"It underscored the vision and the extraordinary ability of our leaders back then to take a long view and make sound strategic decisions that may affect future generations.". Every moment of the weeklong visit was carefully orchestrated and staged, with TV cameras broadcasting it all to rapt audiences worldwide. Today . Accuracy and availability may vary. Although Nixon met with Chairman Mao Zedong only once during the visit, the two had a meaningful dialogue on philosophic problems in the US-China relationship. There certainly is antipathy there, but in trying to understand its policy decisions, we shouldnt be ignoring either domestic considerations there or Chinas need to address certain challenges that all nations face. During the ensuing two decades, various factions in the party would fight over whether economic and political reform was necessary. Although Mao was ill, the two chatted for an hour while cameras captured the world leaders smiling and joking with one another. I also think that in todays world of fragmented social media, its also much harder to pull off than it was in the early 1970s. Feb. 21, 2022 3 AM PT. Before the US president left China, the Nixon and Zhou teams hammered out an agreement between the United States and China known as the Shanghai Communique a document that outlined both individual and common interests, articulated a One-China policy that would redefine cross-strait and US-Taiwan relations, and called upon both countries to work together toward diplomatic normalization. Mao also joked that "I voted for you during your last election. But as the tumultuous 1960s came to a close, the Nixon administration was facing several major challenges: a disastrous war in Vietnam, social strife at home, and stalled nuclear arms negotiations with the Soviets. [1] The seven-day official visit to three Chinese cities was the first time a U.S. president had visited the PRC; Nixon's arrival in Beijing ended 25 years of no communication or diplomatic ties between the two countries and was the key step in normalizing relations between the U.S. and the PRC. But the visit helped to achieve Nixons larger political goal of realigning the balance of power on the global stage. Only after the Nixon visit did my father dare to reach out to his brothers, leading to the family being reunited many years later. HLT: What have been the implications of that trip for Taiwan? We understand each other very well. According to Shelley Rigger, a Taiwan expert and a political scientist at Davidson College in North Carolina, the need to balance the power of the rising Soviet Union brought Beijing and Washington together. After 4 hours in the air, the Nixons arrived in Shanghai. RUWITCH: Wu Xinbo of Fudan University says that hasn't happened. Zhou Yi - Less Revolution, More Realpolitik: Chinas Foreign Policy in the Early and Middle 1970s. The two sides hadnt spoken for decades, and the United States was at war with the Communist North Vietnamese in Chinas backyard. As Kissinger himself explained during his second China trip: "The trouble is that we disagree, not that we don't understand each other. Throughout the 1950s and much of the 1960s, the U.S. and PRC maintained a frosty relationship. Modern thinkers widely misunderstand the contemporaneous significance of Nixon's 1972 trip to China. Today, the Potala Palace is a museum. Known as the "city of sails" thanks to its fabulous harbor and yachting community, Auckland is one of New Zealand's most beautiful cities, as well as the largest, with an incredible skyline and some fabulous beaches. Location: Luoyang, Henan. Former President Richard Nixon's weeklong 1972 China visit provides one blueprint. Kissinger's second trip to China was different from the first exploratory visit which took many US allies and officials at Nixon's White House by surprise with its strict secrecy. RUWITCH: Indeed, just months earlier, the Nixon administration had tried to keep Taiwan in the United Nations under a two-Chinas formula. They also shook hands with each other, the photograph of which is probably the most famous image to come out of the trip. However, the goal was itself flawed in that it left the issue of Taiwan unresolved, not least because it was not a burning issue to be resolved at the time for either side. "[19][20], As an observer of the MaoNixon meeting, Lord noted Mao's peasant-like sensibilities and self-deprecating humor. This meeting was arranged and facilitated by Pakistan through its strong diplomatic channels with China. The Digital Archive also contains the record of a talk between Zhou Enlai and the U.S. table tennis team, an important stepping stone to the Nixon visit. While it was Nixon, an ardent anti-communist, who made the about-face decision to open up relations with China in 1969, Kissinger was initially sceptical and called Nixon's idea a "flight of fantasy". Just a few days before Kissinger left for Beijing, America's ambassador to the UN George H.W. No. The U.S. had diplomatic relations with the ruling Communist Party's arch enemy, the nationalists based in Taiwan. Copyright 2022 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. It's not clear to me that PRC leaders would have accepted the Shanghai Communique if they had known the US would continue to sell arms to Taiwan," Rigger said. At the time, Lord says, Beijing appeared to be happy with the arrangement. But its fate is as unresolved as ever. SHELLEY RIGGER: The Taiwanese absolutely saw this process as a betrayal. JAMES SHEN: Well, Mr. President, I'm going back to Taiwan. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Nixon's porcelain swans statue, a gift to Mao, was presented along the way in the gift-giving ceremony.