Southeast Review of Asian Studies
Volume 34 (2012), pp. 114–127
Red Rendezvous: An Englishman’s Encounters
with Chinese Communism
LAWRENCE KESSLER
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Living and working in Shanghai from 1929 to 1950, Norman Watts (1907–99) played a
role in both the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. Among other things, he
helped Zhou Enlai escape Shanghai in 1931 and fought with Communist guerrillas
against remnant Japanese troops in the fall of 1945. This article recounts two further
episodes in Watts’ remarkable career. In 1949, he was the first Westerner to encounter
Communist forces as they assumed control of Shanghai. Although Watts was
sympathetic to the Communist cause, a People’s Court found Watts guilty of “capitalist”
crimes because of his work with a British shipping firm and expelled him from the
country. Returning to China in 1965 with a British trade delegation, he was able to meet
again with Zhou, who escorted him to a private meeting with Mao Zedong.
Earlier Encounters
The Englishman businessman Norman Watts (1907–99) was one of many
foreigners living and working in Shanghai during the heyday of Western
imperialism in China. While he was never a prominent figure in the
international community there, he nonetheless had some remarkable
experiences that deserve notice. During his years in Shanghai from 1929 to
1950 and even later, Watts had several close encounters with Chinese
Communism and its leaders. The most historically significant encounter
was undoubtedly when he helped save the life of Zhou Enlai 周恩來 (1898–
1976), which Zhou himself publicly acknowledged to foreign reporters in
1947 (Rowan, 64–66). Sixteen years earlier, in 1931, Zhou had been forced
to flee Shanghai when the Nationalist secret police were rounding up
Communist Party leaders and executing them in large numbers, and Watts
helped him escape. Another close encounter with the Communist
movement came in 1945, after he was released from a Japanese internment
camp in Shanghai at the end of the Pacific War. At the invitation of a
Chinese friend who rightly suspected that he harbored resentment against
his captors, Watts joined a local guerrilla unit of the New Fourth Red Army
© 2012 Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies
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and fought with them for several months against remnant Japanese troops
in the Shanghai area. I have described these earlier encounters, which
Watts related to me in 1977, in previously published articles (Kessler, 2009
and 2011). What I want to recount here are his last two rendezvous, in 1949
and 1965, which like the earlier episodes reveal intimate details of
important moments in modern Chinese history.
Watts arrived in China at the end of 1929 as a recruit in the British-run
Shanghai Municipal Police. After serving a three-year stint in the force, he
joined the legendary British-owned Blue Funnel shipping line and
remained in its employ until he left China in 1950. Having learned both
Mandarin Chinese and the local Shanghai dialect, Watts was an effective
supervisor of Chinese workers at the company’s wharf in Pudong 浦東.
When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, Watts’ work was somewhat
circumscribed as they took de facto control of Holt’s Wharf, so-named after
the founder of Blue Funnel’s parent company in England, Alfred Holt
(1829–1911). With the onset of the Pacific War in December 1941, Japanese
troops also took control of the foreign concession areas in Shanghai and
began to intern enemy nationals, including American, British, and Dutch
citizens. In January 1943, Watts was among the first group that Japanese
authorities sent to the Pudong internment camp, one of several camps in
the Shanghai area.
Japanese forces were finally disarmed and repatriated in the fall of 1945.
China’s New Fourth Army, a guerrilla force with which Watts had fought,
rejoined the main army in line with the Communist Party’s new military
strategy, and Watts returned to work with the Blue Funnel line. Holt’s
Wharf had suffered little damage during the war, although it was badly in
need of maintenance (Falkus 1990, 275–76). Life returned to normal.
According to one of Watts’ colleagues: “We had two swimming pools, a
football field, tennis court . . . a large plot of land where [we] would grow
vegetables . . . [and] a club with a snooker table and bar. . . . Every evening,
all the [U.S. Navy] ships berthed at Holt’s Wharf showed a movie with the
screen [hung] on the godown wall” (Leck 2006, 407). But this charmed life
did not last. A new struggle for supremacy had erupted—civil war between
the Communists (CCP) and the Nationalists (GMD)—that eventually led
Watts to a rendezvous with Communist forces quite unlike his previous
encounters.
