Mark Seldon blogs in a series titled “My First Trip to China”. Read his blog in the Hong Kong Economic journal here:
I was a fellow traveler in the 1972 Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars trip to China with Richard Bernstein and Jonathan Mirsky . . . and in other ways with Richard Kagan and Edward Friedman who followed in 1975 and 1978 (Friedman and I visited rural Hebei in 1978 and then spent the next quarter century trying to fathom and write collaboratively about China’s rural transformations). All five of us were or had been active members of CCAS, two of whose primary goals were ending the US War in Indochina and opening diplomatic relations with The People’s Republic of China.
My experience in this first China visit was framed by my recent experience with CCAS and the anti-war movement, and my understanding of America’s Asian wars, military base structures, and the US-China relationship, as well as my research on the Chinese revolution.