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uk/books/2010/oct/30/passport-peking-patrick-wright-china

China: Behind the bamboo curtain

Patrick Wright, author of Passport to Peking, describes a visit to the 'New China' made
by a group of British notables in 1954 [TRADUCC. ABAJO]

Patrick Wright
The Guardian, Saturday 30 October 2010

Article history

This article appeared on p18 of the Guardian review section of the Guardian on Saturday 30
October 2010. It was published on guardian.co.uk at 00.07 BST on Saturday 30 October 2010.

The cultural delegation with (from left)

Stanley Spencer, Leonard Hawkes, Rex Warner, Hugh Casson and AJ Ayer. Photograph: John
Chinnery

On 1 October 1954, Sir Hugh Casson, the urbane professor of interior design who had
been director of architecture at the Festival of Britain, found himself standing by the
Tiananmen Gate in the ancient and still walled city of Peking. In China to present a
statement of friendship signed by nearly 700 British scientists and artists, he was
watching a parade that the reporter James Cameron reckoned to be "the greatest show
on earth". First came the troops and the "military ironwork", grinding past for a full
hour. This was followed by a much longer civil parade in which the people marched by
in barely imaginable numbers, beaming with joy at their elevated leaders who gazed
back with the slightly "subdued" expression of still unaccustomed new emperors.
Float after float rolled by, showing model factories and locomotives. Children released
balloons and elastic-powered model aeroplanes; the masses united to cry "Down with
American imperialism"; and Picasso's peace dove was everywhere. Having recently
migrated from earlier European congresses, this simplified bird appeared to have
usurped the traditional dragons of Peking.

The spectacle with which China celebrated the fifth anniversary of the communist
liberation was brilliantly organised, as Casson felt obliged to admit. He was less
impressed by the admiring expressions worn by many of the other international guests:
"Gold-rimmed spectacles misted with emotion, cheeks creased with years of well-meant
service in this cause or in that, shirts defiantly open at the neck, badges in lapels, and
there in the middle could it have been? an MCC tie."

That particular specimen was Ivor Montagu, a cricket-loving friend and translator of the
great Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein. He was also a table tennis champion who
preferred "New China's" disciplined "physical jerks" to the indolence of a capitalist
world in which "rich men" disdained even walking as "something you paid those less
fortunate to do on your behalf". And he was by no means alone in his enthusiasm for
"New China".

Sickened by the rapture of the communist regime's ardent western friends, Casson
quickly retreated to the shaded "rest room" beneath the viewing stand. Here he lingered
among yellow-robed Tibetan lamas, sipping tea and exchanging impressions with other
doubtful Britons: the classically minded and no longer Marxist novelist and poet Rex
Warner, and AJ Ayer, the high-living logical positivist who would come home to tell the
BBC that China's parade had reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies. They may also
have caught a fleeting glimpse of the Marxist crystallographer JD Bernal, who had no
MCC tie but was sporting his Stalin prize medal, collected in Moscow on the way to
China. Bernal was full of admiration for New China and its celebrations, but as hour
followed hour he too descended from the stand to spend a moment "sipping orange juice
through a straw" at the same table as the dalai lama.

Enraptured or appalled, none of these British witnesses appears to have regretted the
absence of Stanley Spencer. The 63-year-old painter, so famously associated with the
little Berkshire village of Cookham, had managed to escape the entire show thanks, he
later explained, to "some Mongolians", whose timely arrival at the hotel that morning
had provided the cover under which he retreated upstairs to his room.

It was the discovery that Spencer had been to China that persuaded me to look further
into this forgotten episode. I soon realised that an extraordinary assortment of Britons
had made their way to China in 1954, including the former prime minister and leader of
the Labour Party, Clement Attlee. And all this nearly two decades before 1972, when
President Nixon made the stage-managed and even before John Adams got hold of it
distinctly operatic visit that has gone down in history as the moment when the west
entered rapprochement with the People's Republic of China. Were these motley British
visitors just credulous idiots, for whom "Red China" was another version of the
legendary Cathay? That is what the 24-year-old Douglas Hurd and the other diplomats
in the British embassy compound in Peking appear to have suspected of these
unwelcome freeloaders. Or was something more significant going on?
Nowadays, the rapidly increasing number of British travellers to China think nothing of
getting on a plane to fly directly there. Yet Spencer had good reason to feel "trembly" as
he and the five other members of his entirely unofficial cultural delegation approached
the runway at Heathrow on 14 September 1954. Though Britain had recognised China a
few months after the liberation, it had yet to establish proper diplomatic relations with
the communist-led government, and the embarking Britons couldn't pick up a visa until
they had reached Prague. That meant crossing the iron curtain dividing Europe. "Did
you go under or over it?" one joker would later ask, making light of a passage that was
actually more like falling over the edge of the known world. The travellers then had to
fly across east Europe, pausing at Minsk and Moscow before heading across Siberia and
then Mongolia all the time relying on their hosts to finance, accommodate and
entertain them, and also to provide the vibrating twin-prop planes in which they would
hop to the far side of the world, landing every three hours or so to refuel.

