Chinese dissident writers exiled to the West today get a very different response than Soviet writers received not so long ago.
In 1975, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger advised U.S. President Gerald Ford not to meet with writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, warning in a memorandum that doing so would offend the Soviet Union. Now, similar views are held not only by pragmatic politicians but also by multinational corporations with investments in China as well as universities and foundations with links to China.
The Chinese communist regime's penetration of the West far exceeds that of the former Soviet Union. In the Cold War era, the Soviet Union was blocked behind the Iron Curtain; there were few links between Soviet and Western economies. An average American family would not be using products "made in the USSR."