European Diary, 1977-1981 Part 18

WEDNESDAY, 7 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

Pouring with rain. I had noticed a ring around the moon in an otherwise clear sky when walking back from the Charlemagne to the Berlaymont at 7.15 the previous evening. It is the most reliable of all weather signs.

Commission for three hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon. The afternoon session was rather exhausting, with one or two difficult items. I persuaded them with only a little difficulty that we should not present a new budget at this stage. Then there was an unexpected raising of the Haferkamp affair by Cheysson, who did it nominally in helpful terms but who only has to see any bubbling pot to want to stir it. And then an unexpected and tiresome defeat on GSP9 for China. Haferkamp presented it fairly badly. I thought it was all arranged, but to my dismay, Ortoli, Gundelach, Davignon and Cheysson (Cheysson was expected, the others not) all came out in a rather hostile way, so there was nothing to do except half accept a negative decision for the moment but say that I would have to come back to it before I went to China: a boring end to the meeting.

THURSDAY, 8 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

A difficult meeting with Aigner,10 who is Chairman of the Budget Control Committee, about the Haferkamp affair and its repercussions. Then had Francis Pym, accompanied by Crispin, to lunch, rue de Praetere. He was extremely anxious to learn not only about Brussels, but how to be Foreign Secretary which, as I recorded at the beginning of January, he is quite confident that he will be, although he is not necessarily expecting an election before the autumn. I felt a bit like Lord Melbourne with Queen Victoria, although apart from a certain dumpiness they do not look exactly alike. However, I think Pym is nice and straightforward, even if not intellectually sparkling. Crispin liked him too. Then to Bruges, where I spoke and answered questions at the College of Europe for an hour and a half. I enjoyed the meeting which was attended by all their 180 students.

FRIDAY, 9 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

Cheysson at 9.45 to try and move him, not very successfully, on GSP for China. I then saw Napolitano,11 and a delegation of about five from the Italian Communist Party, who had made a great issue about coming to see me. Napolitano was talkative, svelte and moderate, and indeed agreeable and sensible, as I had thought when I had seen him in London about three years before; most of the others were silent.

At 12.30 I had Klose, the Governing Mayor of Hamburg, for half an hour's talk and a lunch. Unfortunately before seeing him I made the mistake of reading the summary of the German press comment on the Haferkamp affair, which Tugendhat had sent me, and was horrified and depressed to find how anti-British, anti-Tugendhat, and indeed how anti-me the German press comment had turned into after its initial, but brief, anti-Haferkamp phase. How right Ortoli was. Therefore I started in a gloomy and not very pro-German mood. However, Klose is a nice agreeable man, though he doesn't get on with Schmidt I am afraid, nor with Apel.

After lunch I saw George Thomson and wept a little on his shoulder about the Haferkamp affair as he had done on mine over the Rhodesian sanctions affair the year before. Then I got the figures for which I had asked for various forms of expenditure, and discovered the horrific bit of news that our 1978 expenditure on avion taxis was more than twice the previous year's, and that as a result we were over our budget for this part of Commissioners' travel and accommodation expenses, though not over the budget for either representation expenses or travelling expenses in the Commission as a whole (that is including officials). After seeing Tugendhat about this bad beginning to the weekend I went home, where Caroline had arrived to stay and where we unusually had a purely English dinner party.

MONDAY, 12 FEBRUARY. Brussels and Luxembourg.

I saw the acting Egyptian Foreign Minister, Boutros-Ghali, for just over half an hour at 10.30: an agreeable, intelligent man. Then I attended a reception which Brunner was giving for Heath and the European Youth Orchestra, spoke briefly to Ted and listened to one or two rather good little performances.

At 12 o'clock I saw Greenborough12 and two or three other people from the British CBI and then, at 12.30, Vredeling, to lobby him successfully about reversing the previous Wednesday's GSP decision for China. Crispin had done a good and much more difficult job with both Davignon and Gundelach the previous week.

After this I gave lunch to a highly distinguished body of Norwegian parliamentarians containing at least two ex-Prime Ministers and, so I was told, either one or two future Prime Ministers-that is always more difficult to tell. At 3 o'clock I saw Ortoli on several matters, including telling him that I was going to try and change the GSP decision, which he accepted with neither enthusiasm nor complaint. He was not going to be at the meeting on Wednesday so he was not of crucial importance, but I thought it necessary to tell him.

