The Shock of Nixon in China — The Great Turn of 1972

In the frozen mountains of the Korean Peninsula, American and Chinese soldiers killed one another. In the Korean War that began in 1950, both nations scattered tens of thousands of lives and came to call each other implacable enemies. To America, the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong was the very embodiment of a red nightmare. There were no diplomatic ties, no trade, not even a thread of dialogue left intact — and that such a relationship would be turned upside down twenty years later was something no one at the time could have imagined.

Yet in February 1972, the world held its breath before its television sets. The American president, Richard Nixon, set foot on Beijing soil. That same Nixon, who had walked his political life under the banner of anti-communism. This unbelievable breach opened in the front line of the Cold War — it all began with a single ping-pong ball.

The Small Door a Ping-Pong Ball Opened

In April 1971, the World Table Tennis Championships were being held in Nagoya, Japan. The American table tennis team taking part there received an unexpected invitation: Would they like to visit China? In the very midst of the Cold War, it was a summons from an enemy state.

The players walked the Great Wall and traded shots with Chinese players, smiles on their faces. Through the small door of sport, a window sealed for twenty years opened just a crack. The world called this ping-pong diplomacy. Yet behind this heartwarming exchange, far larger gears had already begun, quietly, to turn.

What turned those gears was the calculation of cold strategy. By the end of the 1960s, relations between China and the Soviet Union had cooled decisively, finally escalating into armed clashes along the border. A dispute over the road forward as leader of socialism, a vast border line, and dread of a nuclear-armed neighbor — though they belonged to the same socialist camp, China and the USSR were no longer of one piece, and had come to regard each other as their gravest threat. To the leaders in Beijing, the immense military might of the Soviet Union was a real blade held to their faces.

America, meanwhile, was searching for a path of honorable withdrawal from the quagmire of the Vietnam War and was being pressed to rearrange its global strategy. If the Cold War were fought not by the United States and the USSR alone, but with China added as an important piece, the board would look entirely different. Each wished to check the Soviet Union, a common weight upon them both — it was the moment when two nations holding different aims overlapped perfectly at a single point of interest. What drew together America and China, who were supposed to be enemies, was neither friendship nor trust, but the shared shadow of a third great power.

Kissinger Flies in Secret

Nixon had a man of wisdom at his side: National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. This strategist, who read geopolitics with cold clarity, staged a grand drama that moved history.

In July 1971, while visiting Pakistan, Kissinger announced he was ‘resting for a stomach ailment,’ and in that gap he vanished. His destination was Beijing — to meet in secret with China’s premier, Zhou Enlai. Without a soul in the world noticing, contact at the highest level between the United States and China had quietly come to pass.

Once the meeting was done, on July 15 of that year Nixon astonished the world in a televised address. He announced that he himself would visit China the following year. An anti-communist crusader bound for communist China — this news was given almost no advance notice even to allied nations, and threw the leaders of many countries into confusion. The one most shaken was Japan, where this diplomacy over their heads left deep aftereffects known as the ‘Nixon Shock.’

The Handshake That Astonished the World

On February 21, 1972, the aircraft carrying Nixon touched down at Beijing’s airport. Descending the steps, the president walked straight up to the waiting Zhou Enlai and held out his hand. The long handshake exchanged between the two — this single scene was broadcast into living rooms around the world, searing into people’s eyes the moment the Cold War map was rewritten with an audible crack.

Nixon also met with the ailing Mao Zedong, and during his stay the two nations carried out thorough negotiations. The greatest obstacle was, as ever, the Taiwan question. China would not yield an inch from its position that ‘Taiwan is part of China.’ The product of compromise, announced on February 28, was the Shanghai Communiqué. In it, America avoided a head-on collision with an artful turn of phrase: it acknowledged that Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait held that there is but one China. It was not a complete settlement, but a wisdom that ‘shelved’ the conflict for the future.

What the Great Turn Left Behind

Nixon’s visit to China did not, by itself, produce formal diplomatic relations. The two nations would exchange ambassadors and formally establish ties only seven years later, in January 1979, under the Carter administration. At that point the United States broke off relations with Taiwan and recognized the Beijing government as the sole legitimate government of China. The small door opened in 1972 thus grew into a true great gate.

What this great turn left to the world was immeasurable. With China incorporated as a third pole into the Cold War’s bipolar structure, international politics took on a more complex and more flexible shape. The view that one of the distant causes of the Soviet Union’s eventual march toward collapse lay in this US-China rapprochement is a persistent one.

And above all, what mattered most was that this became the entrance that lifted China onto the main stage of international society. A vast nation long in isolation began once more to connect with the world outside. When the door opened, what lay beyond it was a sleeping great power holding a population of nearly a billion. How should America deal with this nation? If it chose the path of welcoming it as a market and growing rich together, what on earth would happen? No one yet knew the answer. What would soon begin was an enormous wager rarely seen in human history — a grand experiment that would open the fate of one nation wide onto the world economy.