Iron maiden indeed
“Women” , Chairman Mao Tse-tung was fond of observing, “hold up half the sky.” Last Thursday morning the woman who wants to hold up half the Western sky winged out of it into Peking, preceded by her Russian reputation as Britain's Iron Maiden. The Chinese may have some difficulty pronouncing the phrase, but Margaret Thatcher is giving them every opportunity to believe it.
Everywhere she goes, Mrs Thatcher is carefully making anti-Russian noises of the kind her hosts want to hear. Her manner, meanwhile, is not unlike that of the Queen on a royal visit. In conversation with vice-premier Li Hsien-Nin, she referred to “my people” , having swept regally into the room pursued by a flotilla of attendant males. Her 23-year-old daughter, Carol, who is along for the ride, also behaves remarkably like Princess Anne. The Chinese are clearly impressed.
Mrs Thatcher's keynote speech in the Great Hall of the People, at a banquet in her honour on Thursday night, was not as stridently anti-Soviet as might have been expected—although she herself insists it was “no less fiery” than anything she might have said at home. She is clearly keeping her options open for further foreign trips. But the speech was reprinted in full next morning in the People's Daily—an honour normally reserved for visiting heads of state—and went down well with party chiefs present at the feast.
Much better, in fact, than the eight-course meal went down with Mrs Thatcher. She appeared to draw the line at sea-slugs (course number six). When the time came for the famous toasts, she avoided the 150-proof maotai which caused Richard Nixon such trouble, and toured the room raising a tiny glass of China's sickly-sweet red wine. She had, she told me, been into the protocol, and discovered to her relief that it is acceptable for ladies to sip from their glasses rather than toss each of the many toasts back in one gulp, as is the Chinese way. The journalists in the party, she noted, did not seem to be experiencing too much difficulty.
Mrs Thatcher has come to China with only two escorts—John Stanley, MP, her parliamentary private secretary, and Douglas Hurd, MP, the Tory Party's China expert, who also came here two years ago with Edward Heath. The Chinese know enough of British politics to avoid asking after Heath's well-being. Mrs Thatcher might as well ask Chairman Hua Kuofeng how he sprang from no-where to become Mao's resolute successor, quickly erasing Mao's widow, Chiang-ching, and her “gang of four” from the scene.
The Thatcher party are staying in a government guest house, complete with small lake, while the rest of us are installed in the comfortable Peking Hotel. Right from the airport, where she was met by Huang Hua, the foreign affairs minister, Mrs Thatcher has headed a 25-car motorcade, which in effect means we have a car each. The parade sweeps all before it, under the curious gaze of the bicycling masses.
Her visit coincides with that of President Ould Dada of Mauritania, who as a head of state seemed at first to be taking precedence. He was met at the airport by Chairman Hua himself, and was guest of honour at a banquet for several thousand in the state banqueting hall. Mrs Thatcher's dinner was held in a small anteroom and attended by some 60 people, half of whom were British. However, yesterday, honour was more than satisfied when Mrs Thatcher became the first Western politician to meet Chairman Hua, though he kept her waiting for an hour before they approached each other from opposite ends of a corridor in the Great Hall of the People.
Also in town is an American congressional delegation, including President Carter 's son, and a deputation of Glasgow businessmen, led by the Lord Provost, whose secret hope is to take home a panda for Scotland.
Mrs Thatcher's first day here was consumed by extremely formal political talks. Only six hours after the gruelling 16-hour flight—which China Airlines failed to alleviate with movies, music or, indeed, liquor—she was starting a two-hour session with Huang. “We expect and hope,” she told him, “to be worked very hard whilst we are here.” He replied that China was under going a great political revolution at the moment, and urged her to go and look at it. He had just started saying that rumours of instability in China had been “greatly exaggerated” when journalists were unceremoniously bundled out of the room.
The same happened later, at her pre-dinner chat with China's number two, vice-premier Li Hsien-Nin, Li told Mrs Thatcher that she had expressed many political views with which he agreed. “They were very firm views,” said his guest. He said he had met “other members of the British Government.” Too tactful to correct him, Mrs Thatcher asked, Who? “Mr Julian Amery,” he said proudly. “Ah,” said Mrs Thatcher. “Did you meet Edward Heath when he was here?” Li said, No, he had not met Heath. Had he met “our other great statesman, Sir Alec Douglas-Home?” Exit journalists before the question was answered, and before the chat—one assumes—got slightly more interesting.
Next morning, Mrs Thatcher had an audience with Chou En-lai 's widow, Teng Ying-chiao, who is now vice-chairman of the standing committee of the People's National Congress. Said Madame Chou: “I see from your appearance that you have high spirits and strong stamina.” Said Madame Thatcher: “I just wear well.”
During the flight, at a one-hour stopover in Karachi, I asked Mrs Thatcher if she intended to walk further than Edward Heath along the Great Wall. Much to the relief of those present, she said she didn't. “We've come an awfully long way, you know. There'll be a lot else to do.” And she's certainly doing it. Up at seven on her second morning, she was out in a Peking market soon after eight, buying stocks of tea, chocolate and preserved fruit. Each session of talks is punctuated by a bit of sightseeing, during which she is an assiduously inquiring tourist. And, when the time came, she walked as far along the Wall as Ted did, as far as Alec even, and further than either Ford or Nixon. “We climbed right to the top,” she told Chairman Hua, proudly. “It was a lovely day.” To which the Chairman replied with a quotation from Mao: “He who fails to reach the top of the Great Wall is no true man.” Mrs Thatcher laughed and the translation was quickly changed to “no true leader.”
