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China was a brutal communist menace. In 1972, Richard Nixon visited, anyway.

A stunned world watched as the u.s. president met dictator mao zedong, whose rule had killed millions of chinese..

nixon visits china us history definition

Chinese dictator Mao Zedong woke up early and got a shave and a haircut for the first time in months. He put on a crisp new suit and new shoes specially made for the occasion. He sat down in an armchair in the study of his home, a porcelain spittoon on the floor nearby.

Not far away, President Richard M. Nixon rested in a guesthouse, making notes on a legal pad. He wore a dress shirt with cuff links. He had just arrived in Beijing for a visit that had shocked the world. He hoped to meet Mao but was not certain when, or if, the Chinese leader would see him.

Suddenly, the word came, as if from an emperor, aides remembered: Mao would see Nixon. Immediately.

It was Feb. 21, 1972, and as stunned observers looked on, the hard-line, anti-communist president was taken away in a black limousine to meet the ruthless champion of global revolution.

The meeting between the two arch foes, 50 years ago Monday, and Nixon’s week-long visit to “Red China,” were earthshaking, the historian Margaret MacMillan wrote in her 2006 book “Nixon in China.”

Back then, it was inconceivable that China would one day be hosting the international spectacle of the Winter Olympics.

Winston Lord, a young American diplomat who was on the trip and present for the meeting with Mao, wrote later: “I run out of adjectives in describing its drama.”

“If Mr. Nixon had revealed he was going to the moon he could not have flabbergasted his world audience more,” The Washington Post had said in an editorial. “It is very nearly mind blowing.”

All the top American journalists were there — newspaper reporters from The Post and New York Times, famous network anchormen including Walter Cronkite, who had brought along electrically heated socks to ward off the cold of northern China.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener was there. Future TV news superstar Barbara Walters was one of only three women in the media group, according to MacMillan.

Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who had secretly helped arrange the visit, was a key figure there.

So was Nixon’s White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, who meticulously stage-managed events but would be disgraced along with Nixon in the Watergate scandal , which began to unfold four months later.

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To impress the Americans, the Chinese set up fake outdoor scenes of picnickers with transistor radios. But after the VIPs had moved on, officials went around and collected all the radios, MacMillan wrote. And the picnickers were taken away on trucks, ABC’s Ted Koppel said later.

The trip was a blockbuster of a story, especially for television, which beamed back images of a country that had been hidden from the world for almost a quarter-century.

And it constituted a massive thaw in the Cold War.

Chinese premier Zhou Enlai offered first lady Pat Nixon a gift of two giant pandas, which ended up at the National Zoo in Washington. (The United States gave China two musk oxen in return.)

The president asked for the release of a CIA agent, John T. Downey, who had been taken prisoner 20 years before when his plane was shot down during the Korean War. Downey was freed the next year.

The Nixons went to the Great Wall, and the president said that only a great people could have constructed it.

There were toasts and banquets. Nixon had practiced using chopsticks. (One set he used was later filched as a souvenir by a Canadian reporter.)

China had been hostile and closed to the West for 23 years, exporting radical ideology even as it seethed internally.

“People of the world,” Mao had declared in 1964, “unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!”

“Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed,” he said.

No American president had ever been to China. The United States refused to recognize the country’s communist government. There were few diplomatic contacts and scant business ties.

China “was the darkest, most mysterious part of the Communist empire,” Nixon aide Dwight Chapin recalled.

Nixon had accused China of spreading “insurrection, rebellion and subversion in every free country in Asia.”

“What do the Chinese Communists want?” he had asked. “They want the world.”

But now both sides wanted to talk.

Both feared the Soviet Union — the polar bear, as the Chinese called it. Chinese and Soviet troops had fought a nasty border skirmish along the remote Ussuri River in 1969.

The ex-chaplain still haunted by the Vietnam War’s most desperate siege

The United States wanted Chinese help getting out of Vietnam. The Chinese wanted the United States out of Taiwan. And China badly wanted acceptance on the world stage.

Since the end of World War II in 1945, much of the world had been locked in the titanic “Cold War” between Western democracies, led by the United States, and communist dictatorships, led by Soviet Russia and later China.

There had been crisis after crisis, the war in Korea in the 1950s that pitted the United States and South Korea and their allies against North Korea and China and their Soviet allies.

In 1972, the United States remained entangled in Vietnam, where 50,000 U.S. service members already had given their lives.

The Americans killed on a single, bloody day in Vietnam, and the wall that memorializes them

China, for its part, had undergone decades of famine and internal upheaval after Mao seized control in 1949 and imposed his draconian economic and cultural policies.

His disastrous Great Leap Forward economic campaign in the 1950s may have killed 40 million people, MacMillan wrote. Starving peasants should learn to eat less, Mao had decreed.

And the bloody upheaval of his Cultural Revolution of the 1960s may have killed a million more, historians believe.

By the winter of 1972, “Chairman Mao” was an aging cult figure. He had a bad heart, a chronic cough and had just gotten over pneumonia. And he ruled a vast but backward authoritarian state of 800 million people.

A successful early meeting with Nixon would benefit both men.

After getting off Air Force One, Nixon had greeted Zhou, the Chinese premier, with a hearty handshake.

The Americans knew that in 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake Zhou’s hand at a conference in Geneva. And they knew the Chinese had not forgotten.

“Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world,” Zhou told Nixon as they rode to the guest quarters that Tuesday. On arrival, the Chinese gave the Americans lunch and then let them relax. There was to be a banquet that night.

But a short time later, Zhou was back. Mao wanted to see Nixon right away.

“I went and got the president,” Nixon aide Chapin said in an interview. Nixon changed out of a blue sport coat and into his suit coat. (Chapin, now 80, also was caught up in Watergate, and served several months in prison for lying to a grand jury.)

Nixon summoned Kissinger. Kissinger summoned his aide, Lord, who had done much of the research and preparation for the visit and had been on Kissinger’s secret trip to China the previous July.

Lord, now 83, said in an interview that Kissinger also wanted him along because he was a superb note taker — a skill that would allow Kissinger to concentrate on the meeting.

Nixon was pleased that Mao wanted to see him so soon. He, Kissinger, Lord, Secret Service agent Bob Taylor, and Zhou piled into a black Chinese car and headed for the compound where Mao lived.

“They are off to the races, and we have no idea where they are,” Chapin recalled. The staff decided not to say anything publicly, “because we couldn’t answer the questions: Where are they, or who’s with him.”

“We had to wait for him to get back before they could put out the news of what happened,” Chapin said.

Arriving at Mao’s modest home a few miles away, the Americans noticed a ping-pong table in the hallway. (The sport was a Chinese national pastime, and a team of U.S. players had created a sensation when they had visited China the year before.)

In the study, a female aide supported Mao by the arm as he stood up to shake Nixon’s hand. The group sat in a semicircle, in armchairs that had fringed slip covers.

Nixon sat beside Mao. Kissinger sat beside Nixon. Lord, then 34 and sporting conservative sideburns, sat beside Kissinger, taking notes.

“We were used to the elegant presentations, sometimes fairly lengthy, by Zhou Enlai,” Lord said. “So Kissinger and I were somewhat taken aback by Mao’s style. He spoke in brief sentences. He was bantering. He was self-deprecating. He kept deflecting substantive questions.”

His speech was also slurred, and he spoke with a heavy accent from Hunan, his home province in southern China, MacMillan wrote. The Americans thought he’d had a stroke.

The meeting, scheduled for 15 minutes, went on over an hour. Nixon tried to talk about Vietnam, Taiwan and Korea.

Mao called them “troublesome issues” that he would rather not discuss, according to Lord’s notes.

“I discuss the philosophical questions,” he said.

Nixon spoke of Mao’s writings, saying they “moved a nation and have changed the world.”

Mao, whose “Little Red Book” of quotations was waved by fanatics across China, said: “Those writings of mine aren’t anything. There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.”

He said: “I like rightists. People say you are rightists, that the Republican Party is to the right.”

Nixon replied: “In America, at least at this time, those on the right can do what those on the left talk about.”

“Over a period of years my position with regard to the People’s Republic was one that the Chairman ... totally disagreed with,” Nixon said. “What brings us together is a recognition of a new situation in the world.”

The general tone was cordial, if lacking in substance, and Nixon was delighted.

Chinese photographers took pictures of the group.

At the end of what Nixon called “the week that changed the world,” the two sides issued a communique stating their conflicting positions, agreeing to disagree.

But the United States got the Chinese to nudge the Vietnamese communists, MacMillan wrote.

The Soviets, rattled by the visit, became suddenly more agreeable.

And China got its lofty place on the world stage.

Fifty years later, though, Taiwan remains a flash point, as the United States has maintained close ties with the island, to the anger of the Chinese, who insist it is still part of China. And Russia is again a threatening presence in Europe.

After Nixon’s meeting with Mao, a group picture of the event ran on the front page of The Post and in newspapers across the country. But Lord had been cropped out of the shot.

“Lord was never at this meeting,” Lord said Nixon had ordered. “Cut him out of the ... photos. His presence is to be kept secret.”

“That was for a good reason, actually, even though it hurt my ego,” he said.

Secretary of State William Rogers had not been invited to the meeting, and Nixon didn’t want to humiliate him further by showing that a young Kissinger aide had been, Lord said.

On a trip to China a few months later, he said, Zhou gave him a copy of the uncropped photo.

“To prove I was there,” he said.

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nixon visits china us history definition

UC Berkeley Library Update

The Week that Changed the World: Nixon Visits China

By Shannon White

February 2022 — This month marks the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s weeklong visit to China, a trip that resulted in the establishment of a formal diplomatic relationship between the governments of the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

The UC Berkeley Oral History Center’s collection contains several interviews discussing the event, as well as the political and public atmosphere that surrounded Nixon’s 1971 announcement of the impending trip. Included in these are the accounts of both Caroline and John Service, the latter a diplomat and member of the United States Foreign Service. The Services were among the few Americans welcomed back to the country in the early 1970s by Zhou Enlai, then the premier of the PRC.  

Nixon and Mao shake hands

In Caroline Service’s oral history, she discusses the era of “ping pong diplomacy” in the early 1970s that occurred prior to the president’s visit to China. “We were all electrified one day. . . by seeing on television, reading in the paper, seeing pictures that the American ping pong team was going to Peking,” Service recalls of this turning point in the relations between the two countries. 

In this interview, Service also discusses the public perception of Richard Nixon at the time of the trip, echoing the popular opinion that only Nixon, as a staunch anti-communist with the support of his fellow political conservatives, could make such a move without widespread criticism. As Service says:

Now I have hardly a good word to say for Nixon. I have disliked him intensely forever, it seems to me, since ever he appeared on the political scene. Yet, I suppose that only a Republican conservative, reactionary almost, president could have done this. I do not think a Democrat could have done this. I think it had to be done.

In his oral history, Dr. Otto C. C. Lin, whose career is in Chinese technological innovation and entrepreneurship, offers his perspective on Henry Kissinger and Nixon traveling to China. When asked about the effects of the visit on Taiwan, Lin said, “Republicans were always considered friends for KMT [Kuomintang]. Hence, Nixon was considered a turncoat and Kissinger an accomplice of Nixon in betraying his friend, the ROC [Republic of China].” Ultimately, though, Lin says, “I think history would say that Nixon and Kissinger did the right thing to help open up China.” 

Cecilia Chiang, a chef and entrepreneur credited with popularizing northern Chinese cuisine in the United States, discusses in her oral history the buzz surrounding the state dinner attended by Nixon and Kissinger during their visit. “The menu was printed in all these newspapers in the United States and also the Chinese Newspaper,” recalls Chiang, “People called in. Called in from New York, from Hawaii, called me. ‘Can you duplicate that dinner? That dinner for us. We would like to just fly in just for that dinner.’”

Chiang remembers her surprise at the simplicity of the meal, stating that when she saw the menu, “I started to laugh. They said, ‘Why do you laugh?’ They put bean sprouts on the menu, because China is so poor at the time. No food, no nothing.” 

These interviews contain a wealth of insightful information concerning not just the presidential visit to China, but also the general political climate of US foreign relations in the 1970s. Caroline Service offers the perspective of a family who had by this point been involved in US foreign diplomacy for decades. Otto Lin leverages the Nixon visit in relation to the modern political, cultural, and economic landscape of China. Cecilia Chiang’s oral history provides a glimpse into the culinary landscape of China, a country still struggling with rationing and food shortages in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. 

Shannon White

You can find the interviews mentioned here and all our oral histories from the search feature on our home page . Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria.

Shannon White is currently a third-year student at UC Berkeley studying Ancient Greek and Latin. They are an undergraduate research apprentice in the Nemea Center under Professor Kim Shelton and a member of the editing staff for the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics . Shannon works as a student editor for the Oral History Center.

About the Oral History Center

The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library has interviews on just about every topic imaginable. We preserve voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public.

Oral Histories Used Here

Caroline Service: State Dept. Duty in China, The McCarthy Era, and After 1933–1977

Otto C.C. Lin: Promoting Education, Innovation, and Chinese Culture in the Era of Globalization Volume I: Oral History

Cecilia Chiang: An Oral History

Related Resources from The Bancroft Library

Cecilia Chiang is included in the Chez Panisse, Inc. pictorial collection . BANC PIC 2001.192.

Caroline Service letters to Lisa Green : TLS and ALS, 1950 Sept.–1995 April. Bancroft BANC MSS 99/81 cz.

Caroline Schulz Service papers, 1919–1997. Bancroft BANC MSS 99/237 cz.

John S. Service papers, 1925–1999. BANC MSS 87/21 cz.

How Richard Nixon’s visit to China 50 years ago changed Sino-US relations

In 1972 Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit the People’s Republic of China. Nixon called the visit: “The week that changed the world”. Since then, phrases like, “Nixon going to China,” have become shorthand for describing surprising and uncharacteristic actions by political leaders.

1950s Hostility between China and the US

The United States believed that China was an aggressive, expansionist power that threatened the security of its noncommunist neighbours. In fact, the two nations had been enemies in conflicts. During the early 1950s, China and the US were involved in both the Vietnam war and the Korean war.

Major events in US-China relations

Nixon’s visit started the issuing of the three joint communiques.

(some issues addressed)

China-US face-to-face meetings

Within weeks after diplomatic ties were normalised between Beijing and Washington in 1979 – China’s Deng Xiaoping, as the paramount leader of the country, made his historic state visit to the United States. Here is a look at the frequency of the US presidents and China’s leaders who have visited each other’s country.

Even though trade was not discussed much during the seven-day trip, it paved the way for the resumption of the US - China trade relationship. Albeit slowly in the first few years, the two leading economies undoubtedly made significant contributions to each other’s foreign trade.

China imports and exports from US

According to the China foreign economic statistical yearbook, China imported US$ 142.6 million of commodities from the US in 1950 and exported $US 95.5 million worth to its counterparts. After Chinese troops entered the 1950-53 Korean war to help North Korea fight US-led United Nations and South Korean forces, the US imposed a collective trade embargo in May 1951.

The US share of overall foreign trade amounted to 21 per cent of China’s GDP in 1950. However, from 1954 to 1971, the total US goods and services trade value with China dropped to 0 dollars .

US President Richard Nixon accepted an invitation from Premier Zhou Enlai to visit China for a week of talks and signed the first communique in Shanghai . China rapidly became the world’s biggest exporter and producer of industrial goods.

China didn’t attract large amounts of foreign direct investment from the US until Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour,which revived China’s commitment to reform amid isolation from the West over its 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. In 2015, Chinese companies invested more in the US than American companies in China for the first time.

The significant contexts of the establishment of formal diplomatic US-China relations in the 1970s and Deng Xiaoping’s open-up policy not only transformed the two countries in foreign trade, but also motivated the cultural exchange. The rapid growth of US adventurers travelling to China is paralleled by waves of Chinese students flocking to US universities.

NUMBER OF US TROOPS STATIONED IN TAIWAN

Withdrawal of American forces from Taiwan began in 1973 after President Richard Nixon's diplomatic opening with the People's Republic of China

The week that changed the world

The icebreaking journey of Nixon was regarded as an opportunity to end China’s decades of diplomatic isolation. Beijing also spared no efforts to improve relations with other Western powers and neighbouring emerging economies in the 1970s. Here is a look at the year of establishment of diplomatic relations with China.

RELATED INFOGRAPHIC

Are Chinese students a threat to US security?

Creative Director Adolfo Arranz Illuratration by Adolfo Arranz

Sources: China Foreign Economic Statistical Yearbook; United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; Institute of International Education; China Statistical Yearbook; A&E Television Networks; Brown University; Statistical Bulletin of Foreign Direct Investment; The Heritage Foundation; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China; The Office of the Historian

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Nixon's Trip to China

President Nixon's trip to China in 1972 ended twenty-five years of isolation between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) and resulted in establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1979.

Listen to Nixon discuss his rationale for the trip, the arrival of the pandas at the National Zoo, and his reasoning for the importance of restoring communications with the People's Republic of China.

These excerpts are drawn from the Third Chronological Conversation Tape Release, which was released on February 28, 2002.

For additional audio, as well as documents and photographs about Nixon's trip to China, visit the  Presidential Timeline .

Conversation Number:   656-10 (excerpt 1)

Date:    January 26, 1972  Abstract:    In this excerpt, President Nixon explains his rationale for making the trip to China in an Oval Office meeting with Barend Biesheuvel, Alexander Haig, and J. William Middendorf.

File china-656-10a.pdf

Conversation Number:   656-10 (excerpt 2) 

File china-656-10b.pdf

Conversation Number:   92-1 (excerpt 1)

Date:    February 29, 1972  Abstract:    After returning from China, President Nixon explains to a group of Congressional leaders, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the importance of restoring communication with China as a way of mitigating suspicion and miscalculation, which could lead to war. 

File china-92-1a.pdf

Conversation Number:   92-1 (excerpt 2)

File china-92-1b.pdf

Conversation Number:   21-56

Date:    March 13, 1972  Abstract:    As a result of President Nixon's trip, China gave the United States two pandas. In this conversation, President and Mrs. Nixon discuss the arrival of the pandas at the National Zoo. 

File china-21-56.pdf

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Nixon’s China visit, 50 years later

On the 50th anniversary of president richard nixon’s visit to the people’s republic of china, david eisenhower, director of the institute for public service at the annenberg school for communication, discusses the significance of the trip amid the fraying relations between the two nations. .

Richard Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai with smiling lookers surrounding them

Feb. 21 marks the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic of China. Heralded as “the week that changed the world,” the trip reestablished America’s relations with mainland China after 25 years of isolation, leading to the opening of that nation to the rest of the world and paving the way to its economic parity with the West.

David Eisenhower , director of the Institute for Public Service at the Annenberg School for Communication shares his thoughts on the significance of the anniversary amid fraying relations between the two nations. Eisenhower, grandson of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and a Nixon son-in-law, offers a perspective into Nixon’s thinking.

President Richard Nixon stands on the Great Wall of China, as the wall extends along the mountainside in the background

Was the opening to China the central objective of the Nixon presidency from Day One?

In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, Nixon campaigned on a pledge to ‘end the war and win the peace.’ Americans generally win wars to win the peace, and so the slogan has always lent itself to interpretation and misinterpretation of the Nixon campaign, along with long-standing inaccurate claims that Nixon also campaigned on a ‘secret plan’ for ending the Vietnam War. What he generally meant—and what his audiences understood him to mean by his words—was that he would advance a strategy to ensure that, as the Vietnam war ended, the U.S. would be charting a new path in international affairs that would lead Americans and the world to a new and better place. Likewise, Nixon spoke of a ‘new structure of peace.’

Imminent fulfillment of these pledges was signified dramatically by Nixon’s arrival in Peking, which occurred 50 years ago this week. And Nixon’s 1972 trip to China was prelude to one of the most eventful years in American history. 

By the end of 1972, the war was within weeks of ending. The foundations of the ‘structure’ were in place. The U.S. had obtained a shaky peace in Vietnam, forged a strategic partnership with the People’s Republic of China, and entered a period of détente with the USSR. And while these interrelated objectives had been pursued from the start, I would say that the ‘opening’ of China was the lodestar, the central and most important of Nixon’s first-term objectives. It signified that the world was transitioning from the postwar era—the Cold War—towards something different, an international system in which the U.S. would enjoy a pivotal advantage. The trip itself was a dramatic step in furtherance of the new ‘structure of peace.’ 

Gone, or soon to be gone, were key features of the Cold War: the division of the world into two hostile camps; chronic nuclear tensions; periodic proxy wars. Near term, the China trip formalized China’s final and formal break with the so-called Socialist Commonwealth. Long range, it pointed the way towards a multipolar order and a global economy as well as a major trading partnership between the U.S. and China. 

Nixon’s trip in 1972 was world-changing. In my opinion, it stands as one—if not the most important—of a number of defining Cold War era events including the Potsdam conference, Mao’s victory in China, the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the four Reagan-Gorbachev meetings. 

Did Nixon’s China success ease U.S. tensions with both the Chinese and the Soviets?

Accentuating the surprise and shock value of the event, Nixon’s China initiative entailed significant risks and required careful preparation. First, it required ongoing efforts to de-escalate Vietnam, looking towards a ‘peace with honor.’ It entailed the risk of defying the Soviets who, by 1969, were engaged in a border war with China which many feared was prelude to a Czechoslovakia-style invasion of the country. Yet Nixon’s companion objective was also to advance detente with the Soviet Union. What many forget is that the Soviets spent the decade of the 1960s attempting to isolate China and to prevent anyone from disrupting their effort to force Mao and the Chinese back into their alliance with the Soviets that China had more or less withdrawn from as early as 1960. There are estimates that by 1969, the Soviets aimed as many nuclear forces at the Chinese as they had aimed at NATO. Ground battles along the Soviet- Chinese frontier began in March and climaxed that August, the month that Nixon decisively shifted the U.S. policy of not meddling in the Sino-Soviet split to one of intervening in it, to bolster China’s autonomy and independence in the face of serious Soviet threats. 

Nixon’s ongoing effort to attain ‘peace with honor’ in Vietnam was integral to the China opening. If the U.S. was to serve the role as counterweight to the USSR in Asia, the U.S. could not be simultaneously abandoning Southeast Asia in ways unthinkable in Europe or any other theater actually valued by Americans. With the China initiative, the U.S. was committing to a major permanent role in Asia and to Asia’s future. Integral also was Nixon’s conclusion that the risks of confrontation with the Soviets were acceptable, that U.S.-China relations would not wreck but improve U.S.-Soviet relations in time. In his view, the European-oriented Soviets were not bent on war with China, despite the military buildup and menacing polemics, and that the Soviets would stand down in exchange for inducements like détente. It is fair to say that Nixon’s gamble that wading into the Sino-Soviet quarrel would not trigger war but produce lasting results to our advantage was a successful gamble.

What lessons on leadership and diplomacy might be drawn from the visit?

At times, I look back on the 1960s and marvel. Never had America’s problems seemed so grave or incapable of resolution. In the late ’60s, at the height of protests against the Vietnam war and racial disturbances, national policy was one large conundrum. The ability to move beyond the situation is an example of the political adaptability of our Republic that in most fields brings talent to the surface when needed. Meritocracy is a term that describes business, the professions, education, and politics. Looking back to my teen years, I remember the major challenges that faced the country. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, America needed leadership to address civil rights in a dramatic new way, and we found it. When Americans needed ways to end—and redeem—the Vietnam war, Americans found leadership. When faced with the problem of binding up the wounds of the Vietnam war, Americans found people to do that. When the time came to move beyond the postwar altogether, Americans found leaders to move us beyond the Cold War in every way towards a brighter future.

Likewise, thinking can never become frozen, and leadership must constantly be regenerated. As the China initiative recedes into history, it is apparent that the new policy towards China begun in 1972 yielded great benefits, but that the benefits would entail future challenges. So now we find ourselves in a competition with the Chinese.

That some day America would be dealing with a ‘rising China’ was a foreseeable long-range consequence of Nixon’s policy and 1972 trip. After all, a key perception that drove Nixon’s policy was that China was potentially great and that, in principle, throttling China’s inevitable rise was reactionary and wrong. How he came by those views I do not know, but I often heard him speak in glowing terms about China well before his trip to China was announced. Nixon’s view was that China, though devastated by a century of occupation and recent wars, would someday emerge as a major—even dominant—power. He was then more correct than probably he knew. 

The China Nixon visited in 1972 was a country that probably resembled the China of the Boxer Rebellion. When my wife and I visited China alone in 1975, it was evident that the country’s infrastructure was in disrepair. Most of its current infrastructure was unbuilt. Yet China in 1975 was inspiring in ways, frightening in ways, poor though not miserable. What we did notice was that the Chinese officials and people we met voiced convincing faith in China’s future greatness. In hindsight, today’s ‘rising China’ can be seen as a product of China’s everlasting embrace of that faith. 

Today, as we deal with China’s emergence, the relationship stands on an entirely different basis, not strategic partnership against a common threat but a relationship on the basis of parity, either existing or soon to be. When facing this challenge, we should not underestimate American diplomacy or skill in politics. For many years before and after World War II, Americans had—or cultivated—a reputation for being novices in foreign affairs. The fact is that America has always produced outstanding diplomatic talent; several of our founding era presidents had been secretaries of state. I think that we can rely on our political and diplomatic talent to guide future U.S.-China relations in a positive future direction.

Are there other takeaways?

Another broad point comes to mind. The China opening was a leap, the product of imagination. Einstein is famously quoted to the effect that imagination is as important as knowledge, maybe even more so. Over the years, how many times have I heard Penn professors say that the university’s role is to train but also to encourage initiative and creativity, to inspire and to mold citizens who combine those traits with empathy, tolerance, and compassion? In my lifetime, imaginative leaps abound. The aforementioned civil rights leap in the late 1950s and early 1960s involved a reimagining of our legal and social structure. America’s ‘winning the peace’ in the 1972-1992 period involved an extraordinary leap in world view and strategic thinking. The creation of a post-Cold War globalized economy has involved many leaps.

Remarkable about these leaps is that Americans seem to take leaps for granted, which is also perhaps an achievement of our education and university system. Taking miracles for granted was/has been a major takeaway from my years of researching, writing, and teaching the history of World War II, an undertaking which obliged me to see things from the perspective of other countries engaged in that war. In World War II, the United States built massive fleets and air forces and mobilized 90 divisions—almost 15 million people donned uniforms in a nation of 130 million—and dispatched those forces across two sub-infested oceans to engage in decisive battles against the two most efficient regional military powers of the era. On paper, American intentions were fanciful, utterly beyond the capacity of all other belligerents at the time. Yet aware of their own limitations, our enemies expected such feats of us. We did too, in a matter-of-fact way. As he mobilized the American war effort, FDR made the war effort seem almost routine. Americans today are probably much closer in spirit to that era than is recognized. We don’t think about it much. Characteristically, Americans do not dwell on the past.

Likewise, a takeaway of the China opening is the role of imagination in thought and boldness in execution. Because Americans imagine a better world and because American institutions are accordingly organized to bring one into being, America moves forward. America has consistently produced leaders who are not satisfied with managing things but who anticipate things and who set out to make a difference. At Penn, we are surrounded by such people. 

On the 50th anniversary of the long-ago opening to China, we find ourselves fortifying ourselves to face serious economic, social, and international problems. As we define and begin to grapple with these problems, we do so with implicit confidence that solutions are out there, as are the people and resources needed to surmount all challenges. Confidence and belief in the future truly define us as Americans. Confidence and belief in the future are woven into our culture and history—indeed, woven into criticisms of our culture and history. Evidence of such confidence and belief abounds in our recent history and in the China opening of 50 years ago. And so from time to time, it behooves us to acknowledge our faith and belief, traits that lead us to value ability, vision, imagination, and know-how, the capacities that have brought us to this place and move us forward, ever forward. 

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50 years after Nixon visit, US-China ties as fraught as ever

FILE - Then Chinese communist party leader Mao Zedong, left, and then U.S. President Richard Nixon shake hands as they meet in Beijing on Feb. 21, 1972. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China's center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China's position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Then Chinese communist party leader Mao Zedong, left, and then U.S. President Richard Nixon shake hands as they meet in Beijing on Feb. 21, 1972. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Then U.S. President Richard Nixon and then first lady Pat Nixon lead the way as they take a tour of China’s famed Great Wall, near Beijing, Feb. 24, 1972. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Then U.S. President Richard Nixon stands at The Great Wall of China, which snakes over the mountain behind him, near Beijing on Feb. 24, 1972. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Then U.S. President Richard Nixon and then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai review Chinese troops at Nixon’s departure from Beijing to Hangchow to continue his China visit, Feb. 26, 1972. First lady Pat Nixon and National Securty adviser Henry Kissinger are seen walking behind Nixon and Zhou. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Then U.S. President Richard Nixon and first lady Pat Nixon enter the palace grounds of Beijing’s Forbidden City as heavy snow falls on Feb. 25, 1972. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Then U.S. President Richard Nixon and then first lady Pat Nixon looks at a sculpture depicting a mythical beast on the palace grounds of Beijing’s Forbidden City as heavy snow falls on Feb. 25, 1972. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Then First lady Pat Nixon watches behind him, then U.S. President Richard Nixon shakes hands with a Chinese girl in Beijing on Feb. 24, 1972 during his tour of historic sites of the Chinese capital. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Then U.S. President Richard Nixon and then China’s Premier Zhou Enlai join the applause at a gymnastic show in Beijing on Feb. 23, 1972 as they stand in the official box under a capacity crowd with a portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong above. First Lady Pat Nixon is seated on lower right. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Then U.S. President Richard Nixon, right, is serious-faced as he eats with chopsticks next to then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in Shanghai on February 28, 1972. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Framed in the opening of a wall, then U.S. President Richard Nixon and then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai walks past as they tour Hangzhou in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang on Feb. 26, 1972. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that over time would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. (AP Photo, File)

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BEIJING (AP) — At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that, over time, would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time.

The relationship between China and the United States was always going to be a challenge, and after half a century of ups and downs, is more fraught than ever. The Cold War is long over, but on both sides there are fears a new one could be beginning. Despite repeated Chinese disavowals, America worries that the democratic-led world that triumphed over the Soviet Union could be challenged by the authoritarian model of a powerful and still-rising China.

“The U.S.-China relationship has always been contentious but one of necessity,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a China expert at Stanford University. “Perhaps 50 years ago the reasons were mainly economic. Now they are mainly in the security realm. But the relationship has never — and will never — be easy.”

Nixon landed in Beijing on a gray winter morning 50 years ago on Monday. Billboards carried slogans such as “Down with American Imperialism,” part of the upheaval under the Cultural Revolution that banished intellectuals and others to the countryside and subjected many to public humiliation and brutal and even deadly attacks in the name of class struggle.

Nixon’s 1972 trip, which included meetings with Chairman Mao Zedong and a visit to the Great Wall, led to the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979 and the parallel severing of formal ties with Taiwan, which the U.S. had recognized as the government of China after the communists took power in Beijing in 1949.

Premier Zhou Enlai’s translator wrote in a memoir that, to the best of his recollection, Nixon said, “This hand stretches out across the Pacific Ocean in friendship” as he shook hands with Zhou at the airport.

For both sides, it was a friendship born of circumstances, rather than natural allegiances.

China and the Soviet Union, formerly communist allies, had split and even clashed along their border in 1969, and Mao saw the United States as a potential counterbalance to any threat of a Soviet invasion.

Nixon was seeking to isolate the Soviet Union and exit a prolonged and bloody Vietnam War that had divided American society. He hoped that China, an ally of communist North Vietnam in its battle with the U.S.-backed South, could play a role in resolving the conflict.

The U.S. president put himself “in the position of supplicant to Beijing,” said June Teufel Dreyer, a Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami. Chinese state media promoted the idea that a “prosperous China would be a peaceful China” and that the country was a huge market for American exports, she said.

It would be decades before that happened. First, the U.S. became a huge market for China, propelling the latter’s meteoric rise from an impoverished nation to the world’s second largest economy.

Nixon’s visit was a “pivotal event that ushered in China’s turn outward and subsequent rise globally,” said the University of Chicago’s Dali Yang, the author of numerous books on Chinese politics and economics.

Two years after Mao’s death in 1976, new leader Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era of partial economic liberalization, creating a mix of state-led capitalism and single-party rule that has endured to this day.

China’s wealth has enabled a major expansion of its military , which the U.S. and its allies see as a threat. The Communist Party says it seeks only to defend its territory. That includes, however, trying to control islands also claimed by Japan in the East China Sea and by Southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea, home to crucial shipping lanes and natural resources.

The military has sent a growing number of warplanes on training missions toward Taiwan, a source of friction with the United States. China claims the self-governing island off its east coast as its territory. The U.S. supplies Taiwan with military equipment and warns China against any attempt to take it by force.

Still, Nixon’s trip to China was touted afterward as the signature foreign policy achievement of an administration that ended in ignominy with Watergate.

Embarking on the process of bringing China back into the international fold was the right move, but the past half-century has yet to put relations on a stable track, said Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history and modern politics at Oxford University.

“The U.S. and China have still failed to work out exactly how they will both fit into a world where they both have a role, but find it increasingly hard to accommodate each other,” he said.

Chinese officials and scholars see the Nixon visit as a time when the two countries sought communication and mutual understanding despite their differences. Zhu Feng, the dean of the School of International Studies at Nanjing University, said the same approach is key to overcoming the current impasse.

“The commemoration of Nixon’s visit tells us whether we can draw a kind of power from history,” he said.

Though his trip to China gave the U.S. leverage in its Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, America now faces a new geopolitical landscape — with echoes of the past.

The Soviet Union is gone, but the Russian and Chinese leaders, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, are finding common cause as they push back against U.S. pressure over their authoritarian ways. The Vietnam War is over, but America once again finds its society divided, this time over the pandemic response and the last presidential election.

U.S. President Joe Biden has said he wants a more predictable relationship with China but major differences over trade and human rights make mutual understanding elusive. The prospect of long-term stability in ties raised by Nixon’s visit seems to be ever farther out of reach.

“China-U.S. relations are terrible,” said Xiong Zhiyong, a professor of international relations at China Foreign Affairs University. “There are indeed people hoping to improve relations, but it is utterly difficult to achieve.”

Associated Press researcher Yu Bing contributed.

This story has been corrected to remove reference to Nixon being embroiled in the Watergate scandal at the time of his trip to China. The Watergate break-in occurred after the trip.

nixon visits china us history definition

nixon visits china us history definition

Monthly News & Updates from the Elliott School of International Affairs

Nixon China visit

50 years later: Richard Nixon’s Historic Visit to China

Nixon China visit

Two Elliott School faculty members who are leading international experts on U.S./China relations offer commentary on the 1972 foreign affairs breakthrough.

President Richard Nixon made one of the most significant foreign visits in the history of the United States 50 years ago when he traveled to the People’s Republic of China Feb. 21-28, 1972—ending two-plus decades of no communication or diplomatic ties between the two nations. 

GW Today sat down with two leading international experts on U.S./China from the Elliott School of International Affairs to discuss the trip to Beijing 50 years later.

David Shambaugh , the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science and International Affairs and director of the China Policy Program, served the State Department and National Security Council during President Jimmy Carter’s administration. He also served on the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S./China Relations and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Asia-Pacific Council and other public policy and scholarly organizations. Before GW, he was senior lecturer, lecturer and reader in Chinese politics at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where he also served as editor of The China Quarterly.

Robert Sutter , Professor of Practice of International Affairs, had a government career that lasted from 1968 until 2001. He served as senior specialist and director of the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division of the Congressional Research Service, the national intelligence officer for East Asia and the Pacific at the U.S. Government’s National Intelligence Council, the China division director at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Shambaugh and Sutter were asked questions, some the same and some different, separately for this article.

Q: At the time, what was the significance of Nixon’s visit to China? 

Shambaugh : President Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972 was described at the time as “the week that changed the world.” While perhaps hyperbole, there is indeed truth in this characterization—for three principal reasons. First, it ended the 22-year estrangement and total lack of contact between both the governments and the people of China and the United States. It would take another seven years before official diplomatic relations would be consummated under the Carter administration—where I worked on the China staff of the National Security Council staff at the time—which in turn opened a wide variety of direct ties between our two societies, but the Nixon visit catalyzed the process. Second, with the American opening to China, other governments around the world, which had been part of the previous U.S. policy to isolate and contain China, now were free to open their own relations with the People’s Republic of China—thus, in a real sense, the Nixon visit not only opened U.S./China relations, but it also did much to open China’s own doors to the world that had been previously almost completely isolated. Third, the Nixon visit was a strategic stroke of genius and fundamentally altered the balance of power in the so-called strategic triangle (U.S., China, Soviet Union) at the time, aligning America and China against Moscow. That, in turn, led over time to the weakening of the Soviet Union, its collapse and end of the Cold War.

Q: How was the event viewed in the U.S. at the time? What about in China? 

Sutter: It was a big news item, and it was widely applauded. Everyone thought this was a great idea. The Chinese were on their best behavior. It was all very cordial. And it was in the interest of both sides to look like they were very close. China was desperate. And China was under the gun from the Soviet Union. It was very much in the Chinese interest because they were very worried about the U.S. and Soviet Union.  

Q: Did Nixon’s China policy and visit facilitate the creation of modern China? 

Shambaugh: Indirectly, yes. Nixon’s visit facilitated China’s broader opening the world, notably the Western world. This brought China in direct contact with the world’s most developed economies—which have been central to the foreign investment, technology transfer, and professional exchanges that have all contributed much to China’s dynamic economic growth since. But it also took the death of [Chinse President] Mao [Zedong] and the coming to power of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 to relax the repression and xenophobia within China, so the country could take advantage of the door that Nixon and Mao initially opened.

Q: What would be comparable to Nixon’s visit today?

Sutter: I just want to reiterate the fragility of China (in 1972). This was a dangerous mission. They were taking a risk. But they must have had enough evidence that they felt the president could be secured, and they could get him out if they had to. It was like going to North Korea today. China then was a lot like North Korea today. Very secretive. There’s so many things you didn’t know. It was a gamble, in a way.

Q: Why does the Nixon visit still fascinate so many? And why is it important for students today to learn about it? 

Shambaugh: The Nixon visit continues to fascinate, in part, because it was such great public theater—because it took place on live television . Here was a society (Communist China) that had been completely closed off from the world since 1949, having recently been convulsed by the cultural revolution (from 1966-76), literally opening itself up for others to peer inside. The drama of Nixon meeting Mao [Zedong], being feted in the Great Hall of the People, touring the Great Wall and signing the Shanghai Communique was all riveting theater. As for students today, I am currently teaching my graduate-level U.S./China relations course this semester, and we watched the film ”History Declassified: Nixon in China” earlier this month, and I also invited to class Winston Lord—who was Nixon’s and [former Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger’s close aide. He participated in Kissinger’s secret 1971 trip to Beijing, the Nixon visit itself, played a key role in negotiating the Shanghai Communiqué, and later became America’s ambassador to China from 1985 until 1989. The students loved it. So, yes, the Nixon visit is still very much alive, at least in my class in the Elliott School. As for what students can still learn from it, I would say that no matter how great a gulf or differences can be between governments or peoples, there is always the possibility of improving ties. This is something we should remember about U.S./China relations when they are as strained as they are today.

Q: Nixon self-described the visit as a “week that changed the world.” Looking back 50 years later and where the two countries are now, is that statement accurate, far off, or somewhere in the middle?

Sutter: It fundamentally changed the world at the time, but the world has also changed since, and China changed. Maybe the United States has changed too, but China has definitely changed. It’s just more powerful. We never knew, we outsiders never knew what China would do if it became very powerful. There was no evidence to back that up. But now we have evidence of it. That changes our perceptions and, and that’s what’s happened over the last few years.

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  • Nation & World

50 years after Nixon visit, US-China ties as fraught as ever

BEIJING (AP) — At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that, over time, would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time.

The relationship between China and the United States was always going to be a challenge, and after half a century of ups and downs, is more fraught than ever. The Cold War is long over, but on both sides there are fears a new one could be beginning. Despite repeated Chinese disavowals, America worries that the democratic-led world that triumphed over the Soviet Union could be challenged by the authoritarian model of a powerful and still-rising China.

“The U.S.-China relationship has always been contentious but one of necessity,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a China expert at Stanford University. “Perhaps 50 years ago the reasons were mainly economic. Now they are mainly in the security realm. But the relationship has never — and will never — be easy.”

Nixon landed in Beijing on a gray winter morning 50 years ago on Monday. Billboards carried slogans such as “Down with American Imperialism,” part of the upheaval under the Cultural Revolution that banished intellectuals and others to the countryside and subjected many to public humiliation and brutal and even deadly attacks in the name of class struggle.

Nixon’s 1972 trip, which included meetings with Chairman Mao Zedong and a visit to the Great Wall, led to the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979 and the parallel severing of formal ties with Taiwan, which the U.S. had recognized as the government of China after the communists took power in Beijing in 1949.

Premier Zhou Enlai’s translator wrote in a memoir that, to the best of his recollection, Nixon said, “This hand stretches out across the Pacific Ocean in friendship” as he shook hands with Zhou at the airport.

For both sides, it was a friendship born of circumstances, rather than natural allegiances.

China and the Soviet Union, formerly communist allies, had split and even clashed along their border in 1969, and Mao saw the United States as a potential counterbalance to any threat of a Soviet invasion.

Nixon was seeking to isolate the Soviet Union and exit a prolonged and bloody Vietnam War that had divided American society. He hoped that China, an ally of communist North Vietnam in its battle with the U.S.-backed South, could play a role in resolving the conflict.

The U.S. president put himself “in the position of supplicant to Beijing,” said June Teufel Dreyer, a Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami. Chinese state media promoted the idea that a “prosperous China would be a peaceful China” and that the country was a huge market for American exports, she said.

It would be decades before that happened. First, the U.S. became a huge market for China, propelling the latter’s meteoric rise from an impoverished nation to the world’s second largest economy.

Nixon’s visit was a “pivotal event that ushered in China’s turn outward and subsequent rise globally,” said the University of Chicago’s Dali Yang, the author of numerous books on Chinese politics and economics.

Two years after Mao’s death in 1976, new leader Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era of partial economic liberalization, creating a mix of state-led capitalism and single-party rule that has endured to this day.

China’s wealth has enabled a major expansion of its military, which the U.S. and its allies see as a threat. The Communist Party says it seeks only to defend its territory. That includes, however, trying to control islands also claimed by Japan in the East China Sea and by Southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea, home to crucial shipping lanes and natural resources.

The military has sent a growing number of warplanes on training missions toward Taiwan, a source of friction with the United States. China claims the self-governing island off its east coast as its territory. The U.S. supplies Taiwan with military equipment and warns China against any attempt to take it by force.

Still, Nixon’s trip to China was touted afterward as the signature foreign policy achievement of an administration that ended in ignominy with Watergate.

Embarking on the process of bringing China back into the international fold was the right move, but the past half-century has yet to put relations on a stable track, said Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history and modern politics at Oxford University.

“The U.S. and China have still failed to work out exactly how they will both fit into a world where they both have a role, but find it increasingly hard to accommodate each other,” he said.

Chinese officials and scholars see the Nixon visit as a time when the two countries sought communication and mutual understanding despite their differences. Zhu Feng, the dean of the School of International Studies at Nanjing University, said the same approach is key to overcoming the current impasse.

“The commemoration of Nixon’s visit tells us whether we can draw a kind of power from history,” he said.

Though his trip to China gave the U.S. leverage in its Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, America now faces a new geopolitical landscape — with echoes of the past.

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The Soviet Union is gone, but the Russian and Chinese leaders, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, are finding common cause as they push back against U.S. pressure over their authoritarian ways. The Vietnam War is over, but America once again finds its society divided, this time over the pandemic response and the last presidential election.

U.S. President Joe Biden has said he wants a more predictable relationship with China but major differences over trade and human rights make mutual understanding elusive. The prospect of long-term stability in ties raised by Nixon’s visit seems to be ever farther out of reach.

“China-U.S. relations are terrible,” said Xiong Zhiyong, a professor of international relations at China Foreign Affairs University. “There are indeed people hoping to improve relations, but it is utterly difficult to achieve.”

Associated Press researcher Yu Bing contributed.

This story has been corrected to remove reference to Nixon being embroiled in the Watergate scandal at the time of his trip to China. The Watergate break-in occurred after the trip.

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The Asahi Shimbun

Asia & World

50 years after Nixon visit, U.S.-China ties as fraught as ever

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 21, 2022 at 14:25 JST

Photo/Illutration

BEIJING--At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China’s center of power for a visit that, over time, would transform U.S.-China relations and China’s position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time.

The relationship between China and the United States was always going to be a challenge, and after half a century of ups and downs, is more fraught than ever. The Cold War is long over, but on both sides there are fears a new one could be beginning. Despite repeated Chinese disavowals, America worries that the democratic-led world that triumphed over the Soviet Union could be challenged by the authoritarian model of a powerful and still-rising China.

“The U.S.-China relationship has always been contentious but one of necessity,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a China expert at Stanford University. “Perhaps 50 years ago the reasons were mainly economic. Now they are mainly in the security realm. But the relationship has never--and will never--be easy.”

Nixon landed in Beijing on a gray winter morning 50 years ago on Monday. Billboards carried slogans such as “Down with American Imperialism,” part of the upheaval under the Cultural Revolution that banished intellectuals and others to the countryside and subjected many to public humiliation and brutal and even deadly attacks in the name of class struggle.

Nixon’s 1972 trip, which included meetings with Chairman Mao Zedong and a visit to the Great Wall, led to the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979 and the parallel severing of formal ties with Taiwan, which the U.S. had recognized as the government of China after the communists took power in Beijing in 1949.

Premier Zhou Enlai’s translator wrote in a memoir that, to the best of his recollection, Nixon said, “This hand stretches out across the Pacific Ocean in friendship” as he shook hands with Zhou at the airport.

For both sides, it was a friendship born of circumstances, rather than natural allegiances.

China and the Soviet Union, formerly communist allies, had split and even clashed along their border in 1969, and Mao saw the United States as a potential counterbalance to any threat of a Soviet invasion.

Nixon, embroiled in the Watergate scandal at home and a war in Vietnam, was seeking to isolate the Soviet Union and exit the prolonged and bloody war that had divided American society. He hoped that China, an ally of communist North Vietnam in its battle with the U.S.-backed South, could play a role in resolving the conflict.

The U.S. president put himself “in the position of supplicant to Beijing,” said June Teufel Dreyer, a Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami. Chinese state media promoted the idea that a “prosperous China would be a peaceful China” and that the country was a huge market for American exports, she said.

It would be decades before that happened. First, the U.S. became a huge market for China, propelling the latter’s meteoric rise from an impoverished nation to the world’s second largest economy.

Nixon’s visit was a “pivotal event that ushered in China’s turn outward and subsequent rise globally,” said the University of Chicago’s Dali Yang, the author of numerous books on Chinese politics and economics.

Two years after Mao’s death in 1976, new leader Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era of partial economic liberalization, creating a mix of state-led capitalism and single-party rule that has endured to this day.

China’s wealth has enabled a major expansion of its military, which the U.S. and its allies see as a threat. The Communist Party says it seeks only to defend its territory. That includes, however, trying to control islands also claimed by Japan in the East China Sea and by Southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea, home to crucial shipping lanes and natural resources.

The military has sent a growing number of warplanes on training missions toward Taiwan, a source of friction with the United States. China claims the self-governing island off its east coast as its territory. The U.S. supplies Taiwan with military equipment and warns China against any attempt to take it by force.

Still, Nixon’s trip to China was touted afterward as the signature foreign policy achievement of an administration that ended in ignominy with Watergate.

Embarking on the process of bringing China back into the international fold was the right move, but the past half-century has yet to put relations on a stable track, said Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history and modern politics at Oxford University.

“The U.S. and China have still failed to work out exactly how they will both fit into a world where they both have a role, but find it increasingly hard to accommodate each other,” he said.

Chinese officials and scholars see the Nixon visit as a time when the two countries sought communication and mutual understanding despite their differences. Zhu Feng, the dean of the School of International Studies at Nanjing University, said the same approach is key to overcoming the current impasse.

“The commemoration of Nixon’s visit tells us whether we can draw a kind of power from history,” he said.

Though his trip to China gave the U.S. leverage in its Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, America now faces a new geopolitical landscape--with echoes of the past.

The Soviet Union is gone, but the Russian and Chinese leaders, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, are finding common cause as they push back against U.S. pressure over their authoritarian ways. The Vietnam War is over, but America once again finds its society divided, this time over the pandemic response and the last presidential election.

U.S. President Joe Biden has said he wants a more predictable relationship with China but major differences over trade and human rights persist, making it that much more difficult to find such mutual understanding. The prospect of long-term stability in ties raised by Nixon’s visit seems to be moving farther out of reach.

“China-U.S. relations are terrible,” said Xiong Zhiyong, a professor of international relations at China Foreign Affairs University. “There are indeed people hoping to improve relations, but it is utterly difficult to achieve.”

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Richard M. Nixon

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 16, 2019 | Original: November 9, 2009

Nixon with the Watergate transcripts

Richard Nixon (1913-94), the 37th U.S. president, is best remembered as the only president ever to resign from office. Nixon stepped down in 1974, halfway through his second term, rather than face impeachment over his efforts to cover up illegal activities by members of his administration in the Watergate scandal. 

A former Republican congressman and U.S. senator from California, he served two terms as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) in the 1950s. In 1960, Nixon lost his bid for the presidency in a close race with Democrat John F. Kennedy (1917-63). He ran for the White House again in 1968 and won. As president, Nixon’s achievements included forging diplomatic ties with China and the Soviet Union, and withdrawing U.S. troops from an unpopular war in Vietnam. However, Nixon’s involvement in Watergate tarnished his legacy and deepened American cynicism about government.

Education and Early Political Career

Richard Milhous Nixon was born on January 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, California . He was the second of five sons of Francis Anthony Nixon (1878-1956), who struggled to earn a living running a grocery store and gas station, and his wife, Hannah Milhous Nixon (1885-1967). Nixon absorbed his parents’ discontent with their working-class circumstances and developed a strong sense of ambition.

Did you know? While serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Richard Nixon won large amounts of money playing poker. He used these winnings to help fund his first political campaign in 1946.

He attended Whittier College, where he excelled as a debater and was elected president of the student body before graduating in 1934. Three years later, he earned a law degree from Duke University, where he was head of the student bar association and graduated near the top of his class. After Duke, he returned to Whittier, California, and began working as an attorney. 

In 1940, Nixon married Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan (1912-93), whom he met while participating in a local theater group. The couple had two daughters, Patricia (1946-) and Julie (1948-). When America entered World War II (1939-45), Nixon joined the U.S. Navy and served as an operations officer in the Pacific.

Following the war, Nixon launched his political career in 1946 when he defeated a five-term Democratic incumbent to represent his California district in the U.S. House of Representatives . As a congressman, Nixon served on the House Un-American Activities Committee and rose to national prominence by leading a controversial investigation of Alger Hiss (1904-1996), a well-regarded former State Department official who was accused of spying for the Soviet Union in the late 1930s.

Nixon was re-elected to Congress in 1948 and two years later, in 1950, won a seat in the U.S. Senate .

An Unsuccessful Bid for the Presidency

Although Nixon’s attacks on alleged Communists and political opponents alarmed some people, they increased his popularity among conservative Republicans. In 1952, General Dwight Eisenhower selected the 39-year-old first-term senator to be his vice-presidential running mate. 

A few months after accepting the nomination, Nixon became the target of a negative campaign that raised questions about money and gifts he allegedly received from industry lobbyists. Nixon answered these charges in his famous “Checkers” speech, claiming that the only gift he ever accepted was a puppy named Checkers for his young daughter. The speech proved effective and preserved Nixon’s spot on the ticket.

Eisenhower and Nixon won the election of 1952 and were re-elected in 1956. In 1960, Nixon claimed the Republican presidential nomination but lost one of the closest elections in American history to U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. The turning point of the campaign came in the first-ever nationally televised presidential debate. During the broadcast, Nixon appeared pale, nervous and sweaty compared with his tan, well-rested and vigorous opponent.

The loss to Kennedy dealt a terrible blow to Nixon’s ego. He claimed that the media disliked him and had slanted campaign coverage in favor of his handsome and wealthy opponent. Nixon returned home to California, where he practiced law and launched a campaign for governor in 1962. When he lost this election as well, many observers believed that his political career was over. As a disgusted Nixon told reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Winning the White House

Six years after losing the governorship in his home state, Nixon made a remarkable political comeback and once again claimed his party’s presidential nomination. He prevailed in the 1968 U.S. presidential election, defeating Democrat Hubert Humphrey (1911-78) and third-party candidate George Wallace (1919-98). 

Nixon took office at a time of upheaval and change in the U.S. The American people were bitterly divided over the Vietnam War (1954-75), while women marched for equal rights and racial violence rocked the nation’s cities.

Declaring his intention to achieve “peace with honor” in Vietnam, Nixon introduced a strategy known as Vietnamization , which called for gradually withdrawing American troops from the war while training South Vietnamese army forces to take over their own defense. In January 1973, Nixon administration officials reached a peace agreement with Communist North Vietnam. 

The last American combat troops left Vietnam in March of that year. The hostilities continued, however, and in 1975 North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam and reunited the country under Communist rule. 

In addition to dealing with the Vietnam War, Nixon made historic visits, in 1972, to China and the Soviet Union. He reduced tensions between these Communist nations and the U.S., helping to set the stage for establishing formal diplomatic relations. Nixon also signed important treaties to limit the production of nuclear weapons.

The Watergate Scandal and Beyond

While Nixon was running for re-election in 1972, operatives associated with his campaign broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Several members of Nixon’s administration had knowledge of the burglary and while Nixon denied any involvement, secret tapes of White House conversations later revealed that the president had participated in efforts to cover up the criminal activity.

Facing impeachment by Congress, Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974. He was replaced by Vice President Gerald Ford (1913-2006), who a month later pardoned Nixon for any wrongdoing. A number of administration officials were eventually convicted of crimes related to the Watergate affair.

After leaving the White House, Nixon retired to California (he and his wife later moved to New Jersey) and quietly worked to rehabilitate his image, writing books, traveling extensively and consulting with Democratic and Republican presidents. By the time he died on April 22, 1994, at age 81 in New York City, after suffering a stroke, some people viewed him as a respected elder statesman. Other Americans, however, rejected efforts to paint him as anything but a disgraced criminal.

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How does national confidence inform US-China relations?

Subscribe to the china bulletin, ryan hass ryan hass director - john l. thornton china center , senior fellow - foreign policy , center for asia policy studies , john l. thornton china center , chen-fu and cecilia yen koo chair in taiwan studies @ryanl_hass.

March 7, 2024

  • 25 min read

Executive summary

There has been a proliferation of forecasts in recent years for when the United States and China may enter conflict. For some, these forecasting exercises have been driven by concerns about an erosion of stability in the Taiwan Strait. For others, they have been a function of a shrinking gap in national power between the United States and China. Yet others have speculated that China may be peaking in national power and may sense a fleeting moment to secure its objectives, by force if necessary, before it begins its descent.

This paper offers a different frame for evaluating the U.S.-China relationship. Based on a review of the relationship over the past 75 years, this paper argues that when both countries feel secure and optimistic about their futures, the relationship generally functions most productively. When one country is confident in its national performance but the other is not, the relationship is capable of mudding through. And when both countries simultaneously feel pessimistic about their national condition, as is the case now, the relationship is most prone to sharp downturns. Domestic factors alone do not dictate the trajectory of relations. They do, however, play a larger role in influencing the relationship than otherwise has been observed in much recent public commentary.

This model for evaluating the relationship yields several policy-relevant conclusions. It suggests the relationship is dynamic and responsive to developments in both countries, as opposed to being captive to historical forces leading immutably toward conflict. It highlights that the relationship has navigated frequent zigs and zags over the past decades and rarely travels a straight line for long. It also makes clear that there is not a market now for bold new thinking about managing the bilateral relationship. The current task for policymakers in Washington and Beijing is to navigate through the concurrent down cycles in both countries while keeping bilateral tensions below the threshold of conflict.

Situating the present moment

The U.S.-China relationship is both strained and devoid of ambition. Conversations with officials from the U.S. and Chinese governments have yielded little optimism for potential improvements in bilateral relations in the foreseeable future. Policymakers in both countries appear to be primarily concerned with limiting the risks of escalation through 2024 and developing more durable means of managing competition over the longer term.

The current state of relations comes as no surprise; the bilateral relationship has traveled a negative trajectory from 2017-2023. Tensions relaxed modestly following the Woodside Summit between President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping in November 2023. At that summit, both leaders reaffirmed the need for the United States and China to manage competition without resorting to conflict. Biden afforded Xi public dignity and respect and reaffirmed the United States’ longstanding policy on Taiwan, and in return, Xi showed responsiveness to America’s top concerns, including by agreeing to staunch the flow of fentanyl precursors from China, restore military-to-military communications, and launch a bilateral dialogue on governance of artificial intelligence technologies and their applications. These steps were laudable, even if they were largely tactical.

As important as these efforts were by both leaders to set a floor under the relationship, they did not alter the trajectory of relations. There are deeper undercurrents influencing bilateral relations that merit further examination, namely the domestic conditions inside both countries. These undercurrents presently are pushing both countries toward intensifying rivalry.

Explanations for the downturn in relations

Both Washington and Beijing have their own explanations for why the relationship has fallen into its current trough. As Jeff Bader, Patricia Kim, and I argued in 2022, Washington believes that Beijing has grown impatient and aggressive over the past decade of Xi’s rule. By trampling the rights of its citizens at home, militarizing efforts to assert control over contested territorial claims along its periphery, actively seeking to make the world compatible with its authoritarian vision of governance, and announcing its intentions to dominate next-generation technologies, many in Washington’s policy community believe Beijing has violated universal values and exposed its revisionist ambitions.

Other American experts go further, arguing that China’s goals for global leadership are incompatible with America’s longstanding role in the world. Still others assert that America and China are destined for conflict, either because of differences over Taiwan or as a function of shifts in relative power, the so-called Thucydides trap . Prominent American politicians, such as Representative Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), frame the contest in ideological terms, warning of the risks of America becoming “Xinjiang-lite” unless China’s global march to dominance is stopped.

China’s explanation for the downturn in relations focuses on U.S. anxiety over its relative loss of power to an ascendant China. Many Chinese analysts believe the United States is lashing out against China to seek to slow China’s rise and preserve Washington’s leadership position in the international system. According to this logic, U.S. efforts to focus attention on human rights concerns, highlight China’s domestic challenges, withhold critical technology, and isolate and contain China are driven by the strategic motive of weakening China and delegitimizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

None of the popular narratives in either country capture the root causes for the intensifying competition. At their core, both countries believe their governance and economic models are best equipped to meet the 21st century’s challenges. Both believe they are natural leaders in Asia and on the world stage. Both countries are contending with rapid societal transformations, which are being exacerbated by the impacts of the fourth industrial revolution. And both countries are determined to limit vulnerabilities to the other while seeking to gain an edge in emerging technologies. This is all occurring while the United States and China remain unsatisfyingly locked into a relationship that is at once both competitive and interdependent. In other words, the United States and China are competing to demonstrate which governance, economic, and social system can deliver the best results in the 21st century.

This notion of competing governance and social systems goes a long way toward explaining the rivalrous nature of relations, but it does not explain why bilateral tensions have intensified and accelerated in recent years. To better understand this trend, one must also place the current moment in a historical context.

This paper introduces a new variable for understanding the rivalry’s rising intensity. It argues that the United States and China presently find themselves in a simultaneous cycle of insecurity and dissatisfaction with their national conditions. Like when U.S. and PRC national down cycles have coincided in the past, this simultaneity is serving as a propellant in both countries for framing the national contest for power and influence in dramatic and, to some, existential terms.

Reviewing past political cycles

For China under the CCP, anxiety about external threats—real or imagined—is a continuous feature of its governance system. Successive Chinese leaders since Mao Zedong have used external threats as rationales to rally greater unity and cohesion at home.

Mao was a master at using outside challenges to unite support behind him. In an interview in 1939, a decade before the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao declared , “We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports.” He framed issues in zero-sum terms, fostering a political climate rife with suspicion, intrigue, and antagonism. Mao encouraged a mindset that CCP leaders must display loyalty to him and hang together lest they all hang apart.

After the founding of the PRC in 1949, Mao launched a series of campaigns to consolidate his personal control and neutralize enemies of his vision for the future of China. These included the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries from 1950-1953, the Great Leap Forward from 1958-1962, and the Cultural Revolution from 1966-1976. These campaigns were historic in their scale and brutality.

nixon visits china us history definition

The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s final act. It generated societal upheaval, widespread purges, and ideological battles. Following Mao’s death in 1976, China entered a brief power struggle, culminating in Deng Xiaoping’s ascent.

Deng used Mao’s tactic of purges in his initial period as he consolidated power, but then shifted toward a more pragmatic governance path. Deng declared in 1978, “Independence does not mean shutting the door on the world, nor does self-reliance mean blind opposition to everything foreign.” In these and other gestures, Deng sought to move China away from devastating campaigns and instead introduce domestic reforms to distribute power, create orderly leadership transitions, carve out a larger role for the private sector, and allay external anxieties about China’s rise.

Deng’s tenure as leader did include cataclysms, none sharper than the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989. In keeping with the CCP’s pattern of blaming outside forces for internal challenges, Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong framed the Tiananmen protests as part of a global capitalist scheme to undermine socialism in his report to the National People’s Congress. Chen alleged that Western powers and Chinese intellectuals had colluded with certain CCP members to incite “political turmoil.” (Chinese leaders recycled similar allegations several decades later to respond to widespread public protests in Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019-2020.) Paranoia infused the public explanation Deng and his leadership cohort used to justify the bloody crackdown on June 4 and their subsequent consolidation of political power.

During the period between Mao’s death in 1976 and Xi Jinping’s ascent to power in 2012, there were other crackdowns. Chinese citizens’ rights were systematically curtailed and public dissent of CCP decisions was dealt with harshly. There was widespread ethnic and religious persecution, particularly in Tibet and Xinjiang. By and large, though, China experienced unprecedented progress during this period. More Chinese people were lifted out of poverty in these decades than any country had achieved in any previous period in human history. China’s economy boomed. Optimism prevailed among a wide cross section of Chinese society.

Xi was elevated to leader in 2012. In one of his early actions as leader, Xi launched an aggressive anti-corruption campaign to target “tigers and flies,” in other words, officials at all levels engaging in illicit activities. In the decade since, Xi has used the anti-corruption campaign as a vehicle for consolidating power and enforcing loyalty. The campaign has netted over 2.3 million officials , including serving and retired leaders at the pinnacle of the CCP’s power structure.

In 2013, the CCP published an internal document titled “Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere.” This declaration, often referred to as Document Number Nine, warned against the dangers of adopting Western values and systems. It singled out concepts such as constitutional democracy, civil society, and freedom of the press as elements of a strategy by the United States and other Western actors to undermine the CCP’s leadership. In doing so, Xi and his team returned to the well-worn playbook of invoking fears of external threats to demand internal unity.

Even as Chinese leaders were launching a campaign to impose vigilance against alleged American and Western attempts to topple the CCP, the U.S.-China relationship remained relatively stable during 2012-2016. There were strains over the South China Sea, cyber-espionage, Taiwan, and other issues during this period, but there also was a sense of common purpose around climate issues, public health, and nonproliferation. The U.S.-China relationship did not reach an inflection point until 2017, or perhaps 2018.

This inflection point in the relationship resembled but did not match the comprehensiveness of the break in U.S.-China relations in the early 1950s, following the founding of the People’s Republic of China. And yet the shift in 2017 or 2018 was sharper than during other periods of Chinese turmoil, such as during the Tiananmen massacre and its aftermath. This begs the question, why have U.S.-China relations suffered sharp downturns during specific periods, but not during other moments of internal turmoil in one or both countries?

Why some political cycles generate bilateral turmoil

For some, the answer is tied up in the personalities of the American leaders involved in managing U.S.-China relations during these sensitive moments. In this telling , President George H.W. Bush and his deputies were overly solicitous of stable relations with the Chinese, and this orientation caused them to “let China’s leaders off the hook” for massacring protesting students near Tiananmen Square. Similarly, Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama were naïve in hoping that China’s deepening integration into the global economy would create pressure for political change inside China.

While American leaders’ views—and their connections with their Chinese counterparts—certainly factor into how the relationship is managed, they alone do not provide explanatory value for why the relationship weathered certain shocks but not others. Rather, by analyzing upturns and downturns in U.S.-China relations over the past 80 years, the U.S.-China relationship appears most prone to sharp volatility when both countries simultaneously are experiencing cycles of insecurity and pessimism about their futures. When only one of the two parties enters a cycle of national instability, the relationship generally can weather turbulence without experiencing sharp deterioration in relations. The moments of non-linearity in the trajectory of relations occur when both countries simultaneously enter domestic political down cycles.

The two periods in the last 80 years when the United States and China simultaneously were in such down cycles were the early 1950s and the period since 2016. In the early 1950s, Mao was launching consecutive campaigns to keep his adversaries off-balance while he sought to consolidate power. Inside the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy was advancing a paralyzing campaign to root out communist sympathizers in government and society. McCarthy warned that communists had infiltrated the government to launch “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” McCarthy vowed to tear apart government and society until every communist was rooted out.

McCarthy symbolized a sense of malaise that had pervaded the United States in the wake of World War II. Even though the United States had triumphed in the war, it struggled to gain confidence that it would win the peace. The Soviets appeared on the march in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and Americans were fearful of their inability to halt Moscow’s advances.

Thus, both the United States and China found themselves simultaneously in a period of intense domestic turmoil in the early postwar years. This turmoil was exacerbated by ideological divisions between both countries as the Cold War’s battle lines began to take shape. These forces placed strong downward pressure on a relationship that had not yet taken root following the CCP’s establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The result was a period of prolonged enmity and estrangement.

Both countries would remain sealed off from each other until Henry Kissinger’s groundbreaking visit in 1971. Even though China was convulsed by the Cultural Revolution and the United States was consumed by war in Vietnam at that time, leaders in both countries saw beyond their immediate domestic challenges. President Richard Nixon, Mao, Kissinger, and Premier Zhou Enlai realized their respective geostrategic positions vis-à-vis the Soviet Union would be advanced by coming together. Balance-of-power politics compelled the leaders to seize that strategic opportunity, even amid domestic turmoil. Nixon’s and Mao’s decision to seize the strategic initiative in that moment of simultaneous U.S. and Chinese down cycles served as the exception to the pattern that this piece highlights.

One of China’s next major domestic convulsions occurred in 1989 with the Tiananmen protests and subsequent massacre. These events occurred at the twilight of the Cold War. Even though it was not yet apparent at the time that the Berlin Wall would fall several months later, there nevertheless was a sense of optimism inside the United States that America was ascendant on the world stage. Many American commentators saw Japan’s economic ascent as America’s primary challenge. By and large, America saw itself as strong and strengthening, with a relatively calm domestic environment, while China was experiencing a societal shock. However, over the next decade, China experienced rapid economic growth and modernization, leading to China’s emergence as a global economic powerhouse and, for the most part, domestic stability.

America experienced its own shock on September 11, 2001. That day’s terrorist attacks triggered anxieties inside the United States that manifested in a dramatic expansion of domestic security, an increase in anti-Muslim racism, and the launching of two grinding wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. China at that time was largely stable and confident in its national trajectory. China’s president, Jiang Zemin, was among the first world leaders to reach out to President George W. Bush to offer condolences and support, saying that “the attacks have not only brought about a disaster to the American people, but also a challenge to the sincere desire for peace of the world people.”

America suffered another shock in 2008-09 with the global financial crisis. The crisis, which emanated from America’s financial and housing sectors, shook the American economy and depleted millions of Americans’ lifetime savings. American leaders reached out to their Chinese counterparts to propose that both countries coordinate to control the financial contagion. Chinese leaders saw such an approach as serving their own interests. They acted on America’s invitation to co-lead the global economic recovery. Beijing’s response highlighted China’s growing economic strength and confidence in its national capacity to lead on the world stage.

Xi’s ascent to power in 2012 and his subsequent launch of a national anti-corruption campaign coincided with Obama’s second term in office. Obama’s political image was forged by optimism about the future. He presented himself as a leader who would pull the United States out of the global financial crisis and propel the country forward, focusing on creating a more just and equitable union at home and bolstering American leadership abroad. He saw China as a formidable competitor that would play a growing role on the world stage in the 21st century. He did not view China as an existential threat to America and its way of life.

Donald Trump ushered in a major shift. He warned Americans that China was “raping” the United States by stealing jobs, and framed the competition between the United States and China as “the Chinese Communist Party … versus freedom-loving people everywhere.” At the same time, Trump also occasionally lavished praise upon Xi as a “strong leader” who could unite 1.4 billion people behind his vision for the future of China.

Although Trump’s rhetoric and posture on China vacillated considerably, the important point is that his term in office marked a return for America to one of its recurring cycles of self-doubt and outrage over injustices, real and perceived. Trump helped frame domestic disputes not as negotiable interests that could be reconciled through America’s political process, but rather as social conflicts that involve deeper values, fears, and hatreds. His tirades against China were an element of these efforts. Trump tapped into a sense of anger many Americans felt—about lost jobs, fading prospects for advancement, and failure to deliver a brighter future for the next generation. He urged his followers to use him as their vehicle for reclaiming power and control in America.

Biden has adopted a starkly different approach toward governance than his predecessor. He has returned America to its constitutional tenets and its normal political rhythms. Even so, political polarization in America remains sharp. For many in the country, political differences are not subject to resolution through compromise but instead are seen as a moral contest between light and darkness. And despite steady economic growth, about three-quarters of Americans at the end of 2023 believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. A majority of Americans believe their country is in decline. There is diminishing consensus inside America on what role it should play in the world, or whether America should pursue leadership on the world stage at all. Arguments in favor of greater nationalism and protectionism appear to be gaining purchase in national debates.

That the U.S.-China rivalry has continued to intensify throughout the Trump and Biden administrations supports the argument that factors beyond the personalities and preferences of individual leaders inform the trajectory of U.S.-China relations. Trump and Biden are different in many respects. One throughline of both of their presidencies, though, has been a sense of pessimism and loss of control among large portions of the American electorate about their country’s future.

As Richard Hofstadter demonstrated in his seminal essay , “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” America is prone to cyclical bouts of pessimism and fear that its way of life will be destroyed by outside forces. Previous periods of American anxiety about foreign interference have included widespread fears of the Illuminati in the late 1790s, the Freemasons in the 1820s, Catholics and European monarchs in the 1830s-1860s, and communists in the 1950s. Americans also have shown a stubborn pattern of anxiety about national decline. Previous bouts have included those occurring during Soviet expansionism in the early period of the Cold War; after Sputnik in 1957, the OPEC oil embargo in 1973, and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam in 1975; and in response to Japan’s economic surge in the 1980s.

While the scapegoats of this current bout of national anxiety are varied and include globalists, immigrants, and allies, China serves as an organizing feature of discourse. China and its leaders act as a foil that certain American leaders use to warn against the erosion of national character and the depletion of national competitiveness.

Meanwhile, China is navigating its own simultaneous period of malaise . Youth unemployment is north of 20 percent. Record numbers of Chinese citizens are leaving the country in search of freedom and opportunity abroad. China’s demographic profile is worsening. China’s housing market is in the doldrums and its stock market has lost over $6 trillion in market capitalization since its peak in 2021. Some of China’s most visible leaders, such as its defense and foreign minister, are disappearing without notice or explanation. While there are pockets of technological advancement in areas such as electric vehicles, renewable energy technologies, and batteries, China’s overall economy is slowing and showing signs of diminishing dynamism.

To be fair, China’s current problems appear most pronounced when compared to its own past performance. The country is decelerating from annual economic growth of 7.7 percent in the decade prior to COVID-19 to forecasted growth of 3-4 percent for the remainder of this decade. On a relative basis, much of the world continues to envy China’s current growth rates. China also could make policy adjustments to boost growth. Even so, given Xi’s concentration of power, his abolishment of term limits, Beijing’s emphasis on state security, and its focus on building a state-directed economic growth model, there appears to be declining optimism in China that any policy course correction is on the horizon.

In other words, the United States and China are both dealing with significant, albeit different, domestic challenges at this current moment. America is undergoing a national self-examination of its internal character and its role in the world, while China is facing rising repression and slowing economic growth. Even so, the broader point is that when national pessimism coincides in both China and the United States, the confluence can serve as an accelerant of U.S.-China confrontation and an intensifier of rivalry. This current moment offers fresh evidence for such an observation.

