Reliable Essays

by Clive James

  But the garden party was not an occasion for confrontation. Instead she socialized, meeting, inter alios, the delightful Katherine Flower, presenter of BBC TV’s ‘Follow Me’, which teaches English to the Chinese. Francis Matthews, the star actor in the programme, is the most famous British face in China. Katherine comes second and Mrs Thatcher third, but by this time she was catching up fast, although getting barely half as much air time as Kim Il Sung, who was still checking out that terracotta army. Perhaps he had at last found the ideal audience for his brand of oratory: statues don’t shuffle. Also present at the garden party was the Hong Kong shipping magnate Sir Y. K. Pao. Destined to crop up everywhere in the itinerary, Powie is a name you should note. He and the War Leader go back a long way together, to the time, one gathers, when he was before the mast and she was being called to the bar.

  Thursday afternoon was culture gulch, meaning that the Strong Woman could plan her upcoming talks with Deputy Prime Minister Deng Xiaoping while her face and feet were on automatic pilot. At the Conservatory of Music there was much emphasis on Beethoven, of whom there is a plaster bust in even the most humble homes, but the star act was undoubtedly the girl Wu Man. Later on she will be the woman Wu Man, but punning on Chinese names is a low form of humour. Meanwhile she is the best young player of the pipa in China. On the pipa, which is less unlike a zither than it is unlike anything else, Wu Man played some dance music of the Yi tribe. The Yi tribe sounded like a fun outfit, and for a moment the War Leader relaxed.

  Relaxing at the British Book Exhibition was less easy, because the joint was packed with a chosen spontaneous crowd of nervous intellectuals. One of my own books was among the carefully selected thousand and I had visions of helping to make a three-pronged impact on China’s spiritual future, along with Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch, but there is the problem of distribution. The War Leader’s Husband found it hard to see why all the rest of the Chinese couldn’t just walk into the library like this lot and sit down to read. A very impressive British Council lady, who speaks effortless Mandarin and is also able to communicate with the Strong Woman’s Man, explained that there was a considerable number of Chinese out there, many of them living quite a long way away.

  After the standard plum-blossom beauty of a Peking sunset the War Leader dined privately with the British business community while the Media formed groups to eat Peking Duck, a large beast which needs a team of people sitting around its perimeter and all eating inwards for several hours before it disappears. Apart from duck demolition there is practically nothing to do in Peking after 10 p.m. except dance to old Fats Domino 45 rpm EPs, usually on your own. The Chinese opera on television is OK if you like acrobats. Then comes a blank hissing screen followed by a fitful sleep and one million bicycle bells at dawn. It is Friday, and the population is on the move again.

  So was the War Leader, entering the increasingly familiar Great Hall of the People for the first meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Deng Xiaoping, hero of the biggest comeback story since de Gaulle. Mrs Mao had him down and almost out, but he hung in. Deng knows a Strong Woman when he sees one. He was seeing one now, with the strawberry-blotched blue taffeta suavely off-setting the cloisonne enamel of her maquillage, so reminiscent of a Ming dynasty incense-burner. He had heard how Zhao had been bested in the Great Fog Conversation, but Zhao was a youngster. He, Deng, was an old hand.

  Deng initiated the Great Food Conversation, using the Governor of Hong Kong, invited for that very purpose, as an unwitting foil. Deng said it had been great fun welcoming Kim Il Sung. Having thrown his right, he crossed with his left, saying the food had been very good in Sichuan. The Governor of Hong Kong agreed that the food was good in Sichuan. But the War Leader refused to be drawn. She said that on her earlier visit to China – managing to imply that she would visit China more often if there were not so many wars to win – she had found the food best in Suzhou. ‘Well,’ said Deng, ‘I don’t think so.’ He had been forced into a hollow protestation, an uncomfortable position for beginning secret talks. The widow of Chou En-lai, holding a bouquet of roses specially flown out by British Airways, complimented the War Leader on her wisdom and tact. ‘At your age,’ she added, ‘it can be said it is the Golden Age.’ The Strong Woman took the compliment as her due, forgetting to return it. What was she, a devil? For in the great Sung painting ‘The Picture of the Search in the Mountain’, are not the women of angelic appearance more ferocious than the dragons?