“The Reds are coming!”—Shanghai 1949
Communist forces had captured most of northern China by 1948 and began
moving south toward two prizes along the banks of the Yangzi, the cities of
Nanjing and Shanghai. That winter, Watts and others in the British
community in Shanghai tried their best to bolster the morale of their
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Chinese contacts and employees, who feared the worst. Watts held special
festivities for workers at Holt’s Wharf, and other British firms gave gifts of
food and clothing (Barber 1979, 62). By early spring 1949, CCP
commanders began drawing up detailed plans for crossing the Yangzi
before the rainy season was upon them. The massive operation, involving
tens of thousands of soldiers, began on April 21. Nanjing fell to the
Communists on April 23, and by early May Hangzhou had been captured,
thus isolating Shanghai.
The CCP military command planned to seize the Wusong 吳淞 forts
guarding the mouth of the Yangzi by mid-May, thereby hoping to prevent
the Nationalists from evacuating Shanghai’s most valuable assets (troops,
ships, gold reserves). Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976) vetoed this plan,
concerned about the Communists’ administrative difficulties in Nanjing.
Furthermore, Mao wanted to ensure the peaceful surrender of Shanghai
through negotiations with local authorities and Nationalist forces. The
city’s mayor and its business leaders likewise wanted to avoid a bloody
takeover and earlier in the year had sent several peace delegations to
Beijing, where Mao and the CCP were then headquartered (Westad 2003,
241–43, 246; Xiang 1998, 185, 190–92).
Meanwhile, the foreign community in Shanghai was readying
evacuation plans. With the Communists approaching from the west, all
British and Americans were expected to assemble at the Blue Funnel
warehouses at Holt’s Wharf, where food, blankets, and other essentials were
stockpiled. Blue Funnel liners would take the refugees downriver to safety
under the protection of the British navy. The Blue Funnel’s agent in
Shanghai, Butterfield and Swire, had all its launches docked on the Bund
ready to transport British nationals to Holt’s Wharf, where Watts was put
in charge of billeting them. He led a squad of men who prepared the
dockside warehouses for bed space, brought in charcoal-burning stoves, and
installed showers to accommodate several thousand (Moore 1966, 107, 113;
Watts 1977a, 25–26). Meanwhile, about 1,500 Chinese from the
surrounding countryside had already crowded into the facilities seeking
British protection. Thirteen of these refugees gave birth at the warehouses,
with Watts assisting in the delivery (Watts 1977b).
As it turned out, the evacuation plan had to be shelved. In mid-April,
Communist shore batteries attacked the British frigate Amethyst as it was
steaming up the Yangzi to bring relief supplies to the British embassy in
Nanjing. Following this incident, British warships left Shanghai to aid the
Amethyst, which was sitting disabled in the river near Jiangyin 江 陰 .
Thereafter, all U.S. and British naval vessels stayed out of Shanghai and
anchored instead in the Yangzi near Wusong, leaving foreigners stranded
in the city. Communist forces had captured Wusong (some report that the
GMD commander there had defected) and now were able to surround
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Shanghai from both the west and the east. In the western suburbs of
Shanghai, Billy Hawkings, chairman of the British Residents Association,
and his wife were trapped in their house for three days as fighting broke out
between the advancing Communist troops and defending Nationalist forces.
The fighting ceased on the morning of May 25, and the Hawkings left the
house to greet members of the victorious Communists before they
continued to the center of Shanghai (Barber 1979, 102, 132, 145, 155).
