But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! The Nixon trip certainly caught Taiwan off guard, as did the normalization of U.S.-PRC relations during the Carter administration. The two sides hadnt spoken for decades, and the United States was at war with the Communist North Vietnamese in Chinas backyard. To avoid embarrassing Secretary of State William P. Rogers, Nixon requested to the Chinese for Lord to be cropped out of all the official photographs of the meeting. Resolving the Vietnam War was a particularly important factor. After a series of these overtures by both countries, Kissinger flew on secret diplomatic missions to Beijing in 1971, where he met with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Richard Nixon Library,WHPO-8521-17a, National Archives Identifier:40509550. It's no wonder leaders in both Beijing and Taipei have a hard time trusting the US," she said. The trip helped bring China out of isolation and realign the global balance of power. On July 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation in a live televised broadcast to make an unexpected announcement: he had accepted an invitation from Beijing to become the first U.S. president to visit the Peoples Republic of China, a Communist nation of 750 million that, next to the Soviet Union, was Americas fiercest adversary in the Cold War. Copyright 2022 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. LORD: Mao kept deflecting Nixon's efforts to engage in substantive exchanges. The outreach by Nixon and [National Security Adviser Henry] Kissinger was of great consequence, of course, but the portrayal of China as entirely passive waiting for the U.S. to come along irks me. While Zhou Enlai described the Taiwan issue as "the crucial question", Nixon also viewed it as a touchstone for both sides. "It's instructive that the US and China were able to reach a modus vivendi in spite of political and ideological differences in 1972 and afterwards. Shanghai at the Huangpu river with Shanghai Tower Did you know that China has the most skyscrapers in any country in the world? As defined by the Oxford University Press, a landmark is a notable structure or characteristic of a landscape that allows you to decipher the location you are in.