Credit: National Archives, Richard Nixon Presidential Library
“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 teaching were slapdash and saturated with Party propaganda. Libraries remained closed to the public; bookstores chiefly offered Chairman Mao’s writing and political study material. Millions of high school graduates and intellectuals were sent from the cities to rural backwater where they languished for many years with no hope of return. In 1971, my father was in a labor camp in Henan, my older brother on a farm in Inner Mongolia.
Despite this impoverished, shabby life in which all of us we
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