To the east at roughly the same time, Red Army units were moving
rapidly toward Shanghai through Pudong, which the newspapers called the
“soft underbelly” of the city because it was so infested with Communist
sympathizers and agents (Ezpeleta 1971, 113). Watts was living now near
the village of Yangjing 洋涇 about a half-mile from Holt’s Wharf. On the
evening of May 24 a battle between Communist and Nationalist troops
raged in the neighborhood. Machine gun bullets riddled the giant packing
cases Watts had on his veranda and some splintered the skirting board
around his bed. At three in the morning on May 25, the company
watchman ran in and shouted, “The Reds are coming, the Red Army is
coming!” In a drizzling rain, Watts walked into the village. The night was
still and he saw no one on the cobbled main street. Then, out of the
darkness, a voice called out in Chinese, “Stand still. Put your hands up.”
Five soldiers approached Watts. He immediately recognized the red stars
on their caps. He also noticed the American-made weapons they apparently
had seized from the capitulating Nationalist general at Wusong (Watts
1977a, 24–25). Thus Watts was presumably the first Westerner to
experience the liberation of Shanghai (the Hawkings’ encounter in the
western suburbs came a few hours later).
Watts’ fluent Chinese amazed the soldiers (Barber 1979, 156). They
asked Watts how many enemy troops were at Holt’s Wharf. There had been
1,500 Nationalist troops stationed there, but Watts assured them that the
troops had fled when the fighting began. Seizing his firm’s vessels, which of
course were flying the British flag, they had headed down the Huangpu
towards the Yangzi. Still, the soldiers ordered Watts to lead them on a tour
of the wharf area, which took about two hours. After checking all the offices
and warehouses and being convinced that he was telling the truth, the
Communist unit posted sentries and returned Watts to his home. But
unlike the Hawkings, who later that morning would simply watch the
Communist forces move on, Watts was told, “You are under house arrest
and stay there until we call on you.” The soldiers then crossed the Huangpu
River and joined their comrades who occupied the main part of Shanghai
(Watts 1977a, 25).
Shanghai was liberated without much of a struggle, as Mao and city
leaders had hoped, although there had been terrifying and unsettling
moments. Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887–1975) entered the city on April
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27 and declared that he was ready to defend Shanghai to the death, a
pronouncement that some thought was meant mainly to impress his
American allies and garner more aid. Chiang had also turned loose the
Nationalist secret police, who arrested and executed scores of “defeatists
and traitors” (Ezpeleta 1971, 97–100; Westad 2003, 248–49). He then
proceeded to strip the city of its art treasures and money—reputedly $200
million in gold reserves stored in the Central Bank of China—and shipped
them to Taiwan, where he had already established a government in exile.
Chiang left Shanghai on May 8 as suddenly as he had arrived, aboard a C-47
transport aircraft named Meiling in honor of his wife Soong May-ling 宋美
齡 (1896–2003). The mayor and many prominent citizens fled as well
(Finch 1953, 337).
In a last ditch effort to honor Chiang’s pledge to “fight to the death,”
Nationalist authorities erected a wooden barricade, what foreigners
derisively called the “picket fence” or “Great Wall of Shanghai,” along the
southern, western, and northern borders of the city (Gould 1951, 183;
Wakeman 2007, 31–32). On May 24, the Nationalist general left in charge of
defending Shanghai staged a “victory parade.” Army trucks carried signs
that read “Celebrate the Great Victory,” store windows displayed defiant
posters stating “Shanghai will be the Communists’ Graveyard,” military
bands played, and a dragon dance was performed (Barber 1979, 142; Finch
1953, 338). A Communist journalist later said he knew it was all over when
the Nationalists decided to hold this parade. “It had become a ritual for
them,” he noted, that “whenever they started to flee from a place they
would stage a victory parade” (Tata 1989, 30). Later that day all Nationalist
officials and commanders left the city and headed towards Wusong, from
there to board ships and planes for Taiwan (Moore 1966, 114–17).