  The War Leader stumbled on the way down the steps but the Media’s excitement soon subsided – she was merely preoccupied, not fatigued. Off she went with the Chinese for a visit to the Summer Palace, the replacement, on a different site, for the one the British burned down. Actually the interloping forces burned down the replacement too, but it had been replaced again. If the Chinese should bring this awkward subject up, she could always remind them that they, in turn, burned down the British Embassy in the days of the Cultural Revolution.

  Later on Friday afternoon the Media were granted access to the War Leader so that she could announce what sounded like a standoff in negotiations. Confucians among the Media might have said her voice was choked with emotion. T’ang positivists might have said she had Negotiator’s Throat. She herself could hardly speak, but this fact meant nothing unless you could see what shape Deng was in, and he wasn’t available.

  It was a pity that, whether for protocol reasons or because of strained vocal cords, Deng didn’t show up at the Return Banquet thrown by the visiting team in the Great Hall of the People, because the War Leader had saved her most stunning outfit until last. A magenta silk gown that recalled Chi’en-lung flambeau ware at its most exquisitely uninhibited, it clashed with the pink tasselled chairs, but that wasn’t her problem. Let them change the chairs. Her throat was still in tatters but she delivered a Chinese proverb in both languages. ‘It is better to come and see for yourself than to read a hundred reports.’ The Chinese version sounded a bit short. The Party functionary sitting beside me described it as ‘understandable’. His name was Fang so I did not argue.

  Zowie’s return speech was the usual railway station announcement read at high speed, but when the eating started he indicated bilateral flexibility by employing a fork. The toasting fluid was a pale British equivalent of mao tai, and some of the British dishes bore a close resemblance to shark’s fin soup and fish lips, but the imported thin mints were a hit. The rapidly improving military band played a very good arrangement of ‘Greensleeves’. There are some instrumentalists in that combo who would make von Karajan drop his whip.

  As they dined on relentlessly, it was dusk outside, with the curved yellow-tiled roofs of the Forbidden City glowing softly like honeycomb through a sea of grey powder. The War Leader had chosen the right time for Peking – a time of transition, when the Lotus Lake in the Winter Palace Park is thick with green leaves, after the blossoms have fallen and before the roots have been collected to be eaten. Out on the lake rises the Jade Island, coming to a point, like a lovely pimple, in the dome of the White Dagoba. When Mrs Mao was at the height of her power, she closed the Winter Palace Park to the people and reserved the Jade Island for her own use, so that she could ride her horse in private.

  In China’s history, a few women are tyrants and millions of them are chattels. The problem is to make them something in between. You can still see thousands of women in Peking whose feet were bound when they were young. You can’t miss that awkward splayfooted walk: they must forever struggle to keep their balance. Feet are no longer bound but that does not mean that minds are free. Despite everything the Revolution can do, the women still serve the men, the girls are still snobs who marry boys who get ahead, and you still can’t get ahead without connections. The Revolution, like any other Chinese dynasty, is behind the times. Margaret Thatcher is a democratic product to an extent of which even the most radical Chinese theorist can hardly dream. She doesn’t even have to think about it, and often forgets to.

  On Saturday morning the Strong W
oman rose into the air, heading for Shanghai with the Media clinging to her wings. After that would come Canton, with Hong Kong soothingly employed as the gate of departure. For does not Wang Wei’s poem say that a chip off the dragon’s tooth is a spear in its side? No, it does not. I made that one up.

  September, 1982: previously included in Flying Visits, 1984

  The Great Leap Homeward

  Her negotiations in Peking for the nonce complete, the Dragon Lady flew south towards Shanghai, altering her image in mid-air, as dragons are wont to do. For the purpose of hard bargaining with the Chinese political leaders she had been the Woman of Jade, a material so tough that it was not until the period of the Warring States that the tools were discovered which could make it fully workable into such treasurable artefacts as the pi disc. But now her purpose was to spread enlightenment, so she took on the aspect of the Woman of Science, Yin Sage of the Book of Changes, Adept of the sixty-four Symbolic Hexagrams, and regular reader of the New Scientist. Corralled into the back end of her winged conveyance, the British Media, showing distinct signs of wear, resigned themselves to yet another punishing schedule.