4.27 train to Luxembourg and worked all the way, mainly on my draft statement relating to expenses, while Nick Stuart and Laura did a breakdown on the dreaded avion taxi figures. We arrived in filthy, gloomy weather and I went to see Colombo to discuss various bits of business for the week with him-a friendly conversation as always.

TUESDAY, 13 FEBRUARY. Luxembourg.

Delivered my not very exciting Programme speech to the Parliament at about 10.15. A tolerable debate during the morning, except for a notably ungracious speech from Fellermaier, the leader of the Socialist Group, who I am afraid likes me as little as I like him. Then I found myself rather unexpectedly called upon to reply to half the debate at about 12.10, and then went out to lunch at Hostert with the Tickells and Nick. I took a minor debate (about Eurobarometre-a public opinion poll commissioned by us in which a foolish and embarra.s.sing question had been asked) at 6.00, and then did a ten-minute TV interview with Robert Mackenzie. 13 WEDNESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY. Luxembourg.

The weather still filthy. A two-hour Commission meeting at 9.00, longer than usual during a Parliament week, but not altogether unsatisfactory. I told them about the avion taxi figures, which reduced them to a state of stunned dismay-most of them at any rate. I got the GSP decision satisfactorily reversed, had a rather gloomy interview with Tugendhat, who is even more depressed than I about the Haferkamp affair, and spoke to Robin Day on the telephone for a World at One recorded tribute to poor Reggie Maudling, whose death had been announced that morning. Then, at 12.30,1 recorded a Southern Television interview with Stephen Milligan, the author of all the Haferkamp trouble, whom I treated fairly frostily.

In the afternoon I appeared before the Budget Control Sub-Committee, which I had had to promise Aigner I would do. I had arranged with Aigner that I would merely make a brief statement, telling them what I was going to say in the Parliament the following afternoon, and then withdraw, and it would all be done without publicity. He interpreted this sufficiently freely that the room was crammed with television cameras and the Committee seemed to have swollen to about four times its normal size, and I had, with the support of a number of other members, to get the television cameras removed before I would start. However, I eventually made a brief statement and they did at least observe the no-questions agreement, mainly due to British Tory and Labour members (Bess-borough and Bruce) being particularly helpful.

At 5 o'clock I saw the Australian Amba.s.sador who had come partly to complain about us and partly to complain about his Government, as is usually the case with that admirable man. Then I saw Donald Bruce and thanked him for his help in the afternoon. He thinks that he has got no chance of being directly elected and would like a job in my cabinet, which is perhaps why he was so helpful, but one should not be too cynical.

I dined with Laura at the St Michel and had the most cheerful meal of this long Luxembourg visit. I decided that I really must bounce up and not allow this dreadful cloud of Haferkamp affair gloom to suffuse me; whether I will stick to this excellent resolution remains to be seen.

THURSDAY, 15 FEBRUARY. Luxembourg and Brussels.

Listened to and wound up with a twenty-five-minute speech the second half of the debate on my Programme speech. Lunched with Laura and Nick, going back to the Parliament rather early to be ready for questions at 3.00. The only one I took was that relating to the Haferkamp affair, on which I made a statement of about seven minutes. This was quite well received with only Fellermaier producing a slightly snide question (which probably turned out to be rather helpful) asking what were the national motives of the Economist. I replied that I had no idea, but one thing I greatly deplored was the introduction of this nationalist note into the dispute, and spoke rather emotionally about my attachment to Anglo-German friendship, and that we must really grow up as a Community. It was unimaginable that if an attack on a New York politician appeared in a Chicago paper it would be regarded as an Illinois plot against the East Coast. It was not very carefully considered, but probably worth saying and went rather well.

Back to Brussels by car, still in horrible weather.

FRIDAY, 16 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

A morning Commission meeting on the budget. The issue was whether we did a budget which was purely supplementary, to which I half inclined the night before, or one which was lightly rectifying as well as supplementary. The two French, Ortoli and Cheysson, both wanted a heavily rectifying budget, and the two Italians a purely supplementary one. Eventually there was no alternative but to compromise on a lightly rectifying one, which indeed Tugendhat had put forward and expounded rather well, and was eventually agreed with dissent from Cheysson from one side and Natali and Giolitti from the other, but not with formal dissent from Ortoli. Therefore a reasonably satisfactory outcome.

