Roderick MacFarquhar

Roderick MacFarquhar interviewed by Alan Macfarlane

Part one 6th April 2017

0:05:11 Born in Lahore which was then part of India, the first baby born in the Lady Willingdon Hospital, called after the Vicereine, in 1930; my father told me later that when my mother's second sister came in with my father to view the baby, she said "If that's babies I'll have dogs"; father didn't speak to her for months; the first eight years of my life were spent in India, mainly in Amritsar, then I went back to prep school; I really don't know much about the MacFarquhars: I was once taken to the Black Isle, which is neither an island nor black, near Inverness; my paternal grandparents were there and it was there that my father was born; according to my father, his grandfather signed his son's birth certificate with an X, so not very well educated Highland stock; he fought on Bonny Prince Charlie's side at the Battle of Culloden; my father was the oldest of the five surviving of my grandfather; he was the first, and indeed the last, to go to university; he went to Aberdeen University up through the Scottish system which was totally by scholarship; my grandfather worked at a tailor's shop and was not particularly rich; years later I asked my father what made him, a person who had never been outside Scotland, apply to join the Indian Civil Service; he replied that the pension seemed good; of course, the British Government being as mean as it always is to it's servants, that pension remained the same from the time my father joined in the late 20s until the mid 50s when the ICS alumni led a revolt and forced the Government to up it; I saw quite a bit of my Scottish grandmother because when my parents were both in India and I was going to Fettes I spent holidays with her in Inverness; she was a very small lady with grey hair in a bun, but was very modern and knowledgeable about films; she used to get a film magazine every week and knew about all the marriages, and the parts they played, totally unlike what you would expect; eventually she had to leave Inverness because she couldn't look after herself; the only girl in the family had moved to Erith in Kent; she was a draughtswoman and had a good job, and was deputed to look after my grandmother, which she did; the only other person who might have gone to university if things had turned out differently was my father's third brother; he had quite a distinguished career; he had driven ambulances during the Spanish civil war, on the Republican side of course; he had briefly been a Communist when he was younger but his faith in it disappeared, partly because of the Communists he met in Spain, partly because of events in Britain; he became a Captain during the Second World War, and later became Secretary of the Highland Fund which was designed to encourage urban dwellers in Scotland to go back to the crofts, and to revive the crofting system in Uist and so on; it was quite successful but he became quite a left-wing Labour supporter (I was a right-wing Labour supporter); we both had the same name and on one famous occasion - he being left-wing was anti-Europe, I being right-wing was pro-Europe - an advertisement appeared in the Times saying that Roderick MacFarquhar had signed an advertisement which was anti-Europe; my late wife, Emily, said I should call up my friends and say something because they will all think I had turned-traitor; I said that nobody would believe that; about an hour later the first phone call came, so I had to plant an item in the Times diary asking that the real Roderick MacFarquhar stand up; we were good friends; he used to come down from Scotland to be on a CND march, he would bring a bottle of whisky - I never drink whisky, but by the end of the weekend it was half gone; I loved him dearly and still have a fine portrait that was done of him

7:55:24 My father's influence I suspect from what my kids and late wife have said was probably in the realm of work, in the sense that he worked very hard; as I grew up he got increasing responsibility; he was Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, which was a very important job in the Punjab; his last four years in Amritsar he was the Settlement Officer which meant he did the last cadastral survey and land assignment in the whole of British India and he worked very hard at it; my part in it was simply riding around to the various villages which were in his purview; we would be greeted with garlands; my greatest memory was one village which had gone out of its way with a big arch which said 'Welcome Mr MacFarquhar', then another arch with 'Welcome Mrs MacFarquhar', then a third arch with 'Welcome young Prince MacFarquhar'; that really made me love those villagers; we used to stay in the Dak bungalows, and it was really when you think of it an incredible life; people would come out in their late twenties and be running areas with hundreds of thousands of people living in it; an enormous responsibility, and it is incredible that at the end of the British Empire in India there were only 1,200 civil servants of whom 600 were Indian; I was obviously very impressed by this job; I remember when my father moved from the Punjab to Central Government in about 1940, once during the 'Quit India' campaign run by the Congress Party we were bicycling home from somewhere and there were some 'Quit India' notices on the walls that lead up to Viceregal Lodge; we stopped and tore them off which was what one did if one was a British person in India; I went to a Christian Brothers' School not because my parents were Catholic but because they thought that was the best education available in Delhi; there were Hindus and Muslims of course, and every religion; I remember one Hindu boy saying to me - the Japanese were at the gates at that time - that he thought we were going to lose this war; I said "No we're not", and there was no way that I thought the British could lose because of the confidence when you ran a place like that; I had been evacuated from my school in Scotland to avoid German invasion of Britain and found there was possibly going to be a Japanese invasion of India, but I didn't even conceive of there being a possibility that we could lose; so I think my father's work habits probably had an effect; work was most important; my mother was brought up in India; she was born in Calcutta, her maiden name was Whitburn; her father had been a ship's engineer who came to Calcutta, presumably left the Merchant Marine and became a civil engineer in Bengal; my mother, like myself later, was sent home to school; she had a wonderful voice and she wanted to be an opera singer but my grandfather insisted she came back and become part of the Indian scene, get married and do what everyone else did; so her career as an opera singer never transpired though she did sing for ENSA during the war, she went round giving concerts for troops; she did not work in the sense that modern women work; she was a brilliant hostess; despite the fact that in India, British women did not go into the kitchen, she was a brilliant cook; she cooked not merely curries but all sorts of things for friends and family when she got back to Britain; it never atrophied her ability to cook; one thing my kids want me to find out whether or not there was any Indian blood in her line of the family because unquestionably there was a half-sister of my grandmother, who was also born in Calcutta, who was clearly Anglo-Indian; my grandmother didn't look it at all but that other side of the family did; so sometime when I get round to it I shall have my DNA checked

