Alan Donald


Sir Alan Ewen Donald was a British diplomat who was the United Kingdom ambassador to Indonesia and China.

Early life and education

Donald was born on 5 May 1931 in Inverurie, Scotland to Robert T. Donald and Louise Turner. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, Fettes College, then Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

Career, 1949-2008

Donald began his studies of the Chinese language at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Soon after joining the Foreign Office in 1954, Alan Donald served as Third Secretary in Peking from 1955-1957, watching as the People's Republic of China responded to the posthumous dethroning of Stalin by Khrushchev, uprisings in Eastern Europe, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and the Anti-Rightist Campaign.
After a series of posts in London and Europe for the FCO, he returned to China in 1964-1966 as the First Secretary of the Embassy in Beijing, and witnessed the initial propaganda of the Cultural Revolution, which he described as a 'visual and aural attack' in the Yangtze River valley.
His next work in the Far East was significant, acting as Political Adviser to Governor of Hong Kong, 1974–77:
He was also a key figure in planning the handover of the British colony of Hong Kong to China, which eventually took place in 1997. He had been a political adviser to the British Governor of Hong-Kong, Glaswegian Sir Murray MacLehose, from 1974-77 and, a decade later, was instrumental in the creation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration while acting as Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office in December 1984. His knowledge of Mandarin and the Chinese psyche were crucial to the eventual handover of the colony by the last governor, his friend Chris Patten, in 1997.

In 1988, he was appointed UK Ambassador to China, a post he held until 1991. This was a crucial period at the end of the Cold War, during which UK-China relations went through turbulence, including the coordination of secret diplomacy. Some of Ambassador Donald's observations of the Tiananmen Square Massacre dating from June 1989 were declassified and published in 2016 and 2017.

Personal life

Donald married Janet Hilary Therese Blood in 1958, and they had four sons.

Honours