Fifty years ago, Gough Whitlam became the first Australian Prime Minister to visit China. But he’d been there before, leading the Western world.
When Gough Whitlam rose to his full 194 centimetres to address the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, at a banquet in Beijing in October 1973, he did so as the first Australian prime minister to have visited China.
Whitlam and his wife Margaret, anyway, were objects of fascination wherever they went in China – both towered physically over their hosts.But Whitlam’s efforts in breaking down the distrust that existed between China and Western nations such as Australia meant he towered over much of the diplomatic world at the time too.
Two years and three months previously, in 1971, Whitlam had taken an immense political risk by making his first visit to China.He was opposition leader then. It was audacious even for the bold, “crash through or crash” Whitlam. China was emerging from its violent years of cultural revolution, but its leadership was still fragile, its senior figures suspicious of one another and the outside world.
Whitlam, crowed McMahon, had allowed himself to be “played as a fisherman plays a trout” by Zhou in Beijing. Whitlam thus emerged as a world trailblazer in the delicate business of forming diplomatic relationships with China, and drawing the massive nation, representing one quarter of the world’s population, into the orbit of international affairs.
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