European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  Then we went across the city to the Temple of Zhu Ge Liang, a still earlier figure, a statesman and sage of the time of the Three Kingdoms, i.e. after the end of the Han dynasty in about the third century AD.

  At 7 o’clock there was a banquet, still in the guest house or hotel, which lasted only until 8.30. The host, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee, was an old bald man, looking rather like a mixture of Lords Denning and Morris of Borth-y-Gest, with a slight partisan Chinese touch as well, if one can imagine the combination. Like all such chairmen, who are moved around like French prefects, he had been there only a relatively short time, having last been in Chungking.

  I made rather a good speech about Sichuan culture, based on what we had seen in the afternoon, and Sichuan’s special place in China, and only hope that the interpreter was up to getting it mildly right. Those who could understand English laughed quite a lot -and in the right places. Jennifer and I went early to bed, but most of the others went for a night walk, in the course of which they succeeded in assembling around them, under an isolated street lamp, a high proportion of the language students of Cheng-Tu. How they did it, I cannot think. But it was clearly a great success and ended with Enzo Perlot rendering Puccini arias to an enthusiastic audience who joined in the choruses.

  MONDAY, 26 FEBRUARY. Cheng-Tu and Chungking.

  We left at 9.30 on another beautiful day and drove for about one and a quarter hours through the attractive countryside of the Cheng-Tu plain; attractive both because of the extreme greenness and intensity of the cultivation, and because of the appearance of the small towns, and even more of the groups of farm buildings, which had a certain French style about them—good grey stone, good tiles, but a lot of thatch as well. In the last part of the journey we began to get into some hills, and arrived at the Juan Xian Irrigation Works. These are quite a remarkable scheme, because although modernized and developed recently they have existed as irrigation works for nearly two thousand years, at first watering only a limited area, but now covering several thousand square miles. The area of the scheme itself was a mixture of temples, dams and bamboo bridges. We wandered agreeably for two hours.

  Lunch with the local Revolutionary Committee in their offices. We got back to Cheng-Tu about 3.00, and visited a large park, which, like all parks in China, suffered from having far too many people in it. This I suppose is a good thing and shows the parks are used, and if you have a population of 900 million they are bound to be somewhere. This park was remarkable for its varieties of bamboos.

  At 4.00 we took off on the 200-mile flight to Chungking. Although equally in Sichuan, Chungking is utterly different from Cheng-Tu. The region is mountainous, rather like the more precipitous South Wales valleys, with great gorges, hardly any level soil, the airport a long way from the city even with the help of a substantial recently constructed tunnel.

  At 7.30 we were entertained to the statutory banquet in our guest house. The Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee, after the usual speeches, took us off to visit the city from 9.30 to 10.30. This meant an eight-mile drive to the junction between the Chialing River and the Yangtse. Chungking has this remarkable site – I can think of no wholly comparable site in the world (Pittsburgh is perhaps the nearest) - where two great rivers join, but not in a plain. The Chialing is about a thousand miles long, the Yangtse three and a half thousand, and Chungking is about half-way along its course and therefore nearly two thousand miles from the sea, although it is already a big river, nearly a mile wide. The Chialing is much clearer than the rather muddy Yangtse.

  Chungking was of course Chiang Kai-shek’s capital during the war and it still has a faintly 1940-ish atmosphere about it, and indeed seems now rather rundown. A great deal of heavy industry was moved here when the Japanese occupied Wuhan in 1938, but the industry has not been doing very well, which is largely attributed to the Gang of Four, but I suspect there are other causes as well. I had thought of Chungking during the war as having a hard continental winter, but in fact it has rather a soft climate. The day we were there, although exceptional for the time of the year in being clear and sunny, was not exceptional in temperature, which was 65° or 68°, with the nights much cooler.

  TUESDAY, 27 FEBRUARY. Chungking and Wuhan.

