Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

all―through direct experience and relationships. A high-profile presidential visit, with the attention it generates in the country visited and back in America, at least can lay the basis for greater understanding and trust. Because China is so important, the argument for an official visit was particularly compelling.

The Center for the Women’s Law Studies and Legal Services of Beijing University is a small legal aid office surprisingly similar to the one I had run as a young law professor at the University of Arkansas. The Center was aggressively using the law to advance women’s rights, a first step in enforcing a 1992 law protecting women’s rights. The Center had tried to put teeth in the law, bringing a class-action suit on behalf of factory workers who had not been paid in months, suing an employer who forced women engineers to retire earlier than their male colleagues and helping to prosecute a rapist. I met several of the Center’s clients, including one woman who was fired when she had her first child without the approval of her company’s family planning unit. Set up in 1995 with financing from the Ford Foundation, the Center had already given advice to nearly four thousand people and provided free legal services in over one hundred cases. I was encouraged to see advocacy like this as well as the experiment in village democracy China had undertaken.

Change in China is a certainty; progress toward greater freedom is not. I think the United States has a big stake in fostering closer ties and understanding.

The Chinese government surprised us by permitting the uncensored broadcast of the news conference Bill and Jiang held―during which they had an extended exchange on the subject of human rights, including Tibet―and of Bill’s address to students at Beijing University, in which he stressed that “true freedom includes more than economic freedom.”

Bill, Chelsea, my mother and I toured the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. We attended Sunday services at the state-sanctioned Protestant Chongwenmen Church―a right forbidden to many―to demonstrate our public support for greater religious freedom in China. Early one morning we visited the “dirt market,” a flea market where vendors unable to get space in the large permanent tent displayed their wares on blankets on the dirt outside. And President Jiang hosted Bill and me at a magnificent state dinner in the Great Hall of the People, which featured traditional Chinese and Western music. Before the performance concluded, both leaders had taken turns conducting the People’s Liberation Army Band. The next night, Jiang invited us, along with Chelsea and my mother, to a small private dinner at the compound, where he and the other highest-ranking officials lived with their families. After dining in an old tea house, we walked outside into the soft summer night to sit on the bank of a small lake. The lights of Beijing were faint in the distance.

If Beijing is China’s Washington, D.C., Shanghai is its New York. Bill’s schedule was filled with meetings with businessmen and a visit to the Shanghai Stock Exchange. I encountered another funny but telling instance of control by the Chinese government. We had scheduled an informal luncheon at a restaurant as a break in the relentless official schedule. When we arrived, Bob Barnett, who was doing advance for the site, told me that a few hours earlier the police had showed up and told everyone working in the nearby stores to leave. They were replaced by attractive young people wearing Western clothes.

At the modern Shanghai Library, which would be an architectural treasure in any city, I spoke about the status of women, constructing my remarks around the old Chinese aphorism that women hold up half the sky. But in most places, I added, when you combine both unpaid domestic work and income-producing work, we end up holding more than half.

Intent on emphasizing religious freedom, Secretary Albright and I toured the newly restored Ohel Rachel Synagogue, one of several synagogues built by the large Jewish community that had flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Jews fled to Shanghai from Europe and Russia. Most of the Jews left China after the Communists seized power because the government did not officially recognize Judaism and the synagogues.

Ohel Rachel had been used as a warehouse for decades. Rabbi Arthur Schreier from the Park East Synagogue in New York City, who along with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Dr. Donald Argue had reported to Bill on the status of religious freedom in China, presented a new Torah for the restored Ark.

From the frenzied pace of Shanghai we flew to Guilin, a place favored by artists over the centuries. The gently winding Li River flows between tall formations of spirelike limestone mountains. Many of China’s most stunning vertical landscape paintings depict this beautiful place.

As soon as we returned from China, I focused on our own cultural and artistic history and a celebration of the millennium that I had been thinking about for months. Democracy requires large reservoirs of intellectual capital to continue the extraordinary enterprise of our nation’s founders, intellectual giants whose imaginations and philosophical principles enabled them to envision, and then devise, our enduring system of government.

Sustaining our democracy for more than 225 years assumes American citizens who understand our nation’s rich past, including its productive alliances abroad, and can imagine the future we should create for our children. Over the last several years, I had become concerned about a cavalier anti-intellectualism in our public discourse. Some members of Congress had proudly announced that they had never traveled outside of our country.

The arrival of a new millennium offered an opportunity to showcase the history, culture and ideas that have made America the longest living democracy in human history and are crucial to the preparation of our citizens for the future. I wanted to focus attention on America’s cultural and artistic history. I enlisted my creative deputy chief of staff, Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, to head our millennium effort, and together, we adopted a theme that summed up my hopes for