mao, a really frightening statistic if you applied it to your own country and imagined the state of abject submission to which the ordinary and the extraordinary Briton or American would have been brought if over 90% of everything published was either fawning profiles of Mr Heath or Mr Nixon or their collected speeches.

Imagine your child who had never heard of Shakespeare, or trial by jury, or open debate in the House of Commons or an alternative political party or free elections or coal strikes or a protest rally.

Well this elaborate, beautifully-staged, demeaning Nixon tour ended with the Nixon smiling and applauding a dance performed by enchanting eight-year-olds, a dance in which they stabbed the air with fixed bayonets. So all in all, what we saw was a combination of the old slogging, boring Intourist films the Russians put out in the 1930s, spliced in with disturbing glimpses of bright, rosy-cheeked Nazi youths with guns.

I’m afraid it’s true to say that at the time very little American editorial comment, except for a hilariously sarcastic report from the conservative columnist Mr William Buckley, who was along, very little was written or said about the shuddering hypocrisy of the Nixon tour or the iron fist that the many little velvet gloves disguised. The imaginativeness, the daring, of Mr Nixon’s historic break-through, that was the general theme.

Well only a day or two after my talk went out in Britain a high official from the Chinese embassy appeared at the BBC to see Mr Aubrey Singer who was then, I believe, in charge of Radio 4. The official was, I was told, quietly steaming with rage in his dry, icy fashion.

He didn’t request, he demanded, that the insufferable Cooke be fired. Mr Singer affected puzzlement, “On what grounds?” “You” said the Chinese, sharing a delusion that the vast majority of Americans hold to this day, “you are the government”. “No”, Mr Singer said, "we are not the government, we are an independent corporation.”

“But this Cooke is your man, is he not?” “No, he is a commentator, a reporter. He is not a member of the staff. He is independent. He speaks for himself.” “But how could that be?”

Mr Singer instructed the official in the elementary principles of a country in which speech is free. To his great credit, Mr Singer sent the man packing. Now whether it was an act of retaliation or just a coincidence I don’t know, but for several months thereafter BBC television crews who were about to undertake filming assignments in China were denied visas. About six months later I was told the visas were granted.

Many years later I brought up this unhappy incident with one or two British and American correspondents and even ordinary tourists who had recently been to China during the more open, the enlightened, the new regime of Mr Deng.

All, I was told, had changed. Whereas the Russians showed you over successful collective farms, picked factories that worked, the Chinese even made a point of taking you to a collective that didn’t work. “Here, we regret to say, we made a mistake."

Nobody I spoke to during those intervening 17 years had ever trekked off alone into the deep interior or seen a labour camp and, more recently still, the economic changes, the opening-up of the free market, the encouragement of entrepreneurs, all these rousing changes, these moves away from rigid Communist doctrine and practice, have all been celebrated in British and American and French television documentaries, so much so that conservative Americans rejoiced to get in on the China market.

Liberal Americans came to assume – without exactly asserting – that the old, dreadful political grip of the Mao regime, of the cultural revolution, of the bad 1970s had probably lost its hold. So even a month ago President Bush could go to China, dine and wine and consult with Mr Deng and his henchmen, to the subdued but general applause of the American media at any rate.

It was only after Mr Bush’s unexpectedly successful trip to Europe in May that anyone chose to write in retrospect that Mr Bush’s trip to China and Japan had been a nothing, a diplomatic disaster.

Then the never-to-be-forgotten 3 June in Beijing Square. The vast mobilising of the people’s army against the people, the rounding-up of student dissidents, the exposure on national television of the faces of the wanted, and the appeal to everybody to inform on and turn in anyone, including your family, you believed or suspected of holding dangerous – that is free – independent thoughts.

Now it is dreadful to realise the massive apparatus of suppression has been in place all the time. It’s an immense let-down. An American professor who has been, for a generation or more, a distinguished teacher of the politics and history of China said it all in one short, sad sentence, “I am a chastened China expert.”

Well our best, at least our most authoritative, correspondents from the press and television are still in Beijing or they are, while I talk, though sooner or later it seems to me the Deng regime is likely to correct its historic mistake in letting western correspondents roam free, if not far.

Our absorption with China still – I’m sure it’s much the same in most democratic countries – is maintained, I think, I like to think, not because in the most populous country on earth, which has seemed so serene for so long, there was a totally unpredicted and appalling spill of blood, but because the revolutionary opening-up of Soviet politics under Mr Gorbachev, the exhilarating economic loosening-up of China under Mr Deng had fanned our naive, our never-doused hope that Communism was a failing system, that its masters were ready to admit it and that, as at the end of the 18th Century, we were about to see a rebirth of liberty in many parts of the globe where throughout the lifetimes of most of us it had appeared to be strangled once for all.

I admit that in our age, for the past 20 years certainly, when for the vast majority of people, peoples, television news is the news that focuses your view of life in our age it is a curse we have to live with – that riots, bloodshed, fires, violence of every visible sort make the best television pictures.

Nevertheless I believe that our daily preoccupation with China is still the aftershock of a disappointed great hope, the hope that the Chinese too were coming to see that in any good form of government liberty comes first.

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