When he wasn't doing that he would, after much prodding, let slip a reminiscence or two about being a target of the Cultural Revolution.
No good.
From Australia's Quadrant Magazine, July 29:
It Could Never Happen Here? Ah, But It Is
As far as the great British public was concerned, the Chinese Cultural Revolution began in London in 1966 when Chinese diplomats rushed out of their embassy in Portland Place (conveniently close to Broadcasting House) and attacked the police stationed there to guard them. A picture of one “diplomat” threatening a policeman with a hatchet made it onto the front pages (above), and the next day crowds gathered in Portland Place shouting anti-Chinese slogans. Drunken British hooligans—less of a cliché in 1966 than today—were patriotically inspired to ransack a few Chinese restaurants across the country. Their owners defensively placed in their windows signs that proclaimed “We Are Hong Kong Chinese and British”—sentiments that have come back into vogue in recent days.
The Battle of Portland Place, though dramatic, was a probably a calculated response to movement restrictions placed on the diplomats by Harold Wilson’s government which itself was reacting (much more reasonably) to the burning of a UK mission and the roughing-up of UK diplomats by “Red Guards” in China. Both governments wanted the crisis over, and when Mao and his faction re-imposed control over both their rivals and their student revolutionary supporters, they embarked on long negotiations that, among other results, tacitly accepted postponing the return of Hong Kong until 1997.
By then, however, the Brits had become fascinated by the anarchic disorders that were sweeping China, where students paraded their teachers in dunces’ caps, local authorities sent lawyers to spread night-soil over the fields in forced labour, and precious artefacts of Chinese culture were seized from museums and destroyed in the streets. Young Red Guards, waving Mao’s “Little Red Book” (a dull collection of communist equivalents to improving Victorian maxims like “The man who watches the clock will always be one of the hands”), were licensed to imprison, beat, torture and even kill people in positions of authority who supposedly represented the obstacles that traditional culture presented to the achievement of true revolution. Those young idealists, as many have since testified, now look back with shame and horror at their combination of crime, brutality and philistinism towards people who had done them no wrong and in some cases had been their mentors.....MUCH MORE
What was mystifying then—and to some extent still is—was whether this was anarchy or dictatorship. I remember the exiled Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely telling a Tory audience in London, only partly tongue in cheek, that all the sources of information seemed to be Maoist: “One radio station will say, ‘In our province the reactionaries have killed 1000 people’ only for another to reply, ‘That’s nothing. In our province the reactionaries have killed 10,000 people.’” Was the entire Cultural Revolution an exercise in power politics to destroy his enemies or a kind of revolutionary fiesta that would ensure the loyalty of an entire generation of young Chinese to Mao’s scorched-earth version of revolution?
It was probably both. If so, the first purpose was achieved and the second inevitably failed. Mao emerged from the Cultural Revolution supreme in China, a kind of god-man, with his party rivals dead or imprisoned, but after his death the Maoists were purged and the politics of revolutionary egalitarianism abandoned. Deng Xiaoping introduced his capitalist-roader economic reforms about the time Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street, and China’s power and prosperity have grown rapidly ever since. Whatever criticisms the Chinese people have of their government today, they show no nostalgia for Mao or his ism....
