Alan Donald

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.

His next work in the Far East was significant, acting as Political Adviser to Governor of Hong Kong, 1974–77:

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.

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

Donald began his studies of the Chinese language at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Soon after joining the Foreign Office (FO) in 1954, Alan Donald served as Third Secretary in Peking (Beijing) from 1955 to 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.

Sir Alan Ewen Donald KCMG (5 May 1931 – 14 July 2018) was a British diplomat who was the United Kingdom ambassador to Indonesia and China.

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 (BA, LLM).