Cold War Studies Research Papers (original) (raw)

For more than two decades, from 1950 until 1972, Great Britain and the People’s Republic of China had a somewhat incongruous relationship, as they maintained a state of incomplete diplomatic recognition characterized by what might be termed major internal contradictions. It featured profound Cold War ideological antagonism, particularly pronounced on the Chinese side but far from absent on that of Britain, in coexistence with substantial commercial and economic dealings, many of which were channeled, orchestrated, and facilitated through the British-administered colony of Hong Kong. Despite the fact that Hong Kong represented territory Britain had forcibly seized from China between 1842 and 1898, the revolutionary mainland regime chose to leave it a capitalist enclave under British control from 1949 until 1997, an anomalous status bestowed largely due to the substantial financial benefits China derived from keeping the city as it was. Keeping Hong Kong a mutually profitable going concern required Britain and China to cooperate, if only tacitly, in setting ground rules for running its affairs. Whereas the United States largely eschewed diplomatic and economic interchanges with China until at least the late 1960s, pressuring its Cold War allies to follow suit and ostracize the new mainland regime, Britain and Communist China could not avoid some level of communication with each other.

Chi-kwan Mark, a leading expert on China’s international relations since 1945, seeks to address what he terms the ‘everyday Cold War’ between these two protagonists in these years of limited but surprisingly significant contacts. In an outstanding monograph, Hong Kong and the Cold War: Anglo-American Relations, 1949-1957 (2004), and numerous insightful articles and book chapters, Mark has written extensively on Cold War Hong Kong, exploring the complex dilemmas that remarkable city posed, in terms of the inter-relationships among Great Britain, the US, the PRC, and the Nationalist government on Taiwan. Reluctance to recycle his earlier work is probably why, although Hong Kong features quite prominently in this study, in terms of trade, its role during the Vietnam War, the 1967 riots and the retaliation they provoked against British diplomats in Shanghai and Beijing, and the British government’s constant preoccupation with safeguarding their continued control of the Hong Kong, it is not the central focus. This despite the fact that almost certainly Hong Kong was itself the locale of the most sustained and routine of the ‘everyday’ encounters between China and Britain, the venue where the details of a functioning working relationship were negotiated and hammered out.

Mark turns instead to providing a much-needed narrative of the drawn-out path to the restoration of relatively normal diplomatic understanding between Britain and China. Drawing on British, Chinese, and US sources, he ably recounts the episodic negotiations between top-level officials on both sides, assisted by professional diplomats and well-placed intermediaries, notably Malcolm MacDonald, former British high commissioner for Southeast Asia, who developed an apparently genuine friendship with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and Foreign Minister Chen Yi after they made a pit stop in Singapore’s airport. The 1954 Geneva Conference, where then British foreign secretary Anthony Eden also came to know and respect Zhou, brought an upgrade in the Chinese and British diplomatic missions to permanent rather than ad hoc status. British trade with China grew fairly steadily, as the United Kingdom gradually relaxed the embargoes imposed on commerce with communist nations, especially China, during the Korean War.

Even so, such progress as occurred took place against a background barrage of constant communist propaganda vilification of Western powers, with the United Kingdom accorded a prominent position. British diplomats and officials in London, Hong Kong, and Beijing cheerfully came to consider as virtually routine these perennial rhetorical assaults, which occasionally blossomed into well-orchestrated mass ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations in Beijing following such landmark events as the 1956 Suez invasion or the Anglo-American intervention in Lebanon 2 years later. Communist-sponsored newspapers and the Xinhua news agency in Hong Kong were equally shrill in their criticism of British and Western policies, though if they went too far, these complaints sometimes provoked crackdowns by the Hong Kong government.

