When Nixon met Mao: 50 years later, reverberations are still felt

A hinge point in modern history, the US president’s trip to China outflanked the USSR and helped bring Beijing out of international isolation

A key was the Shanghai Communique, ‘a very peculiar document’ which acknowledged what the two nations did not agree on

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Robert Delaneyin WashingtonandKinling Loin Beijing

Published: 10:00pm, 13 Feb 2022Updated: 4:43pm, 17 Feb 2022

In February 1972, US president Richard Nixon defied conventional foreign policy wisdom when he arrived in Beijing for a series of meetings with Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who also took a significant risk in hosting the American president. In recognition of the historical importance of the trip, the South China Morning Post is running a multimedia series that will explore some of the most interesting points of the past 50 years in US-China relations. Our first piece, by Robert Delaney and Kinling Lo, begins with the first fumbling attempts to start a dialogue, runs through the highs and lows of the past half-century and asks whether Nixon’s objective has been buried by the bilateral acrimony of recent years.

In the modern history of international relations, few moves held more consequence for the global balance of great powers than US president Richard Nixon’s visit to China 50 years ago this month.

The trip that set Washington’s course towards formal diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China was based on a novel geopolitical calculus that defied American hawks and doves alike. For China, Mao Zedong’s handshake with Nixon in Zhongnanhai, the leadership’s compound next to the Forbidden City, ran counter to decades of his own propaganda.

Mao Zedong welcoming Richard Nixon in the Forbidden City in Beijing on February 22, 1972. Photo: AFP

“It will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other,” Nixon said in a Time magazine interview, discussing his trip just weeks ahead of it.

The comment signalled a departure from a concept that dominated American foreign policy for decades – the domino theory, which posited that the establishment of communism in any one country would lead to the same outcome in others. Acting on this theory, Washington concluded a raft of treaties including the Anzus Pact with New Zealand and Australia in 1951 and the US-Japan Security Treaty a year later.

SCMP Series

50 years since Nixon visited China

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