“Nixon is coming to China!”  Fifty years on, I can still recall how surreal this sounded to my ears back in the summer of 1971. I was 11 years old, about to enter middle school in Beijing that fall and, like everyone else around me, completely stunned by the recent official announcement.  Cut off from the outside world for over two decades, China was then dirt poor and in the depth of the Cultural Revolution. The educational system was in shambles. School curriculum and teach