"There are bears in there," Spencer mused, glancing anxiously down into a nameless
Soviet forest at a moment when the engine sputtered "Fit! Fit! Fit!" There were troubles
at home too. The cold war was entrenched, its dangers exacerbated by the advance of
nuclear weaponry on both sides. Britain, meanwhile, was financially straitened, and
reliant on loans from America, which demanded adherence to Washington's hard-line
foreign policy including its trade embargoes against Russia and China. Under these
circumstances, it was by no means just a handful of disgruntled communists and export-
hungry businessmen who yearned to make Britain's political outlook more independent.
The loss of power gave a distinctly anti-American resonance to the patriotic lament of
Shakespeare's John of Gaunt that "This England" should ever be "leas'd out . . . Like
to a tenement, or pelting farm".

China remained hostile and isolated behind the recently lowered "bamboo curtain".
Nevertheless, by the beginning of 1954 a thaw had begun to seem possible. Stalin had
died in March 1953, and the Korean war had been brought to a ceasefire not long
afterwards. There were indications that Moscow and its Chinese ally might be interested
in making more than a slogan out of "peaceful coexistence" with the west. It was,
however, France's losing war in the area then known as "French Indo-China" that
persuaded many in western Europe to adopt a more optimistic view of "New China"
than President Eisenhower's bomb-wreathed "domino theory" of Asia's imminent fall to
communism.

On the morning of Saturday 24 April, the Chinese prime minister and foreign secretary,
Zhou Enlai, flew into Geneva from Moscow. He came at the head of a large Chinese
delegation to join France, Britain and Russia in a conference aimed at finding a
settlement to the Indo-China war. Previously, west Europeans had known the Chinese
leader only through anti-communist stereotypes, or the equally partisan hymns of praise
issued by witnesses such as Hewlett Johnson, the inordinately optimistic "Red Dean of
Canterbury".

But here he now was, anything but a Russian puppet or, for that matter, a primitive
"agrarian reformer" of the kind many in the west imagined the Chinese communists to
be. Diverse western Europeans were transfixed by the sight of this urbane and highly
competent man, smiling into the cameras as he berated America which had refused
even to take part in the conference and demonstrating his abilities as a regional leader
by negotiating ceasefires in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Later in the year, James
Cameron would describe Zhou as the man who, in the course of his short visit to
Geneva, had produced "the simultaneous double-effect" of "a nervous constriction in the
diplomatic hearts and a violent sexual impulse in the persons of almost every European
woman who clapped eyes on him".

The flights to Peking began shortly after Zhou's European triumph. From Geneva, as at
the Bandung conference the following year, Zhou invited the world to "come and see"
what was going on behind the bamboo curtain. And Britons were among those who
headed for the airport. The Labour leadership sent the opening delegation. Clement
Attlee was at its head, accompanied by various other members of the National
Executive Committee, including Aneurin Bevan and his former insurance minister Edith
Summerskill.

The cultural delegation, which comprised Casson, Warner, Ayer and Spencer, together
with the geologist Leonard Hawkes and the young sinologist John Chinnery, followed
later in the summer. Like the vague statement of friendship in its luggage, its
membership had been decided by people close to the Britain-China Friendship
Association, who were careful to come up with a group that could not easily be
dismissed as communist fellow travellers. A delegation of Labour councillors and shop
stewards was recruited at the last minute and guided, very reluctantly, by the communist
"artist-reporter" Paul Hogarth. He had travelled a lot behind the iron curtain and could
not now escape responsibility for chaperoning a very "third rate" Labour delegation
whose members, as he told me, cared nothing for China new or old, and wanted only to
get drunk at somebody else's expense. A more senior delegation of Labour MPs,
including Barbara Castle, William Griffiths and various other "Bevanites" who had
come into the Commons in the 1945 landslide, delayed its departure until early October
so that its members could attend the Labour party conference, where they had joined
Bevan in objecting, unsuccessfully, to Attlee's support of cold war policies.

There were indeed some pilgrims among the travellers, who saw what they and China's
presenters wanted them to see docilely imbibing tea and statistics, smiling back at
children in model nurseries, and sensing only a bright cooperative future in fields
fertilised with the blood of murdered landlords. But the Attlee delegation was not like
that. Its members had fought their own battles against communism in Britain, and they
had been well briefed before leaving. They had also been given a detailed anticipation
of the "show" they should expect from a collection of Chinese teachers, editors and
intellectuals who had moved to Hong Kong. They liked the new marriage laws, the
apparent abolition of prostitution, and also the new public health campaigns. As in
Moscow, they were, perhaps, a little discomforted as they compared their own
achievements while in government in Britain with China's prodigious construction of
factories, mines, housing, schools and hospitals. They stood up to Mao over tea,
deplored the regime's failure to do anything about the booming birth-rate and also
criticised the communist-led government for imposing an absurdly distorted idea of the
west on their people. If China really believed that the masses in the west sympathised
with communism, and were only held down by an evil ruling class, then they might
blunder into another war.

Even those with strong communist loyalties tried to reduce China's exclusive reliance
on the USSR. Thus, while JD Bernal was known for his mistaken support for the
"proletarian science" of the bogus geneticist Trofim Lysenko, he certainly did not spend
his many lectures trying to convince New China's scientists to rely on such
Soviet models, arguing throughout for a renewed exchange between Chinese scientists
and their colleagues in the west.

