PASSPORT TO PEKING
A Very British Mission to Mao's China
By Patrick Wright
Oxford Univ. 591 pp. $34.95
In September 1954, Patrick Wright reports, "several planeloads of Britons gathered in from various sometimes very loosely defined positions on the left of the political spectrum" flew from England to China, "where they would take part, as invited guests of the Chinese government, in the celebrations marking the fifth anniversary of Mao Tse-tung's Proclamation of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949." For all the Chinese leadership's rhetoric about friendship and peace, the invitations clearly were issued with propaganda in mind, and in the short run they paid offin that regard. In the long run, though, the results were decidedly mixed, due not so much to changes in the Britons' politics as to their (and the world's) revulsion "as Mao and his fellow Communists proceeded to convert China into a nuclear-armed, fully industrialized, and totalitarian superpower."
What most of us in the West are likely to remember about China in the years between Mao's seizure of power in 1949 and his death in 1976 is the extraordinarily cruel and destructive turn that his revolution took, beginning in 1958 with the Five Year Plan known as the Great Leap Forward, which killed untold millions of Chinese in the name of agricultural collectivization, and culminating in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, with the rise of the Red Guards and the chaos they wrought throughout the country. What we are likely to forget is that, for the first five years of the regime, hopes, within and without China, were high. Wright quotes Alan Winnington, "the British Communist journalist who stayed in Peking after [Prime Minister] Anthony Eden had refused to renew his passport," as calling this period "the golden years" and writing:
"The Communists rode on a wave of success: currency stabilized; famine ended, railways restored; industry booming; coal, steel and power leap-frogging. We found workers everywhere at lathes while building workers were finishing the factories. Everyone was better off -- very little better off but in China that could make the difference between life and death."
The delegations from Britain, in other words, traveled to a China almost unrecognizable to those of us who now know of it as an economic giant that somehow managed to emerge from the wasteland that was Mao's legacy. Beyond that, as Wright says, "the book is far more about post-war Britain and its inherited perspectives than it is about the reality of China, either now or then. It is partly for this reason that I have . . . retained the old system of romanized spellings as opposed to the more recently introduced pinyin, and partly in order to acknowledge that, whatever lens it may be viewed through, the walled city that was 'Peking' in 1954 really is not the same city as the 'Beijing' of the early twenty-first century."
Now the city is "Beijing" to just about everyone; one of the few contexts in which "Peking" still is used is in "Peking duck," which, as it happens, the British visitors of 1954 consumed in copious amounts. At that time Peking was still very much "an ancient city wrapped in high crenellated walls some 40 kilometres long and accessed through sixteen multi-storeyed gate towers. . . . [and] still recognizable as the city of Kublai Khan." It had "palaces, peony beds, lotus-filled lakes, pagodas, dragon walls, carved lions embodying the antithetical yet also complimentary principles of yin and yang." It was a jumble "of narrow walled alleys ('hutongs') with gates leading to residential compounds containing internal courtyards joined by 'moon gates' and south-facing single-storey houses with pitched roofs, paper-covered windows, and ancient wooded lattices."
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