Shortly after midnight on May 24–25, truckloads of Communist
soldiers surrounded and secured Police Headquarters and City Hall, the
same buildings from which Nationalist officials earlier that evening had
removed important documents, and raised the Red Flag (Ezpeleta 1971,
181–82). At the same time, a Red Army vanguard had breached the wooden
barricade in the west and begun moving through the French quarter
towards the center of Shanghai, setting up sentinels along major
thoroughfares as it advanced. By daybreak it had reached the Bund
(Wakeman 2007, 34). That morning, the aforementioned Communist
journalist noticed that many of the rank-and-file Nationalist soldiers, with
no means of escape, were discarding their weapons, shedding their
uniforms, and begging local residents for civilian clothing (Tata 1989, 31).
Another observer, the American wife of a Chinese academic, noted that the
takeover had the air of a holiday, with streets deserted and markets closed.
Residents in her courtyard stayed inside and followed the progress of
events on the radio, which began broadcasting Communist announcements
Red Rendezvous
119
at eleven that morning. Like other observers, she recalled instances of
Nationalist troops desperately searching for civilian clothing (Wood 1958,
36–39).
The establishment of Communist rule was orderly, according to
eyewitnesses. The Philippine consul-general feigned initial disappointment,
expecting to see “tough, weather-beaten fire-eating soldiers, swaggering
with assertive sureness” and “bellicose in attitude.” But instead he saw
mostly self-conscious and extremely polite youngsters somewhat awed by
Shanghai’s modernity. “As victorious war heroes,” he declared jocularly,
“they were a flop” (Ezpeleta 1971, 185–86). His Italian counterpart recalled,
“The Communist soldiers . . . lounged peacefully along the sidewalks under
the shade trees . . . they made no attempt to enter either private or public
buildings, nor to interfere with anything or anybody. They even paid for
everything they received” (Rossi 1970, 33). A French correspondent
recorded, “The first wave of invaders . . . entered on felt or rubber-soled
moccasins, and . . . settled down without assaulting the civil population or
looting the houses” (Guillain 1950, 84). An American journalist put it
simply, “One day the Nationalists, next day the Communists” (Gould 1951,
183).
Back in Pudong, Watts remained under house arrest awaiting trial,
although he was free to go to his office at Holt’s Wharf. Two days after his
arrest, he attended a meeting at the wharf to discuss means of getting
Chinese refugees off the wharf and back into the countryside. The chair of
the meeting was the Communist general who back in April had fired on the
Amethyst as it attempted to reach Nanjing. Prior to leaving Shanghai, the
Amethyst had been docked at the Blue Funnel wharf. Watts remembered
having dinner with the ship’s captain and watching The Winslow Boy, a
1948 film about a Royal Naval College cadet falsely accused of a petty theft.
In the aftermath of the Amethyst incident, in which that same captain was
killed, Watts asked the general why he had fired on a British ship when the
two countries were not at war. The general’s replied, “This country is at war.
For the British warship to sail up another country’s river without any prior
permission is an infringement on that country’s sovereignty. Therefore, we
had every justification for firing on it.” Watts promptly relayed that
message to the British Consulate in Shanghai (Watts 1977b). For several
months, British and Communist authorities negotiated terms by which the
Amethyst would be granted safe passage out of the Yangzi, but the
negotiations were mired in a dispute about who fired the first shot and who
was to blame for the whole matter. At the end of July, the Amethyst made a
daring escape under cover of darkness and reached the open sea.1
In early June 1949, Watts was tried before a Peoples’ Court, which had
been set up in the main office at Holt’s Wharf. The presiding judge turned
out to be the Blue Funnel Line’s ledger clerk, with whom Watts had
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worked personally. Watts now learned to his surprise that the clerk had
been the leader of a Communist cell within the company (Barber 1979, 156–
57). The court charged Watts with the major crime of being a capitalist as
an employee of a company that had siphoned millions in profits out of
China over a period of eighty years. It ordered him to inform the Ocean
Steam Ship Co., which owned the Blue Funnel Line, that it must provide
adequate compensation. Watts admitted the charge, but stated that his
company’s business “was legitimate . . . and the profits made were not
excessive. We had employed 1,500 Chinese coolies every day for all these
years. We had employed hundreds of Chinese staff. We’d given them good
positions. . . . These profits were quite legitimate. It was in the ordinary
course of commerce between China and Britain.” The Peoples’ Court also
charged him with some minor crimes, including the ill treatment of a
Chinese sergeant on the wharf’s police force. The force was headed by
White Russian officers but had Chinese sergeants and constables. Two
years earlier, in 1947, Watts had dismissed the Chinese sergeant, after first
issuing several warnings, for frequent drunkenness and tardiness. The
court demanded that the Blue Funnel Line pay the sergeant two years back
salary and punitive damages for having dismissed him (Watts 1977a, 26–27).
