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7/3/2025, 5:43:02 AM
>Tom Hutchinson, a New Zealand socialist (not a communist, he assured) visited China in 1956 and took 600 or so photographs documenting the country in the mid-1950s, the tranquil couple of years before the chaos of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Great Leap Forward began, a time when the PRC was enjoying considerable optimism and domestic order and before relations with the USSR had fallen off--at the time, New Zealand's small communist community was divided on whether China or the USSR was the correct path of socialism.
>Hutchinson like many idealistic Western leftists ultimately came to find that the reality of a communist country didn't match the fantasy. He was annoyed at constantly being watched by state security and he ended up spending more of his trip in Beijing than he would have liked. Hutchinson's visa was revoked a few weeks early when he asked too many questions about the PRC's resettlement of Han Chinese in the western territories. Later when he tried to apply for another visa he was turned down.
>In the following years Hutchinson came to be disillusioned at the inhumanity and intolerance towards political dissent the PRC displayed and many people he met and befriended in China fell victim to the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. He was relieved to learn in 2000 that a favorite translator of his was still alive and living in Beijing.
>Hutchinson like many idealistic Western leftists ultimately came to find that the reality of a communist country didn't match the fantasy. He was annoyed at constantly being watched by state security and he ended up spending more of his trip in Beijing than he would have liked. Hutchinson's visa was revoked a few weeks early when he asked too many questions about the PRC's resettlement of Han Chinese in the western territories. Later when he tried to apply for another visa he was turned down.
>In the following years Hutchinson came to be disillusioned at the inhumanity and intolerance towards political dissent the PRC displayed and many people he met and befriended in China fell victim to the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. He was relieved to learn in 2000 that a favorite translator of his was still alive and living in Beijing.
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