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Nixon and China

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Nixon and the U.S. Rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China

When Nixon began his presidency, the relations between the United States and China had been fraught ever since Mao Zedong’s Communist Party achieved power and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Less than a year later in 1950, the Korean War, in which American troops died at the hands of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, further exacerbated the situation. The next twenty years were characterized by American opposition to UN membership for Mainland China, three crises between the two nations in the Taiwan Straits, threats of nuclear attack, and the fighting of a proxy war in Vietnam. But the two decades of hostility and nonrecognition of the People’s Republic of China was brought to an end during President Richard Nixon’s administration, marked most prominently by Nixon’s historic visit to Mainland China in 1972. In ending this hostile estrangement, Nixon thus executed the first stage of a momentous diplomatic revolution in U.S. policy towards Communist China. This turning point, as Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger suggested, also “changed the world” by transforming a Cold War U.S.-Soviet bilateral international system into a tripolar one, in which powers are balanced and national interests are secured. In the process of the rapprochement, President Nixon, managed to show the world his sound judgment, pragmatic perspective, and negotiation strategy in the field of foreign affairs. Nixon’s early political career was built upon anticommunist foundations. After being elected as a congressman from California in 1947, he worked on the Herter Committee, which undertook a study tour of Europe to prepare the Marshall Plan, in which the ideological goal was anti-communism. During his subsequent time in Congress, Nixon was known as a dedicated

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