Sir Alan Donald
Ambassador to China who in a secret cable gave a graphic report of the Tiananmen Square massacre
SIR ALAN DONALD, who has died aged 87, was one of the Foreign Office’s impressive specialist élite of sinologues who dealt with Chinese affairs after the Communist regime took over in Peking in 1949.
Fittingly, Donald ended his career as Ambassador in Beijing from 1988 to 1991. But perhaps his most influential period was earlier, when, as Assistant Under-secretary in the Foreign Office from 1980 to 1984, he provided the senior official advice to the British government in its approach to Anglo-chinese negotiations. This resulted in the 1984 Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, which arranged the smooth handover to China.
Historians may well regard the Joint Declaration as Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement on the international scene. Sir Percy Cradock, in his book Experiences of China (1994), referred with admiration to Donald’s “resources of flexibility and good humour” in conducting the exhaustive (and exhausting) discussions with the Prime Minister preliminary to negotiations with the Chinese.
When he arrived in Beijing as ambassador in 1988, Sino-british relations were riding on the crest of a wave. The Joint Declaration had been agreed; the Queen had visited China two years earlier and the reformist Hu Yaobang had enjoyed a highly successful visit to London. But a year later, in June 1989, as Donald recalled in his typically understated manner, “things took a step backwards” as the sharp international reaction to the Tiananmen Square massacre seemed to revive in the Chinese all the neurotic mistrust which had so often marred its relations with Britain.
When, on the night of June 3-4, the People’s Liberation Army was sent in to clear Tiananmen Square of protesters, ending a six-week demonstration that had called for democracy and political reforms, Donald was watching events from the rooftop of the ambassador’s residence. The next day he lost no time in advising Britons to leave the country. He arranged safe houses and flights out of the city for British students. Half of the embassy staff were sent to Hong Kong with their families, and for several days Donald and his wife Janet gave shelter to more than 60 British subjects in the embassy.
The propaganda version of events promulgated by the Chinese authorities holds that there was a “counter-revolutionary riot” and 200 people were killed inadvertently, some by stray bullets, some in the confusion of clearing Tiananmen Square.
However, in a secret diplomatic cable dated June 5 1989 that was only declassified last year, Donald, quoting a “usually reliable” unnamed friend of a member of China’s State Council, expressed his belief that the number of dead was really more than 10,000. He suggested that the Chinese 27th Group Army, “60 per cent illiterate and called primitives”, had been especially chosen for the task because of its reputation for unquestioning obedience.
He went on to provide horrific detail of the massacre: “Students understood they were given one hour to leave square but after five minutes APCS [armoured personnel carriers] attacked. Students linked arms but were mown down including soldiers. APCS then ran over bodies time and time again to make ‘pie’ and remains collected by bulldozer. Remains incinerated and then hosed down drains. Four wounded girl students begged for their lives but were bayoneted.”
Some members of the State Council, he claimed, “considered that civil war is imminent”.
Donald and his team worked hard to repair the diplomatic damage, though press comment in Britain and Hong Kong tended to inflame Chinese resentment, and Anglo-chinese relations were still in a precarious state when the time came for Donald’s departure from Beijing in May 1991.
Subsequently, though he was less outspoken than his diplomatic colleague Cradock, he was critical of Chris Patten’s efforts as Governor of Hong Kong to pursue a unilateral package of democratic reforms in the colony, in breach, in their view, of the spirit of the Joint Declaration.
At a hearing of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 1993, while Cradock argued that the reform plans would leave Hong Kong worse off because of the harm to relations with China, Donald called for a return to private diplomacy. “When one compares the strategic goals of China and the strategic interests of Hong Kong and its people,” he wrote in the South China Morning Post, “the continuing search for common ground is more likely to produce the right result than concentrating on difference in political philosophy.”
Donald’s valedictory dispatch, however, quoted in Matthew Parris’s book Parting Shots: The Undiplomatic Final Words of our Departing Ambassadors (2010), put paid to any suggestions that he might have “gone native”. While he was filled with admiration for “the stoicism and good humour of its long-suffering people,” he admitted that “one does not ‘enjoy’ China. The Chinese are xenophobic. Officialdom is stubborn and doltish. The individual has no rights, his life being State property, and the Chinese are often indifferent to each other, and sometimes downright cruel. I doubt if the mainland Chinese will ever learn to make a basin plug that fits or maintain a car properly. They hawk and spit and their lavatories are horrendous.”
Alan Ewen Donald was born at Inverurie, Scotland, on May 5 1931, of Scottish yeoman stock. Educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, he won a scholarship to Fettes in Edinburgh, and another to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read Classics and Law.
After National Service in West Germany with the Royal Horse Artillery in 1949-50, he joined the Foreign Office in 1954 and was assigned as a Chinese language student. He joined the group of lively and talented young bachelors who constituted the Chancery at the British Embassy in Peking in the 1950s, when Sir Con O’neill was Chargé d’affaires. Donald’s fellow diplomatic secretaries included a future Foreign Secretary (Douglas Hurd) and a future Ambassador to France (John Fretwell).
Donald held his own in such company not so much by his brains (though he was no fool), but by his attractive personality and his willingness to contribute to the home-made amusements of the diplomatic community of that time. He was a good pianist, enjoyed amateur theatricals and Scottish country dancing, played a vigorous game of basketball and was generally popular among his colleagues. In appearance he was a burly six-footer who looked as if he would be a useful forward on the rugger field. He proved to be an excellent Chinese linguist.
Donald returned to Chinese affairs at intervals in the course of his career, as Oriental Secretary in Peking from 1964 to 1966, during which time he witnessed the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, as Political Adviser to the Governor of Hong Kong from 1974 to 1977 and most notably in the Foreign Office in the 1980s.
In retirement Donald lived quietly in Kent, where he found relaxation in watercolour painting, music, golf and other outdoor activities. He remained in demand as a Chinese specialist, both in Britain and America, and took several jobs in that field.
He was appointed CMG in 1979 and KCMG in 1988.
Alan Donald married, in 1958, Janet Blood, who survives him with their four sons.
Sir Alan Donald, born May 5 1931, died July 14 2018