It was a similar situation with the artists Paul Hogarth and Denis Mathews. They were
both happy to celebrate the liberation and the ongoing reconstruction of China. And yet
they were also united in their opposition to the idea that Soviet socialist realism offered
an adequate model for the future development of Chinese art. They argued this point
forcefully with the artists who welcomed them and accompanied them around the
country. Both insisted that it would be far better to consider the new forms of figuration
pioneered by Picasso and Guttuso in western Europe.

Meanwhile, confusion as well as unexpected light followed from the visitors' habit of
applying British analogies to Chinese realities. Attlee himself praised New China's still
expanding network of cooperatives, seeing in them the principle of "voluntary action"
that William Beveridge had insisted was the necessary attendant to the welfare state.
The national secretary of the Women's Cooperative Guild, Mabel Ridealgh, likened
China's extensive cooperatives to those of her own organisation and joined Castle in
comparing China's food distribution system to the Co-op in Britain.

Earlier post-liberation visitors had already set about Englishing the new Chinese scene.
"It's the same in Marylebone High Street," the veteran actor Miles Malleson had
remarked in 1953: he was thinking of New China's appetite for dramas with a
contemporary message. Basil Davidson had reserved a different English comparison for
a communist group leader in the southern city of Canton. Aware of what the regime's
critics said about such watchful cadres, he insisted that she was "as much a spy on her
50 families as the chairman of my parish council, in rural Essex, is a spy on me".

Hogarth was merely continuing in this line when he declared arriving in Shanghai to be
like "pulling into Manchester from Sheffield", while Hangchow (Hangzhou) was like "a
South Coast English seaside resort whose better days lay at the beginning of the
century". He found a more original English line on China's revolutionary art. Visiting
the Lu Xun museum in Shanghai, he enjoyed the discovery that those stark woodcuts,
designed to galvanise illiterate peasants into action against both the Japanese and
Chiang Kai-shek's reactionary nationalists, were descended from leafy English scenes
portrayed by such far from revolutionary artists as Gwen Raverat, Robert Gibbings and
Edward Bawden.

There was a characteristically English way of looking at China's notoriously bloody

"agrarian reform" too. In 1949, Mao had famously proclaimed that the Chinese people
had at last "stood up", and Hogarth was happy to confirm that claim. His drawing of a
"Shansi peasant" shows a man standing very upright indeed: clasping the wooden
hayfork that rises next to his head, he stares back with a resolute expression that is
neither cringing nor deferential.

Made in the field, as was this determined artist-reporter's way, Hogarth's drawing
evokes an English analogy already employed by Joseph Needham, Davidson and other
visitors the English Diggers and Levellers of the 17th century, who had torn down
fences and set to work digging up the commons land stolen from them under the new
Enclosure Acts.
It was at once an evasive strategy and a concerted attempt to assert an English tradition
uncompromised by a mutually hated British imperialism. Yet it was Spencer who raised
the art of being English in New China to its strangest heights. Twenty years earlier, he
had recorded the desire to write the story of his life as if it were a wandering "journey to
China", and he had no sooner landed at the airfield outside Peking than he started
peering around in startled recognition: "As I drove along the roads from the airports to
the towns it was almost comic to see these dreams of mine coming true on either side of
the road." Other delegates cringed as he harassed the guides at various historical sites
with peculiar offscript questions, and tormented helpless waiters with requests for fish
and chips. As for New China's artists, Spencer had no prescriptions to offer about
socialist realism. Instead he informed his audience at the Central Academy of Fine Arts
that he was "possibly the most marvellous visitor to China they had ever had". He
ventured that his visit was "something on a par with the coming of Buddha", later
explaining that he had felt obliged to emphasise this fact "because in England if people
don't know who I am I am at once called upon to carry heavy suitcases".

Britain's horrified charg d'affaires in Peking, Humphrey Trevelyan, avoided that

particular occasion but could not escape the "fatuous performance" in which Spencer,
Ayer, Warner, Casson and Hawkes, the leader of the cultural delegation, presented their
statement of friendship to the minister of culture, Kuo Mo-jo, a man whose purpose was
so obviously to "exploit the word 'peace' for political ends". Trevelyan was particularly
dismayed to hear Spencer "guilelessly expatiating" about "the delights of Formosa". For
Trevelyan, as for Kuo Mo-jo and his colleagues, Formosa was the American-buoyed
nationalist island that the communist slogans fiercely insisted was really China's
Taiwan. And now here was Spencer blundering on without ever really making it clear
that the "Formosa" in his mind was actually a little island in the Thames at Cookham,
with a creek, a picturesque old house, and a field in which the local Boy Scouts held
their musters.

