Fischer, Britta

Founded in 1974, the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association was one of the first American organizations devoted to fostering people-to-people diplomacy between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. The founder of the organization, veteran civil rights activist Unita Blackwell, had traveled with a woman’s delegation to China in 1973, only a year after Richard Nixon’s first diplomatic trip, and her experience there led her to devise a means to improve mutual understanding and strengthening the bonds of friendship between the nations.

From its earliest days, the USCPFA pursued its goals by sponsoring a diverse slate of speakers, seminars, cultural and student exchanges, art exhibitions, and language classes, and they published and distributed a range of materials, including the US China Review. Perhaps most notably, they were pioneers in organizing tours of China, and for several years they were virtually the only option for American citizens to visit the People’s Republic. Reaching its peak in the 1980s, the Association remains a national organization with four semi-autonomous regional branches and 35 local chapters.

The 449 color slides (35 mm.) that comprise the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association collection document one of the group’s early tours of the People’s Republic of China, undertaken at the height of the agitation over the Gang of Four. The tour included visits to the Great Wall, Beijing, Shanghai, Jinan, Nanjing, and Yangzhou, taking in typical touristic sites along with visits to schools, factories, workers’ houses, and the countryside. Beyond simple touristic scenes, the collection depicts a state-sponsored version of everyday life in China during the early post-Mao era.

The photographs in the collection were identified by the photographer, a member of a tour group in 1978, and are listed in the inventory below with original spellings and minor editing for punctuation or expansion of abbreviations. At the end of the collection are a series of sixty images of “old China (1906),” of uncertain provenance.