"It's instructive that the US and China were able to reach a modus vivendi in spite of political and ideological differences in 1972 and afterwards. It'll have no credibility, because how can two nations that have hated each other and fought each other and been isolated from each other for 22 years, suddenly put a document out like this that suggests they're friends?" 'The week that changed the world': How China prepared for Nixon The trip would begin a new period of Chinese-American relations. But Nixon saw the China opening as essential to his re-election bid the following year and he decided Kissinger should go ahead with the trip as "we've got to make the big plays now". Repercussions of the Nixon visit continue to this day; near-immediate results included a significant shift in the Cold War balance, driving an ideological wedge between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, resulting in significant Soviet concessions and its eventual fall. So, the fact that Nixon, as president, would be willing to embark in outreach to Beijing came as a surprise. But over time, Taiwan has itself become more important, as well as democratic, and China's strategic and territorial goals have become more forcefully asserted and politically articulated," Magnus said. However, it's quite clear that China is now far bigger and far more influential than in 1972, and has the will and the capacity to try and reshape the global governance system and institutions in its own interests," he said. The negotiations over the communique went for months, finishing when Nixon's week-long China visit had almost drawn to a close and ultimately boiling down to semantics, especially in relation to Taiwan. But the meeting failed to address one major issue, one that's become an even more pressing issue today. At the time of the visit, my grandparents, my father, and my aunt were all in the U.S., but two of my uncles and their families had remained in China after 1949. On July 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation in a live televised broadcast to make an unexpected announcement: he had accepted an invitation from Beijing to become the first. The trip helped bring China out of isolation and realign the global balance of power. It is arguably the most important breakthrough agreement in the history of the US-China relations. That said, it seems to me that without some measure of principled engagement (meaning an engagement in which we do not abandon our values), no global regime (be it about climate change, trade, rights or anything else) will flourish. When I accompanied then-Dean Martha Minow to Taiwan in 2013, we had a very stimulating conversation with then-President Ma Ying-jeou S.J.D. "Both would agree that Nixon's trip and US-China rapprochement was [the] result of a common threat, without which US-China relations are bound to change.". Ailing Chinese leader Mao Zedong wanted to meet. And of course, fifty years after the fact, the Nixon visit is now being evaluated in an entirely new and revisionist light, given the precarious state of US-China relations today. President Richard Nixon and his wife traveled in a landmark visit to the People's Republic of China in February 1972. Nixon, always a fan of the big play, had high hopes that his trip to China would be the kind of seismic geopolitical event that changed the course of history. Those islands featured repeatedly during the famous 1960 presidential debates when Nixon repeatedly tried to cast Kennedy as soft in his willingness to defend allies against communism. US President Richard Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai toast, February 25, 1972, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum Itinerary of President Richard Nixon's historic trip to. Sky Tower, Auckland, North Island. Good Americans, Bad Americans, and the US-China Rapprochement. Dave Roos is a freelance writer based in the United States and Mexico. Alford: The Nixon trip certainly caught Taiwan off guard, as did the normalization of U.S.-PRC relations during the Carter administration. [citation needed] The American ruling class was concerned that communists might dominate schools or labor unions.[5]. He was also tasked with an even more challenging job: to draft a joint statement for the presidential visit with then Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. For Nixon to hold out his hand was a clear signal that times had changed and that America was ready to embrace the Chinese. Shelley Rigger, a professor of political science at Davidson College, says the way Nixon warmed relations with China in secret did not go down well in Taiwan. The visit was a visual spectacle for the US President, his entourage, and much of the rest of the world, which closely watched the American leader's travels inside the world's largest communist country. Some commentators are now reflecting on the decisions made by Nixon in 1972 and whether the decision to embrace China was a sound strategic . But its fate is as unresolved as ever. From Shanghai, the Nixons traveled to Beijing.