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Nixon's visit to China, 50 years on
Eyewitnesses from 1972 offer their views of a relationship in bad shape.
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Chinese leader Mao Zedong welcoming US President Richard Nixon at his house in Beijing on Feb 22, 1972.
PHOTO: AFP
The Economist
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Half a century ago, Mr Richard Nixon took a gamble that made history. On a cold, hazy February morning, he landed in Beijing, the capital of a communist regime that America did not officially recognise, to meet China's ailing tyrant, Mao Zedong.
The president's stated motives were grandly visionary. China, home to a fifth of humanity, languished in angry isolation in 1972, its borders all but closed to the world. Desperately poor, its people were six years into the Cultural Revolution, a decade of ideological purges and violence at times approaching civil war.
