As US-China relations teeter on the brink, could Nixon and Zhou Enlai’s historic meeting hold lessons for the two superpowers?
Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in February 1972 was a global game-changer, but with each side walking a delicate diplomatic high wire, the success of the trip largely came down to simple, everyday gestures
“At this very moment, through the wonder of telecommunications, more people are seeing and hearing what we say, than on any other such occasion in the whole history of the world.”
– Richard Nixon, speaking at Zhou Enlai’s welcoming banquet for him on February 21, 1972.
Folklore has it that, as Zhou Enlai and his delegation of officials walked to the aircraft stairs to meet the arriving Richard Nixon in Beijing in 1972, the Chinese premier was fretting about the loss of face he would suffer if the president of the United States did not shake his hand.
The seed of paranoia had been sowed back in 1954, when US secretary of state John Foster Dulles refused to shake Zhou’s hand at the Geneva Conference, where diplomats from Asia, Europe and the US came together for three months to try to settle the conflicts in Korea and Indochina.
Only a year had passed since fighting in Korea had ceased. In Indochina, the French army was about to capitulate, and the US would be drawn into the fight. “Communist China”, as it was called in Washington, was on the opposite side of both of those conflicts, and Dulles was in no mood to shake the hand of an enemy.
And the story goes that almost 20 years later, Zhou had not got over the slight.
