Courting the dragon: How Scotland is seeking to woo China
Standing on the brink of independence, Scotland is pulling out all the stops to win over China as it seeks to find its place in the world, writes Peter Simpson.
You don’t have to look far to be reminded of Scotland’s relationship with China. Just up, towards the Kowloon skyline and the MacLehose Trail.
Sir Murray “Jock the Sock” MacLehose was Hong Kong’s longest-serving governor (1971-1982) and the last prominent Scot to leave his mark on Chinese terra firma. After the neglect of successive English governors, he modernised with signature Scottish unitarian zeal the colony’s byzantine public services, ushering in new eras in education and housing, building new towns, promoting Chinese civil servants and weeding out corruption (though he later regretted not having introduced democracy). Scores of similar no-nonsense Scotsmen – missionary Dugald Christie (see page 23), banker Thomas Sutherland, civil commissioner James Stewart Lockhart, the Summer Palace-sacking Earl of Elgin, James Bruce and Chinese court tutor Reginald Johnston, to name a few – left their tartan footprint on Hong Kong and China over the 19th and 20th centuries.
“Through their roles as agents and managers of the British empire, Scots helped extend trade and commerce, medicine and education as well as banking and finance in China. They played an important role in the growth of China’s economic infrastructure, including railways and shipping,” says historian Ian Wotherspoon, author of The Scots and China, 1750-2000: Issues, Ideas and Identities.
Scots brought their brand of religion, too. “Many Chinese Christians today trace their faith back to these early Scottish missionary pioneers,” says Wotherspoon.
THE BOND BETWEEN BAMBOO and thistle, initially forged on the narcotics trade, is a peculiar one, and looking down from Arthur’s Seat, my view point across Edinburgh, just weeks before Scotland’s historic independence referendum (which takes place on September 18), I spot the city’s university and Royal College of Surgeons amid the classical architecture.
From these revered seats of learning (the university is currently home to hundreds of Chinese students) went a-trading enterprising, profit-hungry graduates William Jardine and James Matheson. Steeped in the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment (Matheson was an admirer of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and political economy), they firmly believed open trade could benefit all humankind – including those in the stubborn Middle Kingdom.
