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SACU President Michael Wood OBE was interviewed for China Today by staff reporter ZHOU LIN.

“Unless you understand China, you won’t understand what are truly common values in human society on Earth, or what are just Western idiosyncrasies.” – Michael Wood quoted Simon Leys in his interview with China today.

Michael Wood is no stranger to Chinese TV audiences or readers. A famous British historian, broadcaster, and author, he has presented lots of well-known television documentary series from the late 1970s to the present day. His China-themed works – The Story of China, The Story of China’s Reform and Opening-up, and Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet – have all proved to be smash hits among British and Chinese audiences.

“China is simply the other pole of the human mind,” said Wood in an interview with China Today, quoting Simon Leys, a distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature. For a Westerner, it’s always a journey of discovery, he added, noting that China is “the essential other, without the knowledge of which the West would not be able to perceive the outline and the limits of its own self.” 

Hooked on China

Born in Manchester in 1948, Wood’s fascination with China and Chinese culture began in his schooldays with A. C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang. “[It was] one of those books that opened a window on a world one could never have dreamed existed,” he said. 

Later, as a graduate student at Oxford University, sharing a house with a sinologist was another eye-opening period when Wood encountered revelatory books like Arthur Waley’s The Book of Songs, and Chu Ci (also known as The Songs of the South), containing haunting masterpieces like Li Sao. “At that time, among the larger-than-life characters who came through our kitchen was David Hawkes, who as a student at Peking University had been at Tian’anmen Square on October 1, 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded, and who translated what he called ‘the novel of the millennium’ – The Dream of the Red Chamber,” said Wood. 

“Most of all I loved Autumn Wastes by Du Fu, even though at first I found it hard to understand even in English!” said Wood, adding that he loves the quatrains of Du Fu to this day. He said, “Arthur Graham’s translations are still terrific, and his comparisons of Chinese and Western poetry very intriguing.” 

In the early 1980s, Wood came to China for the first time, visiting Lanzhou in west China’s Gansu Province and Kaifeng in central China’s Henan Province. “China was coming out of a very tough period and people you met in the street often seemed traumatized,” said Wood, “but they were always affable, friendly, and welcoming.” He still remembered how many people wanted to practice their English after watching English classes on TV. “I came away feeling how much I liked being with the Chinese people, and that I wanted to go back.” 

As a historian, Wood seemed to be destined to witness history. The changes in China since the 1980s were absolutely incredible, such as the greatest poverty reduction in human history. Wood said that even the U.S. scholars James Stapleton Roy and Ezra Vogel, whom he interviewed in 2018, both saw China’s reform and opening-up as the greatest event in modern world history. 

“China is a vast country with huge regional variations in language, dialect, landscape, food, music, and culture, and with over 3,000 years of records of every kind you can dive endlessly into its history – it is inexhaustibly interesting,” said Wood, confessing that once hooked, it’s impossible not to want to know more. 

A Journey of Discovery

In 2016, BBC’s landmark documentary – The Story of China, written and presented by Wood, was broadcast worldwide and received widespread attention and praise. It was then followed by two other works – The Story of China’s Reform and Opening-up in 2018, and Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet in 2020. 

Wood and his team have received a huge amount of feedback from Chinese audiences. For example, in his documentary, he visited the manufacturing plant of the Fuxing bullet train, where a Chinese engineer told him, “By 2025, the national high-speed rail line will reach 38,000 kilometers. And we are always ready to go abroad.” The conversation was put on Douyin – the Chinese version of Tik Tok, which received 301,000 likes and 11,000 positive comments from Chinese netizens. 

Xinhua, China’s state news agency, said that Wood’s documentary had “transcended the barriers of ethnicity and belief and brought something inexplicably powerful and touching to TV audiences.” “It is one of the nicest reviews I’ve ever had, but it is always a risky thing to make films about another culture, so one must approach it in a humble way,” he said.

As a filmmaker, the challenge is trying to convey to a general TV audience in the West, in a short span of time, the arc, or trajectory, of Chinese history and to also highlight some of the big themes. Everywhere they went during filming people were willing to offer unsolicited help and always ready to share stories of their past. 

“There’s always something new,” said Wood, adding that the ways the Chinese do things and think about things are often very different to Westerners, so it’s always a journey of discovery. 

While the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has put everything on hold, Wood has not stopped working on new projects. He is writing a short book – In the Footsteps of Du Fu, which will include diaries, maps, and photos. He admitted that writing such a book had been on his mind since his schooldays. As the U.S. sinologist Stephen Owen said, “There’s Dante, there’s Shakespeare, and there’s Du Fu; they helped create the emotional vocabulary of their respective cultures.” 

Talking about future TV work, Wood would like to return to China with his colleagues at Maya Vision. They are currently thinking about doing a series, possibly online as well as on TV, of short films which they are calling Parallel Lives: for example, Confucius and Socrates, Sima Qian and Herodotus, Su Song and Leonardo da Vinci, Li Qingzhao and Christine de Pisan, Cao Xueqin and Jane Austen, and so on. The aim is to compare and contrast iconic characters from both cultures in short pithy snapshots, in order to open up ideas about the similarities and differences, and the common connections between the East and the West. 

