How to use this Page

Tweet

In his latest book Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China, journalist and author Patrick Wright tells the story of the British delegations that took up Prime Minister En-lai’s invitation to ‘come and see’ the New China on the fifth anniversary of the communist victory in 1954.   Here, Wright answers a few questions I had about this intense era of diplomacy – when it ended and how it went wrong. –Michelle Rafferty, Associate Publicist

1.) Bill Richardson’s recent trip to North Korea reminded me of a topic you’ve written extensively about: the diplomatic “discovery missions” between East and West. Is this era behind us?

In one far from regrettable sense, Bill Richardson’s trip seems to come after the event. While extraordinary misrecognitions have attended ‘East-West’ travel for many centuries, the ‘discovery missions’ I have written about belong to a modern era that extended from the First World War to the invasion of Iraq, shaped as it was by Cold War attitudes that lived on in the minds of Rumsfeld, Blair and others, even after the breach of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These organized, if also unofficial, delegations made their journeys at a time when the world was divided into opposed and hostile blocs, each with its own ideology and claims to international extension.

2.) We know how the Cold War turned out, so looking back, what can we determine was accomplished on these missions?  Did they offer us any true prescience?

As for the question of ‘prescience’, there can be no doubt that many of the western travelers who visited the communist East during this period got things spectacularly wrong. The Mayor of Lyons and former French Prime Minister, Édouard Herriot, was led through Ukraine in the summer of 1933, and came home to repudiate the suggestion that millions of peasants and alleged ‘kulaks’ had been systematically starved to death under Stalin. Eleven years later, President Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace toured the Gulag at Kolyma in the company of his adviser, Owen Lattimore, without apparently suspecting that he was actually in a vast prison. Many British visitors were also taken in – as much by their own ideals as by the indulgence and trickery of their official minders. Visiting communists saw what they wanted to see, but so too did those well-known and senior pioneers of modern social science, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. As for the anti-fascist barrister D. N. Pritt, he inspected Stalin’s show trials and declared them better than anything available in British courts.

The list of deluded visitors also includes Christian socialists such as George Lansbury, who visited Russia in 1920 and, despite Lenin’s protestations of atheism, declared that the Bolsheviks were doing God’s work, and the so-called “Red Dean of Canterbury,” Hewlett Johnson, who made a similar pilgrimage to China in the early fifties and came home to provoke a storm of public condemnation w

Tweet

By Patrick Wright

On 1 October 1954, Sir Hugh Casson, the urbane professor of interior design who had been director of architecture at the Festival of Britain, found himself standing by the Tiananmen Gate in the ancient and still walled city of Peking. In China to present a statement of friendship signed by nearly 700 British scientists and artists, he was watching a parade that the reporter James Cameron reckoned to be “the greatest show on earth”. First came the troops and the “military ironwork”, grinding past for a full hour. This was followed by a much longer civil parade in which the people marched by in barely imaginable numbers, beaming with joy at their elevated leaders who gazed back with the slightly “subdued” expression of still unaccustomed new emperors.

The spectacle with which China celebrated the fifth anniversary of the communist liberation was brilliantly organised, as Casson felt obliged to admit. He was less impressed by the admiring expressions worn by many of the other international guests: “Gold-rimmed spectacles misted with emotion, cheeks creased with years of well-meant service in this cause or in that, shirts defiantly open at the neck, badges in lapels, and there in the middle – could it have been? – an MCC tie.” That particular specimen was Ivor Montagu, a cricket-loving friend and translator of the great Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein.

Sickened by the rapture of the communist regime’s ardent western friends, Casson quickly retreated to the shaded “rest room” beneath the viewing stand. Here he lingered among yellow-robed Tibetan lamas, sipping tea and exchanging impressions with other doubtful Britons: the classically minded and no longer Marxist novelist and poet Rex Warner, and AJ Ayer, the high-living logical positivist who would come home to tell the BBC that China’s parade had reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies.

Enraptured or appalled, none of these British witnesses appears to have regretted the absence of Stanley Spencer. The 63-year-old painter, so famously associated with the little Berkshire village of Cookham, had managed to escape the entire show – thanks, he later explained, to “some Mongolians”, whose timely arrival at the hotel that morning had provided the cover under which he retreated upstairs to his room.

It was the discovery that Spencer had been to China that persuaded me to look further into this forgotten episode. I soon realised that an extraordinary assortment of Britons had made their way to China in 1954, nearly two decades before 1972, when President Nixon made the stage-managed and distinctly operatic visit that has gone down in history as the moment when the west entered rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. Were these motley British visitors just credulous idiots, for whom “Red China” was another version of the legendary Cathay? That is what the 24-year-old Douglas Hurd and the other diplomats in the British embassy compound in Peking appear to have suspected of these unwelcome freeloaders. Or was something more significant going on?

