FIVE DECADES AND COUNTING

Five decades may have gone by, but Ye Zhixiong, now in his 90s, can still clearly recall the warm welcome the Chinese delegation received inside the UN Assembly Hall on November 15, 1971.

Ye, a Xinhua News Agency reporter at the time, was dispatched there to witness the debut of the delegation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at the UN. Some 20 days earlier, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758 to restore the PRC’s lawful seat.

Some countries had arranged to give welcome speeches on behalf of various regions of the world, but many international representatives spoke impromptu, Ye recalled. What impressed him most were the moments when the Hungarian representative made his speech in standard Chinese and the representative of Chile quoted several poems by Chairman Mao Zedong.

After the head of the Chinese delegation, then Vice Foreign Minister