… the announcement by POTUS Nixon re the trip

Mr President, May I say how much I appreciate this opportunity of sharing my thoughts with you at a time when we are at a crucial and also, I believe auspicious turning point in relations between the U.S.A. and China.

In the past two months I have visited and spoken with faculty members and students on the campuses of America’s great universities at Stanford, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Austin, Houston (Rice), SIU (Carbondale), Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Cornell and Harvard. Everywhere I find widespread sympathetic interest in and friendship for the Chinese people. Popular interest in and support for your forthcoming visit to China is wellnigh universal. My original contention that this could be an historic visit is strengthened.

Like the vast majority of Chinese at home and overseas I hope that this visit at the very least will result in extensive cultural and popular contacts between China and the U.S.A.

My experience in the past twenty years in China convince me that any proposal aiming at longer-term, multilateral exchanges between the U.S.A. and China will be warmly reciprocated in Peking. By multilateral I mean exchanges in the fields of agriculture, industry, technology and science, medicine and culture (sports, arts, archaeology, the dance, theatre, cinema, books, etc.), and communications (the press, TV, etc.).

My conviction is that there would be deep interest in Peking in the widest possible range of contacts even though for a start the first exchanges might be modest in scale and scope.

The full restoration of normal diplomatic relations would, of course, facilitate such exchanges, but in the temporary absence of such relations, I believe that the Chinese People’s Government, while being firm on principle, would be sympathetic to unofficial, people-to-people exchanges and be flexible in its attitude as to how such exchanges could be organised.

Following my West to East tour of U.S. universities, I have the strong conviction that academic exchange (scholars, students, studies) should not be limited to the better-known West and East coast centres such as Stanford, CalTech, or M.I.T., Harvard and Yale, but should include such mid-west centres as SIU which have their own very specific character. I found programmes here in medical services and community college development which closely parallel Chinese experiments in these fields.

I am happy to hear of your belief that this was a time for high statesmanship. That tallies exactly with sentiment in Peking as I know it. My conviction is that as a result of the cultural revolution, China’s leaders today head a consensus of opinion wider and better informed than ever before. It is not a “balance of deterrent power”, the playing off of one nation against another or “deals” that they seek but reasonable settlements of outstanding world problems on the most imaginative and extensive basis and in accordance with the Five Principles of co-existence.

This is not a matter of one power surrendering to another, but of all admitting the urgent demands of the reality of existence on one globe. Such settlements will satisfy the interests of all. If you want peace for a generation …

… so do they – and for more than one generation. This, of course, does not mean and lessening of their opposition to oppression and exploitation of man by man, to colonialism and neo-colonialism and their support for just national liberation struggles of which the American revolution was a shining example.

With sincere wishes for the success of your efforts for peace and international understanding,

I remain

respectfully yours

/ Jack Chen /

Enlarged a bit …