China and the West

Xiao Qian is Instructor in modern Chinese language at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 1939 SOAS moved to Cambridge during the Second World War. College. He was invited to give talks on China. The topics included Chinese culture, literature, and the relationship between spiritual China with the industrial West.
1942-1944 Xiao Qian took a graduate degree in English literature at King's College, Cambridge, and started the Chinese news agency Da gong bao in London to report war news from England. He came into contact with the China Campaign Committee, Victor Gollancz (publisher and head of the Left Book Club), Kingsley Martin (editor of the New statesman and nation), Margery Fry (feminist and social activist), Harold Laski (Labour Party theorist) and Arthur Clegg (reporter on foreign affairs for the British Communist Party's organ Daily worker). Xiao became a principal speaker for the Committee.
Xiao Qian war invited twice to stay at E.M. Forster's family home West Hackhurst in Dorking, Surrey.
In his autobiography Xiao Qian notes : "Forster very generously provided materials and support while I was studying his novels at King's College from 1942-1944. He also gave me some of his essays and little booklets that had been published in Egypt and India, but never in Britain."
"A passage to India had been behind my mind ever since we met. To Mr. Forster, China may be a land with a great deal of personal relationship left ; to China, Mr. Forster would be an altogether different westerner, neither pompous like the admirals, nor complascent like the diplomats, nor nagging as the missionaries, nor patrionising like the connoiseurs, but a sensitive, humane, understanding co-man."
After attending a poetry reading by T.S. Eliot, Xiao Qian stated that he did not expect him "to be so affable and unassuming". He described him as being "of medium height and energetic, at first sight he seemed to have just reached middle age. But when he raised his very shortsighted eyes, his wrinkled forehead made him appear an old man. T.S. Eliot's voice is not very resonant, nor did he raise and lower it or pause like an experiences lecturer. Yet in a subtle way his recital brought out meaning in the verse. When each poem ended you felt you had been listing to a fountain flowing under ice".