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• First Person - Tony Galsworthy
The more things change, the more (some things) stay the same, writes Tony Galsworthy.
When I first arrived in the embassy in Beijing as a very junior officer in the autumn of 1968, the Red Guards were still on the streets, the population was sullen and cowed, the walls were still covered with posters and graffiti, and the attitude of officialdom, when you could find it, was hostile. In a word, the Cultural Revolution was still very much on.
Our concerns in the embassy at the time were almost exclusively political: a lot of our effort was still devoted to trying to get Tony Grey, the Reuters' correspondent then under house arrest, released. Although the next three years saw some normalisation, there was little serious commercial business: I remember our commercial section at the time replying to a rather optimistic enquiry from a British toymaker who was anxious to find agents who could get his product in the department stores before Christmas, that in Mao's China there were no agents, no department stores and no Christmas. Scrooge would have been proud.
The contrast with present-day Christmas Beijing, where the waitresses in every restaurant wear short red skirts, tinselly sashes and Father Christmas hats, and every shop decks its windows for the festival, could hardly be more marked.
I had been in China for long periods between 1968 and my return as British ambassador in 1997, and had seen some of the changes occurring, but even so I was taken aback by the extent of them. A vibrant, modern city, filled with fashion-conscious people window-shopping for the latest products, and incredulous at learning that most British households did not yet own a DVD.
Look beneath the surface
It would be easy to suppose, against this glitzy background, that China has changed fundamentally, perhaps becoming an extension of the materialistic West. This would be quite wrong: China has certainly changed from the China of 1968, but it was the latter, rather than the present day, which was the aberration in Chinese history.
The more I see of film footage, photographs and accounts of the China of the 1920s and ‘30s, the more it seems to me that Chinese society is reverting to the vitality and diversity of earlier eras. This is particularly evident as soon as one leaves the big cities and ventures into the more traditional countryside villages. I stress that this is not a political observation: the present-day political system has almost nothing in common with the politics of those times. On the contrary, it is a statement about the continuity of the culture.
What I think, therefore, is now emerging in China is not a reflection or a copy of modern Western civilisation: it is rather an adaptation of traditional Chinese civilisation to accommodate Western material progress, and perhaps some, though certainly not all, Western values.
I might have added Western market philosophy, but didn't, because I suspect that the principles of Western market philosophy are older in China than they are in the West, and that this is the fundamental reason why the Chinese economy has succeeded where that of every other communist system failed.
China is important to us, and will become increasingly so. It is growing rapidly in stature in the global economy, and is playing an increasingly active part in international political life as well. The Chinese growth engine played a major role in getting the Asian economies through the economic crisis of 1997 onwards: a collapse in the Chinese economy now would have serious implications for the global economy, and for the economies of the leading players, including the United States. Ultimate success is by no means assured; the Chinese economic miracle has a long and difficult path ahead: we should wish it well.
Fortunately, the Chinese need us as much as we need them. One of the most striking features of my time in Beijing was the increasingly enthusiastic adoption by the Chinese leadership of the concept of a globalised economy. The implication, which I think is still not universally accepted in China, is that this is not the sort of competitive economy where eventually China will be strong enough to pursue her own interests exclusively, which I suspect was Deng Xiaoping's concept: it is more likely to be one where all the major economies including China will have to work more or less together to maintain a single sustainable global economy, where any failure would ruin all.
In the year 2000 I was told that one Western leader asked Zhu Rongji what it would be like for the rest of the world to live with a Chinese superpower. After a moment's thought Zhu responded that the next generation of Chinese leaders would almost entirely have been educated in the West. A reassuring thought, certainly. They are likely to understand us better, and, probably, be less suspicious of us.
But, equally, I do not expect it to mean that they will adopt our values and ideas wholesale. As they grow steadily more confident of the weight of their position in the world, they will increasingly, I believe, bring their own ideas to the fora of this globalised world, and these ideas will owe more to the Chinese cultural background than to ours. No bad thing, perhaps. Why should we think we have all the good ideas?
Sir Anthony Galsworthy was British ambassador in China between 1997 and 2002.
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