THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT in the 1960s was one of the key shifts in the Cold War and a turning point in the history of Communism. It turned what had been a binary battle between East and West into a triangular contest. There were no longer two but three global giants – the United States, the Soviet Union and China – all now jockeying for power and influence – and ideological purity.
China’s growing disenchantment with its Soviet ally went back to 1956 and Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denouncing the legacy of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong had been a dedicated disciple of Stalin’s and saw the new criticism of him as a betrayal, a divergence from the true path of Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy. He was also concerned by the uprisings the new policy appeared to have provoked in Poland and Hungary in 1956, and viewed the efforts to deliver prosperity and consumer goods to Soviet society as un-revolutionary. And he thought Khrushchev’s attempts to ease tensions with the United States through visits and summits was misguided.
In contrast to Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, Mao took a sharp turn to the left and in 1958 announced the Great Leap Forward – a mass mobilisation of China’s workers and peasants, herded into huge ‘people’s communes’, with the goal of ramping up heavy industry and agriculture to reach giddy new heights of grain and steel production. It was a monumental disaster, causing chaotic upheaval and a largely man-made famine, which led to tens of millions of deaths.
By the early 1960s, China was rowing back from this ruinous experiment, but Mao’s censure of Khrushchev’s reforms continued. Before long, the world’s two biggest Communist parties were indulging in open polemics, with China castigating Soviet ‘revisionism’ and ‘counter-revolutionary trends’. In 1964 the breach was formalised when the two Communist parties, Chinese and Soviet, broke off relations.
Moscow, meanwhile, had backtracked on a pledge to help China develop nuclear weapons technology. But China went ahead and tested its first atomic bomb anyway on 16 October 1964. It came just two days after the dramatic ousting in Moscow of Khrushchev by his Kremlin colleagues. Even once Khrushchev had gone, the relationship did not improve. Mao dismissed the new Soviet leadership under Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin as ‘Khrushchev-ism without Khrushchev’.
From the United States’ point of view, the Sino-Soviet split was welcome because it divided the Communist world. Washington could sit back and watch from the side-lines as the two Communist giants bickered and undermined each other. But it was also worrying because the various possibilities of flare-ups between any two of the three big Cold War powers had just multiplied and China, now armed with nuclear weapons, was newly dangerous. Mao even made clear that China’s population was so big, the country could probably weather the casualties caused by a nuclear war.
The moment had the eerie feel of life imitating science fiction. With the two Communist big powers now at loggerheads, it was suddenly as though the world had edged closer to the tripartite division imagined in George Orwell’s dystopian novel of 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the three world powers of Oceania (American dominance), Eurasia (Soviet dominance) and Eastasia (a separate Asian power) all existed in a perpetual state of shifting allegiances and hostility.
There was good reason for Washington to fret about the added hazards that the Sino-Soviet rift might create. In the mid-1960s, tensions were already building up along the Soviet Union’s 4,000-kilometre border with China. By 1969, this would lead to clashes between Soviet and Chinese forces and a hint from Moscow that it might consider deploying its nuclear arsenal, raising fears of a full-scale war between the two Communist global giants. In the end, tensions subsided and, a couple of years later in 1972, President Nixon used the fact that Mao could ill afford to stay on bad terms with both Moscow and Washington to ‘play his China card’. The fact that Nixon, a conservative Republican, should be the American President who made that first trip to Beijing to mend fences with Communist China was unexpected, and the irony was even more pointed, given that during the McCarthyite Red Scare against suspected Communists in the 1950s, Richard Nixon had been on the side of those on the American right who had vengefully harangued those supposedly responsible for the US ‘losing’ China to Communism.
But before all that, Mao’s new hostility to the Soviet Union was also a factor in his next alarming policy shift – the Cultural Revolution. Introduced in 1966, its stated goal was to purge any remnants of capitalist and traditionalist elements from Chinese society, and reconfirm the country’s path towards Communism through ‘continuous revolution’ and ‘violent class struggle’.
In part, Mao hoped to show that, unlike the Soviet Union, China had lost none of its revolutionary purity, and in contrast to those complacent revisionist backsliders in the Kremlin, Mao could claim he was the true keeper of the flame, the guardian of Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy. One Chinese poster from the early days of the Cultural Revolution declared ‘Topple the Soviet revisionists. Smash the dog heads Brezhnev and Kosygin.’