Nowadays, the rapidly increasing number of British travellers to China think nothing of getting on a plane to fly directly there. Yet Spencer had good reason to feel “trembly” as he and the five other members of his entirely unofficial cultural delegation approached the runway at Heathrow on 14 September 1954. Though Britain had recognised China a few months after the liberation, it had yet to establish proper diplomatic relations with the communist-led government, and the embarking Britons couldn’t pick up a visa until they had reached Prague. That meant crossing the iron curtain dividing Europe. “Did you go under or over it?” one joker would later ask, making light of a passage that was

Megan Branch, Intern

Patrick Wright a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a fellow of the London Consortium.  Wright wrote On Living in An Old Country and its companion, A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London (read an excerpt here). On Living in an Old Country looks at history’s role in shaping identity and everyday life in England. Below is an excerpt about the house of Miss May Alice Savidge. Upon finding out that her pre-Tudor house was scheduled for demolition to make way for road work, Savidge dismantled it, shipped it 100 miles away, and began reassembling the house piece-by-piece.

On Camping out in the Modern World

“History appears as the derailment, the disruption of the everyday…” - Karel Kosik

So far I have not identified the political complexion of the local authority in Ware, not for that matter of the national government when the decision to redevelop Miss Savidge’s home was made. This has not been the result of any reluctance to deal with the political implications of Miss Savidge’s story. On the contrary, my point is that these implications will not be appreciable unless one also grasps the extent to which politics, at least in the traditional frame of the major electoral parties, have become irrelevant to the issues finding expression in this affair.

In a phrase of Habermas’s, the political system is increasingly ‘decoupled’ from the traditional measures of everyday life, and Miss Savidge cannot be adequately defined as the victim of one party as opposed to another. She fell instead (and, of course, rose again) on the common ground of the post-war settlement, a ground which is made up of rationalised procedures and methods of administration as much as of any shared policies about, say, the efficacy of the mixed economy or the legitimacy of the welfare state. Miss Savidge’s house stood in the way of an ethos of development and a practice of social planning and calculation which have formed the procedural basis of the welfare state under both Conservative and Labour administrations. Governments have come and gone (at the behest of an electorate oscillating at a rate which itself reflects the situation), but a professionalised conduct of social administration has persisted throughout.

The professionals of this world are almost bound to see the more traditional forms of self-understanding persisting among the citizenry as merely quaint and eccentric, if not more dismissively as obstructive and inadequate to modern reality. While there is always room for an arrogant contempt to develop here, the most frequent manifestation consists of a resigned and pragmatic realism (the bureaucratic sigh which responds to people’s demands by saying that things are always more complicated than that) with which officials draw out and exhaust the discussion and patience of residents’ associations around the country. That this system of planning is less than perfect goes without saying, and Miss Savidge is well stocked with complaints on this score. For anyone who stops to ask she will talk about the callousness of the officials who turned up the Saturday before Christmas (1953) to look at the buildings which they had already decided to pull down—even though this was the first the residents had heard of it. She will mention inconsiderate rules applying to council tenants (no cat or dog unless you have a family, and so on). She will also talk about a general bureaucratic incompetence which, in her experience, made it possible to get a council grant towards the cost of installing a bathroom in a house which was already up for demolition, and which was also evident in the many changes of plan regarding the road development itself. Is it to be a new road with a roundabout, or can the old road be widened, and which local authority (town or country) is to be responsible?

Bureaucratic procedure may indeed be conducted as if its rationality were contained entirely within its own calculations, and in this respect it may well seem to stand impervious: free from any responsibility to the world in which its works eventually materialise. But whatever the appearance, this is obviously not a matter of rationality alone. The system of planning into which Miss Savidge was well caught up by 1969 is characteristic of a welfare state that was both corporatist in character (public discussion and political negotiation simulated in thoroughly institutionalised forms), and caught in the contradictions of its commodifying pact with private capital. More than this, the welfare state has developed through a period of extensive cultural upheaval, and Miss Savidge’s is therefore a story of the times in its discovery of tradition not just in the lifeworld but also in an apparently hopeless contest with modernity. While the dislocation of traditional self-understanding could indeed prepare the way for better possibilities, Miss Savidge stands there as a testimony to another scenario in which the prevailing atmosphere is one of insecurity which develops when extensive cultural dislocation has occurred without any better, or even reasonably meaningful, future coming into view.

Patrick Wright is a writer and broadcaster with an interest in the cultural and political dimensions of modern history.  Having started writing A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London while working for the National Council for Voluntary Organizations, he is now a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a fellow of the London Consortium.  A Journey Through Ruins views the transformation of the Britain through the unexpected prism of everyday life in East London. Below is an excerpt about London Fields.  If you will be in London this summer, perhaps you should pick up a copy of Wright’s book and read about your surroundings as you travel.

