Lunch with the FT: Madam Fu Ying
By Lionel Barber
Published: January 29 2010 16:52 | Last updated: January 29 2010 16:52
Madam Fu Ying is a rare specimen in the ranks of Chinese diplomacy. She is female, she comes from an ethnic minority – she was born in Inner Mongolia – and this week, she takes up a new post in Beijing as only the second female vice-foreign minister since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. (The first was Wang Hairong, Chairman Mao’s niece, who was appointed during the Cultural Revolution.)
We settled on the Goring Hotel, near Victoria, as the location for our lunch after delicate negotiations. The biscuit-brown and cream decor is classic and understated; the menu unequivocally English. The ambassador is delighted. Though she describes the past three years in London as her toughest diplomatic assignment, far more demanding than earlier stints in Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines, she will, she says, miss much: the jogs in the park, the walks down Oxford Street, the West End theatre, the football ...
The football? “Yes, very much,” says the ambassador. “A friend of mine introduced me to Arsenal. He was so keen that I started to support Arsenal. I even have an Arsenal T-shirt, with a number 08.”
As a Spurs supporter, I am underwhelmed but the soft-spoken ambassador presses on regardless. “Last November, Arsenal were playing Chelsea and it was a Sunday. Very cold. I have a blue down coat and I matched it with light blue jeans and a royal blue scarf. Very beautiful. But when I arrived in the stadium I already knew I had made a mistake. It was very awkward cheering for Arsenal [whose shirts are bright red] in bright blue.”
Madam Fu is charming but she also knows that charm can serve as a weapon. As when she was questioned at a 2008 trade conference about the possibility of a British trade boycott because of China’s crackdown in Tibet. Such threats, she replied, could have embarrassing consequences since most of the attendees were wearing clothes made in China: “You’ll all be naked.”
The ambassador claims to have forgotten the incident, and turns to the menu. She selects soused herrings, admitting she has no idea what “soused” means but she is determined to order something authentically British. The waiter recites a word-perfect explanation. Satisfied, she moves on to steamed Cornish sea bass as a main course. I, too, choose sea bass, with a pear and beetroot salad as a starter. The ambassador declines a glass of wine. “Need to stay alert,” she says, conscious perhaps that her superiors in Beijing will study this interview as keenly as any diplomatic dispatch.
Highlights of her three years in London include, says the ambassador, lots of visits to advanced manufacturing sites; trips to the homes of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and William Shakespeare; and, less predictably, the British TV talent show The X Factor.
The trickiest point in her tenure came in 2008 with the unrest in Tibet ahead of the Beijing Olympics. A flash of irritation appears on her face as she recalls international pressure for an official boycott of the opening ceremony in Beijing. The very idea of China being “humiliated” – “the last word you would use on China now” – was insulting, not least because it impugns China’s status. She prefers to draw attention to the wave of sympathy for the Chinese people expressed by the British after the devastating earthquake in Sichuan in May 2008. In one month, she notes, the embassy received £2m, including donations from a delegation of 13 policemen who bicycled from Birmingham to London to drop off the cash.
Madam Fu’s command of English is excellent, thanks not only to her background as an interpreter but also to her postgraduate studies at the University of Kent in 1985-86, when she shared a scholarship with another Chinese student. She remembers having to live on £1 a day, after payment of the rent. But however hard life may have been in Canterbury during the Thatcher years, it was nowhere near as tough as her childhood.
Fu Ying was born in 1953 in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, an “autonomous region” of China. Her parents were bilingual, speaking Mandarin and Mongolian. Her father wrote poetry. She can, she tells me, still remember the day that a tall, ethnically Chinese man arrived at the family home to take her father away. It was 1967 and the height of the Cultural Revolution, the bloody chaos unleashed by Mao to purge the party and consolidate power.
“The [tall] man looked into my eyes and said, ‘Democracy is great. Do you know what is democracy?’ I shook my head; I didn’t know. And he said, ‘That’s the change of history. You will be swept away by the change of history.’” (Democracy, during the Cultural Revolution, was equivalent to anarchy. No wonder, I muse to myself, it does not carry the same positive connotations in China as in the west.)
