The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change. The way to do this is to persuade China that it must change: that it cannot satisfy its imperial ambitions, and that its own national interest requires a turning away from foreign adventuring and a turning inward toward the solution of its own domestic problems.20
From early in his first term, then, Nixon set the machinery to work in a long process to pave the way for improved relations with China. In 1969, Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers, announced the administration’s Two Chinas policy, which conceded the existence of mainland Communist China and a Nationalist China on the island of Taiwan. That year, the United States gradually lifted a twenty-year economic embargo on China, and within a few years, also ended a trade ban. And the two countries restarted ambassadorial talks in Warsaw in 1970—though the talks were short-circuited when the Chinese walked out in protest of the US bombing of Cambodia.21
The public knew little about Nixon’s overtures. The most high-profile hint of anything like rapprochement between the two countries came in April 1971, when Mao Zedong invited an American ping-pong team, competing in the World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, to visit China. The players were the first Americans to visit China since 1949, when the Communists took over. The press called the goodwill gesture “ping-pong diplomacy.”
Yet Mao’s gesture was more than window dressing. The aging Communist dictator understood that he could not afford to be at such a sword’s point with both the Soviet Union and the United States, and thus he sought out better relations with America. Diplomatic ties slowly and quietly grew between the two countries, and, in December 1970, Mao held high-level talks with US officials and indicated that he was willing to meet with Nixon. To pave the way for the meeting and eventual normalizing of relations, Nixon ended naval patrols of the Taiwan Strait, eased travel restrictions, and began referring to the “People’s Republic of China”—a major symbolic milestone.
In June 1971, Kissinger traveled secretly to China to make preparations for a presidential visit. After Kissinger’s return, Nixon finally went public with what he had in mind, dropping the bombshell of his presidency: He announced in a national address that he would travel to China the following year and meet with Mao, becoming the first American president to visit the People’s Republic. The announcement stunned the world and was greeted largely with celebration.
“This is a turning point in world history—I cannot remember anything in my lifetime more exciting or more encouraging,” said Great Britain’s Lord Caradon, former ambassador to the United Nations. “This is one of the great moments in the world’s history,” said Joseph Luns, secretary general of NATO.22 Many others echoed these sentiments, including the New York Times: “By his announcement last night, the President has radically improved the world atmosphere and raised the hopes of all men that the cause of peace in Vietnam and elsewhere will soon be substantially advanced.”23
Later in 1971, the United States supported the seating of a Communist China representative at the United Nations (though Washington also tried and failed to ensure that a Taiwan delegation be seated as well). Nixon had risen to fame as an anti-Communist, and these announcements shocked many—especially on the conservative right. Millions of others, however, saw the move as a bold and hopeful one to dial down world tensions. Ever since its 1949 Communist Revolution, China had been cut off from the West; now, the president of the world’s greatest power was opening the door to diplomatic recognition.
And so Nixon left Washington on February 17, 1972, heading for China after first spending three days in Guam to acclimate himself to the time difference. His plane touched down in Beijing on February 21. (It’s worth noting that just as Nixon was leaving Washington to set out on his pilgrimage, US planes were dropping the largest tonnage of bombs on Vietnam since June 1968, thus sending a message to Beijing about American firmness in Southeast Asia.)24
The president’s statesman’s instincts were sharp, and he understood that the symbolism of his arrival—indeed, the symbolism of the entire trip—would likely prove more important than any substantive agreements. He instructed his aides to give priority to television reporters and television cameras over the print press—because he understood that the visual images from the trip would be more important than any written words. As he descended the steps of his plane to meet Chinese premier Chou En-lai, Nixon remembered how, in 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had insulted Chou by refusing to shake his hand. Now the most powerful man in the world offered his hand first, and Chou took it.
For a week, Nixon met with Chou en Lai and Mao in China, toured the Great Wall, and drank toasts with Chinese leaders. Though most Chinese did not own television sets, they followed the events via radio and the newspapers—causing the People’s Daily to sell out of copies for the first time in living memory. Back in the United States, and around the world, a global audience of hundreds of millions watched the events—perhaps more people, Nixon said, than had watched any event in the history of the world.
The most important substantive achievement from Nixon’s China trip was the trip itself and what it signified. But for all the pageantry, the two sides did formalize some agreements, which were contained in the Shanghai Communiqué. In broad terms, the agreements contained a pledge from both sides to work toward normalization of relations and not to seek “hegemony” in Asia. And, in what many saw as a warning to the Soviet Union, both sides added: “And each is opposed to efforts by any other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony.”25
On the issue of Taiwan—an irresolvable issue, as the two sides had utterly unbridgeable positions—the American team came up with artful language: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China.”26 Beijing, in turn, acknowledged that “the American people will continue to carry on commercial, cultural, and other unofficial contacts with the people of Taiwan.” In effect, Nixon’s opening of the US relations with China resulted in an agreement that China indeed existed as one country—while also allowing the United States to maintain that the territories would be overseen by two separate legitimate governments. It allowed the Americans to save face—even though, at the same time, the country was now shifting to a One China policy. Soon after the summit, the United States extended diplomatic recognition and declared that henceforth it would regard the People’s Republic, and not Taiwan, as the legitimate national voice of the Chinese. America relinquished its opposition to Chinese entry into the United Nations, and groundwork was laid for the establishment of diplomatic relations (this did not happen until 1979). Many of the agreements struck in the Shanghai Communiqué continue to govern US-Chinese relations today, especially on the Taiwan issue.27
The political impact of the trip was immediate and entirely to Nixon’s benefit. Nothing he did in office ever approached the acclaim he won for opening relations with China. Nixon had always been respected overseas as a serious political leader, but now he was viewed as a prominent figure in history, as well. At home, too, the trip helped him transform the 1972 presidential race, which once looked like it would be close, into the greatest rout in presidential history. Polls showed 84 percent approval for the China mission—even if conservatives analogized Nixon’s outreach to Nuremberg prosecutors making amends with the Nazis. And while the conservative Right expressed disgust, a Gallup poll revealed that 83 percent of Republicans still supported him for reelection. Somehow he had retained most of his conservative support while pulling off a diplomatic feat that even the most liberal president would have been hard pressed to equal.
Nixon’s overture to China must rank as one of the most audacious and far-reaching foreign policy moves by any American president. It opened the door for an American-Chinese relationship that exists today (with all the complexity that entails). “Nixon goes to China” has become a political metaphor referring to times when a politician with a staunch reputation in one area does something seemingly out of character with, and even in opposition to, his or her long-held principles—but pulls it off on the basis of credibility. (The classical composer John Adams even wrote a symphony about the events called Nixon in China.) Nixon was able to pull it off because as a Cold