Guy Burgess and Britain’s Rather Too Rapid Recognition of Mao’s China

For anyone interested in early PRC/UK relations Andrew Lownie’s Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess is an interesting read. It does shed some potential light on London’s hasty recognition of the PRC and abandonment of Taiwan. I don’t have time to go into it in a mass of detail here, but refer you to Lownie’s excellent biography of Guy Burgess, the traitor.

Briefly though, in April 1948 Burgess (long already a Soviet spy) was posted to the Foreign Office’s Far East Department, covering China and the Philippines. All but one of his colleagues were old Etonians! There were a number of old China Hands in the department, including Patrick Coates (who is still in publication for his memoirs of Hong Kong) and had been with the Chinese Nationalist Army for some time in the War. Burgess’s job was to deal with correspondence from British officials in China. Burgess was interested in China, though no specialist. In the 1930s he had written reviews of several books on Japan and Manchuria for the New Statesman. He saw the Chinese “revolution” as ‘socialist in content, national in form.’

According to Lownie, Burgess was influential on China up into the highest circles of Whitehall – he also passed literally suitcases of documents on British thinking and policy on China/Taiwan to Moscow. Burgess was also, it seems, somewhat influential in arguing for Britain to swiftly recognise the new PRC, where America was hesitant, and shamefully drop the ROC/Taiwan. Lownie’s book also has some interesting information on factional struggles within the CCP and then the onset of the Korean War.

There’s one tale in Stalin’s Englishman that needs a bit more info though – and maybe a China Rhyming reader has it? The defector Anatoly Golitsyn claimed that in 1953/54 Burgess, a well known homosexual, was sent to Peking to compromise in a homosexual blackmail operation a former friend of his stationed in the British mission in the city. Who was that? and did it ever happen?