The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
When Hugh Trevor-Roper went to China
The historian’s acerbic diary of his 1965 trip is a stinging portrait of Left-wing British ideologues. By Brian Young
WHUGH TREVOR-ROPER: THE CHINA JOURNALS ed Richard DavenportHines 296pp, Bloomsbury, £25, ebook £14.98
e are already indebted to Richard DavenportHines for his Proustian annotations to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s previously unpublished letters and his wartime journals. He now proves himself the ideal cicerone in making retrospective sense of Trevor-Roper’s three-week visit to China as a guest of its government in the autumn of 1965.
Trevor-Roper had been invited along with three other members of the apparently commendable cross-cultural Society for AngloChinese Understanding. Having admiringly reviewed studies of ancient Chinese science written by Joseph Needham, chairman of SACU, Trevor-Roper had only very recently joined the society, surprisingly unaware of its darkly political connotations. TrevorRoper was chosen to represent scholarship and learning in a gang of four that included representatives of the arts, trades unionism and public policy.
The pathologies of the various willing stooges of SACU who litter the pages of Trevor-Roper’s account are truly terrifying. Needham, the Morris-dancing embryologist and Sinologist
Master of Gonville and Caius College, folksily combined devout High Anglicanism with a belief in a Communist heaven on earth. It would, perhaps, be too kind to call Needham a Holy Fool. His SACU deputy, Joan Robinson, a Marxist economist at Cambridge, approvingly declared (in the way only a general’s daughter could), “New China is anti-posh”, as if that automatically made everything about the country all right.
Things were not entirely better with members of Trevor-Roper’s SACU travelling party. The absurdly ambitious and nattily attired trades union representative Ernie Roberts (literally a fellow traveller) had been expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain for preferring Communist China to Soviet Russia. (Readers will enjoy the editor’s appendices, particularly the entry on Roberts, a bleakly entertaining account that ends with his expulsion as a north London Labour MP by his local party when he was denounced for that now most unfavoured of positions on the British Left, friendship with Israel.)
For sheer comedic value, it is to be regretted that Vanessa
Redgrave had been unable to take up the invitation to join the delegation. What merry lashings of Trevor-Roper’s pen would she have surely merited? Redgrave had been replaced by Robert Bolt, the playwright whose moral honesty made him a natural ally. The fourth member of the quartet was Mary Adams, a busy Conservative widow, whose twin obsessions were industrial design and contraception, unpromising topics she was eager to introduce at any conversational opportunity. Adams was a great gift to cross-cultural misunderstandings.
Comedy is more than usually enmeshed with tragedy in these pages. The quartet visited on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, but unlike Bolt and Trevor-Roper, Adams and Roberts were accommodatingly “useful idiots” in legitimising Mao’s regime. They unquestioningly accepted the fiction that Chinese history had effectively begun in 1949, with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, whereas the playwright and the historian were less ready to dismiss everything that preceded 1949 as “reactionary” or “feudal”.
Trevor-Roper’s discriminating eye was always alert to the many pleasures to be derived from the art and architecture of classical China; he even acquired a fascination for the traditions of Chinese opera, all too rarely permitted to be performed in Mao’s China. (He would see more of it during a subsequent visit to Taiwan, also chronicled here.)
Trevor-Roper was deliberately kept away from intellectuals, who would soon be in short supply thanks to the anti-Cultural Revolution. Instead, the discordant British quartet was shepherded by “bigoted dunces”, peasants and proletarians rather than by members of the cowed intelligentsia. Trevor-Roper’s frustrations on this front were forthright, frequent and funny. When he dared ask about conditions in Tibet, he was met with obfuscation at best.
Wearily, Trevor-Roper observed that propaganda “is a compulsory game for intellectuals”; it was one he experienced not only in China, but also when he returned determined to expose SACU (known to sceptics as the “Society for Accepting China
Uncritically”) as the Communistfront organisation it was.
Drawing on help from his former Intelligence colleague Dick White, among others, TrevorRoper compiled a dossier and then wrote a piece for Encounter, now published for the first time. (Libel lawyers had prevented its initial publication.)
It is a lacerating account of the stage management of a shady and sinister interest group, and one that continues to resonate. Dreamers of cultural nightmares are still among us. The ousted John McDonnell carries Mao’s Little Red Book around with him, Jeremy Corbyn defended the “Great Leap Forward” during the last general election campaign, and his aide Seumas Milne once stood as a Maoist candidate in a “mock” election at Winchester College. For five years, this was the British government-inwaiting. History repeats itself, both tragically and farcically.
‘New China is antiposh,’ declared one upper-class British Marxist, proudly
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The Group sold 300,000 copies
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