Mao considered tourism antisocialist. It wasn’t until 1978, after his death, that most Chinese gained approval to go abroad for anything other than work or study. First they were permitted to visit relatives in Hong Kong, and later, to tour Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. The government remained acutely wary of the outside world. In 1996, my first year in Beijing, it reformed migration laws to make it easier for Chinese to go abroad, though the rules still required people to be “politically reliable” and explicitly excluded anyone found to be “highly individualistic, corrupt, degenerate, or
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