After almost a decade of surreptitiously sending US social scientists to the People’s Republic China (PRC) as “escorts” to natural scientists, PRC and US academic institutions began discussion on formal scholarly exchanges. This 1982 archive piece by former SSRC president Kenneth Prewitt summarizes a report by a commission of US academics who traveled to the PRC. Prewitt highlights Chinese and US expectations of the exchanges as well as potential challenges US academics would encounter.
