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• First Person - Alan Donald
Alan Donald recalls an astonishing prediction by the Great Helmsman.
In 1955 my first experience of China, Beijing, was still recognisable as the medieval capital founded by Yong Le in the 15th century. The grey city walls with their magnificent gates, the formal compounds of the Manchu nobility (one of which housed our British mission), the Forbidden City and the numerous temples all reminded us of the glories of the Ming and Qing. It felt as if we lived still in a feudal city. In 1955 and 1956 Beijing seemed a museum in aspic; a treasure house for Western minds to ponder and admire an old civilisation. Reconstruction, reform and modern development were in their infancy, though it had begun with impressive peasant mass mobilisation and was moving on to the creation of joint state/private enterprises.
The climate was infinitely more extreme than now. In the early spring we endured dust storms from the Gobi that left yellow grains on the windowsills and choked you when you went outdoors. When it was really cold, if you had not protected your ears and nose, your hands and head, you rarely could endure more that 10 minutes outdoors in January and February. It got humid and suffocatingly hot in the summer months.
Just outside the wall on the south one saw camels laden with huge coal sacks shambling from the mines at Mentakou. Power and propulsion in the city were represented by human beings manually hauling loads on carts. The only form of modernisation was the rubber tyre that had replaced the earlier iron-rimmed wheels. Bicycles were the most common form of mass transport. The "taxi" was the three-wheeled pedicab that was an advance on the rickshaw. The people mostly lived in the courtyard house in the narrow lanes (the hutongs). The "honey carts" nightly collected the ordure from the cesspits in these lanes.
In 1956, when travel outside Beijing was relatively easy, I remember meeting an old peasant somewhere along the Yellow river. He described how he and his parents had been forced to eat the bark off trees to keep alive and to stuff their bellies with earth to quell hunger pangs. He was bitter recalling how Chiang Kaishek had broken the dykes on the Yellow river in the late 1930s flooding the countryside to thwart the invading Japanese, causing death and destruction which affected 30,000 people. He was, not surprisingly, a supporter of the new Communist regime.
The walls come crumbling down
Things were changing greatly when I went back to China in the mid-1960s. I watched with nostalgic dismay the Beijing walls being demolished to make way for the great new highways on the line of the old walls, presaging the later successive ring roads circling the capital. The politics also had begun to change dramatically. The Great Leap Forward, followed after a short lull by the Cultural Revolution, revealed a fanatical determination that development could come about through political willpower and mass organisation alone. These experiments in social engineering and the dash for development were at the cost of 15 lost years in education and economic advance and, tragically, millions of lives.
Life in Beijing for the foreigner in the mid-1960s was much more circumscribed than in the clean-cut, more honest ‘50s. One, however, had to admire the tenacity and stoic courage of ordinary Chinese in those turbulent times.
In November 1956 an article had been written by a Chinese leader in commemoration of the 90th birthday of Dr Sun Yatsen. It was after the tense time of the "anti-rightist movement" that brought the "hundred flowers" to their abrupt withering. But it included this remarkable prophecy: "Things are always progressing. It is only 45 years since the revolution of 1911, but the face of China has entirely changed. In another 45 years, that is, by the year 2001, at the beginning of the 21st century, China will have undergone an even greater change. It will have become a powerful, industrial, socialist country. And that is as it should be. China is a land with an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres and a population of 600m, and it ought to make a greater contribution to humanity. But for a long time in the past its contribution was far too small. For this we are regretful."
The author of this visionary statement was Mao Zedong. The population of China has more than doubled since 1956. Despite more mouths to feed, enormously successful strides have been made in all directions of economic and social policy. There is now, moreover, more personal liberty in China than has been for decades.
Mao did not live to see his prophecy fulfilled. His strategic ambition has nearly been realised: but not by any means due to his methods. He might have been astonished to find that his successor, Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the successful change in the direction of policy in 1978, and the inspirer of the ‘opening' to the outside world and the use of market forces, had created the pragmatic conditions that have made China the formidable economic force it is today. What will the world see in another 50 years?
Sir Alan Donald served three times in China (1955-57, 1964-66 and, as ambassador, 1988-91) and was political adviser to the governor of Hong Kong (1974-77). He accompanied the British prime minister to China in 1982 at the start of the talks on the future of Hong Kong.
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