He had built a reputation as a “red-baiter” during his early political career, denouncing various public figures for their communist allegiances, including towards “Red China”, as he and others liked to call it. Nixon was a particularly unlikely candidate to bring about the rapprochement. “They really pointed the finger at Zhou Enlai and said, ‘Why on Earth are you doing this?’” “The gang of four wanted no part of an opening to the capitalist world,” Mitter added. This included the “gang of four”, a hard-left political faction within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. “There were people in the top leadership who thought this was absolutely appalling,” said Mitter. Amid the violence and fervour he had stoked, there was, in some quarters, strong opposition to the idea of Mao hosting the leader of the US. In 1958 the US briefly considered launching a nuclear strike on the PRC after Mao began shelling Taiwan-controlled territories.Ĭhina was also then in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, with Chairman Mao urging young student radicals to “bombard the headquarters” and tear down all obstacles to revolutionary progress. The US refused to recognise Mao Zedong’s regime, which had been in power in Beijing since 1949, as the legitimate government of China, instead maintaining diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government on the island of Taiwan.
They fought each other during the Korean War (1950-53), and stood on opposing sides of the Cold War. The US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were nominally enemies at that time. The fundamental differences that hindered negotiations between the nations then, such as the disagreement over the status of Taiwan, remain critical fault lines in the relationship 50 years later. But the trip also marked the beginning of a complicated, often painful story that is still playing out today. It altered the course of the Cold War, and set the US and China on the path to formal diplomatic relations and decades of burgeoning trade and cultural exchange. Nixon called his visit to China the “week that changed the world”, and it did. If there was one message he hoped to deliver, he said, it was this: “We came in peace for all mankind.”
Wearing a plain grey suit and looking slightly surprised by the number of people who had arrived to see him off, he described the “historic mission” that lay ahead and invoked the words of the American astronauts who had landed on the moon three years earlier. Leaving for China on 17 February 1972, the US president Richard Nixon gave a short speech to the excited crowds that had gathered on the White House lawn.
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The two leaders discussed how to manage the competition between their countries with the aim of avoiding a “new Cold War”, but they remained bitterly opposed on the question of Beijing’s claim to Taiwan, which Xi called the “very core of China’s core interests” and a “red line that must not be crossed”. Editor’s note: This piece has been updated in light of the US president Joe Biden’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Bali, Indonesia on 14 November.
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