China's trailblazing foreign students - a podcast by BBC World Service

from 2021-07-02T07:00

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China has the largest number of overseas students in the world but when students first started venturing out of Communist China it was still a country feeling the aftereffects of the Cultural Revolution. 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 were disrupted and China was cut off from the rest for world. Farhana Haider has been speaking to Chinese American writer Zha Jianying, one of the first batch of Chinese students to arrive in the US in the early 1980s.

Image: Chinese writer Zha Jianying, July 2015 Credit: Simon Song/ Getty Images

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