Life and Leisure

A family that thawed cold war ice

By Zhang Haizhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-07 08:06

When you visit Englishman Stephen Perry's home, expect to be offered Chinese tea. The choice reflects the deep ties that the 62-year-old and his family have with China.

Perry is the chairman of 48 Group Club, an independent business network committed to promoting positive links with China. Together with his father Jack Perry, he is part of a select group of people who played a major role in breaking the ice over China's trade with Britain and the United States.

As early as the 1950s, the elder Perry was one of the first Britons to do business with the mainland after the founding of New China.

Taking over the baton, Stephen Perry later helped New China reach its first major business deal with the United States; bring the first English soccer team to the country, and introduce Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals to the Great Hall of the People.

"It was a mission for me, like my father," says Perry in his house next to Regent's Park in central London.

It was in 1952 when Jack Perry gave up his business and traveled to China for trade, at a time when the Cold War threatened world peace. It took a team of 48 people, who formed the precursor of the 48 Group Club, seven days to fly to Hong Kong in July 1952, when Americans "were trying hard to stop people going to China".

The team overcame the hurdle with the help of then premier Zhou Enlai's emissary. They spent three days getting to Beijing and saw "terrible poverty and malnutrition".

Struggling to emerge from the predicament, China then imported "very basic things to start a country" from the Perrys. Beijing bought items ranging from grain and copper to machines and medicines.

But as the family business grew, its ties with the West floundered. Many people back home threatened him and local newspapers even called Jack Perry and his peers "the Communist Reds".

In 1972, the father and son boarded a plane to China. It was the younger Perry's first trip to the country.

Traveling from Beijing down to Guangdong province, Stephen experienced a China that was different from his expectations. He saw poverty and the hard life of the farmers. But there were people "spending a lot of time talking, philosophically, on what was the right way to go. I was very impressed", Perry says.

The Perrys later appeared in Washington to meet Henry Kissinger, then national security advisor for former president Richard Nixon, and his staff.

"They asked lots and lots of questions about China. My father helped them understand China in the early days," Perry says.

Following the end of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and the introduction of the reform and opening-up policy, the family managed to break more ice in Sino-British exchanges.

Perry brought West Bromwich Albion soccer club to Beijing to take on the "China Eleven" on Aug 1, 1979, making the Premiership side the first English team in China. But it was only 25 years later that he found out late leader Deng Xiaoping was sitting in the stadium that day.

About two decades after the match, Perry helped bring British musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber to China. Jesus Christ Superstar performed in Beijing in 2001.

After the success of the musical, Perry brought more of Webber's shows, such as Cats and Phantom of the Opera to China. Perry says he never thought his family's China stories were just about business alone.

"I thought I was fortunate ... to see this as an unfolding experience of bringing a world back together."