It All Started on a Train in China in 1976…

Don Rimmington
President of BACS 1976-1977 and 1986-1988

Essay Full Text

Preview:  A delegation of young British academics in Chinese Studies visited China early in April of that year under the auspices of the British Council. Some of us were not that young, but we all had a youthful enthusiasm for the trip, since access to China over the previous ten years of the Cultural Revolution had generally not been possible. There were fourteen of us, six representing the Chinese Studies departments of the time with the remainder being individual scholars working on China in history and social sciences departments. The leader of the delegation was John Gittings, who had previously been an academic in the Chinese Studies Department of the Central London Polytechnic (Westminster University), but who was by then the China correspondent for the Guardian newspaper.