Transcript
RICH ELLINGS: Let me just mention to you my first direct run-in with - and I think it was militia not direct PLA - but my first run-in was literally a physical run-in, in middle of June 1980, and I was in Hefei in Anhui Province , and I'd come over to spend the summer. It was my first trip to the PRC. I had looked over the border from Hong Kong and from Macao. I went over on this program, and I was assigned in the vernacular of the day to a tongzhi a comrade, and this guy turned out to be a great friend of mine in later years actually starting that summer. But he took me for a walking tour of Hefei, and we entered this city park, and half of it was filled with soldiers in green uniforms with machine guns, rifles, and so on. Now, I had been working as a graduate student on a Hudson Institute project and had been pouring through all kinds of primary sources and so on and on very contemporary matters in China. It's a kind of prelude.
So, I come into this exercise as they're training. Here I am, 1980, clearly not Chinese. As a matter of fact, my hair was blonder and longer at the time. They have rainstorms in China in the summer time and there'd been a rainstorm, so things were kind of muddy, and we started picking our way through these soldiers, who are behind machine guns. I thought, boy, this isn't the Soviet Union, by the way. These guys are somehow calm when they've got some guy who's obviously not one of them walking through them. But anyway, they maintained their concentration on what they were supposed to be doing. We started picking our way through, and as I came up to this one machine gunner, he was crouched and sitting in front of this machine gun, I slipped in the mud and my knee whacked his head. I whacked him in the head with my knee. I thought at this point this was going to be a particularly low point in U.S.-China relations. All he did was take the whack in his head. He did not move, he maintained his seated position, and we continued on and I sweated it out. It was blistering hot and sweltering, but we got beyond there. I survived it, and to this day I do not know whether it was militia. But I did know one thing, that if I look at the PLA then or the militia then compared with today, I know there's been progress.
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