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• First Person - Richard Evans
Richard Evans witnessed abject poverty and supreme luxury and everything in-between during his three spells as a diplomat in China.
In three months' time it will be 50 years since Alan Donald and I set out on the long march of learning the Chinese language. We had embarked on a process which led us, ultimately, to competence in speaking and reading Chinese and to three tours each of diplomatic duty in China.
During my first tour, Alan and I were together. We shared a house – indeed three houses running – tutors in Chinese and servants. We lived in the compound of the former British Legation, which had been acquired in 1861 by Lord Elgin for his brother - Sir Frederick Bruce, who was to be first British Minister in Beijing. Surrounded by high walls, the compound was an island of tranquillity and amenity at the centre of a very crowded city. It was also a city which looked very much as it had for centuries. Within walls which were over 20 miles long and about 80 feet high, it consisted almost entirely of palaces and temples of extraordinary magnificence and single-storey dwellings which usually had no windows onto the streets or lanes they bordered.
There was very little motor traffic. Heavy goods were transported on cargo tricycles or on the backs of animals. Once I saw a long string of camels carrying sacks of coal to the centre of the city from one of its western gates.
Politically, the period of my posting – October 1955 to November 1957 – was ceaselessly eventful. This was due as much as anything to the outlook and temperament of Mao Zedong. Aged 62 in 1955, Mao was at the height of his authority - he was chairman of the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party and of the Chinese People's Republic – and of his intellectual vigour. Not yet an old man, he was nevertheless in a hurry to move China on from "new democracy", a social and economic system intermediate be-tween capitalism and socialism, to full socialism.
And he got his way. During the winter of 1955-56 Chinese farming was collectivised and private ownership ended in Chinese industry and commerce. The tocsin of capitalism was sounded by the capitalists themselves. Equipped with drums and cymbals, they marched through the streets of Peking, and of many other Chinese cities and towns, chanting slogans to celebrate the demise of private enterprise.
By the time I returned to China as a first secretary, in the spring of 1964, the Great Leap Forward, Mao's drive to lift China out of its worst poverty in a matter of a few years, was over. It had led to famine – perhaps 20m people had died – social exhaustion and divisions within the country's leadership which were never to heal.
In Beijing there was a palpable air of disillusion and sadness. Policies to rescue China from the devastation, both industrial and agricultural, were in place and were beginning to take effect. But everything was muted in China's political life, or seemed to be to foreign observers. Their chief interest became the burgeoning ideological and political conflict – it was much more than a quarrel – between China and the Soviet Union.
My third tour in China, as British ambassador, was in the mid-1980s. For the first nine months my main – at times total – preoccupation was Hong Kong. It had been agreed during Mrs Thatcher's visit to China in September 1982 that the British and Chinese governments should negotiate about the future of Hong Kong, and a negotiation had been under way for some months by the time I reached Beijing. But it had not made great progress towards an agreement. I myself was in considerable doubt whether an agreement could be achieved until April when a corner was turned during a visit to China by Sir Geoffrey Howe.
From then until September, when the Joint Declaration on Hong Kong was initialled (to indicate agreement on its text) by Zhou Nan, the leader of the Chinese side in the negotiation, and myself, there was no respite for anyone operationally concerned.
The Queen's visit
I remember 1985 chiefly as the year of Daya Bay and 1986 as the year of the Queen's state visit to China. Daya Bay was the site, and was to be the name, of a nuclear power station. GEC was engaged in a complicated negotiation with several Chinese bodies to achieve a contract to build its non-nuclear "island". Because ECGD was deeply involved, the Embassy was involved too. So were French firms and the French Embassy. The climax to a set of parallel negotiations arrived between Christmas and the New Year. In the end, I enjoyed the dramatic, even exhilarating, experience of offering Li Peng, then a vice-premier, final terms on behalf of both GEC and the British government, and of hearing them accepted with the words, "Well, that settles things." GEC's contract was worth about £500m.
Planning for the Queen's state visit, which extended to Shanghai, Xi'an, Kunming and Guangzhou as well as Beijing, had to be meticulous. The visit ended most colourfully as the band of the Royal Marines from Britannia, the royal yacht, beat retreat under arc lights on the quayside at Whampoa, east of Guangzhou.
I was lucky in the timing of my three spells in China. I missed the Cultural Revolution as well as the Great Leap Forward. Travel by foreign diplomats was fairly free during all three spells. By the time I left China in 1988, I had visited all its provinces (or their administrative equivalents) other than Tibet, Sichuan and Ningxia. Perhaps the journey I remember most vividly was the one I made to Hunan and Jiangxi in February 1988, just before the end of my term as ambassador. Because I wanted to associate as much as possible with the Chinese I met on the way, I travelled alone and I concentrated on places of significance in Mao Zedong's earlier life. I spent a most interesting day in Shaoshan, Mao's birthplace, where I found that the farm buildings of his family were comparable in size and strength of construction to those of many prosperous farms in Britain; and a fascinating day in the villages which had been at the heart of Mao's revolutionary base area in the Jinggangshan mountains, high on the border between Jiangxi and Hunan.
During all three of my postings there I was conscious of watching a momentous process: the drive of a great nation which had once been renowned for its wealth, power and self-respect to reacquire those things in a world quite unlike the world in which it had once possessed them. During the process, I came to have great respect for the hardihood, ingenuity and industry of the Chinese people. And I came to like them a lot.
Sir Richard Evans was UK ambassador in Beijing between 1984 and 1988. His book, Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China, was published in 1993. The reference to "Cycle of Cathay" in the title comes from Tennyson's poem, Locksley Hall ("Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay").
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