In his latest book Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China, journalist and author Patrick Wright tells the story of the British delegations that took up Prime Minister En-lai’s invitation to ‘come and see’ the New China on the fifth anniversary of the communist victory in 1954. Here, Wright answers a few questions I had about this intense era of diplomacy – when it ended and how it went wrong. –Michelle Rafferty, Associate Publicist
1.) Bill Richardson’s recent trip to North Korea reminded me of a topic you’ve written extensively about: the diplomatic “discovery missions” between East and West. Is this era behind us?
In one far from regrettable sense, Bill Richardson’s trip seems to come after the event. While extraordinary misrecognitions have attended ‘East-West’ travel for many centuries, the ‘discovery missions’ I have written about belong to a modern era that extended from the First World War to the invasion of Iraq, shaped as it was by Cold War attitudes that lived on in the minds of Rumsfeld, Blair and others, even after the breach of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These organized, if also unofficial, delegations made their journeys at a time when the world was divided into opposed and hostile blocs, each with its own ideology and claims to international extension.
2.) We know how the Cold War turned out, so looking back, what can we determine was accomplished on these missions? Did they offer us any true prescience?
As for the question of ‘prescience’, there can be no doubt that many of the western travelers who visited the communist East during this period got things spectacularly wrong. The Mayor of Lyons and former French Prime Minister, Édouard Herriot, was led through Ukraine in the summer of 1933, and came home to repudiate the suggestion that millions of peasants and alleged ‘kulaks’ had been systematically starved to death under Stalin. Eleven years later, President Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace toured the Gulag at Kolyma in the company of his adviser, Owen Lattimore, without apparently suspecting that he was actually in a vast prison. Many British visitors were also taken in – as much by their own ideals as by the indulgence and trickery of their official minders. Visiting communists saw what they wanted to see, but so too did those well-known and senior pioneers of modern social science, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. As for the anti-fascist barrister D. N. Pritt, he inspected Stalin’s show trials and declared them better than anything available in British courts.
The list of deluded visitors also includes Christian socialists such as George Lansbury, who visited Russia in 1920 and, despite Lenin’s protestations of atheism, declared that the Bolsheviks were doing God’s work, and the so-called “Red Dean of Canterbury,” Hewlett Johnson, who made a similar pilgrimage to China in the early fifties and came home to provoke a storm of public condemnation w