In the forbidden city, where we toured the magnificent imperial palace, Mrs Thatcher was stumping the minister of information with detailed questions about dates and styles. She also visited the neighbourhood committee of Fu Shiu Ching, where she asked a pointed question about female representation, to find that, 18 of the 27 committee members were women. “Where are they all, then?” she asked the all-male reception committee, and was instantly whisked off to a “typical” household which had been laid on. “I bet she goes for broke to get in the kitchen,” said one of her escorts irreverently, just before she asked where the kitchen was. The family of nine, she discovered, had one Calor-gas stove in their tiny, scrupulously clean kitchen, and two bedrooms between them.
Then it was on to the neighbourhood kindergarten, where strictly disciplined rows of three-year-olds sang a song of welcome and jumped up and down with excitement. Their six-year-old brothers and sisters laid on a song-and-dance show, which included a group of tiny armed pilots shooting down the form's non-dancer, who represented a Russian Mig. A pretty four-year-old girl sang in praise of Chairman Hua.
Yesterday, Mrs Thatcher talked with Chairman Hua, flanked by Vice-Premier Li Hsien-nin and Huang Hua, for just over an hour. Beside each armchair in [end p1] the semi-circle was a table piled high with nuts and fruit. Chairman Hua said: “I hope there will be second, third and fourth visits.”
“I hope so too,” replied Mrs Thatcher, looking very nervous and ill-at-ease. “There's so much to see. It's all so very exciting.”
Journalists and Mrs Thatcher's staff were then ushered out of the room, leaving the Tory leader and the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Youde, to continue the talks.
Mrs Thatcher will not reveal what happens each time the journalists exit, except to say that talks range “right round the world,” and to stress that the Chinese are “very, very well briefed.” She herself is extremely well briefed—she was the only Briton not to sleep during the night, as she ploughed through books, Foreign Office briefings, and as she puts it, “even newspaper articles.” Everything in China, she says, turns out to be just like it is in the books and the cuttings. “Except that things must be rather different when you actually see them in practice.”
Last night, she hosted a return banquet in the Great Hall, with invitations on Conservative Party cards saying the Opposition Leader would be “At home” in the Great Hall of the People.
The Conservative leader and her guests are continually harangued with denunciations of the Gang of Four, who are currently undergoing “intensive interrogation and instruction.” Nobody knows where they are. But the expected rehabilitation of Teng Hsiao-ping, the moderate expunged after last year's April 5 riots, will apparently not come as soon as has been rumoured.
Despite the overthrow of the radicals, and the discrediting of all their leaders stood for, Chairman Hua still appears to regard Teng as some kind of threat to his own position. This year's April 5 celebrations—dedicated to the memory of the dead—were cancelled for the first time since the declaration of the People's Republic. This can only be because Hua feared demonstrations in favour of Teng, whom he accused of organising last year's unruly scenes in the Square of Heavenly Peace. At 73, Teng is 17 years Hua's senior, he has a massive following among the people, who cannot understand what rivalry there could be between them. This is all that can be gleaned from random encounters with Chinese, who cower with fear if you try to discuss such matters.
The China entertaining Mrs Thatcher, therefore, is either a secure and forward-looking politburo, or a shaky government seething with internal strife. It is extraordinary how little the most astute and attentive observer can glean. Resident journalists regard Mrs Thatcher's visit as a passing irritant, but are delighted to accompany her to schools and factories—having applied to visit such places many times without success, even without reply.
Mrs Thatcher, meanwhile, is withholding all verdicts, intent merely on appearing as aware as the Chinese of the Soviet menace. As one “preparing to take part in the government of Britain,” she told them, she shared their views on Europe as a crucial defence grouping. Vice-premier Li warmly quoted her previously voiced concerns about detente, and added a Chinese proverb: “As we say, there is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent.”
That seems to be the limit of the views actually being exchanged. For the rest, Mrs Thatcher is intent to appear both sturdy and charming. In a country whose most prominent woman politician, Chiang-ching, is now in disgrace, a woman successor to Home and Heath is transparently regarded as a curiosity. Confucius, whose thoughts included “Women are backward,” is also of course in disgrace, but the uniformly dressed Chinese are clearly fascinated, for instance, by Mrs Thatcher's wardrobe. In her first 48 hours here, I counted no fewer than six different outfits. Alas, I am not qualified to describe them, but they all seemed eminently sensible.
Incongruities crowd the eye. To see Mrs Thatcher, an English rose with her newly-cropped blonde hair, sandwiched between portraits of Mao and Hua, is in itself arresting. To see her struggling with chopsticks is cheap entertainment, especially in view of one's own limited skills. To see her nodding sagely as a neighbourhood chairman explains, “when the Gang of Four was smashed in one blow, this was declared an area of jubilation,” is to understand diplomacy. To hear her fulsome tributes to the Chinese revolution is worth a cable to Central Office.
She herself will contribute. One of her many suitcases contains only Crown Derby china and House of Commons ashtrays, to be liberally distributed to her hosts. But this incongruity pales besides the greater irony it prompts. Mrs Thatcher was invited to China a year ago, before Mao's death and the up-heavals of the subsequent power struggle. The recipients of her gifts will not be those who invited her, and she will leave China no wiser about how their succession took place. Is this trip a chore of statesman-like diplomacy, or the window-dressing of a would-be premier?
Mrs Thatcher was examining lacework in a revolutionary commune—the task, she was told, of women “too old to be fit for anything else.” How did they manage such delicate work with their failing eyesight, she asked. “They wear glasses,” she was told, “they are all about 50 years old.” Mrs Thatcher was 51 last birthday.
For licence-payers interested in the strength of BBC representation: It totals six: Jim Biddulph, two camera crew, a China-watcher from the Overseas Service, and two ladies from Woman's Hour. All are going on with Mrs Thatcher to Tokyo and Hong Kong. With fares at £1,500 and hotel rooms about double that, the one-hour special looks like being Woman's Hour's most expensive.