ABSTRACT

China Briefing 1981, like its predecessor China Briefing 1980, is an offshoot of the media activities of the China Council of The Asia Society. China Briefing 1981 attempts a momentous task in a short space. It seeks to provide a readable overview of what is happening in a country of a billion people living halfway around the world. John Bryan Starr of The Yale-China Association points out that 1980 brought full normalization of legal and commercial relations between the US and China, but it also brought some post-normalization concerns. In the post-Mao era, China has clearly taken a turn toward the outside world and that general trend continued strongly in the past year. Richard Bush of The Asia Society's China Council offers us a portrait of Hu Yaobang and demonstrates how closely his career has followed that of his mentor Deng Xiaoping.