Charmed out of their minds

David Cameron probably didn’t need reminding while he was in China what fools intelligent people can be when they visit authoritarian regimes.

David Cameron probably didn’t need reminding while he was in China what fools intelligent people can be when they visit authoritarian regimes. ‘Useful idiots’, as Lenin didn’t say, they make allowances for dishonesty, even horrors, which they never would at home, express guilt for the past of their own countries, use words like ‘progress’ for the place they are briefly visiting, and accept at face-value hospitality and words which normal consideration would tell them were well-rehearsed and manipulative.

Patrick Wright, a journalist and historian, describes the three ‘missions’ to China in 1954 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Communist victory. The first mission, a high-powered Labour Party group, headed by Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan, met Chou Enlai and had an audience with Mao. The second mission, a ‘cultural delegation’, included Hugh Casson, Paul Hogarth and Stanley Spencer, who produced a number of paintings and sketches. These, especially Spencer’s, strike me as excellent, and show what an observer, even in China, could do if allowed to use his talents without reinterpretation by his hosts. Hogarth, however, later ‘repudiated his drawings’. The third mission included many trade unionists and, as adviser, E. G. Pulleyblank, the Professor of Chinese at Cambridge.

Passport to Peking is far too long and disjointed (it winds through almost a third of its length before the travellers reach China), and is not the ‘desperate comedy’ Wright thinks. But it painfully reminds me of a similar ‘mission’ to China in 1972, one of the first American ones, even before Nixon. My fellow trippers, all PhDs in various Chinese subjects, were, like those in 1954, bowled over by the assurances, banquets, smiles, friendly children, spotless factories, hospitals and cheerful peasants.