Jennifer and I had Ortoli to lunch, rue de Praetere. The purpose of the lunch was to discuss with him things which might happen while I was away14 and, in particular, the paper-not wholly satisfactory-which he had prepared on convergence for the European Council. In view of my impending absence, it was not possible to do more than suggest that he made about four moderately significant changes of presentation, to which he agreed.

About 4 o'clock I went across to the Commission TV studios, thinking I was due to do a ten-minute interview with Michael Charlton. It turned out to be a major programme, lasting forty minutes, with not only Charlton, but Malcolm Rutherford and Maclntyre, the BBC man in Brussels, as well. I began in dismay, totally unprepared for a long interview. However, most mysteriously, although I was somewhat worried when it was over, subsequent responses suggested it was one of the better things I had done on television for a long time.

I saw Davignon at his request for three-quarters of an hour to talk about MTNs, on which he was fairly depressing. Dined at home with the Beaumarchais', who had arrived to stay.

SAt.u.r.dAY, 17 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

Jennifer having put her back out the previous day, there was extreme uncertainty as to whether or not she would be able to come to China. She stayed in bed. I took the Beaumarchais' to Crupet (once again; it is the only near Ardennes restaurant open in February). We had a short walk (still on ice) before lunch. It was not a bad day. Returned via Namur. Snow started to fall quite heavily in the evening and I drove the Beaumarchais' with difficulty to the Nanteuils' christening party. I learnt there that war had broken out between China and Vietnam, which was a highly inconvenient time and raised a question of whether we should still go to Peking on Tuesday.

MONDAY, 19 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

At noon I had a meeting with the Chinese Charge d'affaires, the Amba.s.sador being in Peking waiting for us (we had made a definite decision during the morning that we should go to China rather than postpone the visit; Jennifer fortunately somewhat better, having seen doctors) and did some visit planning with him, including the abandonment of the boat trip through the Yangtse gorges on the ground that three days was too long.

Bill Rodgers came for a drink at 7.30. He was on very ebullient form, although he said he was depressed after the action, but he clearly thought that he had had, as Peter Jenkins put it, 'a good war' during the strike period15 and was exhilarated by having made a public breakthrough and the feeling that he had performed effectively, which he certainly had. He is a great fighting colonel.

TUESDAY, 20 FEBRUARY. Brussels, Paris and Karachi.

A snow run in the Bois, then some fairly frenzied packing before leaving rue de Praetere at 9.50 to address the joint twentieth anniversary of COPA, the European farmers' union, and two other agricultural organizations down near the Gare du Nord. The President of COPA spoke too long, so that I was only just able to get in my short speech (a rather good, tough speech written by Graham Avery) before driving to the Gare du Midi for the 11.43 to Paris, accompanied by Jennifer, Crispin, Celia Beale, Enzo Perlot and Etienne Reuter (Emile Noel, Roy Denman and Endymion Wilkinson, Tokyo-based Sino-expert and good Chinese speaker, joined at subsequent points), lunching on the way. Then to Charles de Gaulle and the 4.10 plane. I did some hard work on briefs during the early evening. We arrived in Karachi after seven and a quarter hours flying and spent an hour and a half on the ground there, standing out for a large part of the time on the platform at the top of the steps. It was a cool, agreeable night, starlight, waning moon and the temperature about 60F.

WEDNESDAY, 21 FEBRUARY. Karachi and Peking.

I slept for quite a long time-well on into the light-before putting on fresh clothes and breakfasting only a short time before a 2.30 p.m. arrival in Peking on a greyish day, no snow, temperature about 32. We had done the whole flight quickly, in thirteen and a half hours flying time from Paris.

We were met on the tarmac by the Minister of Foreign Trade and various other Chinese dignitaries, including the Amba.s.sador in Brussels; Sung, the old Amba.s.sador in London, now more or less permanent head of the Foreign Office; and the amba.s.sadors of the Nine or rather the seven there represented (no Luxembourgeois, no Irish), less the Italian who was away and represented by his Counsellor. Drove, accompanied by the Minister of Foreign Trade, to the guest house in the western part of the city (the grandest one, they claimed), where we arrived at 3.15. Then we had some programme discussion, unpacked, and went over a speech for the banquet that evening.

