1 - Tales from the golden age

Summary

The mission was simple. Get the cavalcade of limousines and the associated bus-loads of officials, diplomats and assistants up the road to the traditional pub and have a pint and some fish and chips. But things were never going to be that straightforward. The first problem was the road – a narrow country lane, which could barely accommodate a large car, let alone a fleet of buses. The second was the pub – a pretty but modest venue, which meant only a few people would actually get to go inside when the delegation finally arrived. The third was the demand that a few realistic-looking local punters be sprinkled around the place to make it appear vaguely natural for the photographers and journalists when they snapped their photos.

The lead participants in this mini-drama were the British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the visiting dignitary he was entertaining – Xi Jinping. It was September 2015, and the event was the first state visit by a leader of the People’s Republic of China to the UK for a decade. The specific location was Cameron’s Oxfordshire constituency, at a pub he liked near one of his homes. There were other reasons to make a fuss about this event. From July 2012 to late 2013, relations between the two countries had hit a particularly rocky patch – relations that were never that straightforward given the disruptive role of the British Empire, at its peak in Chinese affairs for the century after the First Opium War (1839–41), and the prickly history over Hong Kong leading up to 1997. In May 2012, Cameron had met with the exiled Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama, despite vehement protestations from Beijing. He had done so, on the pretext that the Dalai Lama was a spiritual personage, during a ceremony to confer a prize on the Tibetan at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. He may also have calculated that as London would later that year host the Olympics, after the Beijing games in 2008, the Chinese would refrain from any major response.