In part, this was also Mao’s political comeback. The calamitous failures of the Great Leap Forward had damaged his authority. This was a bid to restore his leadership within the party and across the country – helped by a cult of personality that reached near religious proportions – and eliminate or side-line through a mass purge those critics in the party hierarchy whom he saw as dangerous rivals.
The idea of the Cultural Revolution was to involve all strata of Chinese society – workers, peasants, soldiers and officials – to overturn and reshape society and root out ‘enemies’ from top to bottom. It was spearheaded by a new force in Chinese politics, a youth movement called the Red Guards, made up first and foremost of children and students. These young people responded to Mao’s appeal to turn their backs on the norms of school and university and organise themselves into quasimilitary units. They proved their revolutionary credentials by attacking anyone they suspected of harbouring bourgeois values or concealing a ‘bad’ class background, such as a former landlord, rich farmer or capitalist, or indeed anyone, such as a teacher, who had held a position of authority. Their victims were not just those suspected of bourgeois tendencies. Mao’s new child army was also, unusually, a tool to take on the Communist Party itself. These fresh-faced vigilantes vented their fury on old party members whom Mao wanted purged from the ranks, making the Cultural Revolution a disruptive political campaign like none that had come before. Armed with the ‘Little Red Book’ of quotations from Mao’s writings as their guide, they marched out across the country to galvanise the masses and lead the revolution ‘to make China red, inside and out’, as one Red Guard leader put it.
Underpinning the campaign was a mission to wipe out the ‘Four Olds’: old customs, old cultures, old habits and old ideas. This entailed a wholesale destruction of anything associated with the past, all in the name of the revolution. So, numerous religious and historical sites were ransacked and pulled apart, books and ancient manuscripts were burned, and countless cultural treasures were destroyed.
The revolutionary zeal went to extreme lengths. One proposal from the Red Guards was that red traffic lights should henceforth signify ‘go’ rather than ‘stop’. But infinitely worse than this absurdity was the suffering caused to people.
The fanaticism of the revolutionary zealots was terrifying. Their campaigns involved not just rhetorical denunciations, but physical violence on a shocking scale. In the search for counter-revolutionaries, frenzied crusades rooted out imaginary traitors who were paraded, flogged and spat on, often in front of crowds at mass meetings.
A campaign against a suspect would often begin with them being publicly denounced in a ‘big-character poster’, handwritten in large Chinese characters and pasted on walls or reproduced in a newspaper for all to see. Then the victim would be hunted down and subjected to bouts of torture, or humiliated and abused in other ways, such as being made to bend forwards while their outstretched arms were forcibly raised behind them in the degrading and excruciating ‘jet-plane’ position, or having their heads shaved, or being maimed or sexually assaulted, or beaten so hard that they died from their injuries. Those who ‘confessed’ to their crimes would be taken away, possibly executed, or else despatched to hard labour camps to be ‘re-educated’.
The campaign atomised society. Children turned on their parents, students turned on their teachers, denounced regardless of guilt or innocence. Some, unable to stand what was happening or in a bid to escape their tormentors, committed suicide.
Foreigners were not immune. Western embassies were attacked. Mao had not only severed links with the Soviet Union. Immersed in its own revolutionary drama, China also cut off contact with much of the rest of the world.
Before long, the campaign spun out of control. There was widespread factional fighting as opposing groups fell out with each other. Some more radical Red Guard units were suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army and themselves accused of ‘counter-revolutionary’ tendencies. Parts of the country were engulfed in what amounted to civil war.
The Cultural Revolution was above all an urban phenomenon, a purge targeting intellectuals, teachers and party officials. The death toll was nothing like the scale of the Great Leap Forward, but it had a devastating effect on the entire country, as economic activity ground to a halt in favour of revolutionary fervour.
In the countryside, primary education for the rural poor expanded, but in towns and cities, schools and universities remained closed for years, not only because students left but also because so many academics and teachers were persecuted and sent to an early death in rural labour camps.
After the initial two-year spasm, in 1968 a policy was introduced that somewhat calmed down the revolutionary turmoil, though in this second phase there were more victims. It required millions of Red Guards, educated urban young people, to go out into the countryside to live and work alongside the rural poor. It meant that an entire generation of Chinese youth never completed their studies.