  The Yin Sage arrived in Shanghai to find herself lunching with the omnipresent Hong Kong shipping magnate Sir Y. K. Pao, a sort of soy-sauce Onassis. The Chinese need Powie to build ships, but unfortunately for them Powie’s expertise comes accompanied by his personality. Powie puts on a show of dynamism that makes Jimmy Goldsmith seem like a Taoist contemplative. As an old pal of the British Prime Minister, Powie was well placed to make her visit look like an occasion for which he had helped grease the wheels.

  The PM’s advisers must have realized that it was enough for her to be representing democracy without also representing capitalism in one of its more unpalatably flagrant forms, because the bleary-eyed British Media were eventually allowed to get the impression that Powie’s knighthood did not, in HMG’s view, necessarily entitle him to behave as if he were carrying ambassadorial credentials to the Far East. But for the moment Powie was at the controls and hustling full blast. He had a new ship all set to be launched and there were no prizes for guessing who would swing the bottle.

  After the big lunch, the big launch. Shanghai’s Jiangnan shipyards look pretty backward beside the Japanese equivalent, in which half a dozen engineers in snow-white designer overalls converse with one another by wrist-video while a team of Kawasaki Unimate robots transforms a heap of raw materials into a fully computerized bulk carrier with a jacuzzi in the captain’s bathroom. Here there were about a thousand Chinese queueing up to borrow the spanner. But the atmosphere was festive. An air of spontaneity – real spontaneity, as opposed to the mechanical variety laid on by Party directives – was generated by a band truck tricked out with balloons and dispensing the Shanghai equivalent of Chicago jazz. A very big drum and several different sizes of gong combined to produce the typical Chinese orchestral texture of many obsolete fire-alarms going off at once.

  Next to the completed ship, which Powie had cunningly named World Goodwill, there was a sign in English saying BE CAREFUL NOT TO DROP INTO THE RIVER. The Yin Sage was dressed in navy blue with a white hat, thereby establishing a nautical nuance, an impression furthered by her consort’s azure tie. Actually it was the same tie he had worn when arriving in Peking, but this was a different city, and in China every city is a whole new nation. It is not just that there are a thousand million Chinese who have never seen the world. There are a thousand million Chinese who have never seen China. So if you wear the same tie at different ends of the country it is unlikely that you will cause the locals to whisper behind their hands. No stranger to the Far East, the Yin Sage’s Yang Companion has got such considerations well taped.

  Powie rose to his Gucci-shod feet in order to convince anybody who still needed convincing that he bears a truly remarkable resemblance to the late Edward G. Robinson. He thanked his distinguished sponsor for being there. He thanked everybody else for being there as well. He thanked the Chinese Government for its breadth of vision. He was on the point of thanking the population of China individually, but the Woman of Science had a schedule to meet. Referring, in her Falklandish capacity as a connoisseur of naval architecture, to ‘this splendid ship’, she spoke of how it epitomized the ability of Socialist China and the freely enterprising West to work in harmony. ‘This ship . . . is a symbol of the close relationship.’ It was a relationship ship.

  She launched the relationship ship by swinging an axe to cut the line that released the bottle. The bottle declined to break, but according to Chinese tradition it is the blow of the axe which matters, not the result. In the I Ching, according to the great naturalist philosopher Chu Hsi’s justly celebrated interpretation, Li, the cosmic principle of organization at all levels, is coterminous with and ultimately inseparable from chhi, or matter-energy. To put it another way, it’s the thought that counts.

  The relationship ship was already in the water and thus destined to remain immobile after being launched, but the band truck, or Truck of Good Luck, erupted into a rousing rendition of its signature tune, ‘Seven Ancient Fire-Engines Failing to Discover the Location of Chow Fong’s Burning House’. The Yin Sage, charmingly referred to by a nervous young female interpreter as ‘the Rather Honourable Margaret Thatcher’, took leave of Powie with the air of one who knows that the separation will be all too short.

