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In-Depth Information
officials in Dubai than in Paris, the Chinese tore apart the city, turning it into a chaotic
shell, without the exquisite references and planning of old Beijing.
Then in 1958, Mao organized the Chinese in a campaign to make a Great Leap For-
ward to become a modern, self-sufficient economy. All private landholdings ended and
farms were melded into large public communes. Local, even backyard, factories went
up all over the country. The experiment collapsed in three years. The economy was in
shambles; agriculture was devastated with such poor harvests that China suffered a famine
that left tens of millions dead. The backyard factories produced shoddy goods and wasted
precious energy.
At first, Mao admitted he had made mistakes. Then, in 1966, he reasserted his power,
calling for a Cultural Revolution to radicalize the country through its youth, targeting his
rivals in the Communist elite. The young Red Guard went after those in authority, the po-
tential rivals of Mao, and pushed China into further chaos.
Most of this was hidden from the rest of the world. From the beginning, Chinese Com-
munist leaders wanted to shut out foreign influences that had been so detested during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to cut off their economy from the capitalist
system. For their part, the western countries, especially the United States, sought to deny
legitimacy to the new, Communist China and recognized Taiwan as the “real” China.
This deep physical and political division was known as the “Bamboo Curtain” in Asia,
erected by China but reinforced by the West.
Through this tumultuous period, there was no tourism to speak of. Foreign visitors were
largely delegations from friendly nations or foreign political parties who visited to nurture
alliances. The government created the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA)
and the China International Travel Service in 1956 to organize these largely diplomatic
visitors in a new campaign to “Spread Chairman Mao Thought, Assist World Revolution.”
Western Europeans were allowed to visit China, albeit under strict controls. The numbers
were minuscule: over the next decade only 19,000 foreign visitors from 38 countries came
to China, a nation of 740 million in 1966.
Some of the foreign visitors were experts sent to help Chinese development. Others
were foreign students from other Communist countries or overseas Chinese students from
Southeast Asian countries. Even this small trickle of visitors ended with the Cultural Re-
volution when the Red Guard took aim at foreigners. Most foreign experts left and several
foreign embassies were burned to the ground. No more foreign students were accepted.
In 1971, when China regained its seat at the United Nations that had been held by
Taiwan, the country slowly opened. The CNTA could only handle a few thousand tourists
at a time, organized in groups with official sponsors; there were exactly 2,500 beds for for-
eigners in Beijing in the mid-1970s.
It was equally difficult for the Chinese to travel in their own country. Every trip required
official permission, which was given sparingly for official business, family visits or medical
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