Mao declared the Cultural Revolution at an end in 1969. But it was not finally laid to rest until after his death in 1976 when the next Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, began to dismantle Maoist polices and reverse the damage by introducing a programme of economic modernisation and by opening up contacts with the West.
For some people in China, the era of the Cultural Revolution is still remembered with some nostalgia, as a time of inspiring revolutionary fervour, of pure ideals and a moment when politics really seemed to matter. But for those who remember what their parents, teachers and friends were subjected to during the height of the Cultural Revolution, the memory is of manic madness and the pain is still very much alive.
In August 1966, 19-year-old Cheng Zhang Gong had completed senior high school at Luhe Senior High School in Beijing, and his 16-year-old brother, Cheng Zhang Rang, had completed junior high school. Their father, Cheng Min, 54, was the deputy headmaster of the Luhe Middle School, then called No. 1 Middle School, of Tongxian County. The Cultural Revolution started before the last semester ended, so they didn’t have their final examinations.
My father treated his students as his own children. He was really like a father to them. He really cared for the students and looked after them. I remember once our school had a meeting. My father was giving a speech. He told the students that they should study hard, and every one of them should obtain at least one skill. He meant that people should be able to contribute to the society and they should at least have one skill. You don’t need to be developed all around. But you should be able to make contribution to the society.
The policy at that time was that workers and farmers work together. So he took the students to the countryside to do work. My father would go pick up cotton and do farming work in the field. He had a really good relationship with the students.
Before the Cultural Revolution, according to the lines and principles issued by the party, the school had been teaching students about class struggle, enmity between different classes, and hatred between different nations. All schools had to teach that. At politics class or other classes, teachers had been teaching about class struggle. A large percentage of people accepted these teachings. Even I believed them deeply. We truly believed that before the 1949 Liberation everything was bad. The propaganda then told us that all the landlords, rich farmers and capitalists are all bad, even their children. Then, when the Cultural Revolution started, these teachings were deeply rooted in people. The idea that all the exploiting class is reactionary and needed to be overthrown was repeated over and over again. All young people knew was class struggle. We were told stories – how bad the landlords were. We had meetings to recall the sorrows of the past and savour the joy of the present. We had lots of such meetings. People came to the meeting to tell their stories in tears. But all were lies. But we were young. We weren’t experienced. We believed in them. In these ways, young people were poisoned by these lies.
A few politics teachers took out the personal records of every other teacher and told students what their family background and misdeeds were. They made up lots of it and posted ‘big-character posters’ about the teachers everywhere. They were all lies. For example, my father had six siblings. Altogether they owned about a dozen acres of land. But in the poster, they said our family was the biggest landlord of our village. It’s all nonsense. Then the persecution against our family started. [They] wrote more than 200 big-character posters. A number of them mentioned my father. I remember it clearly. [It] said that our family owned more than 500 acres of land. That is not possible. The whole village only owned 500 acres of land. Many families shared them.
The posters were full of lies and rumours. They denounced people for different things based on nothing. They criticised people out of nothing. I remember my father once told me this movement seemed different from before. It’s really different. Before, after every movement, there would come a correction process. If anyone was wrongly criticised or denounced, that would be corrected. There were lots of movements like Three-Antis and Five-Antis, or Four Clean-ups Movement, or the Anti-Rightists in 1957. After all these movements, there was a process to examine if you are what you are accused of.
[The Cultural Revolution] turned out to be really different. They could accuse you of anything. You can have doubts on anything. Yes, you can doubt anything, but you can’t accuse people of things out of nothing, without any basis. My father graduated from Tsinghua University. He always talked about facts. Since we were kids, he told us to speak on the basis of facts.
Students at the No. 1 Middle School of Tongxian County saw Beijing had founded the Red Guards, and said, we should follow suit and found a Red Guard group too, because it was backed up by the supreme leader of the country. Then they just messed around and made trouble. They didn’t know what is right and what is wrong. As soon as they denounced you as a class enemy, landlord, capitalist, capitalist roader or cow demon and snake spirit, they could arrest you, criticise you and persecute you. They hit you, cursed you, put you into a labour camp. They even set up a labour camp unit in the school. A school was turned into a labour camp.