[21]. What are its consequences? The visit and subsequent normalization of relations with the West provided the ideological cover necessary for the economic reforms of the 1980s that launched China from a pariah state to the economic juggernaut that it is today. [26], Nixon's visit to China was well-planned. Rigger said Kissinger might have led Zhou Enlai to believe the US would not stand in the way of China having what it wanted with respect to Taiwan. It adds textures and nuance to our understanding of China's mindset and strategies in diplomatic negotiations, and should aid American diplomats dealing with China in the 21st Century. The Great Hall of the People and 100 Yuan Note. On February 22, 1972, the Peoples Daily printed a picture of Chairman Mao shaking hands with Richard Nixon. "[18] Nixon, charmed, said "you voted for the lesser of two evils," and Mao replied, "I like rightists, I am comparatively happy when these people on the right come into power. They arrived the next day in Guam at 5 pm, where they spent the night at Nimitz Hill, the residence of the Commander, Naval Forces, Marianas. Nixon's trip to China, therefore, was a move calculated to drive an. [25], John T. Downey and Richard Fecteau, CIA operatives who were held captive in China from November 1952, were released after Nixon's visit to China. Mark Wu: On July 15, 1971, President Nixon shocked the world by announcing that he was planning to visit the PRC the next year. Early in his first term, Nixon, through his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, sent subtle overtures hinting at warmer relations to the government of the PRC. Fifty years after Nixons history-making journey, Harvard Law Today turned to two China experts to understand its significance, both then and now. Former Embassy of Taiwan, Washington, D.C. Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Houston, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, Former Ambassador of the United States to China, American Institute in Taiwan Kaohsiung Branch Office, Former Embassy of the United States in Taipei, July 2002 state visit to the United States, Taiwan Relations Act Affirmation and Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2014, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1972_visit_by_Richard_Nixon_to_China&oldid=1144251046, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using multiple image with auto scaled images, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2022, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 12 March 2023, at 17:52. I have benefited from having superb students and excellent colleagues from China, as well as Taiwan. Zhou was quoted by Lord as saying. While the visit was a public relations boon for both nations, Nixon and Kissinger failed to secure Chinas help in ending the war in Vietnam, and no real progress was made on the status of Taiwan. The pair and their aides worked hard and spent more than 11 hours negotiating through seven drafts of the communique. This fostered sustained economic growth. Both men were aware of the historic significance of what they were doing, says Thomas, and they were both showmen in their own way.. The Chinese, it turned out, had their own strategic reasons to re-open dialogue with the United States. While Zhou Enlai described the Taiwan issue as "the crucial question", Nixon also viewed it as a touchstone for both sides. By the late 1960s, frequent border skirmishes between the Soviets and the Chinese verged on all-out war. 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. Taipei eventually left the U.N. And Beijing was voted in in the fall of 1971. LORD: Mao kept deflecting Nixon's efforts to engage in substantive exchanges. These China landmarks are recognized as some of the country's top attractions and can be seen on the six Chinese banknotes from 1 to 100. The trip provided the opportunity, which it seized, to alter its own troubled relationship with the Soviet Union, to reduce tensions with the U.S. which had regarded the PRC as an implacable enemy and, for some leaders, to foster a potential source of help as China sought to compensate for years lost to that turmoil. But the meeting failed to address one major issue, one that's become an even more pressing issue today. This undue focus on ourselves shows up again in the 1980s and 1990s, when far too many Americans including policymakers and academics assumed that the PRC wanted nothing more than to emulate us and converge toward an idealized version of our economy, law and society. The US-China rapprochement, symbolized by Nixons visit, substantially altered the international balance of power and arguably concluded the Cold War in East Asia. 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?" They'd probably like the U.S. out of Asia. One famous landmark in China that you absolutely need to experience is the Dujiangyan Panda Base (also known as the Chengdu Research Base Of Giant Panda Breeding). Nixon did not shift the Wests policy toward Communist China; it was already happening. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. [33] Deng met with then-sitting President Jimmy Carter and ex-President Nixon at a state dinner in the White House.[34][35]. Wu: Gish Jen, a visiting professor in the English department, just released a new book, Thank You Mr. Nixon. Its a wonderful read. In a meeting with Taiwan's military leaders on February 26, a day before the issuance of the landmark China-US joint communique in Shanghai, Chiang told the generals that Taiwan must have a new . 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. 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. RUWITCH: He asks if Nixon had a message for Taiwan's president, Chiang Kai-shek. Wu: Taiwan saw the Nixon and Carter administrations actions as betrayals. 