Before the trial, Watts had considered revealing his earlier involvement
with the Communists—helping Zhou Enlai2 and fighting alongside Red
Army guerrillas—as extenuating circumstances that might affect the court’s
judgment. But a Cantonese friend advised him to plead guilty to all charges
due to the fact that relations between the New Fourth Army guerrilla forces
with which he had fought and the Red Army contingent now in control of
Shanghai were somewhat strained. “The main armies,” explained the friend,
“are very jealous of the guerrillas, who are always portrayed as the heroes
who have done all the harsh work and prepared the ground for the main
armies to come in. Mention of [your] previous activities would only
complicate matters.” On the same grounds, the Yangjing magistrate in
whose guerrilla unit he fought saw no chance to help (Watts 1977a, 27–28;
Watts 1977b). It has since become well known that there was a long history
of rivalry and suspicion between leaders of the New Fourth Army and the
main forces centered in the north under the control of Mao Zedong
(Benton 1999, 730; Lew 2009, 13). This rivalry carried over into the post1949 period, as Party historians downplayed the role of the New Fourth
Army and any aspects of the revolution not associated with Mao. Shortly
before Mao’s death in 1976, for example, CCP authorities rejected a
proposal by Shanghai historians to study the New Fourth Army (Stranahan
1998, 3). In the end, Watts did as advised and said nothing about his
guerrilla experiences. He received a sentence of six months “corrective
training,” suspended upon his agreeing to leave China within six months.
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“At least,” Watts consoled himself, “the judge didn’t forget that we had
been old friends, and didn’t send me straight to prison” (Barber 1979, 157).
Leaving Shanghai was not a simple matter. In early June, a temporary
ban was imposed on the issuance of exit visas (Gould 1951, 185). Even after
the ban was lifted, foreigners continued to have trouble leaving Shanghai.
To receive an exit permit, an applicant had to place advertisements in both
the English and Chinese press to the effect that anyone with a complaint
against him or her should come forward within two weeks. If nobody
replied within the time limit, the applicant next had to state what articles of
value he or she would be taking out of the country. Finally, officials would
come by the home to inspect the party’s luggage. Sometimes “money
settlements” were arranged to facilitate the process (Moore 1966, 126–27).
Watts placed his advertisements without response. He had little to declare
because the Japanese had seized his furniture and books when they
interned him in 1943. The police did not allow Watts to pack photographs
or papers except for the notes he had compiled in the Japanese internment
camp and from which he hoped to write a Chinese cultural history (Watts
1977a, 27–28).
Watts actually overstayed the six-month period stipulated by the court
without any repercussions and did not leave Shanghai until early 1950.
While waiting to depart, he continued to go into his office at Holt’s Wharf,
and even received permission on several occasions to take a launch upriver
to Shanghai to wind up his business affairs (Watts 1977a, 29). On one of
these visits, he witnessed the ceremonial entry of the Red Army. After
capturing Shanghai, the new Communist government waited about six
weeks until early July to declare a public holiday and celebrate the
liberation. It organized a parade in which over a quarter-million troops
participated. They marched in the midst of dragon dances, banging gongs,
and giant portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhu De 朱德 (1886–1976), the two
most prominent leaders of the Communists (Moore 1966, 123; Tata 1989,
33). Here is how Watts remembered the celebration:
In all the years I’d been in China, I’d seen the outlying parts of Shanghai
captured by bandit armies, by these warlords when there was a whole period of
looting. Whenever a warlord captured a place, three days were given to the
soldiers for looting and raping and everything you can think of. But when the
Communist armies came in, the people lined the streets offering them hot tea
in glasses, as they do in hot weather, but the soldiers refused to take anything,
not even the tea. And the Communist soldiers were dancing the yangge.3 They
were holding hands and dancing in circles as they came down the main street.
