European Diary, 1977-1981 (60 page)

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.

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, 28 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.