How China Rose? Edward Wilson’s The Whitehall Mandarin on China and Vietnam

Edward Wilson is a favourite espionage writer of mine who deserves a lot more readers. His latest novel, The Whitehall Mandarin, is effectively the fourth in what I think was planned as a trilogy that comprised The Envoy, The Darkling Spy and The Midnight Swimmer. I recently reviewed The Whitehall Mandarin and Wilson’s work for the Los Angeles Review of Books (The Exile and the Spy here), but there’s a lot more in the novel that might make it especially appealing to those with an interest in China history (presumably China Rhyming readers). So this is a sort of additional few comments, like a DVD extra – you didn’t really ask for it, you didn’t really want it and you most probably don’t need it, but anyway….

One of the issues at the heart of Wilson’s closely observed novel is the idea that, just as Soviet Intelligence penetrated British Intelligence from the 1930s, so the Chinese did from the 1960s and that this is one explanation of how Maoist China, amidst the turmoil of the Sino-Soviet Split and the start of the Cultural Revolution got the A-bomb. Just as an earlier generation of men and women who went on to serve in British Intelligence became enamoured of the USSR in the 1930s, perhaps there was another group, in the 1950s, who became equally enamoured of the PRC and offered western secrets to them. Of course we know that Britain and America had its fair share of student Maoists but it’s not generally assumed that Beijing was in a position to recruit and effectively use them in the way the Soviet Union and KGB had done previously. The Whitehall Mandarin posits that maybe we’re wrong to think that. It is the case that China’s nuclear programme appears to have moved at lightening speed:

FISSION TO FUSION

France = 105 months

United States = 86 months

Soviet Union = 75 months

United Kingdom = 66 months

People’s Republic of China = 32 months

I’m not going to give away any of the plot of Wilson’s novel – you really should read it if even slightly interested in this period and question but it has some interesting scenes in the Zhongnanhai of the 1960s and some observations that are extremely pertinent today given current tensions and events. At one point, among the North Vietnamese, fighting America with Chinese made weapons there is a discussion of whether General Giap and the North Vietnamese will ultimately prove pro-Moscow or pro-Beijing – they are of course playing each of against the other during the Sino-Soviet Split to get as much materiel as possible. But older tensions simmer: “She’s a fanatical Maoist. And she doesn’t realise that China is Vietnam’s historical enemy. We admire their culture, but fear their power.” Given the current tensions between Beijing and Hanoi and the stalemate in their ongoing talks this week this rings as true of 1964 as it does of 2014. One Vietnamese leader tells Wilson’s spy hero – “China doesn’t want this war to end. It’s in China’s national interest to keep Vietnam weak and dependent…” Plenty in Hanoi would still nod sagely at that analysis.

Of course China supported the North during the war but relations swiftly soured after 1975 and a border war followed in 1979 but now those South China Seas issues are back again….