Even though there has been a slight slump in the flow of American visitors to China in recent months, the travel accounts of the period of the ‘China Rush’ from 1971 till 1973 continue to pour out. One type of account coming from the American radicals of the anti-war campaigns seems to show their radical utopia emerging in China. The CCAS delegates’ reports contrast the elitist, consumerist, alienated and polluted society of the United States with the community-oriented, decentralized and humanistic society of China. Other travellers like Harrison Salisbury who are not too unhappy about the contemporary American conditions took a generally condescending attitude towards what they saw in China. They noted with appreciation the many pragmatic policies at different levels which Mao’s China had adopted; but at the same time they pointed at the backward living conditions of the people and the primitive character of China’s technology. Within this category of observers we can also include J.K. Galbraith who generally accepted the rationality of China’s development strategy and appropriateness of some of her techniques though his overall impressions tallied with those of the other prominent Americans. Galbraith, however, commended the Chinese model to the countries of the Third World. A third group of observers can be described as Marxists who went to see how a new socialist society was being built in China.
October 1976, volume 1, No 4