THE Class of '77 does not refer to any school in the Philippines but to the premier university of China, by age and by history, Peking University. Note that it does not carry the modern transliteration, Beijing, but Peking, its original name. As an institution more than a century old, established to modernize China, it keeps its name, while informally known to its faculty and students as Beida.
How did a Filipino, Jaime Florcruz who wrote The Class of '77: How My Classmates Changed China, end up there? For two reasons — contemporary Philippine history and Chinese history. In 1971, Florcruz was an activist college editor of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, veteran of student demonstrations with a record of arrests, when he was invited together with a group of other Filipino students, also activists, some professionals, a monk, to tour China for three weeks. It was a gesture of friendship.
Continue reading with one of these options:
Ad-free access
P 80 per month
(billed annually at P 960)
- Unlimited ad-free access to website articles
- Limited offer: Subscribe today and get digital edition access for free (accessible with up to 3 devices)