There were very few Red Guards at the very beginning. There were only two at my class who were qualified to be Red Guards. Later on, there were more and more. They listened to a temporary Revolutionary Committee. They were the people who controlled all activities at the school. By the end of July, they had put many teachers into confinement. They denounced those teachers as crime-gang members. Anyway, all these 50-odd teachers were denounced as criminal gang members by them. They forced them to do physical labour. Starting from the end of July, they asked all those teachers and school directors to do physical labour. By early August, it was getting worse and worse.
[On 6 August 1966] at 3 or 4am, they woke them up and physically pushed them to the school. Each of them held a stick. They were forced to do pipe ramming under the hot sun. Everyone knows early August are the hottest days in Beijing. They made them work. It was quite cruel. They were not allowed to drink water. They were not allowed to rest. They tortured them. If you refused to work, they would use a stick to hit you, to poke you. It was quite cruel. I started to feel nervous. But I didn’t think it was really a big deal. I felt it was a mass movement. My father said that too. It was a mass movement.
Around noon, my father didn’t feel well. A friend of his told me that my father fell to the ground and I should go and find him. I rushed out to look for my father at the school. I was told he was by the swimming pool, doing some repair work. I went there and saw my father was sitting on the ground under the hot sun. A member of the Revolutionary Committee was with my father. My father told him, ‘You were wrong to do this. You shouldn’t just hit people and curse people. You shouldn’t do that.’ The member of the Revolutionary Committee said to my father, ‘Stop talking like this. You are talking poisonous nonsense.’ He cursed a lot. I was standing at a distance from them, so I didn’t hear every word they said.
At that moment, I desperately wanted to get my father back home. But I didn’t dare to get close. Because there were a few Red Guards and the member of the Revolutionary Committee and they were cursing my father the whole time. Then I followed my father to walk home. Halfway there, we saw my younger brother, and we both followed my father home. He was already in a very bad and weak condition. He couldn’t stand straight when he walked. If we walked past a tree, he would lean on the tree to rest a bit. Slowly, we walked to the gate of the school. Only at that time, I dared to get close to him and held his arms.
We took him home. I was saying that we should take him to hospital to have a check. I went to somewhere near Luhe Hospital and rented a tricycle to take him. At the hospital, a doctor said that he didn’t have any big problem – he was just dehydrated and had sunstroke. The doctor suggested my father have a glucose drip. So I paid the fee, got the medicine and he had a drip. Then my father felt better. The doctor said that you can’t stay here, you can just go home. We felt it was not a big problem. So I asked the doctor to write my father a sick-leave permit.
When I was near home, I saw a big crowd outside our house, and inside. They were threatening my father, saying he had to go back to work. They said, ‘You can’t pretend to be sick to avoid work.’ I told them that the hospital just gave my father a sick-leave permit, and gave it to them, but still they insisted my father go back to work. A few of my classmates were there … Because they were my classmates, they acted more proactively. They forcefully took my father back to school. [One of them] was shouting at my father, ‘Will you go with us? If you don’t go, we will hit you.’ He used his stick to hit the floor, to threaten to hit us. My father looked at them and knew we couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t have any influence. There were so many of them.
So I saw my father leave with them. I had no choice. I was extremely worried. We were so worried at home, every second seemed really long. In the afternoon, I went into the school. My classmate […] saw me and said to me, ‘Look, your father was sweeping the floor. You said he couldn’t work.’ I said to him, ‘He is sick.’ I said we have a sick-leave permit. ‘He is pretending to be sick,’ he said.
I didn’t dare to argue with him and went to sit in my classroom. After sitting there anxiously for a while, I went back home, but didn’t see my father. I was thinking about what was going on, why they still don’t let him come home. To be honest, I was worried, but I didn’t know what to do. So I waited. I waited till around 10pm, nearly 11pm, when I heard something from the gate of the school entrance. We lived very close to the school, about 200 metres away. I heard some noise. And then I heard people shouting: ‘You are pretending to be sick!’