  First we went to visit the house, now a museum or shrine, in which Chou En-lai lived for six years over the wartime period, partly as an organizer of the Communists in the south-west of China, and partly as a liaison officer with the Chiang Kai-shek Government. This house, downtown near the Chialing, was interesting, with some good photographs, and well worth seeing. Then after that to the rather larger house, where Mao and indeed Chou also stayed during the period from the end of August 1945 to the middle of October that year, when Mao came to Chungking immediately after the end of the war with Japan, negotiated with the Chiang people and arrived at an agreement known as the Double Tenth Agreement, because it was signed on 10 October 1945. This was slightly less interesting than Chou En-lai’s house, but this may be partly due to the fact that I always find Chou a much more attractive and interesting figure than Mao. Although one doesn’t hear much of Mao now, one still sees only too much of that moon-like face staring down from placards.

  We then drove for more than an hour to visit a glass factory at Bei-Bei on the west bank of the Chialing River. The drive out was through a lot of industrial suburbs, passing some coalmines, a large steel works, interspersed with areas of intensive cultivation, all in the tightly enfolded countryside. It was easy to see that Greater Chungking had a total, though scattered, industrial population of about six million. The visit to the glass factory was mercifully fairly short. It seemed to be moderately successful, some successful designs, mostly taken over from the Czechs or the Canadians apparently; some hideous modern Chinese designs. There were skilled workers, but the standard of management, I would guess, was not very good; and the general factory conditions were rather like early Victorian England, with practically no industrial safety and a great deal of molten glass being twirled round by workers without masks or proper protective gloves, and twirled round pretty close to the visitors too. After that another twenty minutes’ drive to the North Hot Springs, again alongside the Chialing, and a very spectacular sight. There we were entertained to lunch, saw some temples which were interspersed with the springs, in which some of our party bathed in a hot and overcrowded swimming pool.

  Then to the airport and an hour’s flight, which brought us over the totally different landscape, much covered in lakes, of the three cities which together form the conurbation of Wuhan. It was a beautiful, slightly misty spring evening. We drove, crossing two rivers, the second being the Yangtse, to Wuchang, the third of the towns, where we stayed in a much more lavish guest house, somewhat garishly furnished, than either of the two in Sichuan, or indeed the one in Peking.

  Our Revolutionary Committee host at the statutory banquet was a pretty well-known man called Ling, who had previously been Mayor of Shanghai and had got into deep conflict with the Gang of Four and had been confined to his house for eight years, and his wife, also quite a powerful figure, for six years. He had been an extreme ‘capitalist roader’ in the eyes of the Gang of Four, and was bitterly hostile to them and the whole previous Shanghai position, as he made clear when we told him we had been there in 1973. This aroused no agreeable nostalgia in his mind.

  After dinner there was an acrobatic performance for an hour and a half. It was interesting to compare it with the one which we had seen in Shanghai five years before. It was incomparably more elegantly and artistically presented. Apart from there being no nudity, it was rather like a Paris music hall performance of thirty to fifty years ago, the Folies Bergères or Alcazar. However, it was not as spectacular as in Shanghai, partly because the stage was smaller and gave less of an impression of danger; it was more a performance based on incredibly delicate and extremely impressive feats of balance and contortion. Women played a far more dominant part than in Shanghai.

  WEDNESDAY, 2
8 FEBRUARY. Wuhan and Peking.

  The day began with a mercifully brief visit to a machine tool factory. Those who knew slightly more about machine tools than I thought that it was pretty antiquated, though very large, with a work force of nearly eight thousand.

  The manager said what a terrible time he had had under the Gang of Four, particularly towards the end. When I asked what this amounted to he gave quite an interesting and substantial reply, saying that those then in power had tried to undermine his authority in every possible way, they were only interested in talking and not in production and regarded him as a ‘capitalist roader’ because he was interested in the factory actually producing something. Now that they had got rid of the Revolutionary Committee in the factory the whole thing worked a great deal better, though it still had a long way to go.