Arnaud, the French Amba.s.sador, came by a slight confusion just as we were leaving. We had asked him, were told he could not come, and then had a summons to be at the Great Hall of the People earlier in order to have a talk to Gu Mu, the Vice-Premier who was host, before the banquet at 7 o'clock. So there was a slight embarra.s.sment, but not greatly so, for Arnaud is an agreeable man. I drove with him in the car for the quarter of an hour to the Great Hall, and consulted him as to what I should say on Vietnam in my speech. I talked rather formally with Gu Mu for fifteen minutes or so and we then proceeded into the banquet soon after 7 o'clock. It lasted, including the speeches, for the statutory two and a quarter hours. The food was not as good as I remembered Chinese food on our last visit (1973), partly because apparently it never is very good in the Great Hall of the People and partly because it belonged to no particular cuisine but was an all-China melange.

Gu Mu made a perfectly tolerable speech, rather short. My speech was longer; maybe given the fact it had to be translated after each paragraph it was a bit too long (ten minutes plus ten minutes' translation). On Vietnam I stuck firmly to the declaration of the Foreign Ministers of the Nine, issued on the Monday morning.

Bed at 10.30 and then, after about four and a half hours I woke up sleepless. I noticed that there had been a considerable fall of snow, the first apparently in Peking since well before Christmas, and then heard and saw two tremendous explosions accompanied by great orange flashes in the sky, the first a loud bang like a V2 going off about two miles away, the second a still louder bang which made the furniture shake in the room, like a V2 going off half a mile away. I was not frightened for some reason or other, thought it unlikely that a Soviet air attack had begun, but wondered in a rather detached way what on earth was happening. After that I worked until 5.00, writing out some notes for an opening statement at my meeting with Gu Mu the following morning and generally clarifying my thoughts on a number of points. Then back to bed and slept heavily until 8.00.

THURSDAY, 22 FEBRUARY. Peking., I had great difficulty in gearing myself up from a state of extreme somnolence for the meeting with Gu Mu at 9.00. Fortunately we were told that this had been put back because of the snow, and, rather surprisingly, his difficulty getting to the Great Hall (where does he live?), but then we were summoned only about twenty minutes late. There were hundreds of people hurriedly clearing up the streets of the s...o...b..und city.

The meeting lasted three hours and was held in a conference room round a table. After a welcome, Gu Mu invited me to open as he had indicated the previous evening that he would do. I then made a statement about the world situation, sounding a fairly sombre note, and ranging over matters from Iran, Africa, the Middle East, American leadership or lack of leadership, progress within the Community, normalization of Chinese relations with America, Chinese/j.a.panese friendship treaty, to Vietnam. Vietnam I coupled with the decline in American self-confidence, and said that that unhappy country had already contributed enough to world instability in the last ten years and therefore the Chinese embroilment causes us considerable concern and I hope very much that when you say it is limited in s.p.a.ce and time that that will indeed be the case and the time will be very short. That will make things much easier for the 'friends of China', of whom I count myself one.

I then went on to a description of developments within the Community, EMS, direct elections, enlargement, etc., and then, in the third part of my statement, I came to Chinese/Community trade relations, saying that their modernization programme could certainly be amongst, and perhaps the major development for the remaining years of this century16 and was something in which we wished to partic.i.p.ate fully and which might indeed play a significant part as an impulse to growth for which the industrialized world had been looking. This all took, with translation, a good hour.

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, a.s.suring 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 j.a.pan, although j.a.pan would no doubt be their main trading partner. Gu Mu then rather surprisingly said that our share should be as large as that of j.a.pan or the United States-in other words, equal thirds. I said this was fine vis-a-vis j.a.pan, but vis-a-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/j.a.panese relations, which produced only too long an expose 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 Noel into the conversation, rather as though Emile were a parachute colonel attired in kepi and battle-dress, 'France had acted decisively in Zaire, but n.o.body 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 t.i.t-for-tat att.i.tude 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 cla.s.sical, 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 cla.s.sical 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 exposes. 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. n.o.body 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 Amba.s.sador 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 amba.s.sadors in Peking are notoriously leaky as they have n.o.body 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 c.o.c.ktail 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.

SAt.u.r.dAY, 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 Inst.i.tute 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 expose, but also listened with apparent interest to my expose, 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 a.s.sured 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 coc.o.o.ned 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 const.i.tuency 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 Emba.s.sy and completed the briefing of the amba.s.sadors. 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 s...o...b..und 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 a.s.sembling 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan, 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 gla.s.s factory at Bei-Bei on the west bank of the Chialing River. The drive out was through a lot of industrial suburbs, pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 Bergeres 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.

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 Amba.s.sador in Brussels, and various other people who had accompanied us on the tour round, at the Imperial Restaurant.