We were really nervous and looked out – we couldn’t see anything. After a little while, my father came home with dirt all over his head and body. He actually fell into a coma. He said to us, ‘How can I have been sleeping till now?’ Even at this situation, we tried to not worry. My elder sister said to my father that this is just a mass movement, don’t be too nervous. Then my mother said to let my father rest: ‘Don’t talk any more.’ So my father washed his feet and went to bed with clothes on. That night, my mother said that there was blood in my father’s urine.
They came to my home again next morning at 4am with sticks and forced my father to go back to do physical work. They said he had to go. I asked him not go to. But those people forced him to go. My father didn’t have a choice and went with them. He never came back again.
At around eight, I felt really worried and really anxious. So I went to the school. There was a sandpit outside my classroom, and my father was lying between the sandpit and the building, breathing heavily. I tried to hold him up and asked him what was wrong. My father didn’t respond. He was actually in a coma. I wanted to help him stand up, but my classmates all came to me and pushed me and hit me. They didn’t allow me to save him. I said to them that I wanted to take him home. But they didn’t allow it. They kicked me. They asked me what political stance I was taking.
I didn’t have a choice, so I went home. I saw my mother, and told her that my father was lying on the ground. He couldn’t move. They didn’t allow me to get close to him. My mother was worried and went to the school with me. But there was nothing we could do. My classmates surrounded me, pushed me and kicked me.
I tried hard to get close to my father; I couldn’t. My mother wanted to get close to him; she couldn’t. They asked us, ‘Who do you think this person is?’ They said he is pretending to be dead. They didn’t allow my mother to hold my father’s arms. After a while, my mother still couldn’t even get close to my father, so she said, ‘Do what you want to.’ She left for home. I was pushed and kicked and couldn’t get close. So, I went home as well.
I told my sister they hadn’t let me take my father. Then we remembered that Beijing had just formed a new Party Committee. We were thinking maybe we should complain to the new committee to see if they could save him. So my sister and I took bus to the committee. An official […] said he would phone the school for us to find out about what was going on. We felt hopeful again, so we went home. When we were near home, we heard that everyone was crying. My father was dead. That’s how my father was tortured to death by them. Later, when we had an autopsy, he had bruises and scars all over his body. They didn’t even let us save him. He could have been saved when I went there, if they allowed me to take him to hospital. But they didn’t. That’s how they killed my father. After that, they wrote a note on my father’s body: ‘Landlord and capitalist, class dissident’. Those people didn’t have a heart. They were so cruel to us.
People were not allowed to speak. They denounced you for a crime and they persecuted you. They even killed you. At that time, there was no law. They denounced my father for various crimes. I had nowhere to go to appeal. If there had been a procedure, I would have had a chance to defend my father. Then he wouldn’t have been attacked by the students. The students didn’t know anything. They strongly believed my father was a class enemy, was a bad person. But he wasn’t a bad person. He was a very good man. So the root of the disastrous Cultural Revolution was that it was lawless.
We lost the family income – my family had mostly relied on my father. My elder sister was a primary-school teacher. We felt that we don’t know how to live our life any more. We didn’t know what could happen. We were always worried and scared. We didn’t know when somebody would come in and do something to us. Then they ransacked my house and partly shaved my mother’s head. It was a sign of being a ‘class enemy’. They also shaved one of my elder sisters, who was disabled. They poured ink all over their bodies. They made them stand there and punished them. They ransacked the house and took away anything they wanted. My mother slowly shipped all our stuff to the school under their force. They used sticks to threaten her. Among them, there were Zhang Rang’s classmates, my classmates and classmates of our youngest brother. They were the main people that persecuted my family. They ransacked everything and threw the stuff they didn’t need everywhere. They didn’t leave us any rice or food. So we couldn’t live there any more. They also had big-character posters everywhere and asked us to go back to our hometown. They said that we had to leave before a certain time. So we were kicked out and went back to hometown in Shanxi, where we had relatives who could help us. When we left, we had nothing but the summer clothes we were wearing.
Meanwhile, John Weston was a young British diplomat living with a Chinese family in Hong Kong and studying Chinese at Hong Kong University, in preparation for taking up his post as a Second Secretary at the British Mission in China. In January 1967 he and his wife landed in Peking. He was 26.