Judging from the notes he wrote after returning home, Spencer made very short work of
the Great Wall of China too. Indeed, he reduced it to the garden wall along which he had
liked to walk as a child in Cookham. He had, as he explained, climbed up by the coal
cellar and triumphed over many challenges as he made his way along its length: not the
advancing Manchu army, but the leaning lid of the dustbin, the ivy that stretched over
some sections, and the protruding branches of cherry, yew and fir that also had to be
negotiated over that wall's rather less than 4,000 mile length. Spencer who told Zhou
that "I feel at home in China because I feel that Cookham is somewhere near, only just
around the corner" was uniquely idiosyncratic, but he was by no means the only
delegate who seems to have journeyed to the far side of the world without ever really
leaving England behind.

As for the future of this attempted rapprochement between Britain and "New China",
the optimistic "spirit of Geneva" evaporated soon enough after the last delegates came
home, and the blocs quickly refroze. Yet that moment of hopefulness was not entirely
without consequences. Trade between Britain and China was renewed over the years to
come, diplomatic relations were established, and cultural exchanges did develop. The
Bevanite perspective within the Labour party cannot be said to have thrived, but the
insistence on maintaining an independent British stance towards Washington was alive
in the 60s, when Harold Wilson refused to commit British forces to America's war in
Vietnam. Though insufficient to restrain Tony Blair from joining Bush's invasion of
Iraq, it did continue to resound in the heartfelt declamations that the elderly Barbara
Castle used to launch against various New Labour policies during her last years in the
House of Lords. She informed me in no uncertain terms that the true delinquents of
1954 were those in power who refused to rise to the opportunities of the moment, and
certainly not those like herself who went to China with the aim of lifting the bamboo
curtain.

Of the British artists who went to China in 1954, neither Spencer nor Hogarth would
ever return. Mathews, however, would try to maintain the dialogue even as China went
through the suppression of the Hundred Flowers campaign, the collectivisation of the
briefly "cooperative" economy, and the monstrously costly "Great Leap Forward". He
used his position as secretary of the Contemporary Art Society at the Tate Gallery to
promote an exchange of exhibitions. Working directly with Chinese government
agencies, he began by organising a survey show of British Graphic Art, which was taken
to China by his fellow organiser and artist Richard Carline in 1955. He himself returned
in 1960, accompanying an exhibition of recent paintings entitled Sixty Years of British
Painting in Oils.

He found China to be a very different place. Discussion was discouraged, the circulation
of the show was curtailed, and he was prevented from renewing his acquaintance with
some of the Chinese artists he had got to know in 1954. Mathews made no progress in
his attempt to use the exhibition to create a comparative discussion about aesthetics
finding himself assailed with dogmatic slogans decreeing that all work produced in
China since the liberation of 1949 must be superior to anything produced before, and
that no painting of a shrimp, even by the venerated master Qi Baishi, could beat a
portrait of Chairman Mao.