And behind them came the tanks and armored cars. And it was really a joyful
occasion. They were singing their songs, the military songs that I was later to
hear in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. (Watts 1977a, 30)
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The Blue Funnel Line intended to transfer Watts to Hong Kong. Watts
told his superiors that he was fed up with the political situation and wanted
to get out of China entirely. Privately, however, he worried that the
Communists would soon take over the British colony, and he fumed that
the company had not pulled him out of Shanghai before the Communist
takeover. So he returned to England to work on a special project for the
company (Watts 1977a, 32; Watts 1977b). En route, he spent time in Berlin,
where he got into trouble with Russian authorities. One day, he drove
through “Checkpoint Charlie” into the eastern sector of the city. A Soviet
soldier stopped and held him for several hours until a superior officer came
to question him. In the end, Watts was taken to Soviet headquarters in
Berlin and remained there for about six hours. He got a sympathetic
Russian guard to contact British military headquarters, and they sent an
officer to rescue him. Watts was told he was lucky, because others arrested
in similar circumstances had not been heard from (Watts 1977b).
When he finally got back to England, his parent company, the Ocean
Steam Ship Co., asked him not to publicize his activities in China in the
interest of its relations with the new regime. The company’s hope of
continuing its operations in China proved vain. By 1954, after months of
negotiating with the new regime, the company’s agent in China, Butterfield
and Swire, was forced to close all its offices and sell the Blue Funnel wharf
in Pudong to the Chinese government (Falkus 1990, 70 and 304; Shai 1996,
73–85). Watts married and settled down in the quiet countryside near Diss
in Norfolk County. To his surprise, nobody was particularly interested in
his unique wartime experiences. Watts surmised that his countrymen,
themselves having suffered through the German bombing campaign, did
not see his adventures as that unusual (Watts 1977b).
“A Miracle”—Beijing 1965
Watts returned to China only once, in November 1965, as liaison for a
British trade delegation. Arriving in Beijing, Watts wondered whether
Zhou Enlai, then the Chinese premier, would remember their brief
encounter in Shanghai thirty years earlier. He contacted the delegation’s
host organization, China Council for the Promotion of International Trade,
and mentioned that he had once met Zhou and would like to speak with
him again. Zhou sent word that he would meet with him and inquired
whether Watts wanted to meet Mao as well. Watts jumped at the chance,
and Zhou soon sent a car to chauffeur the Englishman to his residence.
According to Watts, he and Zhou had a warm reunion, reminiscing about
old Shanghai and Zhou’s escape. Zhou admitted to Watts that on the night
they met “he was terrified that he was being led into a trap” because the
path to Watts’ residence on Avenue Haig in the French Concession was a
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long one, taking Zhou down a tree-lined avenue and through a huge garden
in front of the house. Watts told Zhou about his later activities in Shanghai
and his fighting with the local anti-Japanese guerrilla force in 1945 (Watts,
1977a, 34).
After their conversation, Zhou accompanied Watts to Mao’s apartment.
Watts did not know the exact locations of the Zhou and Mao residences,
just that they were “not in the same compound, but several minutes
distance from each other.” Presumably, Watts saw them at their apartments
within the Lake Palaces (Zhongnanhai 中南海).4 Before arriving at Mao’s
residence, Zhou warned Watts not to talk about politics since he was
meeting the chairman as a friend of the premier and not as part of an
official mission. Zhou also told Watts not to speak in Chinese, even though
he knew the language very well, because protocol required the use of an
interpreter. Mao received them in an austere room lined with books on
plain wooden shelves. They shook hands, or rather Mao let Watts grip his
hand, which Watts described as “fat and chubby.” Watts was struck by the
huge mole on his chin, his ungainly frame, his shuffling gait, and his
incessant smoking. Mao invited Watts to sit in an easy chair with a loose
cover.
