bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, p. 22
by Sidney Freifeld
There it was, tucked away with a thousand other listings in The Citizen’s weekly TV Guide earlier this year:
24VIS25 China Mission The Life of Chester Ronning, a Norwegian who attempted to explain China to the Western World
It’s a fine, hour-long, National Film Board documentary, which I draw to the attention of the present generation of Externalites and other bout de papier readers because they would never know, from the above listing, that the film portrays the life of a very Canadian member of our Foreign Service who became a distinguished senior officer of the Department of External Affairs.
Norwegian? Ronning’s parents were indeed of Norwegian origin. They were Lutheran missionaries who arrived on the China coast in 1891 and founded a mission in the interior, in Fancheng, Hupeh province, where Chester was born in 1894. Chester was reared on Chinese milk and dressed, spoke, played, studied and ate Chinese, until the Board of Missions ordered the Ronning family to leave China at the time of the Boxer uprisings. After World War I, during which Chester served with the Royal Flying Corps, the family returned to Fancheng. Following Chinese language studies in Peking, he became deputy principal of the Middle School at Fancheng (1923-27). In 1927, he was appointed principal of the Lutheran College at Camrose, Alberta where he remained until 1942.
During the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression, Chester joined the United Farmers of Alberta and became active in the early CCF, the forerunner of today’s NDP. On the CCF ticket he was elected to the Alberta legislature as member from Camrose, and served as an MLA from 1932 to 1935. Chester was the only External Affairs officer I have known who, before joining the Department, had served as a provincial or federal House member; Roy Maclaren and Don Munro, for example, were elected to the federal House only after leaving External. When I think of Chester — tall and slender, with a fine mane of silver and blonde hair, smiling with his weathered, intelligent and kindly face — I associate him less with China than with early Alberta.
Chester worked in RCAF Intelligence during World War II, joined External in October 1945 and was soon one of its Far Eastern specialists, along with Herbert Norman, Arthur Menzies and Ralph Collins, who were also born in Asia of missionary parents. Ronning was quickly appointed First Secretary at the Canadian Embassy in Chungking and then, from 1946 to 1951, he was Counsellor and Chargé d’affaires at our Embassy in Nanking. His fluency in Mandarin was a great asset to the Embassy. According to the NFB film, Mr. Pearson intended to send Ronning as our first ambassador to the Communist Government in Peking, but Canadian recognition of the Peking regime was sidetracked by the outbreak of the war in Korea. As things turned out, Canada did not recognize the Peking regime until 1970, and Ralph Collins went there as our first ambassador. Meanwhile, Ronning was appointed Minister, and then Ambassador to Norway and Iceland, 1954-57, and then High Commissioner to India, 1957-64. Ronning’s personal friendship with Zhou Enlai enabled him to serve as an effective intermediary in the Geneva conference on Indo-China in 1954 and as head of the Canadian delegation to the international conference on Laos in 1957. He retired in 1964 but continued to be a popular public speaker on China and an ardent advocate of the recognition of the Peking government. He died at Camrose, Alberta in 1984. As unlikely as it may sound, my first and last encounters with Chester Ronning had a piscatorial aspect.
In the early 1950’s, while I was working for External in the East Block, I used to go trout fishing in Algonquin Park with an External Far Eastern hand, Charles Eustace McGaughey, universally known as “McGuff” One Sunday in the Park, where McGuff had a shack, he filleted a dozen speckled trout we had caught and asked me to take them to Chester. Ronning was overjoyed when I brought the precious package to his house, and never forgot the purveyor.
A decade later, I was External’s student for a fascinating year at the National Defence College (NDC). As part of the NDC worldwide tour, we spent a week in India, where Ronning was High Commissioner in New Delhi. On arrival for our first meeting at his Residence, the class was presented to Chester, one by one, by the NDC Commandant. When my turn came to be introduced to Chester, he whispered that the class would be visiting the Taj Mahal over the weekend but that I should skip the Taj Mahal as he had laid on a trout fishing trip for me in the Himalayas! I was the only Externalite at NDC that year. I had decided at the outset of our tour to decline such kindnesses from Heads of Mission who knew me, because that would have involved breaking away from my colleagues with the potential for misapprehension about favouritism within External. So I went with my colleagues to the Taj Mahal and gave up Chester’s trout fishing trip to the Himalayas. I have been regretting that decision for a third of a century ever since.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, p. 22. Read the rest of this issue →