+++++++++++++++

El 1 de octubre de 1954, Sir Hugh Casson, el profesor de diseo urbano de interiores que haba sido director de
la arquitectura en el Festival de Gran Bretaa, se encontr de pie junto a la Puerta de Tiananmen en la antigua
ciudad amurallada y an de Pekn. En China, para presentar una declaracin de amistad firmado por casi 700
cientficos britnicos y artistas, que estaba viendo un desfile que el reportero James Cameron contada a ser "el
mayor espectculo del mundo". Primero fueron las tropas y el "hierro militar", rozando por una hora completa.
Esto fue seguido por un desfile mucho ms civil en la que la gente march por nmeros en apenas imaginables,
radiante de alegra por sus lderes elevados que miraba hacia atrs con un poco de la "moderada" la expresin
de los emperadores nuevo an no acostumbrados.
Flotador despus de flotar rodando, mostrando fbricas modelo y locomotoras. Los nios soltaron globos y
aviones modelo elstico potencia, las masas se unieron para gritar "Abajo el imperialismo americano", y la paz
la paloma de Picasso estaba en todas partes. Habiendo emigrado recientemente de anteriores congresos
europeos, esta ave simplificada pareca haber usurpado los dragones tradicionales de Pekn.
El espectculo con el que China celebra el quinto aniversario de la liberacin comunista, se organiz de manera
brillante, como Casson se vio obligado a admitir. Fue menos impresionado por las expresiones usadas por
admirar muchos de los invitados internacionales: "gafas con montura de oro empaados por la emocin, las
mejillas arrugadas con aos de servicios bien intencionados en esta causa o que, camisas desafiante abierta en
el cuello, insignias en las solapas, y no en el medio - podra haber sido -? un empate MCC ".
Este modelo en particular era Ivor Montagu, un amigo de cricket amante y traductora del gran cine sovitico
Sergei Eisenstein-fabricante. Tambin fue campen de tenis de mesa que prefiri disciplinada "Nueva China",
"tirones fsicos" a la indolencia de un mundo capitalista en el que "los ricos" desdeado hasta caminar como
"algo que pag a los menos afortunados que hacer en su nombre". Y no era solo en su entusiasmo por la
"Nueva China".
Asqueado por el rapto de ardiente amigos occidentales del rgimen comunista, Casson se retir rpidamente a
la "sala de descanso" sombreada debajo de la tribuna. All permaneci entre los lamas tibetanos vestidos de
amarillo, bebiendo t y el intercambio de impresiones con otros britnicos dudosa: la clsica mentalidad y
novelista ya no marxista y poeta Rex Warner, y de AJ Ayer, el positivista lgico alto nivel de vida que llegaba a
casa a decirle a la BBC que el desfile de China le haba recordado las reuniones de Nuremberg. Tambin
pueden tener una visin fugaz de la marxista cristalgrafo JD Bernal, que no tena corbata MCC, pero luca su
medalla de Premio Stalin, reunidos en Mosc en el camino a China. Bernal estaba lleno de admiracin por la
Nueva China y sus celebraciones, sino como hora seguida hora, tambin descendi desde el stand de pasar un
momento de "bebiendo jugo de naranja con una pajita" en la misma mesa que el Dalai Lama.
Embelesado o consternado, ninguno de estos testigos britnico parece haber lament la ausencia de Stanley
Spencer. El pintor de 63 aos de edad, por lo famoso asociadas a la pequea aldea de Cookham Berkshire,
haba logrado escapar de todo el espectculo - gracias, lo explic ms tarde, a "algunos mongoles", cuyo tiempo
de llegada al hotel por la maana haba proporcionado a la cubierta bajo la cual se retir a su cuarto piso de
arriba.
Fue el descubrimiento de que Spencer haba estado en China que me convenci para profundizar en este
episodio olvidado. Pronto me di cuenta de que una variedad extraordinaria de los britnicos haban hecho su
camino a China en 1954, incluido el ex primer ministro y lder del Partido Laborista, Clement Attlee. Y todo esto
casi dos dcadas antes de 1972, cuando el presidente Nixon hizo la etapa gestionados y - an antes de que
John Adams se apoder de ella - claramente visita de pera que ha pasado a la historia como el momento en el
oeste entr acercamiento con la Repblica Popular de China. Eran estos visitantes britnicos abigarrada slo
idiotas crdulos, para quien "China Roja" fue otra versin de la legendaria Catay? Eso es lo que los 24 aos de
edad, Douglas Hurd y otros diplomticos en el complejo de la embajada britnica en Pekn parecen haber
sospechado de estos parsitos no deseados. O fue algo ms significativo pasando?
Hoy en da, el nmero cada vez mayor de viajeros britnicos a China que nada de subirse a un avin para volar
directamente all. Sin embargo, Spencer tena buenas razones para sentirse "tembloroso", como l y los otros
cinco miembros de su delegacin cultural totalmente no oficial se acerc a la pista en Heathrow el 14 de
septiembre de 1954. Aunque Gran Bretaa haba reconocido a China unos meses despus de la liberacin, que
an tena que establecer unas relaciones diplomticas con el gobierno comunista, y los britnicos no podan
embarcarse recoger una visa hasta que haban llegado a Praga. Eso significaba cruzar el teln de acero que
divide Europa. "Fuiste debajo o encima de l?" un comodn despus pedira, por lo que la luz de un pasaje que
era en realidad ms como caer sobre el borde del mundo conocido. Los viajeros tuvo que volar a travs de
Europa del Este, haciendo una pausa en Minsk y Mosc, antes de dirigirse a travs de Siberia y Mongolia - todo
el tiempo confiando en sus ejrcitos a la financiacin, alojar y entretener a ellos, y tambin para proporcionar la
