ANOTHER VOICE
Let us all pray for those in peril on the sea, the Chinese and the Hislops
AUBERON WAUGH
Can any of us doubt that if frightened by a serious challenge to their power and authority as Prime Minister — and if they thought they could get away with it Thatcher, Heath and Wilson would have been equally prepared to shoot down demonstrating students in Parliament Square? One could easily add a host of names of other British politicians who have never reached Number Ten: Foot, Hatters- ley, Parkinson, Douglas Hogg, Jeremy Thorpe. . . . I well remember Mr Heath before he had even tasted the power which eventually went to his head so disastrously, as Leader of the Opposition at the height of the Nigerian Civil War, when the International Red Cross informed us that 10,000 Biafrans a day were dying of starva- tion, assuring students at Bristol University that of course he would treat Wales or Scotland in the same way if they tried to secede from the United Kingdom. Wilson it was who went on supplying arms to the federal government when he had indisput- able evidence that it was using mass starvation as its main weapon to bring eastern Nigeria back under its control. No doubt Wilson could not have got away with machine-gunning students in Parliament Square, or Mr Heath with starving Wales into submission. Even Mrs Thatcher waits before her victims are in Gibraltar before having them gunned down in the street. I merely venture that in different times or different circumstances they would have behaved exactly as Deng Xao-ping has behaved, just as Lord Chief Justice Goddard would happily have sent prisoners to be hanged, drawn and quar- tered, and half the Crown Court judges of England are waiting to hang young women by the neck just as soon as Mrs Thatcher tips them the wink.
It is an unfortunate characteristic of politicians and of those suffering from the power urge that anything is justified if it removes an obstacle to their ambition — and if they can get away with it. Thus I brood, safely returned from China, sitting on a terrace at Combe Florey, podding broad beans in the warm June sunshine with an unbelievably deli- cious glass of chilled Pokolbin chardonnay to hand, the rooks calling to each other in the wood and the two young pekineses romping at my feet as the only reminder of China and all its problems. In fact, I saw no pekineses in China. They have all been eaten by Hattersleyites. Kate Adie's dramatic report from a Peking of burning lorries, blood-spattered streets and tracer bullets caused true sadness as we remem- bered one of our guides in China, of whom the whole party became very fond. As a punishment for doing well at university during the Cultural Revolution (when no degrees were awarded for ten years, and the universities were filled with peasants and labourers) he had been sent for three years to work as a peasant, and for another two years as a factory worker. Now he was forcibly separated from his wife and daugh- ter. During the first three weeks of the demonstration in Tiananmen Square his face shone and he clapped his hands with happiness at every piece of news from Peking, frantically collecting money from us to send to the students. Everybody we met in those three weeks, from all over China was enthusiastically on the side of the students.
One was aware that it could all go horribly wrong, but it seemed inconceiv- able to me that Deng could be so stupid. There was something almost bogus about it all, as the students basked in general approval, holding hands and looking twee and smiling at everyone, before the mood changed. I suspected that they were being manipulated by one half of the Politburo against the other. Deng's liberalisation of the economy had come to grief on the rocks of inflation, and Zhao, his heir apparent and arch-proponent of the capi- talist road, had reckoned that it was time for Deng, at 84, to make way. In the event, the old brute struck back with great effec- tiveness, but it is impossible to believe that anything will last for very long now in Peking.
No analysis of Chinese events means anything if it fails to take account of the peasants who have always formed the power base of the regime. Brutish, illiter- ate and instantly malleable by the crudest of bribes, they have systematically been denied any of the advantages of normal technological progress — in medical care, education or working methods — by a regime which has nevertheless given first priority to satisfying their basic require- ments, with some minuscule improvement in line with their extremely low expecta- tions. The average income of farmers in large parts of China is 600 yuan, or about £100. It was this great lumpenproletariat which Mao turned loose on the educated classes when he began to fear they had seen through him. I can't believe it will work a second time but one must never forget those charabanc loads of Hattersleys waiting to be brought in from outside.
China is a hideous place, when all is said and done, with its miserable cement- coloured buildings, its grinding poverty and its twin economies, like all socialist countries — one for tourists and overseas Chinese, with their Foreign Exchange Cer- tificates, the other for the wretched prison- ers of socialism. But the transition from socialism will be unbearably painful. The saddest part of Kate Adie's harrowing broadcast, at any rate for me, was when she told us that at least one group of students in Tiananmen Square was singing the 'Internationale' as its members were gunned down by their brothers of the People's Liberation Army.
Is there any sensible response, apart from averting the eyes? In a bathroom at Combe Florey I have a photograph show- ing myself among seven small children brothers, sisters and first cousins — posing among the daffodils and beech trees in the park of their grandmother's house in west Somerset. It is an idyllic scene, made all the more poignant by the fact that two of that number are now dead. Underneath, the photographer (also, no doubt, long dead) has signed his name: Compton Col- lier 1944.
At the time that photograph was taken, unspeakable horrors were taking place in central and northern Europe. Cattle trucks were being shunted to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, civilian populations were being bombed and uprooted, terror, dis- ease, starvation and bereavement stalked large parts of the earth's surface, but we were happy as sandpipers. Was there anything to be gained by telling those small children of all the terror and misery? At any moment in time there are areas of terror and uncertainty, others of calm and happiness. In the offices of Private Eye people are wringing their hands, while a few hundred yards away, in the offices of the Literary Review, all is luxe, calme et volupte, at any rate this week. Traditional- ly, the remedy was to say a prayer for those less fortunate people in peril on the sea, or facing extermination, or struggling with the consequences of a disastrous libel action. Perhaps it is the best solution.
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