Ordinary Lives vs. the Big Picture

Being a wonderful storyteller, Wood is adept at using a grand narrative to tell the sweeping history of China from ancient times to the present, and captures the big picture without losing sight of the human details, which is very well reflected in his book The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilization and Its People published in September 2020. 

“A book is a different creature from a TV show produced for mainstream audiences; it allows a much meatier narrative and deeper engagement with landscapes and stories,” said Wood. “But you still try to use what I call ‘the film maker’s eye,’” he added. 

In this book, he has put great effort into telling the story of some writers and characters that particularly interested him and the people from Chinese history whose lives and works illuminate the big picture. 

He gave some examples: Li Qingzhao – who described the experiences of the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty, her wanderings as a refugee, and her experience as a woman in a patriarchal society, including the bitter story of her marriages. Or Cao Xueqin: not only a captivating novelist, but one who shared his life experiences and the rise and fall of his family over four generations. “There have been amazing new finds – some letters by soldiers in the Qin military – the real-life Terracotta Army – writing home to mum, or letters from Han garrisons on lonely watchtowers in the wilds of the Silk Road,” said Wood. “They gave us the kind of immediacy we get in Britain, say, from the Vindolanda tablets on Hadrian’s Wall in the Roman empire.”

Exchanges Matter More Than Ever

While discussing the continuity of Chinese civilization, Wood described China as the oldest living civilization in the world. “We live in a small world and we are all human beings – as Confucius would say. His often simple maxims still crystallize some of the key traits in Chinese culture: civility, duty, hospitality – and humor too,” said Wood. 

China and the U.K. “should always try for dialogue and understanding,” he said, adding, “The differences in our histories and cultures need not be a barrier but a source of enrichment; our different social systems and developmental history don’t block our communications. It is corny and trite to say so, but mutual understanding and exchange can work wonders.” 

He gave another example. As a governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) for 12 years and still a trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, he knows that many interesting exchange projects are being talked about: the RSC is sponsoring a complete new Chinese translation of Shakespeare’s works and planning on getting English directors to direct his plays in China. In the post-pandemic world, they hope to continue their Chinese Translations Project, bringing Chinese classics to Western audiences in English – like Snow in Midsummer. “In both cultures, the poets are the real voices of the people and a great way for our cultures to find common ground,” he said. 

Noting that 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between China and the U.K., Wood stressed, “We live on a small planet, and friendship and cooperation must be the way forward.” He further indicated that both countries can play a positive role, and can contribute to long-lasting, open, and win-win China-U.K. relations. “We should use our best influence to make a better world, and to work together towards a shared future for humankind,” he concluded. 

This article first appeared in China Today on 1 June 2022 (opens in new tab).

There are differences between East and West as discussed below but we have a lot in common with the East as a basis for friendship and understanding as the photographs below show.

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I bought a copy of the book East Side Voices edited by Helena Lee. It presents a wide spectrum of experiences and views from a variety of East and Southeast Asian individuals living in Britain. I have only ‘dipped’ into it so far, but can see some parallels with my own experience, although as a senior British Born Chinese, I am at least a generation removed from most, if not all of the authors.

About 15 years ago, I visited an old family friend. She said you are welcome to come, but I live in a typical ‘throw nothing away’ Chinese house. I immediately knew what she meant as my house and those of some of my Chinese relatives could be described in the same way. Gemma Chan in East Side Voices, was amazed when her dad offered her a Marks and Spencer plastic bag of 1990’s vintage. She later refers to her dad’s Golden Rule No 1, ‘nothing goes to waste.’.

The Chinese love for money and good food seems quite universal. Is it because, since time began, previous generations in old China were always short of these basic necessities? One of the main Chinese government’s priorities has been the eradication of poverty. Through the ages, China has had many disasters with millions of people starving to death.  Historians of old China, recorded that the average peasant in old China, ‘lived on the brink of disaster’. A universal basic freedom, is freedom from poverty.

China Eye No 59, Autumn 2018 contained a report, entitled, ‘Is Yellow the New Blackface?’ This was a conference which discussed the under-representation of British Chinese and East Asians in the screen media. It was held at Blackburne House in Liverpool and was convened by Rosa Fong of Edge Hill University. Speakers included Lucy Sheen, and Diana Yeh (by DVD). David Yip (The Chinese Detective) sent a message of encouragement.

The reluctance to employ Chinese and East Asian actors in major roles is a cause for concern. But is seems it has always been the case. In the 1930, a film was made of Pearl Buck’s novel, The Good Earth. Although the internationally-known Chinese actress, Anna Mae Wong was eminently suitable for the starring role, it was given to a Western actress who was made up to look Chinese. No satisfactory explanation was given for this. Some film critics thought that Anna Mae Wong would never play a leading role, unless the leading man was also Chinese. It was unacceptable, at the time, for a Chinese lady to play opposite a white actor.

Richard Nisbett, a psychology professor compares how Asians and Americans think. (From an article by Hana R Alberts in Forbes, May 11 2009)

East Asians see things in context, whilst Westerners focus on the point in hand: the former are dependent, the latter independent; the former are holistic, the latter analytic. The social aspect to these differences is that Asians are collective, Westerners individualistic. Another interesting observation mentioned was that, Canadians predict that a stock whose value is rising will continue to rise, whilst Chinese tend to think that what goes up will come down.