vibracin de doble hlice de avin en el que que saltaba al otro lado del mundo, aterrizando cada tres horas
para repostar.
"No se tiene en all", reflexion Spencer, mirando con ansiedad hacia abajo en un bosque sin nombre Sovitica
en un momento cuando el motor bombardeada "En forma! Fit! Fit!" Haba problemas en casa tambin. La guerra
fra fue arraigado, sus peligros agravado por el avance de las armas nucleares en ambos lados. Gran Bretaa,
por su parte, fue estrechez financiera, y que dependen de los prstamos de Estados Unidos, que exiga la
adhesin a duro de Washington-la lnea de poltica exterior como sus embargos comerciales contra Rusia y
China. En estas circunstancias, no era slo un puado de comunistas descontentos y hambrientos hombres de
negocios de exportacin-que anhelaba para hacer punto de vista poltico de Gran Bretaa ms independiente.
La prdida del poder le dio una resonancia claramente anti-estadounidense en el lamento patritico de Juan de
Gante de Shakespeare - "... Leas'd a cabo igual que a una vivienda, o desuello granja" que "esta Inglaterra"
nunca debe ser.
China sigui siendo hostil y aislada detrs de la reciente bajada "cortina de bamb". Sin embargo, a principios
de 1954 un deshielo haba empezado a parecer posible. Stalin haba muerto en marzo de 1953, y la guerra de
Corea haba sido llevado a un alto el fuego poco despus. Hay indicios de que Mosc y su aliado chino podra
estar interesado en hacer ms de una salida lema de "coexistencia pacfica" con Occidente. Fue, sin embargo,
guerra perdida de Francia en la zona conocida como "la Indochina francesa" que convenci a muchos en el
oeste de Europa a adoptar una visin ms optimista de la "Nueva China" que el presidente Eisenhower bombas
salomnicas "teora del domin" de Asia es inminente la cada del comunismo.
En la maana del sbado 24 de abril, el primer ministro chino y secretario de Relaciones Exteriores, Zhou Enlai,
vol a Ginebra desde Mosc. l vino a la cabeza de una delegacin china grande para unirse a Francia, Gran
Bretaa y Rusia en una conferencia destinada a encontrar una solucin a la guerra de Indochina. Anteriormente,
los europeos occidentales haban conocido el lder chino slo a travs de los estereotipos anti-comunistas, o los
himnos de alabanza igualmente partidistas emitidas por los testigos como Hewlett Johnson, el excesivamente
optimista "Roja decano de Canterbury".
Pero he aqu que ahora era, nada ms que un ttere de Rusia o, para el caso, una primitiva "reformador agrario"
de los muchos tipos en el oeste imaginado los comunistas chinos a ser. Diversos europeos occidentales fueron
paralizados por la visin de este hombre urbano y muy competentes, sonriendo a las cmaras ya que reprendi
Amrica - que se haba negado incluso a participar en la conferencia - y demostrar sus habilidades como lder
regional mediante la negociacin de alto el fuego en Laos, Camboya y Vietnam. Ms tarde, en el ao, James
Cameron se describen Zhou como el hombre que, en el curso de su breve visita a Ginebra, se haba producido
"la simultnea de doble efecto" de "una contraccin nerviosa en el corazn diplomticas y un impulso sexual
violenta en el personas de la mujer casi todos los europeos, que aplaudieron los ojos en l ".
Los vuelos a Pekn comenz poco despus del triunfo europeo de Zhou. Desde Ginebra, como en la conferencia
de Bandung, al ao siguiente, Zhou invit al mundo a "venir y ver" lo que estaba pasando detrs de la cortina de
bamb. Y los britnicos estaban entre los que se dirigi hacia el aeropuerto. La direccin del Trabajo remiti a la
delegacin de apertura. Clement Attlee fue a la cabeza, acompaado de varios otros miembros del Comit
Ejecutivo Nacional, incluyendo Aneurin Bevan y su ex ministro de seguros Edith Summerskill.
La delegacin cultural, que comprende Casson, Warner, Ayer y Spencer, junto con el gelogo Leonard Hawkes y
los jvenes sinlogo John Chinnery, seguido ms tarde en el verano. Al igual que la declaracin vaga de la
amistad en su equipaje, sus miembros haban sido decididas por las personas cercanas a la Asociacin de
Amistad China-Gran Bretaa, que tuvieron el cuidado de llegar a un grupo que no puede ser fcilmente
descartado como comunista compaeros de viaje. Una delegacin de concejales del Trabajo y los delegados
sindicales fue reclutado en el ltimo minuto y guiada, muy a regaadientes, por los comunistas "artista-
reportero" Paul Hogarth. Haba viajado mucho detrs de la cortina de hierro y no poda ahora eludir la
responsabilidad de ser acompaantes una muy "de tercera" delegacin del Partido Laborista, cuyos miembros,
segn me dijo, no le importaba nada de nuevo o viejo de China, y slo quera emborracharse a otra persona
gastos. Una delegacin del ms alto nivel de parlamentarios laboristas, entre ellos Barbara Castillo, Guillermo
Garcia y los dems "Bevanites" que haba entrado en la Wikipedia, en el derrumbe de 1945, retras su salida
hasta principios de octubre para que sus miembros pueden asistir a la conferencia del Partido Laborista, en el
que se han sumado a Bevan en oponerse, sin xito, para apoyar Attlee de las polticas de guerra fra.
En efecto, hubo algunos peregrinos entre los viajeros, que vieron lo que ellos y los presentadores de China
quera ver - dcilmente bebiendo t y las estadsticas, devolvindole la sonrisa a los nios en las guarderas
modelo, y la deteccin de slo un futuro de cooperacin brillantes en los campos fertilizados con la sangre de
los asesinados propietarios. Pero la delegacin Attlee no fue as. Sus miembros haban luchado sus propias
