What tickles China's political elite?

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You can’t get far doing serious business in China without having friends in powerful places. So when her husband’s company, Jardine Matheson (which once upon a time had smuggled opium into the country), was invited back into a liberalising China in the 1990s, Tessa Keswick had rare access to the country’s top leadership. On the podcast, she recounts seeing Bo Xilai, the disgraced Chongqing party secretary, days before he was arrested by Xi Jinping; the prank that Zhu Rongji, the then Prime Minister, played on Henry Keswick; and what it was like inside Zhongnanhai, the secretive Beijing compound that China’s leaders work from.

Tessa Keswick's book, The Colour of the Sky after Rain, is out now and she is pictured above with Cai Qi, Party Secretary of Beijing.

Chinese Whispers is a fortnightly podcast on the latest in Chinese politics, society, and more. Presented by Cindy Yu. Listen to past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Get 12 weeks of The Spectator in print and online for just £12.
0:04.9	And we'll give you a £20 £20 Amazon Give Voucher, absolutely free.
0:09.9	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:26.4	Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu.
0:29.2	Every episode, I'll be talking to journalists, experts,
0:33.8	and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more.
0:37.3	There'll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some
0:38.1	context as well. How did the Chinese see these issues? In the early 1800s, the East India company
0:44.4	lost its monopoly to operate in China. Within a few decades, other British companies flooded
0:50.3	into the country in order to sell smuggled opium, tea, cotton, as well as other things.
0:56.3	One of those companies was Jardine Madison, setting up home in Hong Kong when the island was
1:00.7	succeeded to the British. Over the years, it moved into the mainland and set up headquarters
1:05.1	in Shanghai as well as Hong Kong. But China's century of turmoil through the Japanese invasion,
1:10.8	then the civil war, and then
1:12.2	the communist takeover, meant that the Jardine didn't have the easy, stable trading conditions that
1:17.1	it had in a century before. The communists kicked Jardines out until the late 20th century,
1:22.4	at which point reform and opening, the beginning of China's route to trade liberalisation, meant that
1:28.2	its leaders were able to invite foreign investors back into the country. Henry Keswick, the then
1:33.7	chairman of Jardine Matersens, went to see China's top leadership. So today on the podcast, I speak to his
1:40.1	wife, Tessa Keswick, who, through her own work and through her marriage to Henry, has
1:44.9	seen China throughout the last four decades at a time when the country wasn't really opened
1:49.3	up to ordinary Westerners. She details her experiences from that very first visit to poverty-stricken
	...

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