So by the early sixties the wheel had come almost full
in China. Power had
cycle. Britain was no longer a force in China.
passed irrevocably to Peking; China had "stood up", as Mao had
put it when he proclaimed "liberation" from the rostrum of the
Forbidden City in October 1949. Britain's military strength
had shrunk; her diplomatic presence was greatly reduced;
with one exception the old consulates had gone; the old
business interests were virtually all erased.
These losses should in theory have freed Britain from
the past and allowed a new beginning. But in practice this
proved difficult to achieve. Britain was too closely
associated with the main enemy, the United States. The slate
was not entirely clean: there was still the matter of Hong
Kong. There was also the general baggage of history, and not
such distant history at that. The Chinese travelled with a
full load. There were not only the new Marxist categories of
wrong-doing; there were also nationalist memories and
aspirations; and always the echo of that sinocentrism, that
sense of China as the Middle Kingdom, which Macartney and his
company had encountered at the Manchu court in the distant
days of 1793. The habits of thought of the two sides were still
far apart. And, curiously, under Communism China had again
become a closed world, speaking a a different diplomatic
language, half nationalist, half Marxist, always too ready to
reject Western learning and experience and
experience and retreat into
isolation and self-sufficiency. There was again an
ideological gulf.
The new relationship was therefore bound to be thin,
harsh, suspicious. Its dynamic would no longer come mainly