Come, see how far we've come

When I was at school, sports lessons included an exercise where we threw hand grenades (made from wood topped with metal to resemble the real thing) against a wall over which a red slogan had been stretched offering the reason for such a militaristic pastime: "Exercise our bodies and protect our motherland."

We feared that China might be invaded one day by the American "imperialists" or Soviet "revisionists". Indeed, the whole West held evil intent toward us. At that time we had little idea about the outside world.

I went to school in Nanjing in the early 1970s, when the revolutionary fever was calming down.