It sounds a bit prosaic today: a half-dozen Chinese students studying journalism at the School of Communications in dusty Crawford Hall on the Manoa campus of the University of Hawai'i.

But 25 years ago this year, at the inception of the Albert Parvin Fellowship Program in Journalism Studies for Chinese students, the idea was farsighted and daring.

China, painfully mistrustful of Western ways, was struggling to emerge from the profound darkness of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Its journalists were loyal instruments of state propaganda; the idea of training them to American standards surely seemed as bizarre and fraught with risk to the UH Board of Regents as it was to the party functionaries who gauged the reliability of these student-journalists and sent them on.

The danger was quickly realized at another exchange program, in 1981, with the dramatic defection of a Chinese dancer studying with the Houston Ballet, Li Cunxin. The act seemed as damaging to his Texas hosts at the time as to the school, founded by Mao's wife, that had sent him.

Yet the program at UH, uninterrupted, has trained some 200 Chinese journalists. Given choices of similar opportunities at schools like Stanford and Harvard, the Parvin fellows remain the largest such group sent abroad for training by the PRC. The program is a tribute to its founders, the late John Luter, former Journalism Department chairman, and the late Albert Parvin, a Los Angeles philanthropist with a commitment to promoting peace, understanding and goodwill among nations.

Luter said UH was the obvious setting for such a program, given Hawai'i's multiethnic character and his department's professionally oriented program.

Albert Parvin responded enthusiastically.

There have been some painful moments at the UH program, including, I am told, one quiet defection and many hours of handwringing as the entire class of 1989 considered how it might protest the bloody Tiananmen debacle. But the Parvin program continues to play a unique role in forging stronger ties between Hawa'i and China.

The Manoa campus has long been a fertile ground of U.S.-Asia exchange, with many respected experts on the UH campus and across the street at the East-West Center. Many American journalists have received their first exposure to Asia during the 30 years of the now sadly defunct Gannett Fellowship, later called the Freedom Forum Fellowship, and others through the ongoing Jefferson and Hong Kong Fellowships at the East-West Center.

And most of these have rubbed elbows and shared dormitories with the Parvins. It is no longer a moment of high drama to witness an informal meeting in Manoa of students from Taiwan and mainland China. But it once was.

A history of Hawai'i-China exchange programs would include names like Koji Ariyoshi, who had befriended the Maoists at their World War II Yenan redoubt; Sen. Hiram Fong; Victor Li, who became president of the East-West Center, and his journalist wife Arlene Lum; Daniel D.W.Y. Kwok, now emeritus UH professor of Chinese history; Hobert Duncan, former Star-Bulletin editor and aide to Gov. George Ariyoshi and later instrumental in helping the Chinese to establish China Daily, the country's English-language newspaper.

Most of the Parvin fellows have come from China Daily (with an average daily circulation of 200,000), with others coming from the national Xinhua News Agency (akin to America's Associate Press, except that it has 10,000 employees), the People's Daily (at one time China's most important — and the world's largest — newspaper) and several journalism schools.

Teachers and administrators involved with Parvin fellows have never sought to convert them in any overt way to a different system or way of thinking. But it's important to appreciate the far-reaching effects of the Parvin Fellowship on newspapers in present-day China.

For instance, 16 former fellows at the China Daily have been promoted to department directors or vice directors. Three of them are on its editorial board, and Zhu Ling, who was a fellow in the first class in 1980, is now editor-in-chief. Yu Jiafu, from the third class, is director of the Foreign Affairs Department at Xinhua.

It's been my very good fortune to maintain a connection with former Parvin fellows over the years. I taught a class in feature writing in the program's first five years, and I visited the original offices of the China Daily in Beijing before it began publication, when it was still printing trial runs, and have since visited its new location, which would easily accommodate a major American newspaper.

As China takes its place of great importance on the international stage, it's reassuring to know that many influential shapers of opinion in China's mass media have a friendly — if not uncritical — familiarity with Americans and the United States, through programs such as the Parvin Fellowship at the UH.

It wasn't so long ago that Chinese newspapers were filled with references to "running dogs of American imperialism." As Beijing and Washington continue to have their share of disagreements, Chinese readers can increasingly expect nuanced and informed discussion because of programs such as this.

David Polhemus, a former editorial writer for The Advertiser, was actively involved in the Parvin fellowship program during its early years and maintains ties with it.