Introduction
China under Mao Zedong has commonly been viewed as one of the world’s most insulated nations, cut off from the West and largely inaccessible to Westerners. The closest parallel in the twenty-first century is probably North Korea, often described as being like ‘another planet’. That small country, though, has only 25 million people as against China’s 541 million when the Communists came to power. In Cold War discourse, particularly but not only in the United States, the bamboo curtain between ‘Red China’ and the West was often portrayed as being virtually impenetrable....