  She was headed for the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry of the Academica Sinica, whither all the British Media, except one, decided not to accompany her. My colleagues, wise in the trade, had knowledgeably concluded that now was the time to file their copy, take a well-earned nap, or check out the attractions of what had once been China’s most westernized big city, the first one to import every occidental fad up to and including Communism. In Shanghai it is even possible to buy an alcoholic drink if you turn the right corners. The girls are just as unattainable as in Peking but they dress more provocatively, with a cut to their comradely trousers which suggests that they are not above withholding some of their labour from the commune in order to sit up at night resewing the odd seam.

  It would have been good to spend more than just a few minutes following Sidney Greenstreet’s ghost past the old Western Concession compounds of the Bund, and on top of that there was the Shanghai National Museum, containing pictures which I had been waiting to see half my life, and of which I can only say that if I could write the way those guys painted I would use up a lot less Tipp-Ex. But like a fool I went to the Biochemistry Institute, and like a fool I got lucky. The Woman of Science put on her best public performance of the tour so far, and I was the only scribe there to cover it.

  The performance was good because for once she wasn’t performing. Biochemistry is her field and the assembled scientists were among the top boys in it, so when they spoke she was for a moment distracted from her usual self-imposed task of proving her superiority to everyone else. The head of the Institute apologized, in beautifully eloquent English, for his English, which he had not spoken for forty years. ‘Today we are very honoured to have you with us. First of all, may I introduce Professor . . .’ He introduced a dozen professors, respectively in charge of such departments as insulin synthesis, nucleic acids, biomemory, molecular radiation and a lot of other things I couldn’t catch. Most of it was Chinese to me but clearly it was grist to the mill of the Woman of Science, especially the stuff about insulin, which she was concerned with when studying under her famous mentor, the Nobel Prizewinner Dorothy Hodgkin – a name revered by the Shanghai scientists, who had a picture of her in their visitors’ book.

  That the Yin Sage was Dorothy Hodgkin’s Pupil plainly went down a storm with the Chinese, in whom the dynastic principle is well ingrained. The Pupil’s pupils sharpened, I noticed, when one of the scientists announced that the laboratory was working on leukaemia and liver cancer. Since the same laboratory had already developed, among other things, such eminently applicable ideas as the reprogramming of fish to breed in still water, there was no need to think th
ey would not crack the case, always provided that their government gave curing old humans the same priority as feeding new ones. Of these latter, needless to say, there is no shortage, and in fact the Shanghai laboratory is working on a fertility drug (derived from the same LH–H analysis that fixed the fish) which could produce irreversible infertility at high dosages – a possibility which the Woman of Science immediately saw might be open to abuse, and said so.

  Touring the individual laboratories, she interviewed the scientists working in each. They all spoke dazzling scientific English, with words like ‘cucumber’ falsely emphasized and phrases like ‘polypep-tide macromolecular electrokinesis’ fluently delivered. After she left each room I backtracked to ask the interviewees, relaxing after their ordeal, whether she still knew her stuff. Without exception they said she did. She missed a trick, though, in the room where they analyse proteins by counting dots. Reminiscing, the Woman of Science said: ‘We had no computers in those days to analyse the dots.’ Her hosts were too polite to tell her the truth, which was that as far as they were concerned those days were still here. Even to the inexpert eye, the laboratory is painfully underequipped. The rubber tubes are perished, glass is hoarded like gold, and there is obviously no more computer time in a year than there are rainy days in the Gobi. They’re counting those dots with an abacus. When the Woman of Science handed a Sinclair desk computer to the Japanese it was coals to Newcastle, or at any rate bamboo shoots to Tokyo. The same computer given to the Shanghai Biochemistry Institute would have made some long friends.

  The banquet that night was hosted by the Mayor of Shanghai, who generously announced in his speech of welcome that ‘British people have always had a great feeling for the Chinese’. He could have put this another way, saying that British people were instrumental in poisoning half the country with opium and showed an enthusiasm unusual even among the European nations when it came to humiliating the Chinese by such practices as shutting them out of their own cities. The park which was denied to ‘dogs and Chinese’ is still there on the river side of the Bund. Nowadays it is enjoyed by the indigenous population but they allow us to share it, which is a lot more than we ever did for them. One only hoped that the Yin Sage knew how tactful the Mayor was being in not mentioning any of that.