Witness to three decades of China’s upheavals and reforms

Geoff Raby, the former Australian ambassador to Beijing from 2007 to 2011, is an academic turned diplomat who has made a career as a “China expert” spanning three decades. Raby has witnessed great changes in Chinese society, from opening up and economic reforms, to the bloody crackdown on the prodemocracy movement in 1989 and a now materialistic society under increasingly tight ideological control and censorship. Raby is still in China where he takes an active role in the private sector and has set up a business consultancy in Beijing. He spoke to Catherine Wong.

How did you start your diplomatic career in China?

I began as an academic economist. When I applied to work for the government, the job I originally got in Canberra at the Office of Nantional Assessments was Indonesian economic analyst. But by the time my security clearances came through, they offered me the China economic analyst position instead. That was in 1984 and you must understand in those days there were almost no professional economists in Australia at all who understood anything about China. Where I had a lucky break originally was at university. I’d taken a big interest in the reform process in communist countries, particularly in Europe - Hungary, Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic. So I had a theoretical and intellectual framework with which to approach China as it was beginning to extend its reforms originally from the agricultural sector to across the whole economy. There’s an old saying that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So although I didn’t know much about China and I’d never been there, I had the theoretical framework and experience of reforms of centrally planned economies in Eastern Europe. And that proved, initially, immensely helpful for me to help make sense of what was happening in China and to explain that to the government.

It was also a lucky time because prime minister Bob Hawke had only been elected in 1983 and he had met early on with former Communist Party secretary Hu Yaobang and premier Zhao Ziyang. They laid out in private conversations the open door economic reform policies and how they intended to change China. Prime Minister Hawke understood immediately that if they achieved what they wanted to achieve, it would have a profound impact on Australia, so he was intensely interested to understand every aspect of the Chinese economy, economic policy reform and I happened to be the right person at the right time and at the right place. I came in 1986 to Beijing and then finished in 1991. So that was big China experience in those days. So in many ways I was the logical person in 2007 to come to Beijing as ambassador.

How did you view the major events and changes in China in that period, from the 1989 crackdown on student protestors to the opening up and reform policy?