1972 visit by Richard Nixon to China

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China lasted exactly seven days, from the 21st to the 28th of February, yet it broke twenty-three years of frozen silence between two of the world's most powerful nations. Nixon, a man who had built his political career as a fierce anti-communist, became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot on the Chinese mainland. What drove a lifelong Cold Warrior to shake hands with Mao Zedong? What happened inside those meetings in Beijing, and what did Mao actually say when he finally sat across from the American president? And what does it mean that Nixon himself called it "the week that changed the world" - a phrase that still echoes today?

• 2. A World Divided

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  After World War II, Americans watched with alarm as the Soviet Union consolidated communist allies across Eastern Europe, while the Chinese Civil War pushed closer to a Communist Party victory. When the Chinese Communist Party gained power over mainland China in 1949, the United States refused to recognize the new government, continuing instead to treat the Republic of China in Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of China. That position held firm for more than two decades.

  At the same time, from 1956 onward, the Sino-Soviet split was quietly reshaping the strategic map. Chinese leadership, now isolated from Moscow, began looking for external allies to counterbalance Soviet power. Washington, for its part, saw an opportunity. Winston Lord, a staffer on the National Security Council who later became U.S. Ambassador to China, articulated the American logic: by dealing flexibly with both the Soviet Union and China, the United States hoped to pressure both countries to reduce their support for North Vietnam. Resolving the Vietnam War was not a side note to this diplomacy - it was one of its driving purposes.

  Herbert Hoover had lived in China as a mining manager from 1899 to 1901 and was somewhat proficient in Mandarin. Ulysses S. Grant had visited China on a world tour after leaving office. But no sitting American president had ever traveled to the mainland. That distinction was waiting for Nixon.

• 3. The Secret Groundwork

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  Documents released from White House meetings show that Nixon began working to open a channel of communication with Beijing from his very first day in the White House. The effort required years of careful, calibrated moves. Romania and Pakistan - both Communist China's allies - became crucial intermediaries. Nixon offered concrete support to Pakistan, including during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, partly to keep that diplomatic channel open.

  The decisive step came in July 1971, when National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger secretly traveled to Beijing during what was publicly presented as a trip to Pakistan. Pakistan arranged and facilitated the meeting through its strong diplomatic channels with China. Kissinger met with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and laid the specific groundwork for the presidential visit. The entire operation was kept hidden from the American public.

  Nixon had already hinted at a new relationship with China before his 1968 presidential election, and had sent subtle overtures through Kissinger to the Chinese government early in his first term. But the announcement, when it finally came, still caught almost everyone off guard. On the 15th of July, 1971, Nixon appeared on national television and told a surprised public that he would visit China the following year.

• 4. The Journey and the Meeting

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  Nixon, his wife Pat, and their entourage left the White House on the 17th of February, 1972. They spent a night at Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station in Oahu, Hawaii, then flew to Guam, arriving at 5 pm and staying at Nimitz Hill Annex. At 7 am on the 21st of February, they departed on a four-hour flight to Shanghai, then continued on to Beijing.

  Almost as soon as Nixon arrived in the Chinese capital, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong summoned him for a meeting. Unknown to the American delegation at the time, Mao had been in poor health and had been hospitalized for several weeks, leaving the hospital only nine days before Nixon's arrival. Mao insisted to his officials that he would meet with Nixon regardless.

  Kissinger and his assistant Winston Lord attended. To avoid embarrassing Secretary of State William P. Rogers, Nixon quietly asked the Chinese to crop Lord out of all official photographs of the meeting. Mao arrived with characteristic bluntness. Speaking through his translator, he greeted Nixon: "I believe our old friend Chiang Kai-shek would not approve of this." He joked that "I voted for you during your last election." Nixon, charmed, replied that Mao had "voted for the lesser of two evils." Mao said he liked rightists and was "comparatively happy when these people on the right come into power."

  Lord, watching the exchange, noted Mao's peasant-like sensibilities and self-deprecating humor. Mao spoke simply and without ornamentation, but clearly conveyed approval of the visit and its diplomatic purpose. Lord called Mao's purposeful, episodic style a "very skillful performance."

• 5. Across Beijing and Beyond

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  While Nixon and his senior advisers engaged in substantive talks with Chinese leadership, including multiple meetings with Premier Zhou Enlai, First Lady Pat Nixon took a different route through the country. She toured schools, factories, and hospitals in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, accompanied by a large American press corps. For the American public watching at home, these images represented something entirely new: the first footage of mainland China that most had seen in over two decades.

  Nixon also visited the Great Wall during the trip. Among the gifts exchanged was a porcelain swans statue that Nixon presented to Mao. The visit produced carefully managed television coverage, with Nixon and his aides having planned the trip deliberately for maximum impact on audiences back in the United States. Correspondents who traveled with the president later described their eagerness to be part of what some called the most important summit meeting ever held.

  On the morning of the 28th of February, Nixon left China on a flight to Anchorage, Alaska. The evening before his departure, on the 27th of February, the two nations had jointly issued the Shanghai Communique, in which both pledged to work toward full normalization of diplomatic relations and acknowledged their longstanding differences over Taiwan. Nixon spoke in Shanghai about building "a bridge across 16,000 miles and 22 years of hostilities."

• 6. The Ripples Outward

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  Within a year of Nixon's visit, a number of U.S. allies - Japan, Australia, and West Germany among them - broke relations with Taiwan and established diplomatic ties with China. The full normalization the Shanghai Communique promised came in 1979, when the Carter administration transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. That same year, Deng Xiaoping made a state visit to the United States from January to February - the first official visit to the U.S. by a senior leader of the People's Republic of China. Deng met with President Jimmy Carter and with Nixon himself at a state dinner at the White House.

  The Watergate scandal, which broke later in 1972, led Nixon to deprioritize further diplomatic efforts with China. One concrete casualty was a Beijing-Washington hotline that had been first proposed during the visit and discussed by Kissinger and Zhou in November 1973. That hotline was not created until 2007.

  For Vietnam, the improving China-U.S. relationship carried a bitter meaning. In the fall of 1971, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong had unsuccessfully asked Mao to cancel the planned visit. Vietnamese leadership interpreted the rapprochement as a betrayal of the China-Vietnam relationship, and real tensions followed. Meanwhile, China's Third Front campaign - an effort to develop heavy industry in the country's rugged interior, driven by fear of invasion - gradually declined as the threat calculus shifted after Nixon's visit.

  Max Frankel of The New York Times received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his coverage of the trip. John Adams composed an opera, Nixon in China, that premiered in 1987. The visit was also the subject of a PBS documentary, American Experience: Nixon's China Game.

• 7. A Phrase That Lasted

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  Writing on the 40th anniversary of the trip, Jeffrey Bader observed that the basic bargain Nixon and Mao had reached - putting common interests ahead of ideology and values - had been substantially honored by both the Democratic and Republican parties across the decades that followed. Few diplomatic agreements survive that long without revision. Fewer still generate their own political vocabulary.

  A "Nixon to China" moment has entered the political lexicon as a distinct metaphor. It describes the ability of a politician with an unassailable reputation among their own supporters to take an action those same supporters would otherwise oppose - an action that someone without that particular credibility could never have gotten away with. Only Nixon, the career anti-communist, could have opened China.

  Mao, for his part, seems to have enjoyed the memory. In his later discussions with Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, Mao recounted telling Nixon "I voted for you when you ran for President. You still don't know" - implying that his approval of the visit predated the meeting itself. The September 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique, which followed Nixon's visit, was itself a downstream consequence of the week Mao and Nixon sat down together in Beijing.