![]() We are now at a point in time, 50 years later to the day, of another new situation in the world. Speaking then, President Nixon said to Chairman Mao, “What brings us together is a recognition of a new situation in the world.” ![]() In an era today when things may look bleak and foreboding perhaps it is fitting to look back to a time when the impossible became possible and the unimagined was imagined. From that humble first trade of Chinese pandas and American musk oxen (the latter usually forgotten by history) the two nations now do more than $550 billion worth of business with each other. In the meantime American companies continue to do business with China.and vice versa. Their economies, their reaches into the developing world and the peaceful fate of the world itself rest with these two nations in a way that could never have been imagined back then. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev: State visit met with Premier Kosygin and General Secretary Brezhnev. need each other more than they did when Nixon and Mao met. Informal visit met with Chancellor Kreisky. They have been compounded by Covid, to be sure, but also by a China that is now the world’s second largest economy and one that is both newly assertive and ever more guarded under current leader Xi Jinping. capitalism, Taiwan and what to do about Russia. Today, those same political issues that were avoided back in 1972 remain: Communism vs. The passing of Mao and the transition to the more practical politics and ideology of Deng Xiaoping facilitated the process and within two decades China had become the factory floor of America. They were already doing business with factories in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan but none of those places offered the scale and scope of what the potential of China held: A country of 800 million people with a reputation of being hard working and a reality of being desperate for a way to take their nation out of the detached poverty it had found itself in, thanks to isolation from the rest of the world and self-inflicted disastrous decisions it had itself made.Ĭould China become a place where the consumer goods that Americans consumed at a voracious rate be efficiently and cheaply made? The Chinese, who were perceived as quick learners and eager to cooperate, were only all-too-eager to accept the Western interlopers. ![]() For the United States, it was the last chance to engage a potential ally. From this vantage point, it is no stretch to claim that The Week that Changed the World was, in reality, but a step (a big one) in a journey already underway. businessmen began to start booking trips to China. Indeed, in 1967 Nixon had called for bringing China back into the family of nations. But it wasn’t all that long afterwards that U.S.
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