Roderick Macfarquhar
MP, Daily Telegraph journalist and broadcaster who became one of the world’s leading Sinologists
PROFESSOR RODERICK MACFARQUHAR, who has died aged 88, became one of the world’s most respected Sinologists despite being denied access to mainland China until late in his career. A man of charm, courage and sincerity, Macfarquhar was the ultimate internationalist. Brought up in British India, he was in turn The Daily Telegraph’s resident China-watcher, the editor of China Quarterly, a reporter for Panorama, a Labour MP, and finally for 14 years Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard.
Having studied the East as a journalist, politician and academic, he received the ultimate accolade for his scholarship and objectivity when in 1997 Peking University appointed him a guest professor. Macfarquhar excelled as a communicator. His explanations of China’s “Great Leap Forward” under Mao Tse-tung and the subsequent Cultural Revolution were not only scholarly but easy to read, and while at the BBC he pulled off a scoop that momentarily chilled Anglofrench relations.
In March 1963 he managed to interview Georges Bidault, the former French premier who was on the run after putting himself at the head of a group committed to overthrowing President de Gaulle. The interview took place in London, to the irritation of the French authorities and the embarrassment of Harold Macmillan’s government, who were unaware Bidault was in the country.
The interview itself was anodyne, but the fact of it caused a severe strain. It also led to a celebrated moment on That Was the Week That Was: as the “Home Secretary, Henry Brooke”, was denying Bidault was in the country, a ringer for the Frenchman burst from the audience and smothered him with kisses.
Macfarquhar was on the Right of the Labour Party, and committed to joining the EEC, but he also wanted to see public schools abolished. When fighting a difficult by-election – which he lost – he welcomed a still fairly moderate Tony Benn to speak for him.
His political legacy was a Bill passed in 1977 which increased the minimum age for owning a shotgun from 14 to 16. He wanted it to cover crossbows as well, but Whitehall objected.
Roderick Lemonde Macfarquhar was born in Lahore on December 2 1930, the only son of Sir Alexander Macfarquhar, an Indian civil servant who became Under Secretary at the UN, and the former Berenice Whitburn.
He left before Partition, and the independence of what became Pakistan, to complete his schooling at Fettes. After National Service with the Royal Tank Regiment in Egypt and Jordan, he went to Keble College, Oxford, to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Graduating in 1953, Macfarquhar took an MA in Far Eastern Regional Studies at Harvard. Returning in 1955, he joined the Telegraph as its China specialist.
The task was challenging; China under Mao was backward, marginalised on the world stage and almost impossible to visit, and Hong Kong was not then a thriving commercial centre but a colony swamped with a million impoverished refugees.
In 1959, when Mao set China the challenge of overtaking Britain industrially in 15 years, Macfarquhar assured Telegraph readers that even China’s economic planners believed this impossible. In the event, it would take half a century.
In 1959 Macfarquhar became the founding editor of China Quarterly. Although it would later turn out to be indirectly funded by the CIA, this was a serious academic venture. Stressing the need for the West to know as much about China as about the USSR, he wrote: “We cannot afford to wait for the Chinese to send a sputnik into orbit.”
He got as close to China for the Telegraph as the offshore island of Quemoy, which was promptly shelled by the Communists. In 1960 he attended an “Orientalist” conference in Moscow which, with Khrushchev and Mao at loggerheads, was boycotted by the Chinese he had hoped to meet.
In 1961 he moved to the LSE to compile an analysis of Chinese Communist Party policy changes since 1955, earning a PHD in the process. He joined Panorama at the start of 1963 as a “fireman”, covering Harold Wilson in Moscow, the breakdown of negotiations to join the Common Market, and India after the death of Nehru. In 1965 he moved on, joining the board of the New Statesman and becoming an associate Fellow of St Anthony’s College, Oxford. Macfarquhar joined the Labour Party, then led by Hugh Gaitskell, in 1962. He fought Ealing South in 1966, then was chosen for the bellwether seat of Meriden in March 1968 after the death of its young MP, Christopher Rowland.
He was defending a majority of 4,581, but that had been in a good year for Labour, and Wilson’s government was now in trouble. Macfarquhar impressed as a candidate but lost to the Conservative, Keith Speed, by a humiliating 15,263 votes.
He became a senior research fellow at Columbia University in New York and, from 1971, at Chatham House; from 1972 to 1974 he co-presented the BBC World Service’s 24 Hours. Prior to the snap February 1974 election which brought Labour back to power, Macfarquhar was selected for Belper, where the Conservative, Geoffrey Stewart-smith, had ousted George Brown in 1970. Helped by boundary changes, he recovered it with a majority of 2,034, increased that October to 5,684.
At Westminster the Foreign Office minister, David Ennals, made Macfarquhar his PPS; he later moved with Ennals to the DHSS, resigning in 1968 after voting against the Government. In the run-up to the 1975 referendum on continued membership of the EEC, Macfarquhar defeated the Government by 270-153 with a call to have the votes counted and the results declared county by county rather than nation by nation. He was less successful with a further proposal to enfranchise Britons living abroad or on holiday.
With the Left-winger Jo Richardson, he inflicted a further defeat on the government over its Sex Discrimination Bill; ministers had wanted to keep restrictions on women’s working hours and contact with machinery.
After the death of Mao, Macfarquhar warned in the North Atlantic Assembly that a Russochinese rapprochement could pose a threat to Nato. He embarrassed the government by asking if Wilson, by then retired, had given Russia a secret undertaking that Britain would not sell Harrier jump-jets to China. He also discovered that hardly anyone in the Department of Trade, which was leading Britain’s export drive, could speak a relevant foreign language.
At the 1979 election he lost his seat to the Conservative, Sheila Faith, by 882 votes. Four years later – having broken with Labour – he was SDP candidate for South Derbyshire, finishing third.
Macfarquhar returned for a year to 24 Hours. He rejoined Chatham House – serving on its Council and just failing to be elected Chairman – and took up research fellowships on both sides of the Atlantic.
He returned to Harvard as a Visiting Professor in 1982, secured its chair of Government in 1984, and two years later was appointed Director of its Fairbank Centre for Far Eastern Research, serving until 1992 and again from 2005 to 2006. From 1990 he was Leroy B Williams Professor of History and Political Science, and from 1998 to 2004 he chaired Harvard’s Department of Government.
In 1984 Macfarquhar called for Britain to press China to give Hong Kong “Taiwan status” post-1997 to reassure business and residents; this essentially happened, as “one country, two systems”. In 1989, after the Tiananmen Square killings, he suggested that if thousands of Hong Kong residents did make for Britain prior to the handover, they could be dispersed throughout the EC.
He was a member of the Trilateral Commission from 1974 to 1998, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At various times he also served on the Fabian Society’s executive committee, was a governor of Soas and a trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust.
Macfarquhar’s masterwork was his three-volume The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. Volume 3, The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961-1966 (1997), won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize. His other books included The Hundred Flowers, The Sino-soviet Dispute, China Under Mao, The Forbidden City, The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, Mao’s Last Revolution and, in 2015, The Politics of China: Sixty Years of the People’s Republic of China.
Roderick Macfarquhar married Emily Cohen, an American Sinologist, in 1964. She died in 2001 and he is survived by their son and their daughter.
Roderick Macfarquhar, born December 2 1930, died February 10 2019