The conversation lasted less than an hour, with Nancy Tang (Tang
Wensheng 唐聞生, b. 1943) interpreting. Mao did most of the talking in a
thick, guttural Hunanese accent. He went on at length in a rambling,
incoherent way that Ms. Tang, the personal translator for both Mao and
Zhou, summed up in a few words. It was polite conversation for the most
part, but Mao did comment on Watts’ earlier activity in China, having
heard certain details from Zhou. He found Watts’ aid to Zhou in the 1930s
“very, very interesting” and knew that Zhou was very grateful to him. He
also asked Watts when and where he had fought with the guerrillas.
Referring to his own experiences in the caves of Yan’an and the roughness
of life in northern China, Mao told Watts he understood the kind of rough
life he must have led with the guerrillas (Watts 1977a, 34–39; Watts 1977b).
Watts noted that Nancy Tang did not translate several of his questions
for Mao and assumed they were not of the right sort. The most curious
omission was a rather straightforward question: “When was Mao last in
Hangzhou?” Watts knew that Mao loved Hangzhou and often vacationed
there, and he thought this topic safe. But Ms. Tang told Watts she could
not convey that question and did not translate it. We now know, what
Watts could not have known at the time, that the whereabouts of Mao was a
sensitive issue given the political struggles occurring within leadership
circles of the Communist Party just prior to the Cultural Revolution.5
China in 1965 was a revelation to Watts. He had known China
previously, as he put it, “with a population of 850 million people in a state
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which couldn’t be any worse, in a degenerate and degraded state.” Fifteen
years later, he found the transformation staggering:
To my mind, it was a miracle. . . . Everybody had enough to eat, everybody was
adequately clothed and shod, everybody had a roof over his head. The people I
met—and I went out and about at night quite a bit and talked to people
freely—were happy, cheerful. You could see them on the streets, rosy cheeks
and smiling, and they were happy. Now when you think of the enormity of
what happened in that short space of time, it can only be called a miracle. . . .
It’s something only a dynamic ideology could achieve. (Watts 1977a, 39–40)
Watts at the time did not know, nor saw any evidence in the capital, of the
horrors of mass starvation as a result of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61).
But it probably would not have changed his outlook. He admitted that
reports of the denial of human rights, widespread persecution and
execution, and mass arrests, if true, were “a small price to pay to achieve
this kind of revolution. . . . Does the end justify the means? My answer is
yes” (Watts 1977a, 40).
The miracle that Watts spoke of had its frightening aspects as well. He
recalled his last evening in Beijing. The trade delegation was honored with
a reception in the Great Hall of the People. Afterwards, the group repaired
to a huge auditorium on the fourth floor, which could accommodate up to
3,000 people and included a stage that could hold about 1,000. There he
witnessed a performance of The East is Red, a musical production that lasted
about four hours and enacted the history of the Chinese revolution.6 Watts
was seated in the front row of the balcony, and his vivid description of what
transpired provides a foretaste of the madness that was soon to grip China
with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution:
The lights went out, and the orchestra, a mixture of Western and Chinese
music, began playing a very plaintive tune. . . . And little by little the music
swelled, and little by little the lights on the stage began to come on. . . . You
then saw on the stage dozens and dozens of what appeared to be huge lotus
flowers, and then, as the music [continued] to swell and the lights became
brighter, the petals of these lotus flowers began to open. You then saw that
they were all Chinese girls dressed in beautiful costumes, and when the flowers
had opened to their full, the orchestra came right up into a crescendo of music,
with one of these striking military songs [he had heard earlier in Shanghai].