Hackney was once a place of pastures and market gardens.  Samuel Pepys practised archery here.  Even today there is a public park in the borough known as London Fields.  It is a place of modest attractions: some fine old plane trees, a new community centre, an open-air lido that, were it not for local objectors, the council would already have demolished.  In the early morning, before the dogs come out, it is often full of seagulls.

Trains rattle by overhead.  London Fields borders on the Cambridge line, and it’s not a bad spot from which to observe passing academics.  They stare back glumly, thanking their lucky stars for Grantchester Meadows and mistaking the figures on the ground for woebegone residents of the Victorian East End.  It’s easy to imagine them adding those contemporary asides that keep turning up in scholarly studies of Dickens, Dore, or life as it was in outcast London: ‘Even today, one only has to take the train from Liverpool Street Station…’.

London Fields certainly has its dismal aspect.  There have been vicious assaults.  Huge and unattended dogs run free.  Young children from the nearby travellers’ site invade the infants’ playground in a terrifying and unbelievably foul-mouthed pack (not for them the clip on the ear with which Richard North once hoped to improve the area).  As I walked out on Sunday afternoon I came across a Ford Cortina parked up against the railings: it was emitting grunts and rocking.

But despite the malevolence that sometimes drifts across it, London Fields also clings to an understated respectability.  On most days of the year, it is an uneventful and slightly melancholy place.  If it has a message for the world it is no longer the progressive Victorian one about the uplifting and civilizing effect of open spaces-green lungs as they used to be called-on the nation’s most down-trodden souls.  These days the park promises nothing so ambitious.  It merely points out that people can be poor without always being beastly; that, no matter what writers like Tom Wolfe may suggest, the inhabitants of the inner city can get by without raping, mugging and insulting each other at every encounter.

The park remains uncelebrated, but its name is too good to be true.  ‘London Fields…’.  It doesn’t take a master class in poetry to reveal the contemporary resonances of that archaic conjunction.  In these ecological days ‘London Fields’ has come into its own as a prime piece of nomenclature, a movable asset that is far too good to be squandered on an obscure dog-patch in Hackney.

The estate agents were the first to act.  Assisted by the usual clutch of lifestyle journalists, they went out one night in the early Eighties, levered the name up from that tired stretch of municipal ground, and humped it half a mile down the road.  No longer confined to the park or the dishevelled part-industrial part-Bohemian zone around the railway arches on its east-side, ‘London Fields’ was now the new name for Mapledene-a pleasant and, as we know, relatively unbroken area of Victorian terraced housing that, through this act of renaming, was now being pulled away from the abysmal Holly Street Estate at its western edge. ‘London Fields’ was still a place of leafy respite, but it had become one that could be bought and sold: a rediscovered ‘village’ within walking distance of the city.

John Milne was the first writer to offer us London Fields, the novel.  He had grown up in a council flat in the area and though his story, issued by Heinemann in 1983, was shy of highbrow presumptions, his publishers were still serious enough to adorn it with somewhat patronizing recommendations from David Lodge (Mr Milne has talent’) and Auberon Waugh (’Mr Milne seems to represent a new development in the English novel’).

Milne is good on detail, but at heart his London Fields was a conventional fable of working-class male endeavour.  Its hero was determined to break away from the poverty of his circumstances: the string of wretched jobs, the dismal estates, the cruelly observed pregnant wife with her nylon dressing-gown and her stifling need for security.  He turns to athleticism, and then, via an exotic inter-racial affair (’She was ebony, pure shining carved ebony’), to the underworld of drugs, black clubs and serious crime.  Milne’s London Fields is a place of confinement and stunted prospects.  The escape route is enticing but it leads inevitable to gaol.

Then, in 1989, Martin Amis came along with the book that swept John Milne’s effort into oblivion.  By the time Amis has finished with it, London Fields isn’t a place at all.  Instead it’s a monstrous condition, a post-modern pile-up at the end of another millennium.  London Fields has become the immortal void where the time-expired allegories of British life go to mutate.  There’s suicide and murder.  There’s imminent nuclear catastrophe and a dark collapsing sky.  There are gross couplings, and they’re not discreetly hidden in a Ford Cortina either.  At one point in the performance, an unprecedented gale bursts into fell thirty-three million trees: all in a single stroke of the Ring Master’s hormonal, mid-Atlantic prose.  People round here may well wonder what Martin Amis thinks he’s doing to their park.

The Nasty Young Man of English letters grows apocalyptic with age.  These days he creeps into London Fields like repentant mugger and practises being human.  He’s achieved some results through these exertions: an abstract devotion to the planet, for example, and a fatal softness for babies.  Nevertheless, he’s still doing horrible things to women and children.  Amis’s American narrator is less of a worry.  He flew into London saying ‘I want time to go to London Fields’, but he died on the way through.  He’ll never know that, despite all his millennialist huffing and puffing, the plane trees in Hackney’s park are still standing.  It’s unlikely anyone in the area will miss him.