batallas contra el comunismo en Gran Bretaa, y que haba sido bien informado antes de salir. Tambin se les
haba dado una previsin detallada del "espectculo" que debe esperar de un conjunto de profesores de chino,
editores e intelectuales que se haban mudado a Hong Kong. Les gust la nueva legislacin el matrimonio, la
supresin aparente de la prostitucin, as como las nuevas campaas de salud pblica. Al igual que en Mosc,
que fueron, quizs, un poco incmodo ya que en comparacin de sus propios logros, mientras que en el
gobierno en Gran Bretaa con la construccin prodigiosa de China de las fbricas, minas, viviendas, escuelas y
hospitales. Se pusieron de pie a Mao sobre el t, lament el fracaso del rgimen para hacer cualquier cosa
sobre el nacimiento en pleno auge de cambio y tambin critic al gobierno comunista liderado por la imposicin
de una idea absurdamente distorsionado del oeste de su pueblo. Si China realmente cree que las masas en el
oeste simpatizaba con el comunismo, y se llevaron a cabo slo por una clase dominante mal, entonces podran
error a otra guerra.
Incluso aquellos con fuertes lealtades comunistas trataron de reducir la dependencia exclusiva de China a la
URSS. As, mientras que JD Bernal era conocido por su apoyo a confundirse con la "ciencia proletaria" de los
falsos genetista Trofim Lysenko, que ciertamente no pasar sus muchas conferencias tratando de convencer a
los cientficos de la Nueva China a confiar en tales modelos soviticos, argumentando a travs de una renovada
intercambio entre los cientficos chinos y sus colegas en el oeste.
Era una situacin similar con los artistas Paul Hogarth y Mathews Denis. Los dos estaban felices de celebrar la
liberacin y la reconstruccin permanente de China. Y sin embargo, se unieron tambin en su oposicin a la
idea de que el realismo socialista sovitico ofreci un modelo adecuado para el futuro desarrollo del arte chino.
Argumentaron este punto con fuerza con los artistas que les dieron la bienvenida y los acompa en todo el
pas. Ambos insistieron en que sera mucho mejor tener en cuenta las nuevas formas de figuracin iniciada por
Picasso y Guttuso en el oeste de Europa.
Mientras tanto, la confusin, as como la luz inesperada seguido de la costumbre de los visitantes de la
aplicacin de las analogas britnica a la realidad china. Attlee se elogi la red sigue creciendo Nueva China de
las cooperativas, viendo en ellos el principio de "accin voluntaria" que William Beveridge haba insistido fue el
encargado necesarias para el estado de bienestar. El secretario nacional de la Cooperativa de la Mujer del
gremio, Mabel Ridealgh, compar las cooperativas extensa de China a los de su propia organizacin y se uni a
Castillo en la comparacin del sistema de distribucin de alimentos de China a la Co-op en Gran Bretaa.
A principios de los visitantes despus de la liberacin ya se haba puesto sobre la escena china Englishing
nuevo. "Es lo mismo en Marylebone High Street", coment el veterano actor Miles Malleson haba en 1953:
estaba pensando en Nueva apetito de China por los dramas con un mensaje contemporneo. Basil Davidson
haba reservado una comparacin de diferentes Ingls para un lder de grupo comunista en la ciudad surea de
Cantn. Consciente de lo que los crticos del rgimen, dijo cuadros vigilante sobre tales, insisti en que ella era
"tanto una espiar a sus 50 familias, segn el presidente de mi consejo parroquial, en la zona rural de Essex, es
un espa en m".
Hogarth no era ms que continuar en esta lnea al declarar que llegan a Shanghai para ser como "entrar al
Manchester de Sheffield", mientras que Hangzhou (Hangzhou) era como "un centro turstico de la Costa Sur
marino Ingls mejor que da estaba en el comienzo del siglo XXI". l encontr una lnea de Ingls ms original
sobre el arte revolucionario de China. Visitar el museo de Lu Xun en Shanghai, le gustaba el descubrimiento de
que los grabados en madera dura, destinada a impulsar a los campesinos analfabetos en accin contra los
nacionalistas reaccionarios a los japoneses y Chiang Kai-shek, eran descendientes de hoja escenas Ingls
interpretado por ejemplo lejos de artistas revolucionarios como Raverat Gwen, Gibbings Robert y Edward
Bawden.
No era una manera caractersticamente Ingls de ver notablemente con sangre de China "reforma agraria"
tambin. En 1949, Mao haba dicho la famosa proclama que el pueblo chino tena por fin "se levant", y Hogarth
estaba feliz de confirmar que la demanda. Su dibujo de un "campesino Shans" muestra a un hombre muy recto
hecho: juntando la Hayfork de madera que se levanta junto a la cabeza, mira hacia atrs con una expresin
decidida que no es ni servil ni deferente.
Hecho en el campo, como se forma el artista determina-reportero, el dibujo de Hogarth evoca una analoga
Ingls ya empleado por Joseph Needham, Davidson y otros visitantes - el Ingls excavadores y niveladores del
siglo 17, que haban derribado las vallas y se puso a trabajar la excavacin de las tierras comunales que les
robaron en el nuevo recinto Hechos.
Era a la vez una estrategia evasiva y un esfuerzo concertado para hacer valer una tradicin Ingls sin
compromisos por un imperialismo mutuamente odiaba britnico. Sin embargo, fue Spencer, que elev el arte de
ser de Ingls en la nueva China a su extraa alturas. Veinte aos antes, haba grabado el deseo de escribir la
historia de su vida como si se tratara de un errante "viaje a China", y, no bien aterriz en la pista de aterrizaje
fuera de Pekn, que comenz mirando alrededor en reconocimiento sorprendi: "Como Fui a lo largo de los
