#NIXON VISITS CHINA REASON MOVIE#

#NIXON VISITS CHINA REASON MOVIE#

It was a miniature city, complete with barbers, a butcher, a movie theater and a huge swimming pool with a 10-meter diving platform. We were installed in the Friendship Hotel, a sprawling compound in then-bucolic northwest Beijing that had been built in the 1950s to house Soviet advisers. My parents were dubbed “foreign experts” and were named to one-year posts at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute No. So to teach its teachers to teach English after years of isolation, the Chinese Education Ministry recruited language teachers like my parents, linguists at the University of Pittsburgh.Īnd so it was that in mid-July 1979 we joined the earliest wave of American families to move to China.

But other than being native speakers, few had language-teaching qualifications. When China opened to Americans, young people hurried there to teach English. But his new project - launching something called “reform and opening-up” that would help infuse capitalism into the communist system - was part of why I ended up in China at age 11. 1, 1979, that meeting echoed into irrevocable history when their successors, President Jimmy Carter and then-Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, officially established diplomatic relations.ĭeng was not China’s “paramount leader” yet. Nixon called it “the week that changed the world.” Seven years later, on Jan. Nixon visited Mao Zedong in Beijing 50 years ago this week, when they both led their respective nations.

Nixon visits china reason