Strained US-China relationship 50 years after Nixon’s visit

At the height of the Cold War, then US President Richard Nixon traveled to the center of communist power China in a visit that, over time, transformed relations between United States and China and Beijing’s position in the world in a way unimaginable at the time.

The relationship between the two countries will always be a challenge, and after half a century of ups and downs it is more tense than ever. The Cold War has long since come to an end, but there are fears on both sides that a new one is about to begin. Despite repeated denials from the Chinese government, Washington is concerned that the world led by the democracy that triumphed over the Soviet Union will be challenged by the authoritarian model of a powerful and still rising China.

“The US-China relationship has always been contentious, but it is necessary,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a China expert at Stanford University. “Perhaps 50 years ago the reasons were mainly economic. Now they are due more than anything to the field of security. But the relationship has never been – nor will it ever be – easy.”

Nixon arrived in Beijing on a gray winter morning 50 years ago. Propaganda posters displayed phrases such as “Down with American imperialism,” part of the uprising under the Cultural Revolution that banished intellectuals and other groups to the camps and subjected many to public and brutal humiliation and even deadly attacks in the name of class struggle.

Nixon’s 1972 trip, which included meetings with Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong and a visit to the Great Wall of China, led to the creation of diplomatic relations in 1979 and the parallel severing of formal ties with Taiwan, which the United States had previously established. recognized as the government of China after the communists seized power in Beijing in 1949.

Prime Minister Zhou Enlai’s translator wrote in an autobiography that he recalls Nixon saying, “This hand stretches across the Pacific Ocean in friendship” while shaking Zhou’s hand at the airport.

For both sides, it was a friendship born of circumstance rather than natural loyalties.

China and the Soviet Union, former communist allies, had split and even clashed along their border in 1969, and Mao saw the United States as a potential counterweight to any threat of Soviet invasion.