and China have still failed to work out exactly how they will both fit into a world where they both have a role, but find it increasingly hard to accommodate each other,” he said.Ĭhinese officials and scholars see the Nixon visit as a time when the two countries sought communication and mutual understanding despite their differences. Still, Nixon's trip to China was touted afterward as the signature foreign policy achievement of an administration that ended in ignominy with Watergate.Įmbarking on the process of bringing China back into the international fold was the right move, but the past half-century has yet to put relations on a stable track, said Rana Mitter, professor of Chinese history and modern politics at Oxford University. supplies Taiwan with military equipment and warns China against any attempt to take it by force. China claims the self-governing island off its east coast as its territory. The military has sent a growing number of warplanes on training missions toward Taiwan, a source of friction with the United States. That includes, however, trying to control islands also claimed by Japan in the East China Sea and by Southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea, home to crucial shipping lanes and natural resources. The Communist Party says it seeks only to defend its territory. Two years after Mao's death in 1976, new leader Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era of partial economic liberalization, creating a mix of state-led capitalism and single-party rule that has endured to this day.Ĭhina's wealth has enabled a major expansion of its military, which the U.S. Nixon’s visit was a “pivotal event that ushered in China’s turn outward and subsequent rise globally,” said the University of Chicago’s Dali Yang, the author of numerous books on Chinese politics and economics. became a huge market for China, propelling the latter's meteoric rise from an impoverished nation to the world's second largest economy. It would be decades before that happened. Chinese state media promoted the idea that a “prosperous China would be a peaceful China” and that the country was a huge market for American exports, she said. president put himself “in the position of supplicant to Beijing,” said June Teufel Dreyer, a Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami. Premier Zhou Enlai's translator wrote in a memoir that, to the best of his recollection, Nixon said, “This hand stretches out across the Pacific Ocean in friendship” as he shook hands with Zhou at the airport.įor both sides, it was a friendship born of circumstances, rather than natural allegiances. had recognized as the government of China after the communists took power in Beijing in 1949. Nixon's 1972 trip, which included meetings with Chairman Mao Zedong and a visit to the Great Wall, led to the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979 and the parallel severing of formal ties with Taiwan, which the U.S. Billboards carried slogans such as “Down with American Imperialism,” part of the upheaval under the Cultural Revolution that banished intellectuals and others to the countryside and subjected many to public humiliation and brutal and even deadly attacks in the name of class struggle. Nixon landed in Beijing on a gray winter morning 50 years ago on Monday. But the relationship has never - and will never - be easy." Now they are mainly in the security realm. “Perhaps 50 years ago the reasons were mainly economic. “The U.S.-China relationship has always been contentious but one of necessity,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a China expert at Stanford University.
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