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30 years on - nation no longer a forbidden place for foreigners
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-12-19 11:10

The long and winding road

Retired engineer Fu Tian still remembers how he felt when he visited Canada for the first time in 1981.

"Everything I saw (in Canada) was completely different from home. The outside world was so alien to me because we had locked ourselves in for such a long time," says Fu.

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Although by then China had already resumed its membership in the United Nations and had forged diplomatic relations with world powers including the United States and Britain, "to ordinary Chinese like me, we and the foreigners were living in two worlds on parallel lines -- we had never met each other," he says.

A blogger on China's popular portal Sina.com also describes vividly how Beijingers demonstrated their "hospitality" to two foreigners in 1980.

"I saw tens of thousands of people converging at the streetside and peering into someone in the middle. I pushed into the crowd and found they were actually two foreigners with blue eyes and golden hair.

"'How can a man be like this?' I heard someone commenting on the man with a ponytail hairdo," says the blogger using pseudonym "Star Badminton Team".

The blogger also says he/she was puzzled for many years by his/her mother's comment: "Foreigners are all evil."

"I always wonder why they are evil and how evil they can be. Many years later, only after I had some real contact with foreigners did I realize most of the people in the world are just as kind as us," the blogger says.

Nowadays Beijing is home to more than 150,000 foreigners, or one in every 100 Beijingers, according to Wo Ai Wo Jia, a house-letting agent company that conducted a survey on demands of house renting among foreign residents in Beijing.

Fu Tian, 65, now lives in an apartment high-rise in downtown Beijing, only 300 hundred meters away from France-invested Carrefour mall and the US fastfood store KFC, while the street is crowded with cars of Japanese and German brands.

"Many big events with global profiles now take place just on our doorstep - the Olympics, the Asia-Europe meeting," he says. "We come to each other as one world. We shall never go back to the old days."

Come together

Fu's feeling is echoed by Prof. Huang Ping, director of the Institute of American Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country's top think-tank.