15:11:05 We used to go to and fro on the Italian Line between India and England; there are lots of pictures of me as a toddler on these Italian boats, the 'Conte Verde' and 'Conte Rosso', but I've no memories of that at all; I think one of my first memories actually was an Indian memory; when I was five my mother had another child, another boy, called David; he died aged one or just under in Srinagar, Kashmir; I kept asking where he was; my maternal grandmother and mother claimed that one day I said "Look at the curtain, there is an angel there"; they said there was nothing there, but I never asked about him again; my other memories are from six or seven so maybe not so interesting; because the sea voyage at that time took so long, the ICS after so many years got eight months home leave; in 1937 we took the leave and went round the world - Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, America; I have a couple of memories from that trip; the first was of a slaughter-house in Chicago which was absolutely terrible, blood dripping from the machines; the other was nearly getting left on the subway in New York; I was sitting, looking out of the window, looked back, and somehow they had disappeared; I had to get up, rush out and find them; on that trip I remember I had a fight with a Japanese boy on the 'Tatsuta Maru' CHECK which was the ship that we sailed in from Yokohama to the West Coast; we had a terrible typhoon and only ice cream was served; I remember a trip on a train to the Great Wall where there was lots of snow, so this must have been very early in 1937; and a dog snapping at me at a garden in Japan; another memory from Shanghai - my mother had told my Anglo-Portuguese nanny that I had to be able to read before this trip because I might be left on my own, which I could - my parents went off sightseeing in Shanghai and I was left alone, and I remember ringing for the room service and asking where my parents were, then reassured, I went back to my books; the last memory I have is of listening to the Coronation of George VI on the radio in New York; we came back to Britain and I went to Craigflower at Torryburn in Fife, a prep school, when I was seven; Frank Wailes was the Headmaster, and someone who is now in the House of Lords, David Hannay, was also there but he was only six; he had tight black curls so in the parlance of that day we called him Little Black Sambo; he is now totally bald; I went there and made my name immediately by saying where was the steward to take my bag, having just come off a ship; I remember quite a bit about my prep school; my mother stayed in England while my father went home to India; we spent a couple of summers in Jersey; then they got me evacuated in 1940 as the possibility of invasion looked very serious

21:59:05 I think I cried when my mother left when I first went to school, but I have no memory of it; what I do remember very strongly however, which would be the equivalent, is when I went to Fettes; my mother and myself came back in 1944; when we arrived at Glasgow the boats were getting ready for D-Day; I remember that she stayed for about a year, and her second sister was going to give me housing with her daughter, who was five years younger than I, while my parents were both in India; I remember very distinctly walking down the platform, possibly King's Cross or maybe Euston, and seeing my aunt at the gate ready to greet me; suddenly realizing it wasn't my mother greeting me something happened inside me - I was just fourteen; I think from that point on I was more inclined to be emotionally self-reliant - I think my mother noticed the difference - because one realized one was not always going to be in the comfort of one's home; I had already been at school but every holiday she was there to greet me 24:45:06 On childhood interests, I certainly had soldiers, and stamps at one point; I know when I came back to my prep school for one semester to take Common Entrance I was the champion swimmer; I won every swimming race in the sports and also got the prize for sharpshooting; it was an odd time, moving back to that school; I don't think there was anyone I remembered before; I don't think David Hannay was still there; there was a master there who told the most wonderful ghost stories; he would tell us to turn off the lights and all we'd see was the tip of his cigarette. and he'd tell these stories; I didn't particularly like him, I certainly wasn't one of his favourites, but I loved his stories; then after a half-term during the first two years I was there, one of my age group - we must have been about ten then - had spent his half-term with him in Edinburgh; this man had gone out and got some kind of a branch and told the boy to beat him with it; we didn't believe it, thought it very strange behaviour; I don't think he told the Headmaster because they were very upright people who ran the school and they would have sacked him immediately; bullying. there was one boy who was a bully and bullied us all at some time; he took it in turns to bully each person; I remember his name too but I won't mention it

28:41:06 My early exposure to India has got nothing to do with my later interest in the Far East; what that movement to and fro did for me was to make me very proud of what Britain had achieved, though I hadn't heard of massacres etc. even living in Amritsar; I felt my father was doing amazing work, particularly when he was riding through the countryside doing his villages, rather than being in Government offices in Delhi; it meant we were very different - though there had been others who had been abroad at my school - from people who had grown up in the home counties, Scotland or the northern part of England - we used to get quite a number of boys from Newcastle at Fettes - whose horizons were much smaller; more basically, I think the sights and sounds and smells of childhood were not British but Indian; I think what it made me feel was much more patriotic in the sense that I didn't take Britain for granted as people who grew up in Britain possibly did; it was a country which had ruled this incredible place out there called India, and other places as well, and it was a country greatly to be admired; I don't think the toing and froing did much to shake me up, I just took it as normal

