![]() ![]() We are now at a point in time, 50 years later to the day, of another new situation in the world. Speaking then, President Nixon said to Chairman Mao, “What brings us together is a recognition of a new situation in the world.” President Nixon's trip to China in 1972 ended twenty-five years of isolation between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) and resulted in establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1979. In an era today when things may look bleak and foreboding perhaps it is fitting to look back to a time when the impossible became possible and the unimagined was imagined. From that humble first trade of Chinese pandas and American musk oxen (the latter usually forgotten by history) the two nations now do more than $550 billion worth of business with each other. The meeting between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will be one of the most important encounters between former enemies, with echoes of President Nixons 1972 visit to China. In the meantime American companies continue to do business with China.and vice versa. Their economies, their reaches into the developing world and the peaceful fate of the world itself rest with these two nations in a way that could never have been imagined back then. Nixons visit to China and Shanghai Communiqu was of particular significance because it marked the beginning of a thaw in ChinaUnited States relations. need each other more than they did when Nixon and Mao met. They have been compounded by Covid, to be sure, but also by a China that is now the world’s second largest economy and one that is both newly assertive and ever more guarded under current leader Xi Jinping. capitalism, Taiwan and what to do about Russia. President Richard Nixon to the Peoples Republic of China was a significant political and diplomatic opening that marked the conclusion. Today, those same political issues that were avoided back in 1972 remain: Communism vs. ![]() The passing of Mao and the transition to the more practical politics and ideology of Deng Xiaoping facilitated the process and within two decades China had become the factory floor of America. They were already doing business with factories in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan but none of those places offered the scale and scope of what the potential of China held: A country of 800 million people with a reputation of being hard working and a reality of being desperate for a way to take their nation out of the detached poverty it had found itself in, thanks to isolation from the rest of the world and self-inflicted disastrous decisions it had itself made.Ĭould China become a place where the consumer goods that Americans consumed at a voracious rate be efficiently and cheaply made? The Chinese, who were perceived as quick learners and eager to cooperate, were only all-too-eager to accept the Western interlopers. businessmen began to start booking trips to China. 5 A trend toward increasing diplomatic recognition of China, and severance of relations with Taiwan, was greatly accelerated by the Nixon trip. But it wasn’t all that long afterwards that U.S. ![]()
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