A tear appears in Madam Fu’s eye. She recounts how school was shut down and she was taken away, aged 17, to a remote town in the mountains, Wulashan, five hours distant by train. There she worked in the fields – “very, very physical, really stressful and extreme for a young girl” – before helping to build a new factory where she was employed as an announcer, broadcasting information to her co-workers about the weather and the like through a loudspeaker.
But then, in 1973, she had her first break. The Cultural Revolution was in its last throes and previously frowned-upon practices such as examinations to test pupil ability were revived. Fu Ying excelled, having squirrelled away first Russian and then French classics from a library in Wulashan. She also excelled in English, having picked up the basics on Chinese radio. She gained a place to study for four years at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
After the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, China started to open to the rest of the world. Suddenly, interpreters were in heavy demand. Madam Fu joined the elite translation department of the diplomatic service. When I ask her if it is correct that she was a protégée of Mao’s favourite interpreter, she will not confirm it – though she certainly made enough of a mark to be elevated to be interpreter to Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor and the man widely credited for introducing market reforms in China.
While the ambassador declines to reveal much about life with Deng, she does confirm a memorable public mistranslation. In January 1988, when the 84-year-old Chinese leader greeted Gro Harlem Brundtland, the then 48-year-old Norwegian premier, on an official visit to China, he observed that she was not so old. Brundtland said that Deng did not look so old either. Deng laughed and said he was only 84 but, explains Fu Ying, “I was in a hurry and said he was 48 ... Deng laughed. But Deng was great. Interpreting for him was really a very exciting experience.”
I ask the ambassador if she was the translator when Deng reportedly declared that he was very pleased with the one-child policy in China because he no longer needed to invade Siberia. “He never said that,” says Madam Fu, showing a momentary sense of humour failure. “He was a very kind man, very alert about the world. I liked Deng; he was very simple, very quick.”
The waiter arrives with our steamed sea bass wrapped in baby spinach. We agree that the fish tastes as good as it looks before I turn to the vexing question of China’s relationship with the rest of the world. How should the west accommodate Chinese power, and why does the scope for mutual misunderstanding seem greater than ever? Madam Fu weighs her answers carefully. “You have your standard [in the west] and you use that standard to measure China, and every time you find China does not fit that standard. But China is never going to, is it? China has such a long history of its own, the only continuous culture in 5,000 years. But it also has about 200 years of a very sad history, with foreign occupations. That hurt China. That’s why the Chinese remember the suffering more than the victories. China has a strong sense of crisis.”
Beyond what I take to be the implied reference to the brutal Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 lies a gut Chinese hostility to being lectured by anyone, whether on human rights, an artificially undervalued currency, the environment or the scramble for raw materials in Africa needed to power the Chinese economy. “There is this frustration about not being understood, not being accepted,” says Madam Fu, who compares different political systems to different types of roof which cannot be imposed willy-nilly on different types of buildings.
The metaphor is seductive but what about universal values, such as freedom of expression, or, more concretely, the controversy over Google, which has just threatened to pull out of China on the grounds that the giant internet group was being both censored and targeted by cyber-hackers? The ambassador seems slightly flustered. “I don’t know the inside story. I don’t know exactly what happened ... I don’t think it’s a clear picture.”
But she soon recovers her poise, noting pointedly that Google apologised last year to Beijing for allowing offensive material on its site (even though the pressure from Beijing that elicited this apology was widely seen in the west as a pretext for renewing state censorship).
As for cyber-attacks, “That is a problem in China and all over the world, so you probably know which country has the best hackers.” The real answer to my Google question comes a few minutes later, and it centres on the Communist party’s determination to maintain its monopoly on information flows and propaganda. As so often with even the most sophisticated Chinese officials, the essence of the argument lies in two words: “political stability”.
“China is in the middle of reform. On the one hand [there is] the importance of maintaining political stability, which is the essential condition for China to grow – and on the other hand, the changing horizon for the government ... I think China is gradually finding the right path and finding the right balance between maintaining political stability while making change, which is one of the most difficult challenges for a government in a developing country. And China is”, she adds, “still a developing country.”
