Thomas Gold on the campus of Fudan University in 1979.[Photo provided to China Daily]

"They were zhi qing," Gold says, citing a term meaning "youths with knowledge", which applied to young men and women sent to the countryside to be "re-educated" during the cultural revolution. Now, these young people, thousands of them, were back in the cities, most having missed their only chance at gaining knowledge in an institution of higher learning.

Gold, who met many Chinese intellectuals at Fudan, said he was impressed as much by the travails they had endured as by their optimism.

"The waste of talent incurred by the cultural revolution was huge. But on the other side, many people were very optimistic about China's modernization and opening-up. Many of them were in their 50s, 60s or even 70s, and their knowledge was sometimes out of date. But they were willing to try, to do whatever the situation would allow them to do to contribute to their country."

Madelyn Ross, who arrived at Fudan in August 1979 to study contemporary Chinese literature and to teach English, calls it "a time of recovery for Chinese and of discovery for Americans in China".

Ross, associate director of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, first became interested in China while seeing coverage of Nixon's landmark visit on television.

"By that time I had already studied French and Spanish. Hearing Chinese on the soundtrack, I thought how interesting it would be to study a language so different from the Romance languages. China looked amazing, fascinating, unlike anything I knew."