Mao had been going through a difficult few years as a result of the Great Leap Forward, so-called – there had been mass famine throughout the country imposing very, very heavy losses and suffering on Chinese people as a whole. That had got out of hand. Liu Shaoqi, the President, had begun to realise what a gigantic mistake it had been. Therefore Mao took against him and effectively realised also that in Russia after Stalin, a phenomenon was taking place that he was frightened about – namely that Soviet Communism was becoming more reasonable. He was afraid that that was going to happen in China – so a short way through to doing something about that was to launch the Cultural Revolution, which was a gigantic purge, but in this case largely a purge of the official classes. So, at the point when we arrived in Peking [now Beijing], this was in train and getting worse.
We knew that the whole underlying strategy of what Mao was doing was to set young people against their parents’ generation and the whole of the official class in Communist China. The whole appeal of that was that the young people should get up and exercise their energies in destroying what was portrayed as being the initiation of a bourgeois replacement for true Communism. So, it followed from that that one was seeing all the time large numbers of boys and girls being grouped together and following along a road with red flags flying, shouting out stuff at the top of their voices. [They were] being encouraged by the placement on every street corner of loudspeakers – there was an absolutely constant torrent of stuff coming out of that. So the whole atmosphere daily and much of the night was being whipped up into a frenzy, and very often the expressions of violence directed by one Chinese person against another, and particularly against older people, [were] of course the natural consequence of that.
Our job was to go out into the streets, to comb the streets for Red Guard newspapers, to read the big-character posters on walls all over the place for the latest news about what was going on. We were trying as hard as we could to find out and report accurately to London the inner stories about the rivalries that were going on at the top. And indeed, in so doing, we were seeing in real life a lot of the troubles going on. There was an influx of young men and women from schools and universities from other parts of China. Often their battles between themselves were carried out on the streets of Peking and it was not altogether unusual to see dead bodies.
As it got worse, there were mass demonstrations – very noisy young people. Then sometimes you’d see a lorry come down the road with some unfortunate middle-aged man or woman on top of it, held in the so-called jet-plane position, while he or she was carried off to whatever their fate was to be. On more than one occasion, we had to take care of ourselves and plead diplomatic immunity, or get on a bicycle and ride away very fast. It was a very heated – overheated – atmosphere.
Among the other diplomatic missions there who we relied on and exchanged information with – the Russians were certainly one of those. They were on the receiving end of some Red Guard attention; as I recall, some kind of minor siege was laid to the Soviet Embassy. We had a couple of good contacts there. I used to see them every week: we’d exchange materials with them. We all felt – the Russians, the other East Europeans, the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, even the Mongolians, the Indians, the French – those were all foreign diplomatic missions in Peking with whom we had regular contact, and with whom we exchanged information the whole time – we were all in the same game. What was going on in this country? Where is it leading and what does it point to at the top?
By 22 August, after the Indonesian Embassy had been burned down and tensions had risen over Hong Kong, the British Mission was becoming a target.
It began like any other day. There were a number of the wives with us, who would come and go in the normal scheme of things. Around the middle of the day, we saw that the Public Security Bureau guards on the gate of our mission, who were there ostensibly for our protection, were becoming quite nervous and when we tried to go out, to walk along to where the diplomatic flats were or whatever, they said, ‘No, no, you can’t come out.’ We said, ‘Why not?’ They said, ‘Look, look, it’s for your own safety, you can’t come out.’ By this time there were smallish numbers of Red Guard crowds who were coming – which wasn’t that unusual, we had all this in June at the time of the Six-Day War, we knew big demonstrations outside the British Embassy happened all the time. However, in this case it was unusual to be told by the Public Security Bureau guards that we couldn’t leave, so we thought maybe this is the kind of siege stuff like the Russians had. So we settled down. We had plenty of food in the office building. Those like my wife who were there and couldn’t get out made themselves useful in the library or whatever. As the day went on, the crowds got bigger. They got bigger and bigger and bigger. Moreover, when we phoned out, we found out the telephone line had been cut. That seemed to be a little bit … there’s something special was going on here. We just sat it out; we thought if we have to sleep in all night, it’s not the end of the world. Donald Hopson, the head of our mission, who was a very phlegmatic ex-military man, with a Military Cross to his name, was playing some bridge upstairs with one or two colleagues. The rest of us were getting on with life, preparing an evening meal, and making sure we had covered all the angles if this got nasty. But we didn’t really expect it to.