31:27:12 One of my proudest memories at Fettes early on was my mother's story that she'd met some man on a train and they were discussing their sons; she told him I was at Fettes and he said that his son had been there too, but it was really too tough and he's sent him to Rugby; we had of course cold showers, cold baths if you were a prefect, beating by prefects and as a prefect I beat; it didn't seem to me to be an affront to my dignity in any particular way, just part of what the place was about; none of the masters as far as I could tell, certainly in my house, took any particular pleasure in beating; in fact I am not sure I was ever beaten by the House Master, only by prefects; you went into the changing room, you bent over, and the four prefects took a run at you and hit you with a cane; it hurt briefly but wasn't very serious; I think I may once have been beaten by the House Master because the science master, Lodge, found me looking at cricket scores in physics, and I think I was beaten by the House Master for that; there was bullying and there was homosexuality; fortunately I never attracted anyone nor was attracted too; on the whole, once you got past your first year or two of not knowing where you were - you had to grow up pretty quickly - it became routine; you did your work, went and played your games - rugger, cricket, field hockey; I liked cricket most and hockey second; sadly, because it was the be all and end all of sport at Fettes, I was not as good at rugger; the first teams that I made were in squash and fives; I don't think that I have anything special to remember about it; hundreds and thousands of boys in the last century have experienced it; on inspiring teachers - the sad thing is that the answer is probably no; it may be that some inspiration crept in and I just don't recognise it; we had a headmaster called Crichton-Miller who looked and felt to me to be rather uncultured though his wife was very cultured; the English master, who was a Reverend, said he always did his plays for her; I did some acting; in fact, one of my best friends from those days played my daughter in a play called 'Thunder Rock' by Robert Ardrey; I remember him, and he probably did have an influence on me in the sense that he said that when you go to Oxford - people from Fettes went to Cambridge for some reason but I was going to Oxford as my mother had always wanted me to - when you go to Oxford, have a good time, enjoy yourself, let the blue-stockings of Somerville go to their libraries and get their firsts, but you enjoy yourself; I think that was probably the worst advice that I could have had because it wasn't until Harvard that I discovered that I really liked to work; my history master, since I was mainly a historian in sixth form, was not very inspiring; once when some old boys had come back we came into the history classroom - there were only three or four of us in the history sixth - and there was a sign written 'Look up there for dramatic effect' which was just what the history master used to do, look up to the left ceiling; he had one effect on me which I to some extent regret; he said that no one had ever been to Keble from this college, and why didn't I apply there; so I did and I got in, but does one want to go to an ugly college when one goes to Oxford? There was one master who believed I was a semi-genius but he didn't teach me too much; sad to say there was no great awakening by one master there

38:45:11 My father was Presbyterian; when I was in India I was sent to Sunday school and church; my father would say that he was not going to church until the war ended, but he never went to church even then; his mother used to take me to church when I spent holidays with her in Inverness, but basically it was not a church-going family at all; I think my mother did believe but didn't go to church; I went once on a Sunday when I was about twelve or thirteen, arrived late, and there were a Captain in uniform, also late, and we sat together; afterwards he asked if he could give me lunch; it wasn't that I was suspicious of him but I said that my mother always had lots of people to lunch on Sunday and why didn't he come too; Captain Burrows was his name, he came to lunch, and stayed until we left India; we put a tent in our garden and he lived in the tent; he was working in intelligence and his boss was Brigadier Enoch Powell; I once rang him up and Powell came on the phone and I asked to speak to Gordon Burrows; Powell asked who was calling him and I gave my name and he called out "Gordon, Madge Crocker for you!", and from then on some of my friends refer to me as Madge; those were happy days; I was Confirmed but only because I decided to get Confirmed, it seemed to be the right thing to do; in fact there was another boy there whose parents were in Singapore who had never even been baptised, so I was his Godfather - he was baptised and I was Confirmed; I did it within the Church of England and not as a Presbyterian; I think the services were ecumenical to an extent but basically Church of England at Fettes; it was a very angloish school; I did not go through any religious phase; I have been very interested in religion but more from a cultural, historical, angle; to what extend do the events in the Middle East happen; I got very struck on an author, Vilikovsky; he was apparently a brilliant guy who wrote books which were published in the late 60s where he was examining Middle Eastern history and reordering the history so that the calendar of the Jews and the Egyptians were better in sync; he pointed out all sorts or thing that were wrong; the one thing he said that was discovered to be true was about the atmosphere of Saturn which everybody thought was X and he said Y, and they finally discovered it was Y; I am interested in what happened, why it happened, what was the relationship there between the various races and the creeds which arose out of the Middle East; North India is more Muslim dominated that the south; we had Muslim servants so I wasn't exposed very much to the panoply of Hindu gods and goddesses in my youth; I think the British probably had a certain aversion to that; so I had no religious phase, just a fascination with how it all arose and the impact it has had

44:48:06 Music has been and is important in my life; my "pops" were the wonderful music from Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and others from the thirties; my mother once in a French nightclub - when I was with my parents doing a continental trip in the late forties - was offered a job when she sang 'Blue Moon' with the band; I had been hearing my mother singing classical songs all my life and hadn't paid too much attention because my father was totally amusical as far as I could tell; I did set myself a course of listening when I was at Oxford; I started with Palestrina and people like that and then got on to the romantic classics; I was graduating by the time I was at Brahms; the great musical experience of my life was when I was in the army; I went to Officer Cadet School and then I chose the Fourth Royal Tank Regiment because it was in the Suez Canal zone; we had gone through on the boat and it had always looked so glamorous; when I got there as a soldier, it was very boring; the Colonel sent me up to Fayed which was the regional headquarters to study the pay system because he wanted to replace the person who ran the pay system; while I was sitting in the grounds of a place I can no longer remember, on a Sunday in bright sunshine, the BBC was on and Ginette Neveu was playing Sibelius's violin concerto; that started a life-long love affair with Sibelius for me, and when my wife and I went to Finland some years ago we went up and saw the various Sibelius places; so music has meant a great deal and I listen to it quite a lot; I think possibly when I was an undergraduate I listened to music while studying, but on the whole I kept my study of music separate so that I actually listened to it; it doesn't really spill over, it's music; the other part of music I love is that to which you can dance; my wife loves ballet though I am not so keen; 'West Side Story' type dancing is mine

