Alumni | February 18, 2012

Ji Chaozhou ’52 helped translate when Nixon went to China

Ji Chaozhou ’52 helped translate for China’s leaders when a U.S. president first visited the People's Republic.

Ji Chaozhu ’52, who left the College during the Korean War to return to his native China and eventually became a primary translator for Communist Party leaders Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping, is today’s Saturday Profile in the New York Times. The article by David Barboza coincides with the fortieth anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic after almost a quarter-century of Cold War hostility.

Ji published an autobiography, The Man on Mao’s Right, in 2008. “I wanted these two great countries to be at peace,” he told Barboza, who interviewed him recently in Hainan. “These were the two I had a connection to.”

For more about Ji, read “Reunion in Beijing,” from the Harvard Magazine archives, by former Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow Geoffrey A. Fowler ’00, now of the Wall Street Journal.

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