Darkness began to fall. I remember going out after dark just to take a peep. The building was surrounded by a wall – I remember going out under the cover of darkness and just taking a good look at what was happening outside. It was very unusual. A huge crowd, all very quiet – not shouting at us, all sitting quietly, occasionally being lectured by whoever the major domo was out there. Nothing else. So, I came back in and reported that.
Nothing changed until the absolute minute of 10pm, at which point, as we subsequently learned from some colleagues in the Polish Embassy, a Very light was fired into the sky and that turned out to be the signal. At that point, the entire crowd outside – who the New China News Agency told us later had been at least 10,000 – got to their feet, swarmed over the walls of the embassy’s premises and came at the building. At that moment, Donald Hopson’s voice could be heard throughout the mission from upstairs at his bridge table, shouting, ‘They’re coming in!’ and we realised we had to do something quick. We quickly barricaded or locked all the outside doors and went to the part of the mission which had iron bars protecting it, where the Registry was and [the] Communication Centre. Getting all the lights out, hunkering down quietly, as we hoped, until it was over.
It wasn’t over: we realised very quickly they were setting fire to the building. They came armed with lots of stuff, including cans full of petrol, which had been spotted by our friends down the road at the Polish and the Czech embassies – but they couldn’t reach us because, of course, the phones had been cut – and the building in no time was on fire. We just kept quiet, we didn’t want to attract too much attention to where exactly we were inside the building. We had to do some fast thinking. Windows were broken; stuff was brought up.
The building was getting hot and smoky inside. It’s not fun being inside a burning building. After about 30 or 40 minutes hoping this would all somehow blow over, we realised it wouldn’t. At this point, some of the groups outside were actually demolishing the brickwork of the building in order to force their way in – it turned out they had battering rams. We had an escape door at the ground level, which wasn’t entirely visible from the outside and was never used, but it was reinforced inside and it was the escape if we were ever caught in a situation like this. The order was given to get that door open from the inside and, on the word from Donald Hopson, we all went out into the forecourt of the mission, into the hands of a very, very angry mob. That was the most difficult part of it all, because the gap between exiting the emergency door and reaching the outside of the circumference wall seemed like an eternity, and the whole of that space was filled by these enraged young men and women who were out to do us – and they did do us. It was very unpleasant being beaten up in that way.
We were carried on the flow of those people. I was holding on to my wife with one hand and another female, a secretary, with the other, and it became very nasty. All one’s primal instincts come to the fore at that point. My wife had her long hair pulled back by one of these people; someone else put their hand under her skirt. I remember thinking, ‘The only way I’m going to get this guy to let go of my wife is to physically bite him’, and I was just going down on to his arm with my teeth – and we gradually, gradually, forced our way through this mob, raining blows on us, to the point where I suddenly saw a member of the People’s Liberation Army and grabbed him and said in Chinese, ‘Do something, you’re a soldier, you’re supposed to protect us!’
They were there to do that, but they were told they couldn’t go into the compound because that’s diplomatic immunity – never mind the fact the Red Guards were all there. But once we got out of the wall, then they could go through the motions of attempting to protect us. Gradually, it all simmered down. We were eventually evacuated in a large lorry where all the soldiers stood up round the outside of the lorry, so it looked as if it was full of soldiers. We were told to lie down so we were not visible and we were evacuated. By this point, the building was a seething mass of flame. The British Mission building was completely burnt out. Donald Hopson’s residence, which was 20 yards down the road, the next building, had also been sacked, but not burned. We went away to lick our wounds.
The physical impact primarily, which we all shared, was intense shock. We all had superficial wounds of one sort or another. Our head guard, who was a man near retirement age, died within a year of this, and he was laid out for quite some time after the event. Another member of our staff had severe concussion from blows around the head. He was looked after by a doctor in the Czechoslovak Embassy as I recall, and he couldn’t move. He was absolutely supine in his bed for a couple of weeks. Someone else was badly mentally affected and had a serious breakdown. We were in a position where we couldn’t get out at will because, at this time, even British diplomats were not allowed to leave the country – we were basically hostages. All that took some time to weather the storm, but we collected ourselves and ‘made do and mended’ as much as one could, and reported it all to London.