49:26:07 Oxford was licensed idleness, maybe it still is, I don't know; I do regret that it was only when I got to Harvard as a graduate student that I began to feel the love of just working all out; when I got to Harvard I think I spent my first afternoon there listening in the music library to a recording of 'Twelfth Night' and thinking how I could enjoy university; then I started my Chinese and realized that there was no way I was going to be able to enjoy university in the way I had enjoyed Oxford; at Oxford I worked moderately hard; I read P.P.E. though I came up to do history; for some reason the University was reluctant to let me change but no student graduated in philosophy from a Public school in those days, so why wouldn't I come from history; I wanted to do philosophy, the great Plato, Aristotle, and so on; there was Strawson, a brilliant man, who hadn't written his book yet, writing on a blackboard, then looking at the class and saying "See it is very simple"; the blackboard was full of symbols and I couldn't understand what he was saying, and more importantly I wasn't interested; Basil Mitchell was my philosophy tutor, more into history of religion I think, and he didn't know anything about this so he was no help; basically I went to the historical end of the politics section of P.P.E.; I heard Isaiah Berlin once; I think all of us doing P.P.E. that year, 1950 when I started - there was a very attractive about fortyish woman lecturer in economics who gave the basic course and we all attended that; the attitude that I got inculcated in, first from my English teacher at Fettes - enjoy yourself - and then from my economics tutor, Lloyd Jones, a very nice man who sent me off to America with a list of contacts, one of whom he recommended as he "packs a pretty Martini"; on my first visit with him we were discussing what lectures I should go to; he said that one was quite interesting, but was at 9am so perhaps I wouldn't want to go to it; somehow it raised my spirits and depressed them at the same time; at Oxford I did a lot of acting; Richardson was the Chairman of O.U.D.S. but I didn't really do anything with O.U.D.S.; I did a lot of E.T.C. - Experimental Theatre Club; I had a friend in Keble who was a very keen actor and took me into his plays, often one-acters, so I enjoyed that; so I took my English teacher's words to heart

54:35:17 I went to the Oxford Union quite religiously to listen to the debates in my first year; William Rees Mogg was President of the Union in my first term; the President in my term when I did my maiden speech was Jeremy Thorpe; he said to me "Remember when you are speaking, all these other people are probably too cowardly to speak", which was good advice; I got quite a good write-up in the Cambridge magazine because there was a Fettesian at Oxford who wrote for that Cambridge magazine, but I made a dreadful speech and I never spoke again at the Union; though all budding politicians who know anything about anything, keep to the Union, meet all the grandees from London coming down, I didn't do any of that; I joined the Labour and Liberal clubs, not the Conservative, but particularly the Liberal Club because the girls were prettier; Dorothy Woodman, Kingsley Martin's wife, once said to me "Your generation, I feel we lost you, because you all read 'Darkness at Noon', which I had and it certainly did affect me; I wasn't involved politically but I knew that I wanted to go into politics more than anything else; the real question in my mind what you do when you are not in politics; if you are Bill Clinton you are always in politics, all the rest of us have to do something else; most Conservative become barristers or will be in the City, and when they had earned their pile they would go in; most Labour in those days were secondary school teachers, and I wanted to be neither; so I thought journalism would be a good career; in those days the N.U.J., the National Union of Journalists, had strict rules that in order to get a job on a London paper you had to have done three years in the provinces doing hatches, matches and dispatches [births, marriages and deaths] and then you could come down to London, and if you were lucky you might get a job on a paper you liked; that struck me as being a bad way to go; there was only one way, and that was to be able to do something that Buggins couldn't do; I thought that was the way to go, to know something that Buggins didn't know; of course, India was obvious but I felt that too many people knew about it, but there had been a revolution in China only about three years before and people would need to know about that, so I would learn about China; so I went to the Professor of Chinese at Oxford who had to be an American as his name was Homer Dubs, and when he discovered that I was not interested in studying the Han dynasty with him, so was not interested in being his student, he became very friendly and talked to me about how to go about studying Chinese in America; he said that Yale had done a lot of work with the armed forces during the war but had their own Romanization system and it was all language, but Fairbank at Harvard had just started the same A program where you could do language but also do politics and economics; that seemed like the royal route to me, and that is what I did






Second Part 16th June 2017

59:30:24 Going back a little to a couple of influences on my later life which I didn't refer to; I was given by a master at school a book by C.E.M. Joad, one of the public intellectuals of the 40s and 50s, an introduction to politics; that was when I became convinced that I should be a Labour supporter; having been brought up in India and having no political affiliation, my father being a civil servant didn't believe that he should have one; the other influence was Emery Reves, a sort of fixer for Churchill - financial, publishing, late in Churchill's life; he wrote a book called The Anatomy of Peace which was about the need for world government; that made me into a world government person, but more importantly since you don't get there in a single step, it made me into a Europeanist; so I became a very strong Europeanist from my teens to this very day
1:01:21:01 At Harvard, Fairbank was rather aloof in manner, a tall man, sparse of speech except when he was actually lecturing; he greeted me with great good humour, but he greeted all of us in the same way because there were very few of us on the programme which Fairbank had set up; in my year there were about four or five of us and he was looking for more converts, to study China and to see how important China should be for all of us; we weren't particularly close, but he wasn't particularly close to any of the students, but he monitored and mentored them well; I took him to lunch at the end of my first year: I had done what I wanted to do for that year but didn't know what to do in my second year; at lunch he suggested the topic, a good topic and I wrote about it, and it was published in a series of cyclostyled papers; we became good friends thereafter; his wife, who was of a very distinguished Cambridge family, her father was a famous doctor, was much more lively; when Fairbank felt he had to go to bed early because he had to be in full command of his faculties the following morning, she would be happy to dance the night away; she gave a very human touch to the Fairbank family; they used to hold teas once a week for students; I almost incurred her total displeasure because having grown up in India I asked for milk and sugar for my tea and this was some good Chinese tea; however, she forgave me and we became good friends; the Fairbanks used to stay with us when I had a fellowship at Columbia, in London, and at one point much later when I was in Parliament, Fairbank suggested that I took one of my books and turned it into a Ph.D.; I said why, and he said why not, so I thought about it, registered at L.S.E. under an old friend, Leonard Schapiro, a Soviet specialist, and when I lost my seat in the Thatcher revolution I took one of my books, cut out half the text and half the footnotes, and turned it in as a Ph.D.; when I went to Harvard later to become a faculty member, the Dean, who had been in Japanese class with me years earlier, was unaware that I had a Ph.D. as it was assumed that no-one of my generation would have had one; unfortunately it didn't make any difference to my salary; Fairbank was very important; when Harvard was trying to recruit me in the early eighties I hadn't fully left politics as I was going to fight again as a Social Democrat in 1983, Fairbank wrote me what I can only call an academic love letter, really trying to persuade me to come to Harvard; when I did accept the offer he introduced me to places which he felt were the most important societies on the campus of faculty members and so on; once he took up with you he was very solicitous, a patron
