East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925-1976

277 Pages·2012·3.327 MB·English

by  Tom Buchanan

EAST WIND
This page intentionally left blank
East Wind
China and the British Left, 1925–1976
T OM B UCHANAN
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Tom Buchanan 2012
Th e moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2012
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Buchanan, Tom, 1960–
East wind : China and the British left, 1925–1976 / Tom Buchanan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–957033–1 (hbk.)
1. China—Relations—Great Britain. 2. Great Britain—Relations—China. 3. Socialism—Great
Britain—History—20th century. 4. Liberalism—Great Britain—History—20th century. 5. Right
and left (Political science)—Great Britain—History—20th century. 6. Great Britain—Politics and
government—20th century. 7. China—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title.
DS740.5.G5B83 2012
303.48'2410510904—dc23 2012002808
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn
ISBN 978–0–19–957033–1
For Angus and Brenda
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
C hina may never have exercised the same hold over the imagination of the British
left as the Soviet Union, but it was an abiding interest throughout the fi ve decades
after 1925, and there were particular times (notably in 1925–7, 1937–8, and
1950–3) when it demanded the full attention of both the left and the wider Labour
movement. Supporting China, however, was far from straightforward. In July
1925 the socialist writer Noel Brailsford posed the question, ‘What then is China?’1 ,
and throughout these years the left struggled to provide an answer. China pre-
sented a confusing multiplicity of faces: oppressed and oppressor, ancient civiliza-
tion and new culture, hope and threat. It represented anti-imperialism in the
1920s, anti-fascism in the 1930s and 40s, socialist development in the 1950s, and
revolutionary unpredictability in the 1960s and 70s. From the late 1950s onwards,
moreover, China off ered its foreign supporters a series of ever more severe political
shocks, and many on the British left had lost interest or transferred their loyalties
elsewhere long before the mid 1970s. Th is book, therefore, charts the relationship
between China and the British left across fi fty years of tumultuous upheaval and
remarkable political and economic transformation. In the process, it addresses
three principal questions: fi rstly, how did the British left (broadly defi ned) under-
stand and relate to China during a period of such intense change and confl ict;
secondly, what impact did China make on the British left; and thirdly, what part
did the left play in Sino-British relations?
Th e left was convinced that it had a role to play in promoting a better under-
standing of China: yet understanding often seemed to be in short supply, some-
times comically so, in its own dealings with China. In 1955, for instance, Kingsley
Martin, the long-serving editor of the N ew Statesman, interviewed a senior Chi-
nese government minister in Beijing. He misread the situation and, mistaking
courtesy for evasion, walked out before the interview had properly started 2 . Th e
left also struggled to translate Chinese revolutionary politics into a British context,
and much was lost in the translation. One hallmark Maoist policy that held a par-
ticular fascination for the British left was the requirement that all workers, includ-
ing bureaucrats and intellectuals, should undertake periods of manual labour. In
1965 Tony Benn (as Postmaster General in the Labour government) privately
mused that he would like to see the top management in the Post Offi ce doing one
day a week on the shop fl oor. But he realized that a ‘good idea’ that was appropri-
ate to a revolutionary society such as China would not necessarily work in Brit-
ain. In any case, ‘. . . somehow I don’t see myself as a cleaner or a postman without
1 New Leader , 3 July 1925.
2 C. H. Rolph, Kingsley: Th e life, letters and diaries of Kingsley Martin (London: Victor Gollancz,
1973), 318–19, citing Martin’s private diary. Martin later felt mortifi ed for behaving like an ‘impa-
tient, insensitive, bungling Westerner . . .’.
viii Preface
the whole thing becoming just a huge press gimmick’ 3 . Rather less endearing was
the response of some leading British intellectuals to the plight of their Chinese
counterparts during the Cultural Revolution, which showed an often chilling dis-
regard for the true power relations in Mao’s China. Raymond Williams commented
that ‘[w]hen I heard pathetic stories about professors being taken from their librar-
ies and laboratories and sent to help bring in the harvest I felt totally on the side of
the revolutionaries. . . . I do not see why an ordinary healthy man or woman should
not participate in manual labour.’4 Likewise, the economist Joan Robinson is re-
ported to have said that ‘a lot of professors could benefi t from physical exercise’5 .
As these remarks indicate, the British left’s relationship with China could easily
be presented as little more than a series of gaff es born of mutual incomprehension.
Such an assumption underlies the substantial, and sometimes not very discrimi-
nating, literature on fellow-travelling and political tourism6 . Th e left was undoubt-
edly at times naive and guilty of seeing only what it wanted to see in revolutionary
China. However, the intention here is to illuminate not only the left’s weaknesses,
but also its achievements. For instance, for some years after the Chinese Commu-
nists came to power in 1949, when the British government, businesses, and mis-
sionaries were forced to curtail or greatly reduce their activities in China, the left
provided the only remaining bridge between Britain and the new People’s Republic
