I finished my Master’s thesis, the topic of which had changed from the UN to the history of Tibet, one early September morning in 1975 and handed it in, post-haste, to the faculty for marking. By the afternoon I was already sitting on the train to Moscow en route to China, which was then under the rule of Mao Zedong, and which, according to later history books, was still in the grip of the Cultural Revolution.

The Finnish Ministry for Education had awarded me a scholarship to study in China, and Ministry wished me to study a total of three years in China. The first academic year was spent on language courses at the Beijing Language Institute (now Beijing Language and Culture University), after which I was able to specialise in Chinese history at the universities of Peking and Nanjing.

Naturally, following political and societal changes was interesting: when the time came for me to return home Deng Xiaoping was in power, and the winds of change could already be sensed. On the other hand, Deng’s reforms were still considered a passing political campaign, the continuation of a series of previous campaigns. We were wrong: the period of reform has already lasted 37 years and China’s progress has been immense in comparison to its situation in the 1970s.

In October 1979 I again headed east, this time by plane to Japan, where I was to research Sino-Japanese relations at the University of Tokyo for a period of five years on a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship. During that time I became a Japanese PhD when I completed my doctoral dissertation on the role of the scholar Zhang Taiyan in the Chinese revolution of 1911. Directly after, I began work at the Finnish Embassy in Tokyo as a press and cultural attaché.