Audrey Young: Memories of China in another era

There are three personal milestones that remind me I'm old.

I've been to a Seekers concert, I've been at the Herald for 30 years and, more relevant to my current location, I visited China when Mao was still alive.

Like Jacinda Ardern, this is my fourth visit to China and I'm here to cover hers.

My first visit was in 1976, before she was even born.

It was a student trip, of university and teachers' college students - 24 of us being closely shepherded around China for three weeks during what turned out to be the last year of the Cultural Revolution.

At almost every venue we visited we would hear from our hosts about that ratbag and capitalist running dog Deng Xiaoping.

They were right. He was a capitalist roader but not such a ratbag, rising to the leadership four years after Mao died and beginning the opening up of China.

China was so closed at the time that we had to walk across the border at Hong Kong to catch the train to Canton as it was then known, or Guangzhou today.

We went on to Nanchang which had so few western visitors that when the blondest of the group, Rachel Scott (Otago University Press), went for a walk, she returned to the hotel followed by literally hundreds of fascinated locals.

We also visited Shanghai where the highlight for me was a variation on health tourism.

We watched a young man having a tumour removed from his knee under acupuncture. Between winces, he would wave up at us from the operating table.

And we went to Hangzhou and Beijing.

New Zealand recognised China only in 1972 and visitors were so rare that the ambassador of the day, Bryce Harland, threw open the embassy's swimming pool and tennis court for our use when we arrived in Beijing.

Ardern will be there tomorrow to open the new embassy, before she meets Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping, who was sent to countryside for re-education during the Cultural Revolution.

One of my fellow travellers was Dame Catherine Healy, who was recognised last year for her work on the rights of sex workers.

I called her this week to see what she remembered of Beijing besides the unforgettable state of the women's toilets at the Great Wall.

She remembered the numerous ivory-carving establishments we had been taken to throughout the trip - elephant tusks piled high - the wall-to-wall bicycles, and the fact we narrowly missed one of the most deadly earthquakes, the Tangshan earthquake not far from Beijing which killed an estimated 242,000 people.

I remember the ritual of every place we visited, a discussion in big armchairs, with cigarettes and tea.

Mao Zedong died within two months of us leaving - although he lives on the yuan of every denomination.

I returned to China 37 years later to cover John Key's second trip to China as Prime Minister in 2013, and the following year to cover Apec in Beijing.

I'm well and truly primed for the fourth.