of China (PRC). In particular, its promotion of trade with the PRC during the
1950s posed a rather eff ective challenge to the rigidity of the Cold War. More
generally, it will be shown that the left held true to the belief that China had im-
mense unrealized economic potential. For each of these fi ve decades, we will en-
counter serious commentators on the British left who saw trade with China as the
solution for Britain’s economic diffi culties. At the time such claims appeared fan-
tastical, and as late as 1972 the seasoned journalist Richard Harris told a Fabian
Society working party that ‘[t]he mirage of a vast China trade has come and gone
three or four times in the last two centuries. It is not dead yet’ 7 . However, China’s
remarkable economic growth since the 1980s has not been a mirage, even though
modern China is hardly the receptor for British manufactured goods that the left
had once intended.
Th e left’s vision of a ‘vast China trade’ spoke to the economic insecurities of the
British working class, but there was always more to the left’s solidarity with China
than mere commercial calculation. Th is was also a story of profound human
3 Tony Benn, Out of the wilderness: Diaries, 1963–67 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 337 , entry for
1 October 1965. Benn had been speaking to an unnamed Labour politician (probably William
Warbey) who had recently visited China.
4 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with ‘New Left Review’ (London: New Left
Books, 1979), 403–5.
5 Marjorie S. Turner, Joan Robinson and the Americans (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), 213 .
6 David Caute, Th e Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1973) provides a more subtle treatment than Paul Hollander, P olitical pilgrims: Travels of
western intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981) ; see also Colin Mackerras, Western images of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
7 British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES), Fabian Society papers, J/75/2/73,
memorandum by Richard Harris, p. 14.
Preface ix
sympathy for a people that had suff ered more than its share of bad government,
poverty, foreign exploitation, and natural disaster. From the 1920s onwards, the
left frequently challenged the popularly held negative stereotypes of China—of
‘Charlie Chan, murder, torture and villainy’ 8 . In their place it presented an image
of the Chinese as resilient, calm, and dignifi ed in the face of suff ering. Th e dan-
ger—especially after 1949—was that such sympathy could cloud the left’s capacity
for critical friendship. Th is was what Bertrand Russell, in an essay published in
1950, described as the beguiling myth of the ‘superior virtue of the oppressed’.
Referring to the nationalist movements of nineteenth-century Europe, he wrote
that: ‘One by one these various nations rose to independence, and were found to
be just like everybody else; but the experience of those already liberated did noth-
ing to destroy the illusion as regards those who were still struggling’9 . China’s will-
ingness to throw its weight around in the 1960s destroyed some, but by no means
all, illusions. As late as 1980 the journalist Jonathan Mirsky complained of what
he termed the ‘smack the Panda-haters disease’ amongst China’s supporters. By this
he meant a refusal to believe that China was anything other than ‘warm, cuddly,
cute, but—above all—endangered’1 0 .
In this book a broad, three-fold defi nition of the ‘left’ has been adopted. It en-
compasses, fi rstly, political parties explicitly of the left, such as the Communist
Party of Great Britain (CPGB), the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and, latterly,
some small Marxist–Leninist parties; secondly, intellectuals of the Communist and
non-Communist left, such as Rajani Palme Dutt, Kingsley Martin, Bertrand
Russell, and Joseph Needham; and thirdly, the left within the Labour Party and the
trade unions. For much of this period—at least until the Sino-Soviet split—the
Communist Party played a central role in the left’s relations with China. Accord-
ingly, I have sought to determine its exact role with regard to organizations such as
the China Campaign Committee and the Britain–China Friendship Association.
However, the book also addresses the policies and attitudes of the ‘mainstream’
Labour movement. It should be noted that all the leaders of the Labour Party from
Ramsay MacDonald to James Callaghan took an interest in China at diff erent
stages in their careers 11. Even Hugh Gaitskell, on the right of the party, was in-
trigued by the idea of visiting China—a project entitled ‘Operation Marco Polo’—
shortly before his death in 1963 1 2. Another major theme that will emerge is that
while the left was often critical of mainstream Labour’s stance over China, there
were, in fact, many points of convergence. Whether with regard to the crisis in
Sino-British relations of 1926–7, the proposed consumer boycott of Japan in
1937–8, or the attempts to improve relations with the People’s Republic in the
8 Tribune , 16 April 1937.
9 Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell: A political life (London: Allen Lane, 1988) citing R ussell’s Unpopu-
lar essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950), 82.
10 China Now , 91 (July/August 1980), 26.
1 1 Th is particularly applies to Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson (see below, esp pp. 149–51, 145 and
159), but note also James Callaghan’s interest in China in 1979–80 (see below, pp. 214 and 214 note 9).
12 University College London (UCL) library, Gaitskell papers, C285, correspondence between
D esmond Donnelly and Gaitskell, July 1962. Th e idea came from Donnelly, a Labour MP who had
visited China on a number of occasions in the 1950s.