Description: Bkerrychina
It is an honour to be asked to deliver this year’s annual Lord Caradon lecture. When I put up on social media news of this, an academic friend in America whose family originally hailed from Jamaica sent a message saying how his father and mother has strong memories of Hugh Foot, as he then was, and his time as Governor in Chief on the island. As Minister of State for the Foreign Office, no doubt Lord Caradon in the 1960s would have spent time thinking about the role of the People’s Republic of China. But a
When we hear about the fractious and challenging role of China today, it is good sometimes to give a sense of perspective and remember what it was like in the depths of the Cold War. I asked a colleague who had been active at this time in issues relating to China what it was like back then. They laughed and said that even mentioning one was interested in the country risked causing criticisms, so many just kept silent. These days, things at least haven’t got to that level. Yet!
We should be interested in China. And we should certainly be as interested and engaged with its politics in ways that most people are about US or European issues. Sometimes I am envious of my academic colleagues who deal with these areas. They don’t need to explain the importance of what they are talking about. Why does the US or Europe matter are questions where the answer is self-evident. But until quite recently, the same kind of question about China was often levelled at me, without it sounding slightl