Sam Gibbons: “Yes, things are bad in China. They have been worse. We preferred to ignore them, though, when they were worse, because…”

“Yes, things are bad in China. They have been worse. We preferred to ignore them, though, when they were worse, because we did not have to face them. I first went to China in the early 1970's. At that time it was perfectly obvious that we were faced with a tremendous task of trying to pull a very backward and a very crude nation into the modern world. We have made progress; not all of the progress I want to make and not all of the progress we should make. However, by cutting off normal relationships, normal trade relationships to China, we would only succeed in isolating ourselves from China again and isolating the Chinese from the reality of the Western World. We should be building bridges at this time in our history, and not burning bridges. It is far more difficult to build the bridges. What kind of bridges should we be building? We should be bringing more Chinese students and encouraging more Chinese students to come here and be exposed to the Western ideal. We should be sending our students to China to help expose them to our Western ideas.”