But China is also the coming global power. Does China wish to replace the US as the world’s hegemon? “Deng Xiaoping said China will never be a hegemon. If one day, China becomes one, the world will stand up against China. That is very deep in our hearts. Every diplomat knows that.
“The west should calm down and learn to see China for what it is, not keep speculating and putting their own colour into this painting,” explains Madam Fu, who has a collection of modern Chinese and Mongolian art. “A Chinese painting is watercolour: fresh, very light. If you pour oil on it, you don’t see the painting any more.”
The waiter arrives with Madam Fu’s roly-poly pudding. To show solidarity, I break my informal rule and order a dessert (a poached pear with stem-ginger ice-cream). We have a coffee and tea respectively, and I ask about her next post in Beijing. She treads carefully, noting only that her husband, an anthropologist at the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, is, as we speak, en route to London to help with the packing. As I prepare to pay the bill, Fu Ying opens her bag and presents me with a small gift: three tiny, out-of-circulation food coupons from Inner Mongolia, once preserved by her mother. The gift at the end of a meal conforms to Chinese etiquette but it also displays a personal and diplomatic touch (she donated a similar gift last October to the British Museum to mark the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic).
Earlier Fu Ying had referred to Britain’s strong sense of justice. Now she says she feels a sense of personal accomplishment as well as a sense of history and her own modest place in it. “I think I will be leaving with a few full-stops, but lots of commas. I opened things, but I haven’t accomplished much, but the passage is open. And there are still a few question-marks which will be answered in future.”
Madam Fu’s language is deliberately opaque. For two-and-a-half hours I have listened to a consummate professional; charming, steely, wary. We started to scratch the surface but there is more to come: how about a rematch in Beijing?
Lionel Barber is editor of the FT
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The Goring Hotel
Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1
Set lunch x 2 £70
Soused herring
Pear and beetroot leaf salad
Steamed fillet of Cornish sea bass with baby spinach
Jam roly poly with custard
Poached pear with ice-cream
Coffee x 1 £5
Pot of Assam tea x 1 £5
Large still water x 2 £8.50
Total (including service) £99.56
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Geoff Dyer on China’s charm offensive
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| Fu Ying with Gordon Brown, 2008 |
“I have to admit that I also enjoy watching The X Factor when there is time and have my favourite contestants,” she wrote in November, following a minor media kerfuffle about noise at her residence from a next-door building that housed the show’s stars. She was coy about who she was rooting for but said many of the wannabe singers had “great qualities”.
For much of the past decade, China has been on a charm offensive, settling border disputes with neighbours, becoming an active player in a host of international organisations and distributing aid in the developing world. The overriding goal has been to play down the idea of a looming “China threat”.
That also means a different style of diplomacy, of which Madam Fu has been one of the most prominent examples. To audiences used to remote, cliché-spouting cadres, her quick wit has been disarming. By writing regular opinion pieces in British newspapers, she has tried to convey the image of a country that is willing to engage in argument and not hide behind defensive slogans.
That has also made her a controversial figure at home. Although China has been working to soften its image, officials overseas face a risk of being denounced for showing weakness in the face of foreign pressure. During the furore over the 2008 riots in Tibet and the Olympic torch relay in London, she came under fire in China for being soft after she wrote an article for The Sunday Telegraph.
Such sniping does not seem to have held her back, given her recent promotion as one of three new vice foreign ministers. Yet she is also returning to Beijing at a time when the mood appears to be shifting and China is not so keen to present a suave demeanour to the world.
There were the bruising talks in Copenhagen over climate change, and the recent threat by Google to leave China after alleged bullying by Beijing and high-tech hacking.
One of Madam Fu’s last acts in London was being summoned by Foreign Office minister Ivan Lewis after the execution of British citizen Akmail Shaikh for smuggling heroin. Beijing responded by highlighting Britain’s role in the 19th-century opium wars. No one seemed to be making jokes about The X-Factor.
Geoff Dyer is the FT’s Beijing bureau chief
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