European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  Gu Mu replied at least at equal length, covering even a wider range of subjects, most of them fairly predictable, all predicated on a strongly anti-Soviet position of course, but this not put in particularly violent terms. The Vietnamese, he said, had become ‘little hegemonists’ (a phrase which I felt somewhat contradictory but did not bother to take up subsequently). After his long statement, I came back with various comments, assuring him in the first place that he need have no doubt of our awareness of possible Soviet threats. We had indeed been aware of them longer than most, having lived through the Czechoslovakian coup in 1947 and the attempt to strangle Berlin in 1948, and had set up NATO as a result, which still remained in good order, etc.

  The interesting part of the trade discussion was on the relative shares of the market which the main powers might hope to occupy. I indicated that we expected a larger share than the United States in view of the present pattern of trade and our longer history of diplomatic and commercial relations with the People’s Republic, and a significant share in relation to Japan, although Japan would no doubt be their main trading partner. Gu Mu then rather surprisingly said that our share should be as large as that of Japan or the United States—in other words, equal thirds. I said this was fine vis-à-vis Japan, but vis-à-vis the United States we expected more, for the reasons given. This interchange ended inconclusively but perfectly amicably. The meeting was generally thought to have been good and useful.

  Back to the guest house soon after 12.30. There were as many bicycles as ever but a good deal more motorized traffic in Peking than I remember from the last occasion; I would think about twice as much. More trucks, but also a new element, a sort of small jeep, Chinese made, which now occupy about as big a proportion of the traffic as taxis do in central London, and are apparently owned by government departments, agencies, rural communes, etc.

  Lunch alone with our team of nine at the guest house. Very good food, much better than the night before. Then back to the Great Hall of the People for a slightly over-long meeting with the Foreign Minister, Huang Hua. Having talked so much in the morning I was rather anxious to get him to talk, and opened by asking him about Chinese/American and Chinese/Japanese relations, which produced only too long an exposé on his part. However the conversation got more interesting in the second half of the two-and-a-quarter-hour session.

  In justifying the Vietnamese operation - ‘against the Cubans of the East’ - he complained that we had not done enough to combat the activities of the Cubans in the West in Africa. ‘France’, he suddenly said, drawing Emile Noël into the conversation, rather as though Emile were a parachute colonel attired in képi and battle-dress, ‘France had acted decisively in Zaire, but nobody else had done much.’ I said the Belgians had done something and, in any case, we were necessarily somewhat inhibited against African intervention by our imperialist past. He said that China for her part would maintain her tit-for-tat attitude towards the Soviet Union and her accomplices. Now China was teaching a lesson to Vietnam. The boundaries were comparatively unimportant. What was important was the overall strategic concept, in which context it was necessary to see China’s punitive action against Vietnam. She was battling not for selfish motives but for the general interest in containing Soviet expansion.

  There was some talk about the PLO at the end, which I raised, saying that they were undoubtedly a destabilizing influence in the Gulf and possibly in Saudi Arabia and what were the Chinese doing about this. Huang Hua said it was a rather disparate organization, but they exercised what restraining influence they could. Huang Hua, as I discovered subsequently at dinner, spoke and understood extremely good English, having been at the UN for five years, but we nonetheless did the whole conversation with translation which at least made it more leisurely.

  To the Peking opera from 7.30 to 10.00. There were three separate little operas; all of them classical, i.e. set in the eighteenth century or earlier. The first was a sort of duelling match in the dark and more ballet with an element of acrobatics than opera; the second, apart from the music, was reminiscent of an overstylized Mozart production; the third, The Monkey King, was again ballet and still more acrobatically orientated. All three, the music apart, were rather good. The costumes were elaborate, quite different from anything we had seen five years before when this form of classical opera had been heavily frowned upon. There was an auditorium for about 1500 people, fullish but not packed, with a fairly high proportion of foreigners, including a number of tourists, but a fair number of Chinese as well. The applause, as indeed tends to be the case with Chinese applause, was moderate rather than enthusiastic.

  Dinner at the guest house and bed at 11.30. During the day we had been given the official explanation of the explosions and illuminated sky of the night before, which was that a boiler had blown up in an apartment house. I suppose true, for I cannot think of any other plausible thesis. But it must have been a very big boiler and very damaging to the apartment house.

  FRIDAY, 23 FEBRUARY. Peking.

  Up again at 8 o’clock, again with difficulty. A meeting with Deng17 at 10.00. We first had a photograph and then settled down for one and a half hours of extremely fast, taut, intensive conversation. Compared with when I had last seen him five and a half years ago, when Jennifer and I talked to him for the same length of time, the first foreigners that he had been allowed to see after his first period of disgrace, Deng looked younger, despite the fact that he is now seventy-four, and he has gained enormously in authority. He is now an extremely tough, impressive personality by the highest world standards, with a great grasp of the details of international affairs, accompanied of course by an extremely hard line. Unlike the meetings with Gu Mu and Huang Hua there was no question of long exposés. Neither of us spoke for more than two and a half minutes at a time and the interchanges were fairly evenly balanced. He began by asking about the progress of the Community and showed his knowledge by asking one or two extremely shrewd questions, such as: ‘Would the new directly elected Parliament, frustrated in its ability to have greater nominal powers, not take it out a little on the Commission?’ I said, ‘Maybe yes, but their real target would be the Council of Ministers.’