The establishment of some level of diplomatic relations with China did not imply extensive or revealing channels of communication. Until the late 1970s, members of the British mission, like those of the few other Western powers—the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and after 1964 France—with pre-1970 representation in the Chinese capital, rarely met Chinese people in non-official settings. Unless the Chinese bureaucracy wished to deliver a message of some kind, communications with the Foreign Ministry were sporadic and unpredictable. Foreign diplomats in Beijing lived in considerable comfort, except for those occasions when they became targets of communist political displeasure, but were largely isolated from the broader society to which they were assigned. They were rarely permitted to travel more than twelve miles from Beijing’s center, unless taken on carefully supervised official tours of model facilities and historic sites. Chinese diplomats in London had rather more latitude: leading Labour politician Denis Healey recalled that in the 1960s they sent their children to the local British school at which his daughter taught. By the early 1970s, the chargé could attend seminars at Chatham House, the British think tank. Even so, their movements were restricted, partly thanks due to British limitations imposed to reciprocate for those suffered by their counterparts in Beijing, and they were subject to party discipline. Diplomatic exchanges were often formulaic and confrontational.

The great breakdown of this already challenged system came in the mid to late 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution Chairman Mao Zedong had unleashed triggered anti-foreign sentiments that for a while escaped Politburo or Foreign Ministry control. Chinese Red Guards particularly resented the Hong Kong government’s forceful repression of 1967 riots, initially triggered by a labour dispute that prompted local communist activists, encouraged by Xinhua (New China News Agency) representatives in the territory, to demand an end to British rule. In retaliation, Red Guard factions—initially emboldened by an incautious endorsement from the ailing Premier Zhou Enlai—mounted physical assaults on British representatives in Shanghai and Beijing, and burned the British mission in Beijing, the culmination of a series of earlier sieges and sackings of the French, Soviet, Indian, Burmese, and Indonesian embassies. Low-level Chinese diplomats in London quickly added fuel to the fire by staging attacks on policemen watching and guarding their building in Portland Place. The destruction of the British building and the subsequent retention in China as hostages of the beleaguered diplomats, together with a Reuters correspondent taken as a bargaining chip for left-wing journalists jailed in Hong Kong—marked the nadir of Sino-British relations. Thereafter, Harold Wilson’s Labour government, followed by Edward Heath’s Conservative administration, worked not simply to repair the damage through piecemeal mutual concessions, but to move toward establishing full diplomatic relations. The Chinese government, after suppressing assorted Red Guard factions and regaining control, cooperated by rebuilding the devastated mission at its own expense. And the British closed their consulate in Tamsui, Taiwan, and eventually, after lengthy negotiations, devised a verbal formula that enabled them to leave the question of Taiwan to final resolution—still not reached—by the parties concerned.

Mark’s account makes it clear that on neither side was particularly sentimental relationship. The British and Chinese cherished few illusions about each other after dealings dating back for many years, but did have various common interests. It may be instructive that for Britain, trade came first. A Sino-British Trade Committee was created with government support in 1954, the ancestor of today’s China-British Council. Not until the early 1970s was the Great Britain China Committee (later Centre) established to promote broad Sino-British understanding. In the United States, the order was reversed, with the National Committee on US–China Relations founded in 1966 by a combination of academics, peace activists, and a few businessmen, and the US-China Business Council only established in 1973. Mark notes that, when engaged in negotiations intended to bring full diplomatic normalization, British officials eschewed the flowery panegyrics to Red China that characterized the rhetoric of US President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser. Throughout his study, Mark defends the British stance against those critics who condemn it as ‘appeasement’ of China, arguing that successive British governments rightly—and despite much provocation on China’s part—recognized that excluding China from the existing international system, including the United Nations, simply justified and encouraged communist Chinese intransigence.

The book would have benefited greatly from decent copy-editing, to correct minor errors on almost every page. References to the diplomatic ‘packing order’ in Beijing, ‘armless British police officers’ (I believe the original intent was unarmed rather than harmless), and ‘quip pro quo’ have a certain charm, but the novelty soon wears off. Bloomsbury has done awfully well financially from Harry Potter. And sloppily produced books lack a certain inherent subliminal credibility. How would Hermione handle this?