The University continued its month-long celebration of the 4oth anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s trip to China yesterday by hosting a keynote speech from Nicholas Platt at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
Platt, an American diplomat and former U.S. ambassador, accompanied Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger@@http://www.henryakissinger.com/@@ as part of their diplomatic entourage to China in 1972 — a historical venture that started the dialogue between the two world powers.
He gave his keynote address and showed home videos he had archived from the Nixon visit and his time spent living in China in the early 1970s in front of a standing-room-only crowd that included Mayor Kitty Piercy as well as University professors and students.
Platt spoke of why he believes people are so fascinated with China and their way of life when he said, “Anything that’s as big as China and growing so fast is bound to indenture a lot of interest.
“China has been the most populous country on earth for a long, long time, and they’re growing at a rate of 10 percent a year,” he said. “They’ve gone from one of the poorest countries on earth to a stage where they’ve lifted about 250 million people out of poverty.”
Throughout his address, he reflected not only upon his personal experiences in China but also how the historic trip gave the American people their first look into communist China — a sight that had never before been divulged.
Platt said he was quite intrigued by the Chinese and their way of life upon his first arrival in the region. He documented and archived this interest through the lens of his video camera.
“I had always carried a movie camera with me ever first since I went to Asia in 1963,” he said. ”We were studying Chinese in Taiwan, and it was just second nature to me to have a movie camera in my briefcase.”
At the end of his home movie reel, he read selected readings from his published memoir, “China Boys,”@@http://www.amazon.com/CHINA-BOYS-Relations-Personal-Memoir/dp/0984406220@@ and participated in a Q-and-A session with the crowd.
Ryan Eugenio,@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=student&d=person&b=name&s=Ryan+Eugenio@@ a sophomore business major who was listening in the audience, found himself intrigued by a topic he had previously known little about.
“I thought it was good,” Eugenio said. “It’s always interesting to come to these things and actually hear from people who were at historic events.”
Platt ended his presentation by looking toward the future of relations between the United States and China and how important the coming years would be.
“The U.S. and China are stuck with each other. We don’t have a choice,” he said. “We’ve worked our way into a clench in the past 40 years, and it’s our job in the next 40 years to keep that clench.” @@clench? Odd word choice@@