A changing China that seems much closer

Watching an old film recently made me think how much China's image in the United States has changed.

In the 1981 movie An Eye for an Eye, starring martial arts legend Chuck Norris and Christopher Lee (the late English actor known for his Dracula characters), the story centers on a gang in San Francisco's Chinatown smuggling heroin out of Hong Kong.

Norris plays Sean Kane, a city narcotics officer whose partner is brutally killed in an undercover operation. The partner's Chinese girlfriend, Linda Chan (Rosalind Chao), a reporter at the TV station, was investigating the smuggling too before the gang tracked her down and killed her.