  Then a cold visit to the East Lake. It was a remarkably clear day -the weather had changed overnight—a north wind having blown out all the mist of the previous evening. It was rather like a spring day in Chicago. From the lake we went to the Archaeological Museum, where we were taken round by an extremely intelligent curator and shown things which had come out of a recently discovered 2600-year-old tomb, including a whole variety of domestic utensils, but also a great set of bells on which they played a rather haunting version of ‘The East is Red’, which hardly achieved an authentically contemporary note, but nonetheless brought out the quality of those ancient and variegated bells.

  An early lunch at the guest house, and then a visit to a remarkable Buddhist temple, which was more reminiscent of India than China. Then a drive round the centre of Hankou, which of the three towns is the one with the most metropolitan animation and which, c. 1900, had a series of international concessions like Shanghai, and which still has the air of a city of that sort. Unfortunately we never got to the Bund, alongside the Yangtse, mainly because the Chinese local officials are moved about so quickly that they don’t know their way about the towns they are administering.

  Then to the airport to return by our Trident to Peking. Peking was still under snow, but it was a beautiful evening with a splendid red sunset. We reached the guest house at 6.30 and dined there.

  THURSDAY, 1 MARCH. Peking and Karachi.

  Leisurely morning visit to the Temple of Heaven in the south of the city, the best of the Peking monuments. We lunched with Kang, the Ambassador in Brussels, and various other people who had accompanied us on the tour round, at the Imperial Restaurant.

  Then back to the guest house, where Li, the Minister for External Trade, came to say goodbye. This turned out to be a rather serious conversation, in which he obviously thought he ought to say one or two things which he had omitted at the meeting the previous Friday afternoon, such as what great importance they attach to GSP and how good their silk was. So the conversation was a curious mixture of courtesy and rather excessive detail. Before leaving we made presentations to various people from Kang downwards, the interpreters, the Chief of Protocol, the head of the Security Service, my bodyguard, the cook at the guest house, etc. We had brought a lot of clocks with us, and there were also signed photographs and books.

  Sung, the old Ambassador to London, came to drive with me to the airport and I had a rather good talk with him on the journey. Then at the airport we had the ambassadors, or at any rate five or six of them, and also the deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. The French did much better than the British, who in spite of requests produced no newspapers, whereas the French produced a complete set of Le Monde for the days we had been away.

  We took off at 5.45, with one and a half hours of sunset and then dinner over South-West China. It was a slow flight as there was a great head wind of 160 knots, so that we took eight and a half hours to reach Karachi.

  FRIDAY, 2 MARCH. Karachi and East Hendred.

  Athens at 5 a.m. The light came up over Yugoslavia and we got into Charles de Gaulle just before 8.00 French time, an hour and a half late. A quick change round and on to the plane to London, with newspapers, boxes, etc. We were typically stacked over Heathrow. Filthy weather in Paris, slightly better in London. East Hendred by 10.00, feeling surprisingly well.

  SUNDAY, 4 MARCH. East Hendred.

  Bonham Carters came about noon to drive over with me to lunch with the Briggs’ at Worcester (College).

  It was a typical large Briggs Sunday luncheon party—twenty-two in all, I think: Berlins, John Sparrow, the American Ambassador and Mrs Kingman Brewster, Janet Suzman, Catherine Freeman, all an agreeable lot of people, although rather too many of them. However, I like the Briggs’ very much. We walked in the Worcester garden for a bit, and then did a drive around Oxford, going in particular into the new St Catherine’s, which I don’t think Mark had ever seen.

  MONDAY, 5 MARCH. East Hendred, Brussels, Bonn and Brussels.

  8.25 plane to Brussels, caught with difficulty as the motorway was jammed from near Maidenhead. An hour’s Coordination Meeting for the Foreign Affairs Council, and then back to the airport and an avion taxi to Bonn for a talk with Schmidt.

  Lunched with Oliver Wright22 at the British Embassy, the first time I had been there since the Hendersons left. It was a good lunch, sitting at a little table in the window of the dining room looking across the river to the sun-bathed (for once) Siebengebirge opposite. Wright is a curious man, a good presence, well informed and shrewd about German politics, but lacks subtlety or breadth of vision. He is perfectly friendly and yet without warmth (towards me, at any rate).

