Meet the Chairman (New Society, 8 November 1979)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.

Meet the Chairman by Ian Walker

A black limousine parked in the farmyard has a red flag on its bonnet and a tea lady on its back seat. The chauffeur told her to get in so she would know how the Queen feels. At first, she sat in the front, but the chauffeur told her that the Queen always travels in the back.

“I’ve done ’em all,” he says. “King Hussein, Castro, Faisal before he died. They’re all punters, aren’t they?” That is, they all help pay his wages. Today’s wages: courtesy of the Chairman Hua Roadshow.

At 9.30 that morning at Sherwood House farm, in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, policemen marched round in wellies speaking into walkie-talkies. County types stood around in small groups, shaking hands and forcing smiles. A man in shirt-sleeves led by a white rope, connected by a ring to the nostrils, a black bull, which was to be “a present from the British people to the Chinese' people.” An XJ6 flying the union jack swept into the farmyard. Colonel Sir John Thompson, Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, stepped out: a chestful of medals on his navy blue uniform, a red stripe down the trousers, boots with silver spurs, a ceremonial sword. Was he to play the part of paper tiger?

“I say hello and salute.” The colonel rehearsed his routine. “But, of course, he won’t understand what I’m saying so I’ll have to sort of . . .” He made a shoving motion towards the table in the barn where the speeches were to be made and the cups of Twining’s Lapsang Souchong tea drunk.

Flashing blue lights on the BMW police bike at the head of the entourage. Photographers and camera crews jostled for position. “We don’t want any injuries,” said a police sergeant. “We’ve forgotten our first aid kit.” A cavalcade of black limousines pulled up. The colonel clicked his heels to attention and saluted Chairman Hua, more modestly attired in a grey raincoat over a Chinese tunic. Even though the farm had been hosed down the night before, the Chairman still got mud on his black side-gusset shoes as he walked towards the table in the barn. “I got a policeman’s head,” one photographer moaned to another.

After brief speeches, the entourage drifted up a track which led to a bungalow inhabited by a cowhand and his family. The Chinese delegation had requested that the Chairman be shown some peasant’s quarters.

A police cordon was thrown round the bungalow to prevent the mob of photographers tramping all over the garden. They had to wait outside while the Chairman went inside, before appearing on the lawn with cowhand David, his wife Linda, their six girls and one boy, this last a baby cradled in David’s tattooed arms. They posed for pictures. Chairman Hua wore the frozen smile Chinese leaders always have on those socialist realist portraits in oil.

The delegation shlepped off to the fleet of Range Rovers which would whisk them round the farm. The photographer carrying the step-ladder said to one of his mates, “Shall we go and get this bull, then?” 

“Yeah, let’s get the bleedin’ bull.”

I walked back with them to the farm where I found the tea lady giggling at the idea of sitting in for the Queen. A few yards from the car, a young girl held a miniature porcelain Friesian on a black base. “Don’t let go until he’s definitely holding it,” said her mother.

“Oh, you’ve said that so many times." 

The delegation returned from its quick tour of the farm for the next set piece: The Presentation Of The Galloway Bull (donated by the Galloway Society and due to travel over to China next April).

The Chairman Hua Roadshow is now behind schedule. The convoy of limousines, motorbikes, XJ6s and police buses raced at high speed through Brightwell-cum-Sotwell and then through Wallingford streets lined with citizens who smiled and waved.

Chinese traffic lights have a different colour code: red means go. This convoy went on red, orange and green. It did 60 mph in 40 mph built-up areas, and slowed to 40 only to take the roundabouts, all manned by police holding back the rest of the traffic. The convoy’s destination was the Randolph Hotel, Oxford’s swankiest.

I was thrown out of the foyer by an official who was unimpressed with the reasons for my lack of official accreditation. Down the road in the narrow wood-panelled bar at the Eagle and Child two dons discuss the Chairman’s visit:

“Were you interrupted by Chairman Hua this morning?”

“Insofar as I was stuck for half an hour at Giles Circus.”

