Budding Chinese diplomats, the Cultural Revolution and the London School of Economics.
Vision and a chance encounter brought these unlikely elements together to produce some of the country's top officials in the Foreign Ministry and international trade departments today.
Among the half-dozen students who attended a special study-abroad programme in the 1970s were Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, Ambassador to the United States Zhang Yesui and Wang Guangya, the new director of the State Council's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office and a former ambassador to the UN .
The course ran at a time when China was still hesitant about reaching out after decades of distrust of the West and years of internal turmoil. Then-US President Richard Nixon had just visited China, but Sino-US ties were far from normalised. Many young students were still toiling in the fields to prove their commitment to the working class.
Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai became convinced of one thing after they met the young advisers to Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger - they must better groom the country's next generation of diplomats.
'The [study-abroad] programme was initiated by no less than Mao and Zhou,' said Michael Yahuda, professor emeritus of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), in a recent e-mail interview. Yahuda was the only China expert at the university at the time.
The two leaders decided to call in from the countryside many of the graduates who had been dispatched from the institutes of foreign languages, gave them a brief preparation, then sent them on a two-year programme abroad to 'improve their English', the professor said.