Nisbett’s work is discussed by Ed Yong in New Scientist, March 2009. He presents a chart by Daphna Oyserman, a professor of psychology, Education and communication in the University of South California. A summary of the qualities of Easterners and Westerners are:

East; Collectivism; harmony, duty, context, hierarchy.

West; Individualism; private, self-knowing, unique, independent

George Soros in The Crisis of Global Capitalism, on page 95, makes the points that ‘Pure reason and a moral code based on the value of the individual are inventions of Western culture, they have little resonance in other cultures. For instance, Confucian ethics are based on family and relationships and do not sit well with imported concepts imported from the West’.

Professor Alan Macfarlane in Youtube videos makes certain important points. Macfarlane is a professor of anthropology at Cambridge University. The following comments are my understandings from his talks.

The West sees China through a distorting mirror. There are prejudices and views associated with an imperial past. Many analysts and reporters, even so called ‘experts’ and historians, know very little. They write ‘what they think they know’.  Some have never even been to China. He recommends that people should go and see for themselves and meet the people. They should go and make friends with Chinese people and in this way get ‘inside’ and get to know them and the country in depth. Get to know and understand the language, customs and culture. He believes the Western media, including the BBC, tend to concentrate on negative news and aspects of China; Aljazeera, a little less so.

His view is that Western thought is moulded by a ‘binary’ approach, Chinese thought by comparison is a ‘quantum’ approach. He maintains that this is influenced by religion; Western religions have one single God, (Christianity, Judaism, Islam), whilst China has many; Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism and ancestor worship plus many other gods. All beliefs merge and are tolerated, without any conflict.

Whilst India has a caste system and England has social classes, there have never been such systems in China. Education has always been valued in China and determines social mobility and position in society in China. The basic social unit in the West is the individual. In China there are structured relationships between people, the family is very important.

Macfarlane has been to China 16 times in recent years. He invariably went with a Chinese student companion as a translator and was able to speak to people at all levels of society, from workers, civil officials, politicians, business people to university professors. He says he has been ‘transformed’ by his visits to China.

Recommended reading; Alan Macfarlane. China, Japan, Europe and the Anglo-sphere; A Comparative Analysis. Cam Rivers Publishing, Cambridge 2018

Additional comments:-

Some scholars hold the view that Western civilisation has its origins in Greek democracy, Roman law and Judeo-Christian religion. Chinese civilisation developed entirely separately and along different paths.

Some analysts believe that ‘white superiority’ influences Western thinking and is behind certain policies of the ‘Anglosphere’. Many believe socialism and communism are misguided, if not completely wrong ideologies and must be opposed, if this means covert action or even force. ‘Sinophobia’ is certainly present in our society, Sinophobia against which the recent SACU march demonstrated.

Some Western politicians, especially those in the Anglosphere, oppose the ‘Rise of China’. They justify this by claiming China does not play by international rules, is an autocracy, is ‘not like us’ and does not share our values. A senior US politician has declared, ‘Nations must choose between freedom or tyranny!’

Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, visited China in the 1920s. He commented, ‘In many ways the Chinese are the most civilised nation in the world and it is shameful that we make it our business to teach them lessons in barbarity’. A traditional Chinese proverb is, ‘Good iron is not made into nails. Good sons are not made into soldiers.’ This is in contrast to the Western military tradition, with royal sons festooned with military decorations. In the modern world of course, the PLA is necessary for national defence in a potentially hostile world.

Negative reporting of China is likely to increase as events develop. The security departments of certain Western countries are to be extended, specifically to deal with China.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been criticised as producing ‘debt traps’. People fail to note that all agreements have been voluntary. ‘Cheque book diplomacy’ has been mentioned, but this is better than ‘gun boat diplomacy’. And not a single life has been lost in the BRI negotiations. Compare this with the hundreds of thousands – if not millions, of lives lost to European armies in Africa – competing for colonies and building empires. And, that continent was still horrendously poor after 300 years of Western involvement.   

Walter Fung is Editor of SACU’s quarterly magazine China Eye. This article first appeared in China Eye, issue 74, summer 2022, pages 21-22. 

SACU welcomed the Rt Hon Sir Vince Cable for a discussion on his new book, The Chinese Conundrum: Engagement or Conflict.

Fred Hobby (SACU)

Fred is currently a Global Affairs MSc student at King’s College London specialising in Chinese and Middle Eastern Politics. He graduated at the University of Manchester in History and Politics, whilst focusing on Chinese history. 

How does the West wish to view China in the next 50 years? Ten years ago, it was seen as a land of opportunity, sadly times have changed. In Europe, the importance of a working economic relationship with China is often acknowledged through gritted teeth. In reality, how can a prosperous world for the United Kingdom and broader international community be successful without the inclusion of China? In short, it cannot. 

To begin with, we must take note of the shared problems that both the West and the Chinese face; Nuclear proliferation, Issues of development in areas of Africa, Climate change and pandemic management (to name a few). Benefits of greater economic inclusivity and cooperation between the two will help to solve these issues. However, if friendship continues down a spiral of disrepair, we may fall victim to the problems at present and many more to come. 