caminos desde los aeropuertos a las ciudades era casi cmico ver a estos sueos mos haciendo realidad a
ambos lados de la carretera. " Otros delegados se encogi como objeto de las mismas guas en varios lugares
de inters histrico con preguntas offscript peculiar, y atormentado camareros indefensa de las solicitudes de
pescado y patatas fritas. En cuanto a nuevos artistas de China, Spencer no tena recetas para ofrecer un
realismo acerca socialista. En su lugar, inform a su audiencia en la Academia Central de Bellas Artes que fue
"posiblemente, el visitante ms maravillosa a China que haba tenido nunca". Se aventur que su visita era "algo
a la par con la llegada de Buda", ms tarde explic que se haba sentido obligado a insistir en este hecho
"porque en Inglaterra si la gente no sabe quin soy yo estoy en una llamada a llevar a maletas pesadas ".
encargado horrorizado de Gran Bretaa de negocios en Pekn, Humphrey Trevelyan, evitar esa ocasin
especial, pero no pudo escapar de la "performance fatua" en la que Spencer, Ayer, Warner, Casson y Hawkes, el
lder de la delegacin cultural, present su declaracin de amistad a el ministro de Cultura, Kuo Mo-jo, un
hombre cuyo propsito era tan obviamente a "explotar" paz "la palabra con fines polticos". Trevelyan estaba
consternado especialmente or Spencer "cndidamente expatiating" sobre "los placeres de Formosa". Para
Trevelyan, como por Kuo Mo-jo y sus colegas, Formosa fue la isla nacionalista de Amrica-impulsado que las
consignas comunistas insisti ferozmente era realmente de China Taiwn. Y ahora aqu estaba torpe de Spencer
sin realmente lo que es claro que el "Formosa" en su mente era en realidad una pequea isla en el Tmesis en
Cookham, con un arroyo, una vieja casa pintoresco, y un campo en el que el local de Boy Scouts celebraron su
reunin de urgencia.
A juzgar por las notas que escribi despus de regresar a casa, Spencer hizo un trabajo muy por debajo de la
Gran Muralla de China tambin. De hecho, l lo redujo a la tapia del jardn a lo largo de la cual le haba gustado
a caminar como un nio en Cookham. Haba, segn explic, se subi por la bodega de carbn y triunf sobre
muchos desafos a medida que se abri paso a lo largo de su longitud: no el avance del ejrcito manch, pero la
tapa inclinada de la basura, la hiedra que se extenda sobre algunos sectores, y las ramas que sobresalen de
tejo de cerezo, y el abeto, que tambin tuvo que ser negociado en la pared de poco menos de 4.000 millas de
longitud. Spencer - que Zhou dijo que "me siento en casa en China porque creo que est en algn lugar cerca
de Cookham, slo a la vuelta de la esquina" - fue nicamente idiosincrasia, pero l no era el nico delegado que
parece haber viajado en el extremo lado del mundo sin tener que irme detrs de Inglaterra.
En cuanto al futuro de este intento de acercamiento entre Gran Bretaa y la "Nueva China", el optimista "espritu
de Ginebra" se evapor pronto despus de los delegados ltima lleg a casa, y los bloques recongel
rpidamente. Sin embargo, ese momento de esperanza no era del todo sin consecuencias. El comercio entre
Gran Bretaa y China se ha renovado en los prximos aos, las relaciones diplomticas se establecieron, y los
intercambios culturales se desarrollaron. La perspectiva Bevanite en el Partido Laborista no se puede decir que
han prosperado, pero la insistencia en mantener una postura independiente britnica hacia Washington estaba
vivo en los aos 60, cuando Harold Wilson se neg a comprometer las fuerzas britnicas a la guerra de Estados
Unidos en Vietnam. Aunque insuficiente para frenar a Tony Blair de unirse a la invasin de Iraq por Bush, que se
mantuvo a resonar en las declamaciones de corazn que las personas mayores Castillo Barbara utilizado para
lanzar contra diversos Nuevas polticas del Trabajo durante sus ltimos aos en la Cmara de los Lores. Ella me
inform en trminos inequvocos que los delincuentes verdadera de 1954 fueron aquellos en el poder que se
negaron a subir a las oportunidades del momento, y ciertamente no los que como ella se fue a China con el
objetivo de levantar la cortina de bamb.
De los artistas britnicos que fueron a China en 1954, ni Spencer ni Hogarth volvera nunca. Mathews, sin
embargo, tratar de mantener el dilogo aun cuando China pas a travs de la supresin de la campaa de las
Cien Flores, la colectivizacin de la breve "cooperacin" econmica, y la monstruosamente costosa "Gran Salto
Adelante". l utiliz su posicin como secretario de la Sociedad de Arte Contemporneo en la Tate Gallery de
promover un intercambio de exposiciones. Trabajando directamente con las agencias de gobierno chino,
comenz por organizar un programa de estudio de ingls del arte grfico, que fue llevado a China por sus
compaeros de organizador y el artista Richard Carline en 1955. Se volvi en 1960, acompaando una
exposicin de pinturas recientes titulado Sesenta aos de pintura britnica en aceites.
Encontr a China a ser un lugar muy diferente. Los debates se desanime, la circulacin de la muestra se redujo,
y se le impidi renovar su amistad con algunos de los artistas chinos que haba conocido en 1954. Mathews
hecho ningn progreso en su intento de utilizar la exposicin para crear un anlisis comparativo acerca de la
esttica - verse asaltado por consignas dogmticas decretando que todos los trabajos producidos en China
desde la liberacin de 1949 debe ser superior a todo lo producido antes, y que ninguna pintura de un camarn,
incluso por el venerado maestro de Qi Baishi, pudo vencer a un retrato del Presidente Mao.