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. Key materials from February 1972 include the verbatim records and agreements of US-China bilateral exchanges, including: Memorandum of Conversation between Chairman Mao Zedong and President Richard Nixon, February 21, 1972, Memorandum of Conversation between Richard Nixon and Zhou Enlai, February 22, 1972, Joint Communiqu of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China (Shanghai Communiqu), February 27, 1972, Although declassified Chinese language records from the February 1972 are generally lacking (the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives never released any materials dated later than 1966), the Digital Archive does feature a number of sources from before and after the visit. Resolving the Vietnam War was a particularly important factor. Astill rather tedious negotiating and acculturation process was necessary before the formal exchange of diplomatic relations could be achieved in 1979, and before business, military, cultural, and people-to-people ties could flourish over the next few decades. [13] For this ambitious goal to be reached President Nixon had carried out a series of carefully calibrated moves through Communist China's allies Romania and Pakistan. Sky Tower in Auckland, North Island. The reason for opening up China was for the U.S. to gain more leverage over relations with the Soviet Union. Alford: The U.S. and PRC were certainly not going to agree on everything and the intentional ambiguity that marked the Shanghai Communiqu proved beneficial for decades. This landmark sits on over 7-acres of land and took a total of 400 years to construct. The U.S. had literally turned a cold shoulder to Chou in 1954, says Thomas. 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. And Nixon knew that no single made-for-TV moment was more important than the first time that he met face-to-face with Chou Enlai, the same man whom the U.S. Secretary of State had publicly snubbed in 1954. Russia's war against Ukraine has largely overshadowed the 50th anniversary of Nixon's landmark trip to China in 1972, which established the basis for a normalization of relations between the two powers. The Nationalist government, supported by the Americans, fled to Taiwan, where the Republic of China (ROC) continued to be recognized by the United States and most other Western countries as the legitimate government for all of China. They stress the need to see the trip not only through a U.S.-centric lens and caution that, for all the change it spurred, its full import remains to be seen. That lack of attention has been very costly for the relationship, inflating our sense of agency and fostering undue expectations among policymakers here and in the American public more generally about our capacity to shape events in China to our liking. Before his election as president in 1968, former Vice President Richard Nixon hinted at establishing a new relationship with the PRC. And in the Shanghai Communique, the U.S. crucially acknowledged the Chinese position that Taiwan is a part of China. But there was another American at the meeting that day in Mao's cluttered study. A longtime contributor to HowStuffWorks, Dave has also been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. Mark Wu is the Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law. What Lessons Can We Learn from The Week that Changed the World?. Mine was one of those. When former American national security adviser Henry Kissinger returned to Beijing three months after his secret groundbreaking trip in July 1971, the real test had just begun for the Cold War rivals seeking rapprochement through dialogue. And tension has been rising as China-U.S. relations stumble. The statement enabled the U.S. and PRC to temporarily set aside the "crucial question obstructing the normalization of relations"[23] concerning the political status of Taiwan and to open trade and other contacts. [4] After World War II, Americans saw relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorating, the Soviets consolidating communist allies over much of Eastern Europe, and the potential victory of CCP forces in the Chinese Civil War. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. According to Winston Lord, then a national security aide who later became US ambassador to China, most of the Shanghai Communique was negotiated during their second trip to Beijing, except for aspects relating to Taiwan, which was "the most sensitive and that we had to keep haggling about [it] during Nixon's trip itself in February 1972", he later recalled. It was a breakthrough, says Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Shanghai's Fudan University. Read more, The Cold War International History Project supports the full and prompt release of historical materials by governments on all sides of the Cold War. You still don't know.'" So that's very important for China. inflation. LOPEZ: Yeah. On the morning of February 21, 1972, US President Richard Nixon landed in the Peoples Republic of China. The 1979 communique on the establishment of official ties between China and the US said the US government "acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is a part of China". "[6], Due to secrecy surrounding diplomatic negotiations during the visit and various media restrictions, American press in China often followed Pat Nixon's sightseeing. So too did photos of first ladyPat Nixon inspecting a kitchen at a Beijing hotel. Instructing the rest of his envoy to wait onboard the plane, Nixon descended the stairway first with his wife Pattywho wore a long red coat, a color of great significance to the PRCand eagerly extended his hand to greet the PRC premier. Throughout the week the President and his senior advisers engaged in substantive discussions with the PRC leadership, including a meeting with CCP chairman Mao Zedong, while First Lady Pat Nixon toured schools, factories and hospitals in the cities of Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai with the large American press corps in tow. Examining China's perceptions and tactics in negotiating with the United States during the Cold War, this Working Paper features an introduction by Yafeng Xia and translations of more than 30 original documents from the Chinese Foreign Ministry. On the morning of February 21, 1972, US President Richard Nixon landed in the People's Republic of China. We still suffer from the illusion that the U.S. can successfully lead the West in a strong unified response to China, when in fact, our allies historically have been generally more willing to placate Beijing. J. Stapleton Roy, Douglas Spelman, and Yafeng Xia revisit a critical turning point in the history of the Cold War, President Nixons visit to China in 1972, on an episode of the Wilson Center's dialogue. SCMP China Series: 50 years since Nixon visited 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 resumption of harmonious relations between the United States (U.S.) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) after years of diplomatic isolation. Landmarks can include historical, cultural, natural, and human-made constructions. When the Chinese Communist Party gained power over mainland China in 1949 and the Kuomintang retreated to the island of Taiwan after the de facto end of the Chinese Civil War, the United States continued to recognize the Republic of China (ROC) as the sole government of China, now based out of Taipei. Kissinger, who had just emerged from the glittering success of the first visit, also took Nixon's Air Force One, the "Spirit of '76". "It was unprecedented, and probably the most meaningful part in the communique. If we scratch away the theatrics, The Week that Changed the World looks less momentous than many have portrayed it. And from Beijing's perspective, the U.S. is once again playing the spoiler. "I suppose it was 'putting it off' in the sense that the US wasn't handing the island over as part of normalisation (which is not something the US could have done anyway), but [Zhou] did not think the US should continue to provide military help to Taiwan. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. National Security Council staffer (and later U.S. From the moment U.S. President Richard Nixon landed in China on February 21, 1972, he understood that global politics would undergo a transformation that would last well into the 21st century. The historic visit by President Richard Nixon to the People's Republic of China warmed relations between the two nations and substantially altered the balance of power between the U.S., China and the Soviet Union. Nixons visit was not only symbolic; it was also substantive. It was described as "a masterpiece of undercover work" by the late Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar. [27] This resulted in putting off deliberations over the establishment of a Beijing-Washington hotline, which was first proposed during the visit to China and discussed between Kissinger and Zhou in November 1973 meetings. The U.K., West Germany, Japan, and Australia quickly switched their diplomatic recognition in the months following the Nixon visit, even though the U.S. would not formally do so until 1979. Being so large, Yangtze is China's most important waterway, providing water to farmland that gives food to one-third of the population. RUWITCH: Lord says the Americans were a little disappointed at first. I cant help but see his behavior on this front as redolent of the duplicity we saw in his approach to the Vietnam War and race relations at home, and that eventually did him in. In a coded cable sent back to the White House, Kissinger shared the good news with Nixon in one word: Eureka.. As for the visit itself, I agree with Bills prescient observation that we pay too little attention to what was happening within China itself. For the 50th anniversary of the "week that changed the world"--- the summit between the United States and China from February 21-28, 1972 during which US President Richard Nixon met with Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong---this video features excerpts from China experts on the significance of what is considered one of the major diplomatic turning points in modern history. Alford: It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Mao said that he had no interest in Japan's Communist Party, and "also voted" for Kakuei Tanaka. Buildings and monuments can also be included. Mark Wu: On July 15, 1971, President Nixon shocked the world by announcing that he was planning to visit the PRC the next year. Lets not forget his central role in the Red Scare rhetoric that essentially prevented other political figures from advocating for engagement with the PRC in a more tempered manner. His attacks on Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas for being soft on communism were instrumental in his early electoral victories and, as Mark noted, he sought to deploy that same strategy against Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race. I fear no communique can paper over this existential competition.". Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger came to believe that by thawing relations with the Chinese and bringing them into the society of nations, America could gain a powerful new ally in its negotiations with both the North Vietnamese and the Soviets. In the communiqu, both nations pledged to work toward the full normalization of diplomatic policy and acknowledged longstanding differences. But from the Chinese perspective, Nixon's words were prophetic. Great Hall of the People, Tiananmen Square, Beijing. [31], Nixon's visit played a role in opening China to U.S. trade eventually putting downward pressure on U.S. It's been 50 years since President Nixon went to China, a trip that changed the world's balance of power.