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DAVID BONAVIA
INfOA NEW ^^oVEÞ ERA
compare notes. It's reasonable to assume that the two Bonavias are up there in
Born: March 4, 1940, Aberdeen, Scotland.
Died: September 16, 1988, Aberdeen, Scotland.
the spheres right now. patting Bizet on the back for having
aqì
written the only descending chro-
matic scales in the literature of opera; Carmen's Habanera. Or perhaps they're having a chat withTolstoy. CynthiaHydes
AVID BONAVIA was a they offered him a staff job and sent ography David Bonavia wrote over the master of languages. He him to Saigon. He was never a "sharp last few years and which now will
SOME years ago (going back, in
spoke and wrote Chinese, Russian, German, French
end" reporter and rarely joined the other correspondents on the battle-
sadly be published posthumously). David Bonavia was the product
and Italian very well and was more competent than most in a dozen more.
his Triestino grandfather who emigrated to Britain and of his harsher upbringing in Aberdeen. When the
fact, into near-history) the leader
of a prominent African country caught sight of his visitor, a youthful-looking correspondent writing forThe Trnes, and murmured:
"I
a man's
do was
see they sent a boy to
job".
The "boy"
David Bonavia. People have often made the same mistake about David. A
cherubic face, impossibly
tidy hair and an
un-
infectious.
schoolboy humour have fooled many.
To
us, David was a tremendously generous soul, His great-
est charm was an unswerving honesty. His faults were obvious and henever hidthem. Heloved cats and cat people. He was parl
cathimself, really. He scratched
name.
"The Doge" -- a rib-
knocker for his Venetian ancestry. And he was quick with the latest sick j oke.
But David knew
about
words, the way few can handle
them. Interviewed in
the
ing the first shot of the Taiping Rebellion. When I was in Taiping afew
name of the museum
cent
pink."
Jeny and Martin Evan-Jones
friends.
It seemed an old theme, he suggested, in a town famous for fir-
penetrable red; Chinese communism is a subtle and translu-
The sixth form never left him. He gloried in the knick-
pomposity or
TONY BAYNES expressed surprise at finding an Anti-British Museum in Taiping (C,Aug'88).
years ago,
his
at
deceit. He purred among
Opium war memorial
mid-1970s about the difference between communism in Russia and China -- a philosophical subject he uniquely understood -- his reply was: "Russian communism is a soulless and im-
David was asurprising individual and a good friend. \We'll
and snarìed
ITUARY
miss him.
I
a
saw
museum commemorating Chinese resistance in the Opium Wars, not the
Taiping Rebellion. The full (which
was
in Chinese only)
Lin destroyed the opium that he hacl seìzed from mosíly British ships off Guangzhou in 1839, an act leading dìrectly to the first Opium War and, among other things, the British seizure of Hong Kong. Lup cheung, and
this first
hard blow against the opium trade, are Taiping's greatest claims to fame. Barry Parr, California
Not in the Standard WITH reference to
the feature,
translates roughly as The Fumne People's Anti-British Opium War Memorial Hall.
categorically deny any involve-
Fumen is the Pearl River "gate" and fortress nearTaiping.
Standard.
It was
New Members (C.Aug. '88), I ment whatsoever with any of the cartoons canied by Ihe Hongkong
here that Commissioner
Gavin Coates
a
fields; instead he usedhis languages to cover the political, strategic and cultural conflicts behind Indochina's wars. In 1969 he moved to Moscow where he was one of the first correspondents to win the confidence of the dissident in-
first-class correspondent or the style
tellectuals. After keeping David and
that helps make the successful author, but David Bonavia had all these qualities and many more.
his Australian wife Judy under intense KGB surveillance for several months, the Soviet authorities expelled them. David partially purged this trauma in the pages of his book. Fat Sasha and Urhan Guerilla. John Le Carre's enthusiastic praise for this work came too late to give it the success it deserved.
Linguistic abilities are not automatically accompanied by the energetic cu-
riosity that makes a good reporter, the intelligent understanding that makes
After a Double First in Modern Languages at Cambridge, he did a stint for Reuters (London and then Central Africa), returning to Cambridge to study Chinese (he had taught himself Russian at school). By the mid- I 960s, at the age of 25, he was in Hong Kong wastinghis abilities inthe local Chamberof Commerce, where he translated
international trade enquiries. However, in a timely move, he joined the staff of the ^Far Eastern Economic' Review and began stringing for the
London Times, as the drudgery of
CL-Alexnnders Laing
&
Cruicl<shank Searities (HK)
Ltd
China Vy'atching began to be infused with drama. In 1961 , the Cultural Revolution boiled over, spilling into the streets of Hong Kong. David was
in his element. When Hong Kong's
Private client and Institutional stockbroking
version
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CREDIT LYONNAIS GROUP
6 THE CORRESPONDENT ocToBER I988
waving
their Little Red Books, demonstrated outside the wrought-iron gates and carefully tended lawns of Govern-
33lF BOND CENTRE
lsl¿t A MEMBER OFT}IE
of the Red Guards,
TEL: TELEX: 81678 WLCS HX FAX:
5-8109338 5-8780189
ment House, David wrote that on that day the worlds of Mao Zedong and Somerset Maugham had comefaceto
face --
and that both
had retired
baffled.
The
Times so liked his materital
Saigon and Moscow
having
produced their differentdisappoinr ments and tragedies, the Bonavias moved to Beij ing in 197 2 with hopes of charting the progress of a more humane version of Marxism. David's facility in Chinese gave him many insights (recorded in his best book,The Chinese), but it also served to intensify his rage
and frustrations with a once-vibrant civilisation smothered by successive bureaucracies, of which the Marxist version was the latest and most oppressive. He was witnessing China emerging from a dozen years of isolation in the aftermath of President Nixon's visit, absorbing the deaths of Zhou Enlai and Mao and the attempt of the Gang of Four to seize power. He rebased himself loi the Far Eastern Economic' Review in Hong Kong 1916, perhaps too early to be much impressed by the impactof the open-doorpolicies
of Deng Xiaoping (the subject of
a
bi-
of
warm sunniness of his nature was uppermost, he was a fellow of infinite jest, wont to set the table on a roar with skirls of laughter as he parodied a Chinese opera or made a telephone
call to the Hong Kong branch of the New China News Agency successfully imitating one of its Beijing editors demanding local reaction to Deng's latest policy twist. At other times the Black Dog of a northerly melancholia sat heavy on his shoulders. This world was not fit for children, and affection was lavished instead on birds and cats.
The pro$es-
sive disillusionments of the cities he had reported and of the people who he felt had failed his expectations helped towards his early defeat by his own talents. intelligence and sensitivities. In such moments his wife Judy, who had won her own degree in Chinese after their marriage, was the greatest single source ol strength. David Bonavia in many senses
couldbesaidto have been avictim of
the various ways in which he
had
witnessed the oppression of the human spirit. His rage and frustration were not reactions against political systems, but against human frailties.
-- Derek Davies (See also
LETTERS Page 3 and 6)
This tt ¡bute Á'as Ìirst ¡tttblished ín
The Independent, londoa
OCTOBER I988 THE CORRESPONDENT 7