Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he’s been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today’s resurrected item:
Message to Hu by Dalai Lama
By Graham Earnshaw in Peking
July 17, 1981
Tibet’s exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, has sent congratulations to the new chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Daily said in Peking yesterday. He urged Chairman Hu Yaobang “to continue with your courage and efforts in recognizing realities and respecting people’s aspirations”.
Publication of the double-edged message by the Chinese media has significance. Diplomats suggested that the Peking authorities calculated the message might convince some of the Dalai Lama’s followers in Tibet that he was coming round to accepting Chinese control there.—END
Author note: And so the story rattles on, decade after decade. This item indicates there is a precedent for an admission of dialogue. Hu (as an Australian diplomat put it in the mid-1980s, it’s not who ya know, it’s Hu Yaobang) was the party chief through the 1980s, and was one of the two Chinese leaders for whom the Dalai Lama has expressed admiration – the other being Deng Xiaoping. Hu took the view that Tibetan culture had been damaged by the huge officially-organized Han migration to Tibet in the 1960s and 1970s and withdrew large numbers back into the heartland. Deng famously stated that as long as an individual accepted the concept of no division of the People Republic of China – i.e. no independence for Taiwan or Tibet – then everything else was negotiable.
I visited Lhasa in 1982, on one of the first foreign journalist group visits, and as I always did in those days, had my Martin guitar with me. I lugged it up all the steps in the Potala right to the roof, and played some songs sitting up there. I did not, as I often claimed, play a version of Louis Armstrong’s hit, Hello Dalai. But I did play Chuck Berry’s Maybelline. The KGB agent on the tour – the Tass correspondent – then played a Russian tune called “Tibet”. And the valley gleamed beneath us.