Drawing in part on research in the SSRC’s archives, Pete Millwood’s essay tells the story of how, in the 1970s, some US social scientists gained access to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In collaboration with other scholarly organizations, the SSRC sponsored the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC starting in the mid-1960s. The PRC was open to US natural scientists, but wary of social science scholars traveling to China and engaging with their counterparts. Millwood reports that, as a workaround, social scientists would accompany natural scientists as escorts and translators until the late 1970s, when leadership changes in the PRC created a relatively more open environment for scholarly exchange.
