Beijing and Beyond

n May of 1981, I was given an incredible opportunity to visit China. I was then the Coordinator of the NMPC, the National Moratorium on Prison Construction, in Washington, D.C. (Funded by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, we had staff in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and, of course, D.C.) My counterpart in San Francisco, Naneen Karraker, had just inherited some money, and asked if I’d be interested in joining a People-to-People criminal justice tour of that once-forbidden country. Because she was pregnant at the time, she decided it was prudent to remain here, but wanted to see, through my eyes, what “criminal justice” looked like in a country that had been closed to the outside world — and especially to the United States — since Mao Tse Tung’s Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949. Only a decade before had Americans been provided their first glimpse into China, when, in April of 1971, an American ping-pong team was permitted entry, and the world was introduced to Ping-Pong diplomacy, negotiated by President Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. 

In January of 1981, less than six months before we began our journey, Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four, had been convicted of “anti-party activities” and sentenced to death. Mao Tse Tung had died only three years earlier, in 1978, and was replaced by Deng Xiaoping as China’s preeminent leader. It was a time of transformation in China. There was no air pollution. There were barely any cars. Urban renewal had only just begun. And university students — who were born shortly after Mao launched his disastrous “Cultural Revolution” that had victimized so many of their parents — saw an opportunity to influence the changes that were coming. Like students everywhere, they were impatient for promised reforms and reforms they wished to be promised. Their impatience was met with a brutal military assault on thousands of student reformers massed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, just eight years after we were to get our own brief glimpse of China in transition. The tour would be led by Diana (Dinni) Gordon, the director of the progressive National Council on Crime and Delinquency. I didn’t hesitate a second before accepting Naneen’s generous offer. 

The only person I knew that would be on this tour was my predecessor at the NMPC, Kay Harris, who was then just beginning her tenure as a criminal justice professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. She and I were very good friends, which made the prospect of this tour even more appealing.

During the trip, I kept a daily log, which is the basis for what follows.