World Economy
I was a nineteen-year-old student, not yet a journalist, when I travelled through China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. I was visiting my father, then the British Ambassador to Outer Mongolia, and there were no international flights.
The only way to get to the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator in those days - it was 1971 - was to fly to Hong Kong, then go by train through China.
It was an intimidating journey for a young man: the train from Hong Kong took me only to the Chinese border, where I had to disembark and lug my enormous suitcase (I had packed for a two-month stay) about three hundred metres in the tropical summer heat, to the frontier itself.
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