  We then moved over the whole world scene with considerable speed. The only point on which I thought he was unrealistic was a Middle Eastern settlement, and unrealistic there because of his unwillingness to allow the Soviet Union any place in the world scheme. He therefore thought that while there must clearly be a Palestinian state on the West Bank, while there must clearly be recognition of the integrity of the rest of Israel and its right to exist; a guarantee for this need not be provided by great powers but should be provided by some non-aligned powers. I would put the likelihood of the Israelis accepting, say, a Yugoslav/Indian/Malaysian guarantee at about zero.

  On Vietnam, he gave me the impression that things were going fairly badly. I asked him about the equipment of the Vietnamese army and he gave a neutral answer, saying that one machine gun, one rifle, was very much like another, and air power was not involved. What was, however, the case was that the Vietnamese troops were much more battle-experienced than the Chinese troops. Nobody in the Chinese army had fought for twenty years, and those who had fought then had all become ‘old fat generals’. He stated that the Chinese were not going far in, they could extricate themselves whenever they wished, whenever they had taught the Vietnamese a lesson, had shrunken ‘their swollen heads’.

  He said that the risks of a Soviet intervention had been very carefully calculated. There were various possibilities: that of a minor deployment of force against the north or the north-west of China; and that of a more major activity there. They had calculated on both possibilities. Neither had happened. There were, however, some people in China who thought that the fact that nothing had happened so far might indicate a stronger rather than a weaker reaction at some stage in the future. I said that what I would fear more from a Chinese point of view was that the Soviet Union would continue to do nothing and that if the
Chinese got bogged down for any length of time in Vietnam, world opinion—perhaps nervous and fickle in their view but no less real for that—certainly in the Third World and to some extent in the West, would be alienated from the Chinese position and this would militate against the building up of the broad front against ‘Soviet hegemony’ which they so much desired.

  I don’t think he liked this point very much, and said: ‘Well, no doubt the Chinese would have a bad name for some time, but this was better than to behave in the inactive way against which they had been preaching in other theatres.’ And so we left the Vietnamese topic.

  We talked briefly about trade relations, but he made it clear that he mainly delegated these to the Minister for External Trade, whom I was seeing that afternoon. We then had an hour’s pause for reflection before proceeding right across the city to the extreme eastern part where is the new diplomatic enclave. There the French Ambassador had a lunch for his six European colleagues and us. This was the one Western meal we had in China; the French wine was more welcome than the food.

  I gave them a slightly expurgated briefing, for the European ambassadors in Peking are notoriously leaky as they have nobody much to talk to except Western journalists and I did not want my impression of the Deng talk relating to the Chinese doing badly in Vietnam to appear immediately in the press.

  Then once again to the Great Hall of the People for our detailed meeting with the Minister for External Trade, Li. This was reasonably satisfactory. Roy Denman did some of the talking, though not much. Li gave the impression of not being particularly well-informed, and has a maniacal laugh, but is probably quite shrewd. On most of the points on which we wanted detailed agreement, the Business Seminar in Brussels in the summer of 1980, the Trade Centre in Peking, we were able to get agreement quickly. On textiles18 we neither expected nor achieved much progress. We held out to them the prospect of generalized special preferences, which they did not ask for and did not snatch at, so we were able to put it in a fairly tentative form. With great difficulty we extracted their estimates of Chinese annual imports by 1985, which by a process of elimination and short bracketing we were eventually able to establish as $25/$30 billion as opposed to the present total of just over $10 billion.19 Altogether it was a useful, pedestrian meeting.

  That evening we gave a cocktail party in the Peking Hotel for the European press, the diplomats, and some ‘Chinese friends’ who were not quite senior enough to be asked to our banquet the following evening. I talked a bit to all three circles, and it was over by about 7 o’clock. We dined in the guest house alone with our party.

  SATURDAY, 24 FEBRUARY. Peking.

  A beautiful morning following two rather cloudy days after the snow on Thursday and Friday; temperature still about freezing point. I addressed the Institute of Foreign Affairs at 9.00, the same body which I spoke to five years ago. There was a larger audience than last time, about 150, although I was rather curiously expected to speak to them sitting down. I delivered not a bad prepared speech which, with translation, took almost exactly an hour, and then answered questions (last time there were no questions) for forty-five minutes. Most of them were planted and prepared, as they so carefully and methodically covered the main areas one would have liked to have been asked about in relation to the Community: enlargement, EMS, direct elections, etc. But there was one unprepared one from a Chinese lady, who asked it in English and attracted slightly Batemanesque glances, but more I think because of the nature of the question and because she was not on the list than because of her asking it in English and not Chinese. This was about events in Iran and how damaging they were to us. Then a cold, sunny, very rapid walk through the Imperial Palace and to the top of Coal Hill. Lunch in the guest house and a necessary hour’s sleep in the afternoon.

