Derek Bryan

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Herman Derek Bryan OBE (born 16 December 1910, died 17 September 2003) was a diplomat, sinologist, lecturer, writer, translator and editor.

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[edit] Education

Gresham's
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Gresham's

From a Quaker family in Norwich, Derek Bryan was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, from 1924 to 1929 and then at the University of Cambridge where he graduated in modern languages. At both Gresham's and Cambridge he was a friend and contemporary of the spy Donald Maclean.

[edit] Career

After Cambridge, Bryan passed the civil service exams and took up a job at the British Embassy in Peking in 1933.

He was a fluent linguist and made many friends among progressive Chinese. In 1943, he married Liao Hong Ying (1914-1998), who was then working for the British Council in China.

In April 1949, he helped to resolve the Yangtse Incident, a clash on the Yangtze River between the British warship H.M.S. Amethyst and the People's Liberation Army.

While not a communist, Bryan often took the Chinese side. While serving as the British Consul in Beijing, he called for the admission of the People's Republic to the United Nations a generation before the Americans stopped vetoing it, and in 1951, during the Korean war, he said he approved of Mao's social reforms. He was a career diplomat with eighteen years in China, but the Foreign Office decided to move him. He was offered a job in Peru, and opted for early retirement.

Bryan then played a leading role in the Britain-China Friendship Association. With Joseph Needham, the historian of Chinese science, he established the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, which for some years provided the only way for the British to visit the People's Republic.

In 1963, he began to teach Chinese at Holborn College, later part of the University of Westminster. In 1974 he founded a degree course in modern Chinese there. He retired in 1978, and in his final years returned to Norwich, his birth place.

In his will, he funded scholarships for Chinese postgraduate students at the University of East Anglia.

[edit] Editor

From 1963 to 1965, Bryan was the founding editor of Arts and Sciences in China, a journal of Chinese studies published in London. Among the members of the Editorial Board were J. D. Bernal, Sir William Empson, Joseph Needham, Sir Herbert Read and Arthur Waley

[edit] Author

Bryan's published works include -

  • The United Nations Need China (1958)
  • China's Taiwan (Britain-China Friendship Association, London, 1959)
  • The World Belongs to All (London, 1960, with Liao Hong Ying )
  • Li-po Chou's Great Changes in a Mountain Village (translator) (Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1961)
  • The Land and People of China (Macmillan, London, 1964) ISBN 0-02-715110-7
  • Cultural Restoration versus Cultural Revolution: A Traditional Cultural Perspective (Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1964)
  • Let's Visit China (Macmillan Children's Books, 1983, with Liao Hong Ying)

[edit] Honours

[edit] Sources

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