The China Journals: Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s, by Hugh Trevor-roper
The China Journals: Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s Hugh Trevor-roper, edited by Richard Davenport-hines Bloomsbury £25
Hugh Trevor-roper made his fortune and public reputation with his Last Days of Hitler.
His work as an MI6 officer investigating what had been the dictator’s fate at the end of the war enabled him to become one of the original media dons. Then he suffered ridicule for his authentication of the so-called Hitler Diaries in 1983.
One reason he fell for the hoax was that the manuscripts of the Hitler Diaries, which he inspected, lay in a lucky place for Trevor-roper. It was in the same Swiss bank vault that he had found the diaries of Sir Edmund Backhouse
(1873-1944) – ‘The most obscene thing I had ever read,’ he told me – which formed the basis of his bestseller Hermit of Peking (1976), which exposed how much of the accepted history of lateimperial China had been manufactured by the fantasist revealed in his diaries.
Without knowing Chinese, TrevorRoper showed it was possible to see through an intellectual fraud working in that language. He had in fact visited China only once – in autumn 1965 – with a delegation under the auspices of the Society for Anglo-chinese Understanding. What Trevor-roper came quickly to understand about Mao’s regime and its Western admirers ensured he would not be asked back.
His diary of the visit is full of the frustrations of depending on poor-quality interpreters translating propaganda pap from repetitive Communist officials. Brainwashing may have been the Maoist regime’s speciality – the Chairman told another visitor that he washed his own mind once a decade – but the mindnumbing propaganda was a revulsion therapy for Trevor-roper. He was in China as the Cultural Revolution’s frenzied attack on the heritage of Chinese civilisation was beginning.
Barely 15 years after Mao seized power, his British delegation got to meet scholars who had made their reputations before 1949 but were still in post – though those naïve enough to fall for Mao’s One Hundred Flowers trick to flush out critics had disappeared.
Trevor-roper soon worked out that the vice-president of any given institute or the vice-director of even a primary school was the Communist Party’s local representative – and therefore the real boss, with an ageing and intimidated superior quietly avoiding the risk of saying anything interesting.
Trevor-roper catches the mindbending boredom of being trapped in an official delegation led by the nose and prevented as far as possible from seeing anything interesting, and also draws out the characters of his fellow travellers. The playwright Robert Bolt is the sceptical exception to the rest of the party, who are bent on seeing the positive in every staged, ‘spontaneous’ encounter. The self-appointed leader of the delegation was an early queen of the quangos beginning to regulate so much of British life in the 1960s.
Mary Adams was on the board of the Council for Industrial Design, as well as sitting on the ITV authority and being a senior figure in the Consumers’ Association. She showed no interest in anything in China other than being introduced to important people, who sadly failed to recognise the Quango Queen for her worth. And an invitation to meet Mao’s Number Two, Zhou Enlai, evaporated.
Trevor-roper relished a public scandal and used this experience to expose how the Society for Anglo-chinese Understanding was really a front organisation for Mao’s regime. Mobilising a variety of Oxford dons, some with similar intelligence backgrounds, Trevor-roper fought one of those Cold War battles that now seem so remote.
Maybe when we think how many ‘experts’ and entrepreneurs fell head over heels for the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, as a model reformer, yesteryear’s enthusiasts for ruthless rulers such as Stalin and Mao as the hope for humanity will seem less incredible.
These diaries are as much about the forgotten world of Britain’s intellectual and academic élite in the Cold War as they are about China. They offer unusual light on the cultural Cold War underway in the West between fellow travellers of the Communist regimes, then apparently on the rise, and Western anti-communists of various strains.
Trevor-roper’s rare service in both MI6 and MI5 gave him intelligence contacts who shared information about doubtful characters across academe and cultural life. Trevor-roper’s Oxford was also where future Cold War intelligence officers such as John le Carré cut their teeth as student informers on the pro-soviet left.
All this might seem a footnote to the history of the 1960s, if it weren’t for the footnotes provided by Richard Davenport-hines. If not a book-withinthe-book, they provide a retrospective counterpoint to Trevor-roper’s grand themes from the mid-’60s, correcting occasional errors and misjudgements, and amplifying what he got right.