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Witness History: Leaving China to study after the Cultural Revolution

Documentaries

Leaving China to study after the Cultural Revolution

01/09/2023 GMT

BBC World Service - Witness History, Leaving China to study after the Cultural Revolution

We hear from one of the first students to study overseas after the Cultural Revolution

In the early 1980s, the first Chinese students ventured overseas to study after the Cultural Revolution. Writer Zha Jianying tells us her experience.

Launched in 1966 by Communist leader Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution plunged China into a decade of chaos. The education of millions of young people was disrupted and China was cut off from the rest of the world.  

When students first started venturing out, it was still a country feeling the after effects of the Cultural Revolution. 

Farhana Haider spoke to writer Zha Jianying in 2021. She was one of the first batch of Chinese students to arrive in the USA in the early 1980s.

(Photo: Zha Jianying. Credit: Simon Song/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)

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