![]() ![]() Today, American Views of China Have Plummeted Rather than changing public attitudes, the Nixon trip walked through a door already opened by the American public. Two-thirds (66%) thought it would be fairly or very effective in terms of improving world peace. ![]() In a March 1972 Gallup poll, nearly everyone – 97 percent of Americans – said they had heard or read about Nixon’s trip to China, and a Harris poll that August found that seventy percent of Americans rated the trip positively. Six in ten (62%) didn’t think it would bring about a faster end to the war in Vietnam. Only two in ten (22%) thought that the US and China would agree to control nuclear weapons a majority (51%) thought it wouldn’t happen. However, as a Harris poll conducted in February 1972 just days before Nixon landed in Beijing showed, they didn’t expect all of these priorities to be satisfied. A plurality (47%) also said they’d like to see increased trade in non-strategic goods. Those included an agreement on control of nuclear weapons (76%), more talks between US and Chinese diplomats (74%), more cultural (71%) and sports (68%) exchanges, and travel by US and Chinese citizens to one another’s countries (52%). A May 1971 Harris poll found that seven in ten Americans (70%) wanted to see friendlier relations between the United States and Communist China.Īmericans also had policy preferences they wanted to see reflected in a renewed US-China relationship. Still, the general idea of opening up to the PRC was a popular idea. Instead, Americans were divided: 26 percent said the priority should be establishing relations with the PRC, while 25 percent wanted to focus on maintaining relations with the Nationalists-and three in ten (29%) said both were equally important. But the desire among Americans to open to the PRC did not mean they wanted to throw Taiwan overboard. Indeed, as a Harris poll in August 1971 found, a majority of Americans (59%) wanted to recognize Communist China. And nearly everyone heard about it: 85 percent in a July 1971 poll by the Opinion Research Corporation, and two-thirds (66%) thought it was a good thing. Nixon’s announcement that he planned to visit the PRC was front-page news. Americans Open the Door to China, Nixon Walks Through Far from a bold stand against a hostile American public, polling from before and after Nixon’s trip shows that while there may be recriminations over US policy towards China in the past 50 years, Americans at the time were supportive of a change in policy. In that process, the circumstances of the trip have become mythologized. Nixon’s China visit even inspired an opera. Outside the policy world, the notion that ‘only Nixon could go to China’ caught on (and was quoted in the 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country as an ‘ old Vulcan proverb’). Today, modern commentators ache to re-enact the shift in great power relations between the United States, the USSR, and the PRC (with themselves, one imagines, playing the role of Kissinger). ![]() In the foreign policy work, the trip become a touchstone for punditry, rivaled only by ‘Munich 1938’ and references to the Peloponnesian War. Nixon’s 1972 trip to China may be the most famous overseas trip of any US president, as the visit quickly and firmly lodged itself into American cultural consciousness. Could the US today replicate Nixon’s feat, pulling China away from Russia? Nixon Goes to China Today, as then, international politics seem to hinge on the triad of Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. Some commentators are now reflecting on the decisions made by Nixon in 1972 and whether the decision to embrace China was a sound strategic move. Russia’s war against Ukraine has largely overshadowed the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s landmark trip to China in 1972, which established the basis for a normalization of relations between the two powers. ![]()
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