Former leader of the Liberal Democrat party, Sir Vince Cable came to talk to SACU about his new book, The China Conundrum: Engagement or Conflict. His first visit to China was 30 years ago, whilst working for Shell as their Chief Economist. At the time he was sent out to take part in some due diligence work looking to help Chinese firms make decisions on the future of their economy. Practically, his approaches and understanding of China and politics have not strayed far from his background as an economist. He studied a PHD at Glasgow in economic integration and industrialisation. 

After the speech, a point that was quickly raised among the SACU team members was his levelheaded approach to fostering international relations. He breached subjects like the UK’s past relationship with China, Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and ‘the New Cold War’. In his time in government, Sir Vince had the responsibilities of dealing with Chinese companies and officials building up trade in Xi’s Golden Era. Further abroad, he also worked on Xi’s new BRI at the time in Africa, alongside a group of Nigerian businessmen. Years worth of exposure and work led him to write a book on how he sees the progression of the East Asian powerhouse from the past to the present day. 

One interesting point he ended on was his comparison between where China has been and where it could be in the future. Sparta, Ming and Davos were used as examples in explaining relationships between security and economics in China. The first favours security over everything. In this instance, there is little need to further mutual interests as threats of invasion are very real. 

As we go further down the list, Ming China was described through the example of Zheng He’s powerful fleets that ruled the waves in the 15th/16thC. Their tribute system connected the Middle East, Sri Lanka, parts of Southeast Asia and more to China’s southern coastline. It was by far the most powerful fleet the world had ever seen, towering in size and wealth of Magellan and Columbus. However, almost overnight the emperor decided that these were not in China’s best interests and swiftly closed their doors to the outside world making China focus its attention domestically. Finally, the example of Davos China, a place he stated we were in 10 years ago. Here, businesses from China and the United Kingdom were creating win-win deals with one another. Security is less of an issue between the two as a level of trust is maintained. The economic benefits are in the mutual interests of all involved, this is where the countries should seek to return. 

Historically, wounds still affect Chinese politics and social mobilization to this day. Arguably the most prominent of these is China’s 100 years of humiliation. It is something that countries negotiating with them must remember vividly, Donald Trump’s brash rhetoric towards China set back the US-China relations by decades. There have been other mishaps, but none more damming particularly in a period when trust must drive economic integration. Sadly, as we can see from recent situations such as Hong Kong, the UK’s scepticism of Huawei and the most recent COVID crisis, this trust has been distorted by geo-politics. In the case of many Westphalian states the past can only take you so far, but in the case of the civilisation state that is China, the past is the key to the present and future. 

Sir Vince made a very compelling argument for the reintegration of UK-China relations, he highlighted some very pressing economic arguments. SACU benefited greatly from the insights he had to offer, and we recommend you all to read his new book! It came out last September and it is available to buy online.

The Chinese Conundrum: Engagement or Conflict by Sir Vince Cable, published by Alma Books, 2021

The book talk with Sir Vince Cable was a great success on Zoom and face-to-face. We thank Sir Vince Cable for sharing his valuable experience and thoughts with us; we also thank our brilliant SACU Council member Iris Yau 丘靜雯 for organising this event and all the other members who volunteered to help Iris (Arron, Jiaxi, Caroline, Fred, Ros and Zoë) to make this book talk happen.

Thank you to all participants for joining us online or in person at The Exchange, St Marys University, Twickenham.

The full recording is available here

About Vince Cable

The Rt Hon Sir Vince Cable was the Leader of the Liberal Democrats 2017-2019; He served as Member of Parliament for Twickenham 1997-2015 and 2017-2019; Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and President of the Board of Trade (2010-2015); Deputy Leader of the Lib Dems 2007-2010; and Shadow Chancellor 2003-2010.

Vince is currently a Professor in Practice at the Institute of Global Affairs, London School of Economics (LSE); A Visiting Professor at the School of Economics, University of Nottingham; A Visiting Professor at the Institute of business, Law and Society, St Mary’s University.

About Iris Yau

The talk was chaired by 丘靜雯 Iris Yau FRSA FHEA. Iris is a member of the Council at the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU); a fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA); a fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK (Advance HE); Iris has curated and produced exhibitions including ‘Iris’s Silk Route’ at University of the Arts London, ‘Opium, Silk and the Missionaries in China’ at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London.

Andrew Hicks is a SACU Council member who has lived in Chinese-influenced communities in Asia for over 20 years. He first lectured in Law at the University of Hong Kong from 1976 to 1983, then went on to lecture at the National University of Singapore and later settled in Thailand for some years. Now back in the UK, Andrew says being a Council member of SACU enables him to share his passion for all things Chinese.

His book, Jack Jones, A True Friend to China: The Lost Writings of a Heroic Nobody: the Friends Ambulance Unit ‘China Convoy’ 1945-1951, was published in 2015.

Living and teaching in Beijing in the 1970s

 Michael Sheringham

 Michael is a regular contributor to China Eye. He was an early member of SACU. This article was first published in China Eye, Issue (51) Autumn 2016. It is the second of Michael’s personal memories of the early days of SACU, (see China Eye, Issue 50), and of his time in the Peoples Republic of China. 

