Our trip was successful so far as I know, seeing as we were essentially tourists, albeit among the first after Nixon's trip to China. I was all of seven at the time. My parents were physicists from Taiwan (living in the US), so this was presumably some small bit of cultural diplomacy involving overseas Chinese scientists (we rode the coattails of a Nobel laureate colleague who had visited earlier). We were not important personages, but as foreigners, even Chinese ones, we might as well have been from Mars. We got trotted around to all the Socialist attractions, schools, hospitals, factories, communes (including the village where my grandfather grew up), etc. When we visited the Great Wall, we were the only ones there; it wasn't even open to the Chinese public. We had one minder in Beijing, two elsewhere, as the one from Beijing traveled with us. I don't remember riding a bicycle, though it might have happened, but we did get out of the car. Our minders weren't so uptight that we couldn't walk around on our own at least some of the time. I remember buying food was occasionally an issue, since we didn't have ration tickets for so many grams of rice. Buying our own Mao suits in a futile attempt to fit in was also a minor issue, as cotton was also rationed.

So that, in a nutshell, is what I remember from the trip.