1:06:37:16 The subject he suggested for an M.A. was the Whampoa Military Academy which the Soviets had set up with Sun Yat-sen in South China; Chiang Kai-shek was the head of the Academy; Lin Biao, one of the great Generals of the People's Republican Army was one of the early pupils, Zhou Enlai was effectively the faculty member who taught politics because the top man was a Nationalist politician who never had time, so Zhou Enlai was very intimate with all these future Generals of the People's Republic Army and some who became Generals in the Kumintang Army; there were a few books in Chinese in the Library of Congress which I managed to get hold of; I think it is occasionally still cited
1:07:58:01 In the early fifties the China field was run basically by historians and they were interested in reading Chinese; many sinologists in America and Britain of that generation did not speak very good Chinese; I only had one semester of spoken Chinese; today you would be immersed totally in spoken Chinese but they were interested in reading; I would say that after two years I could very slowly read a People's Daily editorial; when I returned to England and started working for the Daily Telegraph I would keep on with my reading, I subscribed to the People's Daily and other Chinese magazines, and I gradually got better, it took time; but speaking, because I never went into China until later, I have never been fluent; my then wife, who later died, who took the same programme as me a few years after, and had a year living with a Taiwanese family in Taiwan, spoke much better than I did
1:09:52:17 I went into journalism because I intended to go into politics; you had to have a second career and most Labour people were secondary school teachers while most Conservatives seemed to be barristers; I didn't want to do either of those things and I thought journalism would be a good career to fall in and out of politics; to get into a Fleet Street newspaper in those days to get past the Union rules, you had to spend three years in the provinces; then you could come to London, and maybe you could get a job on a paper you wanted; I decided I would have to do the royal route which was knowing something that Buggins didn't know; there had been a Chinese revolution, I thought papers would need to know about it, and I decided to learn Chinese as purely a means to a means to an end; I never had a misty feeling about Ming vases or anything like that; I remember at our very first seminar John Fairbank saying to the newly arrived class of half a dozen of us how he got into China; he was a student of British history when he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and he got involved in British Imperial history and that involved him in a little bit on the China side; then he heard that there were some archives opening up in China so he went off to China, learnt Chinese in Beijing, and he said that China has a way of taking you over; I distinctly remember saying under my breath, "not me"; one of the few times I have been wrong
1:12:17:06 As a journalist I was totally unsuccessful in getting into China; my first application for a visa went in in 1955 and they kept telling me at the Chinese Embassy that they hadn't heard from Beijing; during that period they did admit the Daily Telegraph correspondent from Tokyo twice, and it was widely rumoured, and later I found out to be rumoured correctly, that he wrote so seldom for the Telegraph that he must be an employee of MI6; so the Chinese gave two visas to an accredited spy, if you like, instead of a bright eyed young man who in principle might have been influenced by them; I didn't get in until 1972 by which time I was no longer a journalist though I posed as a journalist; one of the escorting officers for that trip - it was Alec Douglas-Home as Foreign Secretary going in on a goodwill visit because we had just exchanged ambassadors for the first time - the Chinese minder looking me straight in the eye, saying Mr MacFarquhar this is a goodwill visit so we decided to accept as a journalist anyone the British said was a journalist, in other words, don't try it again; he later became Ambassador to Britain; by that time I had left the Telegraph, had gone into television for a time, and was generally a sort of freelance scholar, broadcaster
1:14:20:08 I knew a graduate student who had been at St Anthony's when I was an undergraduate and we had got to know each other through one of the seminars; he suddenly turned up on my doorstep when I was working for the Telegraph and said would I like a Fellowship; he was starting a new programme at the Rockefeller Foundation and he was handing out fellowships, so I took one for a year to start what turned out to be a series of books on China; during that time I was approached by one of my fellow World Government people, a friend, David Webster, who was a producer with 'Panorama', did a screen test and was asked to join 'Panorama' so didn't go back to the Daily Telegraph which was the only paper that would employ me as a China specialist; I should say that when I was at the Telegraph I worked under and with the Soviet specialist there, a man who had been in his youth a Communist but had seen the error of his ways perhaps, and was fairly anti-Communist but understood the Soviet system very well; so I learnt the Chinese system via the Soviet system to some extent, and that of course did not endear the Chinese system to me and I started off feeling that the Chinese system was flawed; when I went into television I didn't go to China at all; for 'Panorama' I covered ordinary things, both foreign affairs but also domestic subjects like anyone else; by that time I was trying to get into Parliament and that took longer than I had hoped because China had taken me over to some extent; I was editing the China Quarterly which started in 1959 and I edited it until 1968, so I was getting more and more involved with China and writing books about it; my entry to politics would have happened earlier I think had I had a dull job, something that really didn't interest me, so I didn't get in until February 1974 1:17:44:11 The first book I was commissioned to write about China was about what happened in the "hundred flowers", what did people say when they were allowed to speak; my first book was in fact a collection of quotations, from many very distinguished Chinese in many cases who said things about the Communist regime for which they later suffered because they launched