I was excited and privileged to be invited to teach at Peking University (Beijing Daxue – Beida) in 1972 after years of anticipation while I continued with my Chinese studies in London. It all comes flooding back. Early experiences are often the most memorable, and the welcome by my future colleagues in the Western Languages Department when I arrived at Beijing Airport in late September was a taste of things to come – a wonderful meal there before driving to my new home and work-place. Hitting a dog on the road was not so memorable, my first cultural shock.

Now settled into my new home, the Friendship Hotel in the northwestern outskirts of Beijing, I could begin to orientate myself to my new surroundings. At that time, on clear days, I could see the Western Hills in the distance, shimmering in a blue sky. The intervening countryside in Haidian District was covered by fields of crops and vegetables, only punctuated by the grand Summer Palace, with its Kunming Lake, and before that the village of Zhongguan Cun, still with its alleyways and traditional courtyards. Peking University with its own little lake in a picturesque campus (originally Yenching [Yanjing] University) lay close by, originally part of the vast parkland that formed the Yuanming Yuan (Old Imperial Summer Palace), stretching as far as the new Summer Palace. Among the famous intellectuals who taught at the university in the early 1920s when it was just established were the writer/linguist Hu Shih (Hu Shi), the writer Lu Hsun (Lu Xun) Professors Li Ta-chao (Li Dazhao) and Chen Tu-hsiu (Chen Duxiu), both founders of the Communist Party, and Mao Zedong was a librarian there.

One early and exciting experience was being taken to the celebrations for National Day (October 1, 1972) at the Summer Palace by a Chinese girl student of English at Beida. The park was packed with Chinese holiday-makers, enjoying the sights, stage performances and boating on the lake. There I saw two of the top Chinese leaders, Zhu De and Guo Moruo, watching a show by the lake, and was able to photograph them, although I shyly declined the offer to be introduced to them.

What struck me on leaving the gates of the Friendship Hotel, guarded by PLA soldiers at all times, was the rural-style market opposite, with mountains of cabbages piled up for customers. When I took photographs of this (to me) novel sight, the local women tried to prevent me, as if it was a state secret. The cabbages were in fact stored underground all through the frozen winter, ‘excavated’ for basic food consumption during this period. Nearby was the Evergreen Commune, a large area of farmland run by the neighbourhood to produce vegetables for the whole of Beijing. At our request, I and my sister, who was staying in the university for a couple of months, went to this commune with two girl students to work with the local peasants there during the summer vacation. We spent most of the time chatting to them while we took cover from the rain, and they were also no doubt trying to save of us from the real efforts of manual work.

The Friendship Hotel, well-known to past and later generations of foreigners working in Beijing was to be my home for some years, while I was able to move to Peking University for most of the latter half of my 6-year stay. Read any account of foreigners who have lived at ‘Youyi Binguan’ and you will know about their frustrations at being ‘cooped up’ in a fortress-like compound with all the modern facilities, then unimaginable to most of Beijing residents. Like them, I bridled at the prospect, but soon decided to make the best of it and make friends with others from many countries, including Indonesian, Nepalese, Sri Lankan, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese and even other British. After all, we basically shared a spirit of affection for the Chinese people and interest in their lives and destiny. The trouble was that we could not share their lives at closer proximity, and many of the younger foreigners, especially the ‘radical’ ones from European countries, soon became frustrated with the restrictions and protective measures which they encountered both in their residence and in their work places.

When I started teaching at the university at the beginning of the new term the distance closed considerably. I soon declined the privilege of being chauffeured to the university and bought a bicycle and cycled the 15 minutes’ journey to the university. I also tried to avoid being treated with excessive politeness by my students, who started by standing up when I entered the class-room. Of the 150 in the first group and now in their third year, most were from the PLA armed forces – air force, navy and army. They always wore their military uniforms, so perhaps the discipline of saluting their officers was familiar to them. But it was not what I expected (as a young man of 26, who had read a fair amount about Westerners’ dominance of China during the previous one and half centuries), nor did it chime well for me with the principles of equality and revolutionary pride which I expected from these radical youth of the Cultural Revolution. So I dismissed this particular polite display of respect and made every effort to break down the barriers between teacher and students.

It was, of course, more difficult for the Chinese teachers to adapt to the new political climate and educational environment, since they were used to the traditional relationship between teachers and students even during the period of Socialism. During the Cultural Revolution, which broke out in 1966, Mao Zedong called on the youth to rebel against all forms of authority. I had expected that this often violent movement carried out by the Red Guards would have destroyed that elitist barrier, and that the teachers and educational authorities would have been humbled if not intimidated. But old ideas still obviously endured in spite of the harsh treatment that the teachers had had to endure during this period of upheaval. They tried their best to adapt to the new circumstances and requirements of the ‘Revolution in Education’, and to a great extent they succeeded. There was a new leadership in charge of the university consisting mainly of army personnel, with workers supervising every faculty, but the Vice-Chancellor was a senior scientist and the old professors once again enjoyed the traditional authority even if under the leadership of Party officials.

