The eight US students who arrived in Beijing on Feb 23, 1979 are seen in this group portrait with their Chinese hosts.[Photo provided to China Daily]

"For the first time the issue of educational exchanges was being discussed at a high level," Thomson says.

As if to make up for lost time, what unfolded in the ensuing months did so in the manner of lightning fast changes in a time lapse film. On July 10, 1978, Press met China's leader Deng Xiaoping, who had reinstated the country's college entrance exam and reopened its universities the previous year. A Chinese delegation was invited to tour US universities and meet White House officials three months later, in October.

On the last day of that visit, a memorandum of understanding for exchange of students and scholars was signed. The first official document signed by the two countries, it was later added to the normalization agreement as Appendix 1.

On December 26, 1978, five days before China and the US established diplomatic relations, 52 Chinese student-scholars boarded an aircraft at Beijing Capital Airport, where the US students would arrive two months later.

The CSCPRC was charged with selecting students. "All our students had learned about China, and in doing so quite a number of them had spent time in Taiwan or Hong Kong when the Chinese mainland was not accessible," Bullock says."They knew what they wanted to achieve academically and were determined to make full use of their stay. The first group was a trial group. We increased the number to 50 when we sent out our second group in fall 1979. There were many more students and scholars who wanted to go."