  Then our final important meeting—with Chairman Hua—from 5.00 to 6.20. Hua is very different from Deng, much less fast-talking and quick-comprehending, but in his way quite impressive. In a sense it was a rather intelligent head of state performance, not a head of state in the Carter or Giscard sense, nor in the Queen’s sense, but rather like talking to Scheel, compared with talking to Schmidt. We talked a certain amount about China geographically, where everybody on their side came from; talked a bit about our delegation, with Hua trying to identify the different nationalities in our team.

  He then gave a long exposé, but also listened with apparent interest to my exposé, in which I developed more strongly than I had done previously the need for a stimulus to the Western economies, which gave us not only a friendly interest, but also a self-interest, in helping with Chinese modernization. He seemed quite interested in this analysis, which followed naturally from what he had just been saying about his study of Western economies.

  On Vietnam, which he raised without prompting from me, he gave the impression that they had had some further bad news in the past twenty-four hours. Contrasting with what we had been told on the Thursday—and even what Deng had said the previous morning—he was hesitant about a date for coming out, saying that this depended on two sides, and that they wanted to be assured that the Vietnamese would not pursue them over the border if they extricated themselves, or words very much to that effect.

  Hua had read (or been briefed on) my speech that morning and commented friendlily on my remark that China was neither wholly a part of the first world, the second world, or the third world, but potentially part of all three.

  The Hua meeting over, we had our press conference at 6.30, which was easy to the point of being dull.

  Then, upstairs a little early for the banquet we were giving in the Great Hall, where we had most of the same guests as on the Wednesday evening, except that the Foreign Minister came as well as Gu Mu and the Minister for External Trade; and we also had the stars from the Peking opera, the main lady from the Mozart-like piece in the middle and the Monkey King himself. The food was rather better than they had provided and all done at a cost of not much more than £300 for about fifty people (which makes it still more mysterious what Haferkamp did with his £1800 in China last autumn). The banquet conversation was interesting but only mildly so. Huang, on my left, talked English very well, and delivered one message, saying that he greatly hoped that if Eric Varley20 (who had just arrived in China) told him that Britain couldn’t sell Harriers for the moment, he wouldn’t bring a lot of false excuses, but would just say that public and parliamentary opinion made it too difficult while the Vietnam war was going on. If it was put frankly in this way the Chinese would accept it, but if it was cocooned in a lot of unconvincing excuses they would be offended.

  Gu Mu, on the other side, complained a good deal about interest rates, which led to certain reflections on my part as to how interest rates operate when you are lending from inflationary economies to an allegedly non-inflationary one. The exchange rate ought to deal with this, but if the exchange rate is totally managed, and is that of a currency without any world market, does it? This, however, was a little too complicated for the interpreter, who was one of the weaknesses of the trip, and was not as good as we had on our private visit in 1973.

  However, it was worth noting that the Chinese were very hooked on the interest rate point and will do their best to break any Western consortium to hold the line on rates of interest on long-term credits. They have a slightly naive approach to interest rates, rather like the arguments I used to have with my Birmingham constituency party in the 1950s, with the claim that housing could be much cheaper if the money were free of capitalist usury. It is one of few remaining bits of anti-capitalist dogma in China.

  After the banquet we went to the French Embassy and completed the briefing of the ambassadors. On the whole they are not a very impressive lot, although Arnaud is agreeable and the German (Wickert)21 intelligent. Cradock wasn’t there on this occasion (because of Varley) so he is not involved in this judgement, although I do not find him exciting. The Dane looks like a caricature of the Chinese view of nineteenth-century ‘foreign devils’ - large, red-faced
, carrot-coloured’hair.

  I then had my first good night’s sleep of the trip. The talks had been completed and on the whole we thought they had gone well; certainly they had been held at the highest level and had been of very considerable interest, and I think we had improved relations without disguising our concern and apprehension about the Vietnamese position, not so much on moral grounds as on the possible weakening effect on China’s position in the world.

  SUNDAY, 25 FEBRUARY. Peking and Cheng-Tu.

  We took off just after 11.00 in a private Chinese Government Trident—a vast improvement on the old Ilyushin we flew in last time—for Cheng-Tu in Sichuan Province. A surprisingly long flight of two and a half hours, first over a snowbound landscape, then the snow dying away, then some mountains with more snow, then the Yellow River, then another range with little snow, and then down into the extremely green mountain-rimmed plain of Cheng-Tu. We drove in about ten miles from the airport, through this rich agricultural area, looking slightly like the plain of Lombardy before industrialization and pollution, to a guest house or hotel—it was never quite clear which it was—just inside the town and across a bridge over the river. We lunched there on hot spicy Sichuan food.

  At 3.15, it being the most beautiful, balmy, early spring day, with a particular quality in the atmosphere and light, and the temperature about 65°, we went off on two semi-cultural expeditions, the first to the ‘cottage’ of Du Fu, who was a well-known Chinese poet of about the year 800 and whose poems go on being printed throughout the world, so much so that they have there made an interesting collection of about 150 of the 500 known editions of his works, approximately two-thirds of them in Chinese and going back to the eleventh century, and the others from a whole variety of foreign languages. It is not a ‘cottage’, but a series of pavilions and rather well laid out and interesting and attractive.