When I was teaching in Lesotho in southern Africa during the 1980s, I taught a class on comparative foreign policy. The course included trips to the US embassy, the Soviet embassy, the British embassy and the newly established Chinese embassy. The students could ask the ambassadors and staff questions about foreign policy, and would then write a report as their final term paper.
The Chinese ambassador felt that the US-style education I delivered was unique and invited me to go to China to teach.
At the time, China was planning to open up to the world, and it needed professors versed in public international law to cultivate domestic talent. All of the professors who after World War II studied in the West and returned to China had disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, so China had to rely on foreign experts.
