Sir Alan Ewen Donald KCMG (5 May 1931 – 14 July 2018)[2] was a British diplomat who was the United Kingdom ambassador to Indonesia and China.
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.
He had been a political adviser to the British Governor of Hong-Kong, Glaswegian Sir Murray MacLehose, from 1974 to 1977 and, a decade later, was instrumental in the creation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration while acting as Assistant Under-Secretary of State (Asia and the Pacific) 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.
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.