And the excitement there was so intense, it was like hysteria, the kind of
mass hysteria that one associates with Adolph Hitler, the way he stirred the
masses of people at the Nuremberg rallies. And the people [in the Great Hall]
became so caught up with the whole thing that they were singing at the tops of
their voices. I was joining in, too. I didn’t know the words, but I was joining in.
And they all stood on their seats, and I thought the roof was going to cave in, it
was such a tremendous rallying call, as it were.
And after that had died down, then the play continued, and it showed in
stylized forms all of the great events, the Long March and the arrival at Yan’an,
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the various battles with the Nationalist troops . . . and eventually—again, a
very stirring event—the [anticipated] recapture of Taiwan. And it was almost
unbelievable, but you saw—at least I thought I saw—airplanes dive-bombing
Taiwan Island, and huge warships bombarding it. I saw with my own eyes, but
it couldn’t have been possible. How it was done, I don’t know, but it was really
out of this world. And it ended with that episode, the recapture and the
reunification of Taiwan with the Chinese mainland. That’s how the whole
thing ended. (Watts 1977a, 41–43)
Little more than a decade later, I interviewed Watts about his activities
in China. He thought it was a “tremendously broadening experience . . . a
marvelous adventure,” although he admitted he had not thought about it at
all in those terms while actually there (Watts 1977b). While he never
authored his planned history of Chinese culture, nor even recorded his
China experiences in a memoir, what Watts revealed to me in 1977 at least
outlines the remarkable adventure of his twenty-year sojourn in Shanghai
and his brief return to post-revolutionary China.
Notes
1
The most detailed accounts of the Amethyst incident can be found in Murfett 1991,
which is based on official British government records, and Earl 1951, which is based on
extensive interviews with survivors shortly after the event. See Murfett for the drawnout negotiations and escape. The British had received last-minute approval from the
Nationalists to send the Amethyst up the Yangzi, but not from the CCP, with whom they
had no contact. Although the CCP steadfastly denied it, ample evidence indicates that it
fired first on the Amethyst without any provocation from the British ship. See also Xiang
1998, 189–90.
2
At about the same time as Watts’ trial but unknown to him, Zhou had made a brief
return to Shanghai, being the only member of the CCP’s top leadership to visit the city
shortly after its takeover. Zhou spent two days there in early June meeting secretly with
business and political leaders (Westad 2003, 252, 370 n.74). Noel Barber (1979, 169)
implies that Watts and Zhou met at this time, but Watts told me he met Zhou only
twice in Shanghai, both in 1931.
3
The yangge 秧歌 (literally “rice-sprout song”) was a celebratory folk dance popular
in northern-central China. It was often performed at Communist Party celebrations
because of its peasant associations.
4
Mao lived in the “Garden of Abundant Nourishment,” an elaborate complex in
Zhongnanhai constructed by the Kangxi emperor 康熙 (r. 1662–1722). His personal
quarters were in the eastern part known as the “Study of Fragrant Chrysanthemums.”
Zhou lived in these quarters temporarily, before turning them over to Mao and moving
to the “West Flower Pavilion” in the northwest corner of Zhongnanhai. It was
originally built in 1909 for Prince Chun, the father of and regent for the young
Xuantong emperor 宣統 (the “Last Emperor,” r. 1908–11). Unlike Mao’s residence,
which was considered the most beautiful courtyard among the Lake Palaces, “West
Flower Pavilion” was quite dilapidated (Barmé 2008, 14–15, 152, 154, 162; Barnouin and
Yu 2006, 122–23).
126
L. Kessler
5
Mao visited his West Lake villa over forty times between 1953 to 1975, not just to
vacation but also to remove himself from political drama in Beijing and affect Party
policy from afar (Barmé 2011, 3–5).
6
Watts was unaware that Zhou Enlai played a major role in the shaping of this
production, first shown in 1964 to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the
founding of the People’s Republic of China. Zhou ensured that the musical reflected
Mao’s personal domination of Party history (Barnouin and Yu 2006, 217–18; Gao 2007,
99).
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