Nixon’s China visit: 50 years on
'From curiosity to promise to disappointment to increasing suspicions'
Richard Nixon landed in Beijing on Feb 21, 1972, becoming the first US president to visit China in a historic first step towards normalising ties with the isolated communist country. Fifty years on, that adventurous diplomacy is still as relevant as ever, amid the current rising tensions between the world’s two largest economies. ST correspondents look back at the landmark trip and how it changed the world then and now.
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As President Richard Nixon shook hands with Chairman Mao Zedong, toured the Great Wall and was hosted to a banquet in the Great Hall of the People during his groundbreaking visit to China in 1972, the images were beamed into homes on television screens in America.
At the time, China scholar David Lampton was a PhD student preparing to visit the then-British territory of Hong Kong for his dissertation fieldwork - interviewing refugees who fled China during the Cultural Revolution.