Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

You're listening to the Witness History Podcast on the BBC World Service with me for Hana Hither.

China has the largest number of overseas students in the world, but when students first started venturing out of Communist China, it was still a country feeling the after effects of the Cultural Revolution, which had disrupted the education of millions of young people and cut the country off from the rest of the world.

I've been speaking to Chinese American writer Jaja-ing, one of the first batch of Chinese students

to arrive in the US in the early 1980s.

So this telegram was delivered to me.

I remember I was in the Pink University student dorm,

and it was only three sentences.

Application received,

we have scholarship, please send transcript.

And I was totally surprised and overjoyed to receive it.

You know, this meant everything to me. surprised and overjoyed to receive it.

You know, this meant everything to me.

In 1980, Jain was a student at the newly reopened Peking University, now Beijing University. At the time China was just emerging from its so-called

Cultural Revolution which had thrown the country into a decade of chaos. Jain was 7 when the

Jain was 7 when the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966

by the communist leader Chairman Mao.

...