“You know, if anyone wanted to take a potshot at him, they could do so from one of the windows . . .”

“Who wants to?”

A crowd gathered outside the Randolph at 1.45 pm. The Chairman is due out at 2 pm. A student stood on a limousine’s back bumper to get a photo of the foyer. He is chastised by a fat chauffeuse in a green uniform: “These cost £30,000 you know, and you pay for it.” A red carpet was rolled out from the hotel to the limo and a doorman vacuumed it.

Passing students, on bicycle and on foot, tended to stop and join the crowd. Workers mostly walked on by. They, after all, had work to do. No time for the lunchtime theatre “Where do correct ideas come from?” asked Chairman Mao in his Little Red Book. “Do they drop from the sky? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone.”

Would Chairman Mao, who put “politics in command,” be as happy about being feted in the shadow of the dreaming spires as Chairman Hua?

The Chairman must still be eating dessert. “Running late. Running late. Three zero minutes late. Hold positions,” crackled a woman’s voice over the police walkie- talkies. “This Hua, he’s not as charismatic as Mao is he?” asked a young woman of a man in a college scarf. “No. He doesn’t write as many books.”

Forty minutes late, Hua walked down the red carpet to receive the acclaim of the crowd. No voices were raised in criticism, though one man raised a poster, PINOCHET, POL POT, HUA, MURDERERS OF THE PEOPLE.

The Chairman Hua Roadshow drove the short distance to the Bodleian library, but the Chairman now only had time for a quick in-and-out en route to Merton college. The photographers resumed their battle with each other and with the police as we walked down a high-walled alley to Merton, where Harold Macmillan was waiting to take tea with Hua in the Breakfast Room. A woman outside the college with a bouquet of flowers fought hard to hold ground as the photographic swarm encircle her. A placard held aloft the waiting crowd said, “Down with Lapsang Souchong, PG tips is tops.” The chant worked out a small group of demonstrators was the whacky: “Down with Chinese and Soviet Chinese Imperialism.” It didn’t really scan.

Once past the man on the door who inspected the IDs, photographers enlisted to help of students in finding places in the college from which they could photograph Hua and Macmillan with a zoom lens. One press man took some film off a student who said that he was editor of Cherwell, the undergraduate newspaper, and that he bribed a college servant to gain access the Breakfast Room.

How much would Hua and Macmillan have to say to each other? Not that much. The Chairman was on the move again ten minutes, accompanied round the grounds by the university vice-chancellor Sir Rex Richardson. Through the interpreter, he explained that the building this court had a sundial 300 years old “And the part of the building we were before, that is 700, er, no, 600 years old . . ."

As I left the 600 year old court, I was buttonholed by a policeman. He said: - "A police spokesman said, ‘We’re fucking pissed off with it all.’ ”

Now, off to the station to snap the Chairman boarding the high-speed train back to London. The train, all first-class carriage stood at the platform. But the entourage was on board already. No pictures. “I hope you got something at Merton,” said the Brummie reporter to his photographer.

On the next train back to London (standing room only in second class) a young man, in a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt reads Workers Weekly, an irregular production of the Communist Party of England Marxist-Leninist. Down with Modern Revisionism! said one of the headline (most seem to start with down and end with!). This maoist group, which is pro the Gang of Four, broke with China some time ago over the Chinese three-world view. Outlined first by Mao, it is still the guiding principle of foreign policy.

The first world is that of the superpowers (of which the more dangerous is the Soviet Union); the second world is that of the European powers who, Mao believed could be brought into alliance with the main progressive force, the third world, against the super-powers. “The logic of the Chinese view,” said a Sinophile friend when I go home, “leads them to support Pinochet in Chile. Whereas the Albanians say that you cannot support Chile, only Chilean workers.”

So the third world came to the second world to engineer a kind of alliance agains the first world. Friendship-cum-business in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, through the Randolph Hotel, the Bodleian, the Breakfast Room in Merton and a first class compartment on a high speed train. DOWN WITH THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD!