Nixon Opens China

In February 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon traveled to the People's Republic of China, becoming the first American president to visit the country. The week-long trip ended more than two decades without diplomatic relations between the two powers, and it reshaped the Cold War. It signaled that Washington was willing to deal with Beijing's communist government, and that China was ready to move out of the isolation it had lived in since 1949.

The background was a long estrangement. After the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949, the United States refused to recognize the new government, continued to back the Nationalist regime on Taiwan, and fought Chinese forces in Korea in the early 1950s. China, for its part, was aligned with the Soviet Union until the late 1950s, when the two communist giants began to quarrel over ideology and leadership. By 1969 their rivalry had produced armed clashes along the Ussuri River border. Beijing began to see Moscow as the greater threat, while Washington, bogged down in Vietnam, saw a chance to exploit the split.

The opening came in stages. Public gestures such as the so-called "ping-pong diplomacy" of 1971, when an American table tennis team visited China, softened the mood. In July 1971, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing to meet Premier Zhou Enlai and arrange the presidential visit. Later that year the United Nations seated the People's Republic and removed Taiwan's representatives. When Nixon arrived in February 1972, he met Mao Zedong, held long talks with Zhou, and toured sites including the Great Wall. The event was closely covered on American television.

The visit produced the Shanghai Communiqué, a carefully worded statement in which each side set out its own positions rather than hiding disagreements. The United States acknowledged that Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait maintained there was one China, without endorsing or contesting the claim, and the two governments committed to broader contacts. Full diplomatic relations did not come until 1979, under President Jimmy Carter.

The legacy is still debated. The opening gave Washington leverage in its dealings with Moscow and helped pave the way for détente. For China, it ended diplomatic isolation and, after Mao's death in 1976, supported the economic reforms that brought trade and investment on a huge scale. Critics have argued that the policy of engagement did not produce the political liberalization some hoped for, and the status of Taiwan remains one of the most sensitive issues in world politics. Whatever one's verdict, the trip is widely regarded as one of the most consequential diplomatic moves of the twentieth century.