  Then to the Chancellery, where we had Schmidt for a full two hours. It was not a particularly illuminating talk. He was in one of his gloomy, complaining moods, not fortunately much about us, but about the world and almost everybody in it, although Carter had a special place in his demonology list. He was not particularly friendly towards Callaghan, indeed asking whether I thought a new British Tory Government would be more ‘predictable’, which is now his favourite favourable word. There was not much reference to ‘my friend Valéry’ either, though surprisingly little criticism, considering the way the French had messed up the start of the EMS.

  We had a good deal of discussion about the CAP, on which he is a mixture of fundamental good sense and rather supine acceptance of being locked in to no reduction in German farm prices, which he interprets as being the same as no reduction in farmers’ incomes, which it is not. However, a certain amount of progress was made on these subjects, although there was a complete unwillingness on his part to take the lead at Paris the following week and try to force through a solution to the still held up MCA/EMS problem. ‘I tried in Brussels,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a success. I can’t try again; now it’s up to Giscard. He is the chairman. I mustn’t interfere with him.’ I tried on leaving to put a bit more enthusiastic backbone into him, but I am not sure it was successful. However, as a ground-clearing enterprise the talk was worthwhile.

  Brussels by 6.30, and into the Council for one and a half hours. François-Poncet with Nanteuil and a young private secretary to dine, rue de Praetère. I was accompanied as usual on such occasions by Crispin and Christopher Audland. It was a surprisingly successful three-hour dinner, with really very good talk with François-Poncet, partly general conversation mainly about France socially, geographically, historically, and partly some business talk relating to the Council. It was a vast advance on relations in December and I thought we had got on pretty good terms for the first time. On this occasion at least, he was an agreeable, sensible, highly intelligent, well-informed, talkative man.

  TUESDAY, 6 MARCH. Brussels.

  A rather belated press conference on China. Then the Council for two hours. The discussion was mainly on the state of progress in the MTNs and was not as bad as I expected. The opposition, from Deniau for the French, and to some lesser extent from the Irish and Italians, seemed broadly containable. Haferkamp and Davignon, particularly the latter, did well, and I intervened at the end to make it clear that while we would try to deal with one or two of the peripheral points which had been raised, there
was no real chance of getting any substantial change in the package before we came back to them in April, when they would have to take a firm decision.

  In the afternoon there was a long-drawn-out Concertation Meeting, with five or six representatives of the Parliament, on the budget question. François-Poncet dealt with this with great tact giving nothing in substance but being extremely polite, so that they left in a tolerable temper.

  WEDNESDAY, 7 MARCH. Brussels.

  Commission meeting for three hours in the morning. Then to Comme Chez Soi with Simonet, where all the family and staff were on particularly good form because they had just had advance notice of their third Michelin star. Their cup of joy would have been overflowing if they had also heard that the Villa Lorraine had lost its third star, but that was not the case. Henri (Simonet) was firmly convinced that there would be a Belgian Government under Martens the following week, hopeful that he (Henri) might stay on as Foreign Minister, and more than hopeful that Martens being too busy in Brussels he might be allowed to go to the Paris European Council alone and thus have the heady pleasure of dining with heads of government. He was as friendly and agreeable as usual.

  Three and a half hours of Commission in the afternoon. Dinner at home for John Sainsbury,23 with Nanteuils (Luc being on particularly talkative form and agreeable in a way that would have amazed most of his COREPER colleagues), Brunners, etc.

  THURSDAY, 8 MARCH. Brussels and London.

  12.30 plane to London. Lunch with Hayden at Brooks’s. One and three quarter hours with Callaghan at 4 o’clock. He was, as in several recent interviews, immensely friendly, quite different from two years ago, and keen to talk on a whole range of issues, British internal ones to begin with. He was not very well informed or focused on the issues for the Paris Summit, but quite anxious to be told about them and not making any fuss about the bilateral issues which he raised with me, except for a hard continuing note of complaint about the British share of the budget being unfair. He tried to shrug off the devolution débâcle24 but was not particularly optimistic about the political situation generally.