[16]. The pair and their aides worked hard and spent more than 11 hours negotiating through seven drafts of the communique. JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Shortly after landing in Beijing, as the first U.S. president to set foot in China for more than two decades, Nixon was summoned. Nixon's historic trip to China: how the landmark Shanghai Communique They also highlight that Nixon was perhaps a follower, not a trendsetter, among democratic countries in seeking a new modus vivendi with China. An iconic black-and-white photo released afterwards shows Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger sitting with Mao, a translator and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. [citation needed], Nixon held many meetings with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai during the trip, and made visits to the Great Wall, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. MARTIN: And it did. LORD: But then we realized in the coming days that Mao had rather skillfully, somewhat elliptically and certainly laconically sort of put down a few markers, which gave Zhou Enlai the authority and the structure to elaborate Chinese positions in much greater detail. We understand each other very well. The U.S. had diplomatic relations with the ruling Communist Party's arch enemy, the nationalists based in Taiwan. The two sides hadnt spoken for decades, and the United States was at war with the Communist North Vietnamese in Chinas backyard. In the aftermath of the Chinese civil war, the communists had captured mainland China and declared the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. Part of Kissinger's mission was to hammer out the finer details of United States president Richard Nixon's historic trip to China that both sides had agreed to in July, including setting the date and discussing press coverage to convince the hostile public in the US to warm towards communist China. The History and Public Policy Programmakes public the primary source record of 20th and 21st century international history from repositories around the world, facilitates scholarship based on those records, and uses these materials to provide context for classroom, public, and policy debates on global affairs. Yafeng Xia - Negotiating the Return of Civilians: Chinese Perception, Tactics and Objectives at the First Fourteen Meetings of the Sino-American Ambassadorial Talks. Almost as soon as the American president arrived in the Chinese capital, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong summoned him for a quick meeting. During Kissinger's second China mission there were closed-door talks between Kissinger and Zhou, mostly over the drafting of the communique, while relying solely on Chinese interpreters - a departure from past protocols. RIGGER: I would argue that Beijing, to this day, looks back on those events as a kind of betrayal and says, you know, there's an original sin here. 2, Taiwan. So what they want, President Nixon writes, build up their world credentials. February 27 marked the joint issuing of the Shanghai Communiqu, a statement of Chinese and American foreign policy views that has remained the basis of Sino-American bilateral relations. William P. Alford 77 is the Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of Law and director of the East Asian Legal Studies Program. No. According to Kissinger, he spent nearly 25 hours over the following week combing through the details of Nixon's upcoming trip and a host of regional issues relating to Taiwan, their shared concerns about the Soviet Union, the Vietnam war and the ongoing South Asian conflict over Bangladesh. Nixon himself had won early political fame as an anti-communist hawk with his pursuit of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of spying for the Soviet Union. Wu: There are areas of profound disagreement, but also narrower areas where the two sides may choose to cooperate. [24], Nixon and his aides carefully planned the trip to have the biggest possible impact on television audiences in the United States. It's no wonder leaders in both Beijing and Taipei have a hard time trusting the US," she said. A blog of the History and Public Policy Program. "[6], Due to secrecy surrounding diplomatic negotiations during the visit and various media restrictions, American press in China often followed Pat Nixon's sightseeing. JOE LOPEZ: This is an interesting one here, this section - what they want, what we want, what we both want. They also shook hands with each other, the photograph of which is probably the most famous image to come out of the trip. Nixon and Kissinger cooked up this idea of pitting the Soviet Union and China against each other with the United States as a third corner of the triangle to create a stable balance of power, says Evan Thomas, journalist and author of Being Nixon: A Man Divided. RUWITCH: Winston Lord was 34 at the time and an aide to Kissinger. But the second visit in October 1971 was very different to the first because it coincided with the United Nations General Assembly's annual debate and vote over membership for the People's Republic of China. Wu: Taiwan saw the Nixon and Carter administrations actions as betrayals. The Digital Archive also features materials on the diverse responses to Nixons visit from members of both the capitalist, communist, and non-aligned camps. From February 21 to 28, 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. A pivotal moment in twentieth century diplomatic history, historians and other observers nevertheless continue to debate the visit, its legacies, and some of the myths that have come to surround it. RUWITCH: Where they wanted to cooperate most was in counterbalancing the Soviet Union, which both saw as a threat. But he soon became preoccupied with seeking detente with the largely isolated communist regime and was more than eager to win personal credit for it. inflation. This landmark sits on over 7-acres of land and took a total of 400 years to construct. The visit helped to break several decades of US-PRC hostility and launched a new cooperative course in the relationship that generally persisted until the end of the Cold War, if not longer. This fostered sustained economic growth. Tiger Leaping Gorge. [8] Two decades before becoming president Herbert Hoover lived in China as a mining manager from 1899 to 1901,[9] being also somewhat proficient in Mandarin. Rigger also said that of the three China-US communiques, the Shanghai Communique was the most important.
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