Implications

This examination of how simultaneous bouts of insecurity and pessimism in the United States and China are impacting their bilateral relationship is intended more as a thought experiment than an empirical study. However, if this thought experiment holds explanatory power, it would lead to several implications for evaluating U.S.-China relations.

First, this thesis would lend credence to a mental framework that successive generations of American policymakers have passed down from the 1970s to the present: the relationship functions best when Washington and Beijing both feel secure and optimistic about the future, and the relationship is most turbulent when both countries feel insecure and pessimistic. This study would fill in several gaps between those two poles. For example, this survey reveals that both countries are capable of muddling through when only one of the two parties is navigating turbulence, such as was the case around the Tiananmen massacre, September 11, the global financial crisis, and the period from 2012-2016. Also, the two countries can overcome the effects of simultaneous down cycles when they both have leaders who are determined to focus on the strategic horizon instead of the immediate moment, such as was shown between Nixon and Mao in 1972.

Second, this thesis would support viewing the bilateral relationship as dynamic and responsive to developments in both countries, and not hostage to immutable historic forces or a function of their leaders’ personalities and preferences. In other words, the United States and China are not predestined to conflict based on past patterns between rising and established powers. The nature of bilateral relations also is not simply an extension of two leaders’ preferences and personalities. There are other factors involved, specifically both countries’ internal dynamics and their levels of confidence in their national directions.

Third, these findings would suggest that during periods of simultaneous tumult in both countries, which appears to be the case now, the focus for both should be on getting their own houses in order. At this current moment, there is no market for bold creativity about reimagining the bilateral relationship. Rather, the demand signal from both capitals is for sober thinking about guarding against downside risks and seizing limited opportunities for mutually self-interested coordination on common challenges, such as climate change, public health, and risk reduction in the employment of new and emerging technologies in national security.

Even as the current moment is not conducive to exuberant optimism, neither should it be susceptible to excessive fatalism. This survey of the relationship’s recent history highlights how the relationship rarely travels on a straight line for long. A cursory review of the past 75 years of U.S.-China relations reveals various zigs and zags, from the early years of enmity and estrangement following the PRC’s founding to the cautious opening between Nixon and Mao in 1972, to the guarded optimism surrounding the opening of diplomatic relations and then America’s deep disappointment following the Tiananmen massacre, to the shared project of integrating China into the global economy, followed by joint work to combat climate change, and finally to the current period of sharp and intensifying rivalry.

If past is prologue, there will be periods in the relationship when patience is needed while one or both countries work their way out of domestic down cycles. And then there are periods when both countries simultaneously feel secure and optimistic about their futures. These are the periods when there is openness to bold ideas for advancing bilateral relations, even amid irreconcilable differences over fundamental issues such as Taiwan, human rights, and the distribution of power in the international system. If this is the case, then the project for the moment is to manage through the current down cycle in relations while preparing for a future moment when there is more space for new thinking about the relationship.

These findings will feel unsatisfactory to many observers of the U.S.-China relationship in both countries. For example, Chinese nationalists will balk at the suggestion that factors beyond U.S. hostility to China’s rise are informing the current downturn in relations. Biden’s supporters will chafe at any assertion that Americans currently lack optimism in their country’s future. Human rights advocates and democracy promoters will argue that this framing insufficiently weighs ideological differences and the impacts of China’s rising repression at home and its efforts to export elements of its security practices abroad. National security experts will critique this model for underemphasizing the degree to which China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and along the Sino-Indian border have intensified the U.S.-China rivalry. Others will argue that external factors should be accorded greater consideration in any assessment of the U.S.-China relationship. In other words, the U.S.-China relationship does not operate in a vacuum and cannot be understood only by looking at factors within both countries.

I am sympathetic to many of these critiques. The purpose of this paper is not to elide these factors or minimize the fact that China has contributed disproportionately to the downturn in relations. Rather, it is to highlight the impact of domestic political cycles in the United States and China on the management of the bilateral relationship.

Several facts about the relationship are inescapable. The U.S.-China relationship is the most complex bilateral relationship in the world. It will have the greatest impact on the largest number of people in the world. U.S.-China competition is a structural feature of the international system. It is a relationship that defies single-factor explanations, including in this study.

Nevertheless, by focusing on the role of U.S. and Chinese domestic cycles on the relationship between both countries, this piece aims to illuminate a variable in the relationship that has been relatively under-explored amid recent enthusiasm around great power competition, ideological struggle for supremacy, and forecasting future conflict. There are exceptions, such as Evan Medeiros’s recent examination of the role of domestic politics on the relationship. This piece seeks to add to that inventory, helping to broaden understanding of how political cycles in both countries will influence the trajectory of relations between the world’s two largest powers in the 21st century.

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IMAGES

  1. The Week that Changed the World: Nixon Visits China

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  2. Nixon announces visit to communist China

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  3. Nixon's China Visit, 1972

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  4. How Nixon's 1972 Visit to China Changed the Balance of Cold War Power

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  5. This Day in History

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  6. China-US relations: historic Mao-Nixon encounter resonates 45 years

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VIDEO

  1. History Brief: Nixon Goes to China

  2. Lessons Learned: Richard Nixon Goes to China

  3. Nixon Departs For China

  4. Nixon in China: The Week that Changed the World

  5. Nixon Answers: Why Did He Go To China?

  6. The Inside Story of Richard Nixon's 1972 Journey to China

COMMENTS

  1. How Nixon's 1972 Visit to China Changed the Balance of Cold ...

    The historic 1972 visit by President Richard Nixon to the People's Republic of China marked a strategic diplomatic effort to warm relations between the two Cold War nations.

  2. 1972 visit by Richard Nixon to China

    The 1972 visit by United States President Richard Nixon to the People's Republic of China was an important strategic and diplomatic overture that marked the culmination of the Nixon administration's establishment of relations between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China after years of American diplomatic policy that favored the ROC in Taiwan.

  3. President Nixon arrives in China for talks

    Richard M. Nixon. Still mired in the unpopular and frustrating Vietnam War in 1971, Nixon surprised the American people by announcing a planned trip to the PRC in 1972. The United States had never ...

  4. 50 Years Later: Richard Nixon's Historic Visit to China

    President Richard Nixon made one of the most significant foreign visits in the history of the United States 50 years ago when he traveled to the People's Republic of China Feb. 21-28, 1972—ending two-plus decades of no communication or diplomatic ties between the two nations.

  5. Nixon's 1972 Visit to China at 50

    Cold War International History Project. President Richard Nixon and his US entourage, along with Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing, at a performance of "The Red Detachment of Women" in February 1972. On the morning of February 21, 1972, US President Richard Nixon landed in the People's Republic of China. The visit was a visual spectacle for the US ...

  6. Fifty years after Nixon's historic visit to China, questions ...

    When US President Richard Nixon walked down the red-carpeted stairs from Air Force One to shake hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai on a cold day in Beijing on February 21, 1972, it was hailed ...

  7. Richard Nixon's visit to China: His Mao Zedong meeting in 1972 stunned

    February 20, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EST. Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong, left, and President Richard Nixon shake hands on Feb. 21, 1972, during their momentous meeting in Beijing. (AP) (AP ...

  8. The Week that Changed the World: Nixon Visits China

    By Shannon White. February 2022 — This month marks the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon's weeklong visit to China, a trip that resulted in the establishment of a formal diplomatic relationship between the governments of the United States and the People's Republic of China. The UC Berkeley Oral History Center's collection ...

  9. China and the United States: Nixon's Legacy after 40 Years

    Forty years after President Nixon visited the People's Republic of China, Jeffrey Bader discusses how the visit renewed the relationship between the United States and China, and argues current ...

  10. How Nixon's visit to China 50 years ago changed the world forever

    By and Published March 1, 2022. In 1972 Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit the People's Republic of China. Nixon called the visit: "The week that changed the world". Since then, phrases like, "Nixon going to China," have become shorthand for describing surprising and uncharacteristic actions by political leaders.

  11. Nixon's China Visit, 1972

    Thursday, February 24. The President and Mrs. Nixon, accompanied by Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien, drove 35 miles north of Peking to visit the Ba Da Ling portion of the Great Wall of China, and then ...

  12. 50th Anniversary of Richard and Pat Nixon's Historic Visit to China

    Pat Nixon in her signature red coat on the Ming Tombs Sacred Way. (WHPO-8556-25A) Pat Nixon touring the Summer Palace in Peking (Beijing). (WHPO-8513-27) Visiting the Great Wall of China. (WHPO-8547-32) Tea length, red wool coat worn by Pat Nixon during her visit to China in February 1972. Richard Nixon Estate, 2003.19.274.1-.3

  13. Nixon's Trip to China

    President Nixon's trip to China in 1972 ended twenty-five years of isolation between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) and resulted in establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1979. Listen to Nixon discuss his rationale for the trip, the arrival of the pandas at the National Zoo, and his ...

  14. Easing China-US Tensions: Lessons From Nixon's 1972 Trip

    Former President Richard Nixon's weeklong 1972 China visit provides one blueprint. Modern thinkers widely misunderstand the contemporaneous significance of Nixon's 1972 trip to China. Today ...

  15. Nixon's China visit, 50 years later

    Feb. 21 marks the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon's historic visit to the People's Republic of China. Heralded as "the week that changed the world," the trip reestablished America's relations with mainland China after 25 years of isolation, leading to the opening of that nation to the rest of the world and paving the way ...

  16. 50 years after Nixon visit, US-China ties as fraught as ever

    By KEN MORITSUGU. BEIJING (AP) — At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China's center of power for a visit that, over time, would transform U.S.-China relations and China's position in the world in ways that were unimaginable at the time. The relationship between China and the United States was ...

  17. 50 years later: Richard Nixon's Historic Visit to China

    President Richard Nixon made one of the most significant foreign visits in the history of the United States 50 years ago when he traveled to the People's Republic of China Feb. 21-28, 1972—ending two-plus decades of no communication or diplomatic ties between the two nations. GW Today sat down with two leading international experts on U.S ...

  18. 50 years after Nixon visit, US-China ties as fraught as ever

    At the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon flew into communist China's center of power for a visit that, over time, would transform U.S.-China relations and China's position ...

  19. The Opening of China » Richard Nixon Foundation

    The Week that Changed The World. On July 15, 1971, President Nixon — broadcasting live from studios in Los Angeles — sent a tremor through the Cold War world, announcing that he'd be visiting the People's Republic of China early the following year. The move proved to be a geopolitical game changer. When President Nixon took the oath-of ...

  20. 50 years after Nixon visit, U.S.-China ties as fraught as ever

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  21. Richard M. Nixon

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  22. How does national confidence inform US-China relations?

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