So in this somewhat paradoxical situation, I, a ‘Foreign Devil’, with the old academics, some Party members, and political supervisors, prepared English texts and lessons to teach the new generation of students from worker-peasant-soldier backgrounds in a new and revolutionary way. I was teaching with another English couple, who had taught in China before the Cultural Revolution, and other foreign teachers taught other Western, Arabic and Asian languages. We all certainly had to adapt our thinking and methodology to the requirements of the time and of the students, who were among the first years of intake after the ‘hiatus’ of 4-5 years, when universities closed during the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution.

One of the main features of the teaching material which I was asked to write for the students’ spoken English course was practicality. I prepared dialogues in colloquial English based on situations which they were likely to need in their immediate situations. These often involved visiting places in and around the university, such as the clinic, pharmaceutical laboratory, library, sports ground or middle and primary school attached to the university. Having practised some of these dialogues in the classroom, I went with students to the actual places, where they acted as interpreters for me as a foreign visitor. These visits would prepare the students for real situations when foreign visitors came to visit the university, including SACU groups and Ted Heath, the British ex-Prime Minister, who spoke with the students in May1974.

After my first visit back to the UK after two years, I travelled around the country, visiting places which I thought might be of interest to my students – not the usual historic sites, but the old mining areas with their museums of the industrial revolution and the country houses of the aristocracy, which showed how ‘the other half’ lived. I wrote texts and dialogues as teaching material for the students to practice as if they were visitors with myself as guide. I must admit that I presented these views of Britain with a certain political slant. I and my English colleagues also gave talks to our students about British history and aspects of society and people’s lives, which supplemented the background texts on English literature and other aspects which the Chinese teachers prepared for them.

In fact, the Chinese leadership, with Premier Zhou Enlai playing a crucial role, promoted teaching English and training teachers of English in his diplomatic drive to ‘open up to the world’. Apart from calling Beida English students to discuss this promotion of English himself, Zhou instigated a National Conference on Education and Scientific Research under the Minister of Education, Zhou Rongxin in 1972. The main thrust of the educational policies in this period of the ‘Revolution in Education’ was the balance of ‘Red’ and ‘expert’, emphasising political ‘working-class’ educational priorities, while attempting to raise academic standards.

In effect, this was a turning-point, where the ‘professionals’ won Zhou Enlai’s support to pay more attention to ‘expertise’. Following the ‘Red’ principle, teachers were still encouraged to help students from ordinary (particularly rural backgrounds) to keep up their studies by giving them extra tuition and encouragement. I also did this with specially selected groups of ‘slower-learning’ students. “The conference also advocated the ‘open-book’ method of examinations, whereby students could freely refer to textbooks.” (quote from my talk to SACU in July 1977.)

Another basic principle in education at that time was combining study in the classroom with work experience (‘bangong banxue’) both within and outside the university, or schools. My students and their Chinese teachers had spent a year in the countryside in Jiangxi Province, working on the land to reclaim marshland in harsh conditions. When they came back to the university, they did regular stints of manual work on projects such as building the foundations of the new university library. I sometimes found them not in the classroom for English lessons, but on the campus digging ditches or laying bricks with their teachers and political supervisors (from the army leadership in each department). They often sang songs as they worked, and I insisted on joining them in their work as far as I could. One problem I found was that the teachers didn’t practise English with the students on these occasions, probably because the political supervisors, who didn’t speak English, would have criticised them for doing this. I think I broke this barrier, although I also tried to practise my Chinese outside class whenever I could.

The students also went out to practise their English in various ways, organised by the foreign language department. Some of our third-year students had spent several months in Shanghai acting as interpreters for Africans working at the docks in the year before I taught them (1971). The second group of students (entry of 1971), who were termed ‘educated youth’ and wore civilian, Mao-style clothes rather than uniforms, went to work in hotels in Beijing for several weeks, where they did various basic tasks and had contact with early foreign visitors, such as the American Guardian newspaper group. This group happened to include my aunt and uncle from New York, who were visiting China for the first time as progressive activists in the civil rights movement. I went to visit them and my students at Minzhu Hotel in Chang’an Boulevard on several occasions.

When such friendship groups came to visit the university, they were usually received by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Zhou Peiyuan, a suave intellectual who spoke fluent English, in the ‘Hall by the Lake’, and I was invited with some of my students and their Chinese teachers to attend these sessions and take the guests around the campus. Although I found these good opportunities for the students to practise their English and for the visitors to get closer to the lives of the students, I was frustrated by the cultural/political barriers which I felt were manifested by the stilted language (full of political slogans) of the students which hampered mutual understanding. I tried my best to act as an intermediary or even interpreter as they struggled to explain why they were studying English, how they were selected and what the aims of their education were. So much for the colloquial English language which I was teaching them!

When the first year of students were preparing to graduate after three and a half years (shortened from the original pre-Cultural Revolution course of 4-5 years), they carried out a movement to sum up their progress in transforming education at the university. Apart from discussions and debates, they used ‘big-character posters’ to express their opinions, which were often criticisms or warnings to the teachers to beware of falling into old ‘bourgeois’ habits of teaching and standing aloof from their students, particularly the worker-peasant students. I remember one tough-looking army student coming up to me as I was reading these posters and asking me what I thought of them. I told him that I agreed with them (of course!), but realised how intimidating these young, zealous ex-Red Guards could be. I was pretty radical myself, suggesting that barriers between ‘town and gown’ could better be eliminated by knocking down the old wall which surrounded the campus and integrating with the surrounding neighbourhood.

