‘Sinophile’ Gough Whitlam a man for our moment
Gough Whitlam performed magnificently on his historic trip to China in 1971.
Gough Whitlam performed magnificently on his historic trip to China in 1971, I thought.
He sailed around China looking every inch a statesman, with a delegation of nine Australian journos never far behind.
Mao Tse Tung was too far gone for a meeting with the head of a friendship delegation, and we got Chou En-lai. We were told to wear suits and assemble at the Peking Hotel just before midnight, and then conducted to the Great Hall of the People.
The chairs were arranged in a U, before the mural of Mao’s long march. The media was led to our side, where we waited for the rest of the friends to arrive. I did not expect the exchanges to be confidential but I believe the ALP members did. Certainly their faces were a study when they were led in and saw us.
Gough and Chou and their interpreters sat at the head of the U. If Gough was taken unawares, and he should not have been, it didn’t show. He conducted himself with aplomb. He was not overwhelmed. He held up his end.
I took a shorthand note of the entire discussion, the content of which I have long since forgotten, established myself in the little hotel post office, and began transcribing. Whenever the ancient lift announced, by its rattling, that a colleague was on the way down I would type “mtc” – more to come – at the end of the page and hand it in.
I kept the operators tied up, punching a transcript that ran in full in Australian newspapers, and abridged, round the world on the Reuters wires. I fitted in a lead, and took time off to file the group photograph when it became available. If there was a big story around, then I was determined it would be mine. I was being pursued by the head of our friendship group on our way out from China, and I was endeavouring to avoid him – I did not need another talk about the iron rice-bowl, and what happy places the May 20 cadre school concentration camps were in this land where everybody wore a cotton uniform, coloured according to their calling, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
For a journalist, China is a story that keeps on giving. But don’t cross them while you are still in their country.
While the ALP friendship visit was happening Henry Kissinger was also in Peking, unknown to us, negotiating a visit by the US president Richard Nixon. The ALP delegates went sightseeing and scattered to different parts of China, while Philip Koch of the ABC and I were making our way home via Japan.
We were in the very large lobby of the Tokyo Prince Hotel when we heard that Kissinger had been in Peking at the same time. It blunted the domestic political criticism Gough was getting back home for being a “lickspittle Sinophile”. Gough was on the far side of the hotel lobby when he caught sight of us. His voice boomed across the lobby. “They’re f..ked,” he said of his critics.
He was right. He won the next election with a handy majority.
The transcript of these exchanges with Chou, who was leading China out of the Mao era, made Whitlam a statesman.
David Barnett covered the 1971 trip for Australian Associated Press
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During his 1971 trip Gough Whitlam filed a series of articles for The Australian about what he saw, and why he believed so passionately in the need for Australia to develop a relationship with China. They are remarkably resonant today.
Read them here:
Whitlam’s Dateline Peking: Labor’s leader reports from China
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