an anti-Rightist campaign as the Party didn't like the way that they were attacked; the second book which started off with my year with a Rockefeller grant would turn out to be published as I entered Parliament in 1974; that was the first volume of the origins of the Cultural Revolution; before that I had published a couple of books; one was a Time-Life picture plus essay book on the Forbidden City which is worth buying for the photographs alone, they are so beautiful; the other was a documentary study which I did of the US-China relationship on the eve of the Nixon visit to China; so I went into politics with four books under my belt, which is just as well because it meant that I had a credential with the China community; before that I had started with John Tusa presenting this current affairs radio programme, '24 Hours', for the BBC World Service; it was great fun; my most vivid memories were actually of the Argentine because all sorts of things were happening with Peron and his third wife Isabelita taking over; it turned out that the decision I'd made as a nineteen year old that journalism would be a good career to fall back into if I even had to leave politics was correct; I lost my seat on a Thursday because all elections are on a Thursday, on the following Tuesday '24 Hours' called me up and asked if I would like my old job back; as one of my colleagues put it, for the equivalent of two afternoon's work a week I was paid more than my Parliamentary salary; so journalism turned out to have been a good bet
1:21:03:04 On the roots of the Maoist revolution, I don't think I am particularly unconventional in this but I think the first and primary route was the challenge of the West which gradually emerged; the Ching Dynasty was always concerned mainly with the threat from the North, the Mongols and other peoples of the North, because that was where they had come from too; as the West encroached from the Southern coast it wasn't apparent that there was a great danger, but gradually it did, and their successive attempts to cope with it failed; finally even the little Japanese transformed themselves into a Western-type state and defeated them in 1894-5; I think that Japanese defeat was the traumatic experience that led to the final abandonment of the Confucian system, then finally to the abandonment of the Imperial system in 1911-12; so I think that the impact of the West was very important for one of the roots of what we see in China today; the second great impact of course was the Russian Revolution because up till that time anyone who studied Marxism, and there were people who studied Marxism in China, assumed that the revolution couldn't take place in China but would take place in Germany or Britain, somewhere like that; the Russian Revolution proved that you could have a revolution in a large agrarian state; the people who joined the Chinese Communist Party at that time decided that that was the way to go; the third thing, some people trace it to Daoism but I'm not so sure, but it is the sense of struggle; Mao, as one of my late colleagues put it, loved upheaval, he loved struggle; he obviously preferred it when he was the top guy, but even when he was not the top he loved struggle; he did not like bureaucracy, the settled existence, and felt that all life should be continually changing; I think that does find roots in Chinese traditional philosophy; so I think it is a combination of the West, Bolshevik Revolution, and for Mao himself, a combination of traditions of change and struggle and of rebellion; he was a great reader of the Chinese historical novels, and rebellion and the rebels were big characters in his mind, and that's what he became
1:24:56:10 The great tragedy of Sun Yat-sen was that the democratic society. the polity, that he hoped to create, was set aside by General Yuan Shikai who attempted to set up a new dynasty under himself but failed; war lords took over when General Yuan Shikai died because he was the only senior General who could keep order; warlordism, of course, as it had done in Chinese history, convinced Chinese that they had to reunite the country because they hated to see it divided; I think the Nationalists would have united and led the country but for the Japanese invasion; Mao is reported to have said to the first delegation of Japanese businessmen who came to China in the early fifties, and apologised for the invasion of China, that he would not have been there but for their invasion; that is true; the Communists had a better war than the Nationalists; the Nationalists did more fighting, lost more people, but the fundamental problem with the Nationalist armies was that the idea of land reform would never be part of Nationalist ideology because Chiang Kai-shek was too dependent on his officer corps who were nearly all related to landlord families; the Communists could set that aside as their armies were basically peasant armies; I think that the inability of the Chinese Nationalists after a brief period of rule from 1928-37, before the Japanese invasion proper, to consolidate a Chinese state in those few years was very helpful to the Communists; the Communists did things like run an opium trade in their hideouts in the north-west during the war that they wouldn't officially have approved of; Mao and his colleagues instilled the discipline and the elan which would enable them in the mid-forties to launch the civil war and to win, not as guerrillas any longer but as full-fledged armies defeating full-fledged armies
1:28:02:05 I think the first and most important thing about Mao - and he said this on his deathbed too - was that he managed to unite China after many years of division, foreign invasion, and just general disruption of the system as a result of the Western influx of ideas and of armies; he united the country under one central Government and imposed unity upon it, with the exception of course of Taiwan; I think that was very important to re-establish the Chinese realm in the modern era so that China could start to develop; secondly, I think that until fairly late, in fact when the Cultural Revolution started seventeen years later, he also managed to keep a pretty well united leadership which was very important; in many developing countries, many newly independent countries, the coalition which won independence fell apart quickly afterwards and people fought each other; under Mao who was the unquestioned leader, then stayed together by and large until 1966; seizing power and maintaining it with a strong Communist Party until 1966 was definitely a Mao achievement; I actually think that setting aside for the moment his big disasters - the man-made famine of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution itself in which the country itself seemed to be falling apart - I think that in fact I have a slightly odd view perhaps of his contribution; I think that what he did in the Cultural Revolution which was to unleash the people against the Party, against the Government, against officialdom, was enormously important for the future of China because the rule of the bureaucracy has been unquestioned for centuries in China, that's the way they rule; in fact one Chinese official, a woman whom I got to know quite well, who was very liberal in her thinking, when I said to her once: "What do you think about the prospect for democracy?" she said, "Democracy. We have been ruled for the last twenty-five, thirty years by peasants" (by which she meant the Communist Party of China) "If we have democracy we'll be ruled by peasants forever!", and the intellectuals of China don't like that idea; they like the idea of bureaucracy and them being in charge; I think Mao's achievement will be seen in time as destroying that myth of the bureaucratic system that has to run China and opening it up to the people at large; he did it in possibly the worst possible way but it was a dramatic way to do it; I don't think the Communist Party, even with the anti-corruption campaigns of the present is going to recover its original mystique because of what Mao did to it, and I think that's good for China in the long run; of course you have to have bureaucracy, and the Chinese invented it and are very good at it, but the way that China has always been run by bureaucracy and with no input really from the populace at large, that has to change and it is beginning to change very very slowly, and that will be seen in the long-run as the Maoist achievement
1:32:56:11 I am enormously encouraged by what I have seen in China in this sense; I think what happened in the last almost forty years since Deng Xaioping came back for the second time in 1979 has been the unleashing of the Chinese people; '49 was called by the Communists officially as Liberation, but it wasn't, it was a straight-jacketization, as the Marxist system, the Stalinist economic system, was put on them; what happened in '79 and onwards was that Deng Xiaoping said they had to use anything that would get the country moving otherwise they would throw the Party out; the result of that there was first of all a revolution in the countryside so that urban dwellers went to look to see whether it was really true that peasants were building three-storey houses because there had never been any rural envy before; that is long past now because the urban people are doing much better; I think what the reform did, and Deng Xiaoping should get the credit, was to unleash the Chinese people, because this is a dynamic, well-educated, and self-confident people, if given their heads; Mao always talked about giving the people their heads and his Communist Party leader comrades did not like that idea; they were imbued with the idea that traditional Chinese bureaucracy and Soviet Communist Party ideas were that the Party must rule, the elite must rule; Mao would never like challenges to his personal authority but challenges to the bureaucracy, fine; I think what Deng Xaioping did was in effect to carry out that Maoist revolution in a much more benign way than Mao himself did by allowing people to make money; to get rich is glorious was the motto of the time; the only sad thing was that the Communist Party officials who had been spat upon during the Cultural Revolution said why shouldn't we get rich as well, so massive corruption; I think that Mao's face will be on Tiananmen until the Communist regime folds and goes away because he is still the legitimating factor; after the Cultural Revolution the Party's reputation went down, it's corruption has lowered it's standing, people join the Communist Party for careerist reasons not for ideas any longer, but Mao himself still legitimates what happened in '49, and as long as they can claim that today is a following up of '49 they'll keep him up there
1:36:35:03 I do foresee the Communist Party fading, how it will happen I've not got the slightest idea; what I do believe is that there is not an inexorable economic law that when everyone gets to a certain economic income suddenly they will become democratic, we have seen that not happen in various countries; what I do believe, however, is that people as dynamic as the Chinese and as numerous are not going to be ruleable from one centre, one party, or one person, Xi Jinping or whoever it is, for very much longer; they are going to be too savvy, too much wishing to spread their wings and do their own thing, and the idea that the Party knows best and only the Party can rule, I think it will disappear; whether it will disappear by some kind of new revolution or just gradually fade away I don't know; I think in the long run China will end up with some form of democracy; it may not look anything like American or British democracy any more than Japanese democracy looks like them, but it will be a form in which there is a possibility for the people to speak their minds and to have some impact, at the local level, the slightly higher level, whatever; that will come eventually but how and when I wouldn't speculate; I think China can match the world in terms of achievement; I think the problem at the moment, and this is why so many families now they can afford it send their kids abroad to be educated either in Europe or America, is that the constriction, the procrustean bed of Chinese education, which combines certain elements of how you learn in China and also the Communist tradition of having to learn in a certain political way, those constrictions will inhibit the Chinese to some extent; they obviously have not inhibited everyone because we see amazing entrepreneurs springing up and building world class companies; the only problem for that is that those businessmen are subject to the whims of the Party and could disappear tomorrow, and do, however rich they may become; China can match the world but China will have to do it with different political configuration; they can call it what they want but there will have to be in my view, and this was discussed in China in the twenties and rejected, there has to be some kind of devolution, federalist or whatever, so that people not at the level of the nation - 1.3bn - or of the province - 50-60m - but people at the level of the county, with a few tens of thousands of people can have some say in their locality, and some say in how people are elected who will make decisions at a higher level; I think that has to come; I think what we will see gradually emerging, and it's already emerging to some extent, that in some parts of China it will be a little like what happened when the Soviet Union broke up; some of its components were very dynamic and rich and others were backward and dictatorial; the -stans were mainly dictatorial, the Baltics mainly democratic; I think we shall see that, sadly, some poor provinces, in the north-west, for instance, may be rather dictatorial because they don't have the dynamism among the people that Shanghai might have, or Jiangsu or Zhejiang; so I think I see a China which is more and more susceptible to popular opinion, popular decisions, but one which because of it's vastness and because of the differentials of resources, both intellectual and material, will vary considerably in the degree to which you can say this is a democratic unit; Shanghai could be democratic tomorrow, it just happens to have a very strong Party system because they are Shanghai and they are very bright and think highly of themselves; they run most of China because they have so many graduates that go off elsewhere within China, and are resented often; somewhere like Gansu, Yunnan, poorer provinces, one doesn't know how they will develop 1:42:48:04 I think the Chinese have already become proud and aggressive, I think they are already flexing their muscles to say we are once more the Central Kingdom and you South East Asians, they are actually our islands, keep your hands off them; China which had South East Asia eating out of it's hands has now antagonized almost all of them; they are still very cautious about China, of course, but in terms of large-scale invasions, for instance to recover the territories that the Russians took from them three hundred years ago, I don't think that kind of thing is going to happen; but they will be saying we are the best and you've got to accept that our ideas may be the ones that should be installed as the way that the world functions; however, I think that they may see that the system that the English-speaking people, basically the American and British, set up after World War II have now got some legitimacy and some success, even if they should be reformed, and I'm not sure that they'll want to upset every part of the old liberal international system because they will be antagonizing people when they don't need to
1:44:52:07 I enjoyed the five years as a politician very much; one reason that I had not expected was that I actually liked the constituency work; an M.P. has very little power but quite a bit of influence; most of the stuff in the constituency are controlled by either the District Council or the County Council, but you have a voice with those bodies and if they are the same party you have a considerable influence upon them; I liked working on behalf of people, trying to get their pension settled or whatever it was that went wrong; Jim Callaghan did not give me any job to do though I was put forward by a couple of Cabinet Ministers, so it was just as well that I got my pleasure both out of constituency work and other work which I did; I set up an Indo-British forum which met in India a couple of times and then in Britain, designed to increase understanding about India in Britain before the old ties totally died out; that was quite successful; I think it still persists as a Government organization; I had a little aid agreement with a constituency in the Punjab for funding medical supplies for eye doctoring; one of the most important things I helped to do was to help to get the funding for the Nissan Institute at Oxford which was my idea; it was very interesting how the Japanese worked; I was at a conference in Japan and was asked what they as Japanese could do to make antagonism less in Europe; I suggested setting up institutes for Japanese studies in Britain, Germany and France, and use them to spread learning about Japan to their students; the French and German representatives did not go ahead with that but I persisted, and in my last election as a Labour Party member David Owen came to speak for me; I knew he was meeting the Japanese Foreign Minister in a few days so asked him to raise the issue of the idea of an institute for Japanese studies at Oxford, which is where I had decided it should be; to his credit he did, and I was told by my friends in the Japanese Foreign Ministry that the Japanese delegation was so impressed that the Foreign Secretary had raised something that was not on the agenda that it must be something very important to him; the Foreign Minister contacted the Ambassador in London; the Ambassador contacted his school-mate who was the head of Nissan, and the money arrived
1:49:13:09 I would not choose any of my books to take to a desert island because I would have read them, written them and be bored with them; if you insist on my own books I think the book I did with my Swedish colleague, Michael Schoenhals, on the Cultural Revolution (one volume) is I think quite valuable because it is the only volume which exists that considers the Cultural Revolution from the top but also what happened at the bottom; I think that is important for people to know and for the Chinese to know, and it's been translated, but not on the mainland; another - I think I would take the history essays that I wrote for the Time-Life book on the Forbidden City because I read a lot of Chinese history to write that book and I have been back to it and was surprised at all I had absorbed and found out, so I would probably take that 1:51:06:09 I think that the opening lines of the novel, The Three Kingdoms, is probably one of the essences of China - The Empire united will be divided. Divided it will be re-united; there is this primeval fear coming out of the terrible wars of the Warring States period which led almost all Chinese philosophers to embrace the idea of a single ruler for the whole of the Chinese sphere; I think that is a very powerful essence, the idea that without unity China descends into chaos; but I think what we see emerging now and will see more of is that idea that if the people can be trusted to run themselves they don't want chaos more than anyone else and they will ensure there is no chaos; I think the most primitive political essence of China is that we have to be united, disunited we kill each other and we are killed by outsiders; I think that respect for age is greater than it has been in the West; women have fared no better and probably worse in China than in many other places; I would say the essence of the Chinese system, and Confucius and others have talked about this, is the idea that at the root of the civilisation is the strong family; I remember one of my most distinguished colleagues in political science in Harvard giving a talk - he is dead now, but he used to study criminals in prisons and things like that; people used to ask why he studied this as it was not political science; he said that the reason was the basis of political science is order, there has to be political order, and crime is an example of how political order is disrupted; he said he had been to the philosophers and none of them deal with the family which he had found, by studying the criminals, is the most important element in disorder and criminal behaviour being formed; he said that none, including Plato, had ever studied this; I said that there was one who saw the family as the basis of a sound state and that was Confucius; I think that probably the Chinese put the family first still - you see this with the diaspora now from Hong Kong to Vancouver, Beijing to California - you see the family is still this incredibly powerful unit; the clan, of course, but that is a more amorphous thing, especially in this age of travel and dispersal, the family unit I would say is still one of the essences
1:56:09:16 I think looking back that most of my best ideas came when I was younger, when you take risks, in my twenties and early thirties; I was prepared to formulate ideas about the Chinese political system and what was happening in it at that moment; I had nothing to lose; I had no reputation at the time, I was young and it was a small field and I was one of the few people in it; as you get older you are the prisoner of your past pronouncements and of the reputation you have built up, so you take less risks; I think that the way that I got at the ideas was one principle to start with, the Chinese are human beings like the rest of us, they may have different methods of behaviour in certain circumstances, but the basis of jealousy, ambition and so on they are all there; as long as you assume that the Chinese are ordinary human beings like the rest of us then certain rules will apply; the basic rule of politics, while there's death there's hope, (when someone dies then a post opens for you), that applies in China as well; I studied and looked at the system and how it developed; I read what Mao wrote, and other people, and gradually you get the feel of it; it takes time; I may have had one or two eureka moments, I'd have to reconstruct them now, but basically it is a lot of hard graft then suddenly, "Christ. Yes!"