With most of the foreigners living in China and the Chinese leaders of our various work places, I was privileged to participate in an important event on March 8, 1973, a meeting in the Great Hall of the People where Zhou Enlai addressed us about the official policies regarding foreigners living in China. As we sat at the round dining tables allocated to each work place (in my case, Peking University), Zhou talked for about 3 hours, declaring that Mao’s policies were internationalist and welcoming to friendly foreigners. He denounced Lin Piao (Lin Biao), the former Minister of Defence and Mao’s designated successor (who had died in a mysterious plane-crash in 1971), as a ‘renegade’ and apologised on behalf of the Government and Party about the wrong ‘ultra-leftist’ policies which had victimised foreigners during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Many had been wrongly imprisoned and had only just been released after years of captivity and were now present at this meeting. Zhou made a point of walking around the hall and greeting those at each table.

 

At our Beida (Peking University) table he stopped to make a particular point about one family with whom I was closely acquainted. Marcelia Yeh was a long-time American resident in Beijing, who was teaching English with me at the university. She had been married to a Chinese scientist who had died some years previously, and was bringing up her children in the residence of the Academy of Science nearby. Zhou had heard that her son was in love with a Chinese girl working in a factory with her son, but that her family had her sent away into the countryside to prevent the two from deepening their relationship. He instructed the university leaders to have the girl brought back to Beijing and to make sure that her parents or any other authorities should not interfere in their relationship. It was Mao’s policy, he said, that Chinese could marry foreigners and international relations should flourish. It was also significant that Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, was also present on this occasion, presumably ‘forced’ to attend as a snub against her ‘ultra-leftist’ policies, which had caused factionalism and incited anti-foreign sentiment during this period. Apparently, she spoke not a word to the foreign friends at her table, bearing a sullen demeanour throughout the proceedings.

Zhou Enlai’s efforts to promote a more open foreign policy and professional approach to academic and scientific research could be felt in many ways as more foreign students came to study Chinese at the university and language colleges, while the English teaching material itself included texts based on diplomacy. A speech of Ch’iao Kuan-hua (Qiao Guanhua – Deputy Foreign Minister) to the UN, for instance, was one of the texts which the Chinese teachers used to teach to the first group of students. While Zhou and the reinstated Teng Hsiao-ping (Deng Xiaoping) emphasised training experts and professionals (the ‘Expert’ school), the ‘Reds’ continued to push for popularising skills and political (Marxist) aspects to be the determining factors in education. In another campaign ‘to oppose the rightist trend..’, the radicals argued in the media and Party directives against ‘back-sliding’ and a reversion to elitist tendencies in every aspect of cultural and educational policies.

At the university in 1975, there were discussions amongst students and teachers, which I attended, about how to promote another educational campaign based on the ‘Chaoyang experience’. Chaoyang was an agricultural college in the northeast which had pioneered and promoted teaching even more closely related to the students’ practical experience in the fields. When the national media extolled this educational experiment, the universities, and each department, were called upon to discuss how to follow this Chaoyang ‘model’ in their respective disciplines. This was obviously not so easy to implement in the cultural and linguistic subjects, but it was decided that the Western language department students and their teachers would move to a rural area outside Beijing to pursue their courses. This was a more drastic measure than doing brief stints of working and studying in field and factory, as it involved moving furniture and equipment such as heavy tape-recorders out of the campus and into the countryside.

As foreign teachers, we were not expected (or indeed allowed) to go with the Chinese students, but remained back on the campus to compile teaching material and teach a group of teachers who came back once a week. I was also assigned to teach Vietnamese and North Korean students who were studying English at the university. Now, after two years of ‘proving my reliability’, I had been invited to move to a dormitory on the campus, which was the accommodation for foreign students and some of their Chinese class-mates.

I was, of course, delighted to teach these ‘Socialist brothers and sisters’ and much enjoyed living and eating with them, but I argued with my English department leaders that I had come to teach the Chinese students and teachers and would like to join them in their new venture. This request, vigorously supported by my previously-mentioned American colleague, was refused (on the grounds that it was ‘subjective’ – another term for selfish) and that we could best serve revolutionary and educational needs by visiting the students once a week to teach them on the spot at their rural base in Dongxing County near Beijing. I remember how we were taken there and back in a jeep and freezing on the way! Learning about their life and work there provided the basis for the teaching material which we prepared for them and got them to practise during our teaching visits. We did, however, join our Korean and Vietnamese students and their Chinese teachers, when they went to the countryside near Beijing to do manual work in the fields for a week.

While this experiment lasted about a year, and was widely broadcast in by media, the rear-guard reaction of the conservative or ‘right-wing’ faction and their academic followers could be sensed in many ways. Deng Xiaoping was dismissed from office again and criticised in the press, on big-character posters and at meetings, which we foreign teachers attended for our own ‘education’. There were campaigns to extol educational heroes like Huang Shuai, who criticised her teacher for being ‘bourgeois’ or ‘elitist’ or Zhang Tiesheng, a country boy who refused to take the ‘bookish’ entrance examination. A very radical film ‘Fanji’, Counterattack, dealing with the ‘Revolution in Education’ and how some old-style academics were trying to sabotage it, was produced in October 1976, but only shown as ‘negative propaganda’ after the political tide had turned again.

It all changed in the traumatic year of 1976. In January, Premier Zhou died of cancer and a popular commemoration of his life by thousands of people laying wreaths in his memory in Tiananmen Square in April was crushed and condemned by the current authorities. I passed by the Square in a taxi, but was advised not to stop there as trouble was expected. This led to the final overthrow of Deng Xiaoping and the appointment of Hua Guofeng as Zhou’s successor and Vice-Chairman. A few months after this, the revolutionary army leader, Zhu De, and then Mao Zedong passed away. In between, in that long hot summer, there was a massive earthquake in Tangshan near Tianjin, and the effects of this and aftershocks could be felt in Beijing.

I was travelling in the mountains of Jinggangshan with my parents and a Chinese teacher at that time, when we heard the devastating news, assuming that it was actually a political earthquake. In a sense, it was too, as we witnessed not only the survivors being transported to the south to recuperate in sanatoria in Wuxi, where we were also seeking sanctuary, but also lorries full of ‘condemned’ (as we assumed) political prisoners being paraded to meet their fate. This scenario was, as it turned out, the last throw of the dice of the radical ‘ultra-left’ movement to gain supremacy before Mao died. And the rest is history…

My parents returned to London via Shanghai and Hong Kong, and I and my colleague went back to Beijing, where we stayed in temporary ‘tents’ (sheets over bunk beds) at the university while the aftershocks from the earthquake still threatened the buildings. Our students went off to join the soldiers to do rescue and rehabilitation work in the stricken and flattened city of Tangshan (a quarter of a million dead). When they returned to the campus and resumed classes, they reported to me in English about their exploits – except that they said nothing about their own experience, only mechanically repeating what they read in the newspapers (“Man’s Will Overcomes Nature!”). It was only 40 years later when I saw a feature film, Aftershock (‘Tangshan Da Dizhen’, directed by Feng Xiaogang, 2010), about the real experience of those terrible events and how they affected ordinary people that I relived them and cried.

Mao’s death and the subsequent overthrow of his followers, his wife Jiang Qing and the others known as the ‘Gang of Four’, were terrible events which played out like a Greek tragedy or Beijing Opera. Seeing how the students and teachers at the university prepared wreaths in sullen and sad composure seemed an expression of genuine admiration and grief for the loss of their leader and symbol of their revolutionary history. I and other foreigners were taken to pay tribute as Mao lay in state in Tiananmen, but the wailing and crying there, on the other hand, seemed traditionally operatic.

I was shocked when the news about the arrest of a group of Mao’s ‘left-wing’ associates in the leadership was announced on the BBC radio news that November morning, and when I told one of my students about it, he exclaimed “This is terrible if it is true!” He and others were soon celebrating their downfall in public demonstrations. When I went to my office in the Western Languages Department later that day, the head of the department, a German-speaking academic whom I knew well over the years and liked, took me aside and expressed the relief and joy which he and other academics and intellectuals felt at hearing this news. “We are at last really free, but we couldn’t tell you all these years how suppressed we felt”, was his spontaneous reaction to these events. I could appreciate the conflict these intellectuals had felt in their academic and often official Party roles, but I could never understand how they had managed to put on a different face all through these years.

During the celebrations for the ‘Gang’s’ demise and the appearance of the new leader and Chairman, Hua Guofeng, I marched with my students down Chang’an Jie, waving banners and taking photographs, but this seemed to be just another performance of Beijing Opera in a new guise. It would herald another (and the biggest) reversal of China’s recent history, and a new campaign to condemn almost everything that had been applauded during the years I had been living in Beijing. I felt sorry to see my students from ordinary backgrounds being undermined by the new policies which were soon introduced in education. Their achievements in studying English were belittled by the new intake of students from mostly intellectual and urban backgrounds, who had to pass rigorous entrance exams to this prestigious university and others like it. At least one professor expressed how relieved he was not to have to struggle to teach these students from poor and poorly-educated families, who found it so hard to learn a foreign language. I continued to teach these students for another term, but they graduated soon after I left for England in the Spring of 1978 without the qualifications that graduates from such a university deserved. No other English teacher had continued to teach them and they had no more colloquial English oral classes before they graduated. It was the end of an era and the end of my time in Beijing too.

Postscript: In the following years I met several of my old students when I went back to the university or when they came abroad. A good many went on to study abroad, mainly in the US, gaining PhDs and becoming successful academics. Recently, I met one of my old army students from the first group which I taught. He went on to work in the army as an interpreter and was later transferred to a Chinese state company working in several countries in Africa for many years. His two daughters studied in the UK and one has settled here with her Chinese husband and children. Generally, this generation has adapted very well to the new times and learnt new skills to enable them to be successful and provide even more opportunities for the next generation – those who are really at home in this globalised world economy and culture.