Editor’s note: This piece has been updated in light of the US president Joe Biden’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Bali, Indonesia on 14 November. The two leaders discussed how to manage the competition between their countries with the aim of avoiding a “new Cold War”, but they remained bitterly opposed on the question of Beijing’s claim to Taiwan, which Xi called the “very core of China’s core interests” and a “red line that must not be crossed”.
Leaving for China on 17 February 1972, the US president Richard Nixon gave a short speech to the excited crowds that had gathered on the White House lawn. Wearing a plain grey suit and looking slightly surprised by the number of people who had arrived to see him off, he described the “historic mission” that lay ahead and invoked the words of the American astronauts who had landed on the moon three years earlier. If there was one message he hoped to deliver, he said, it was this: “We came in peace for all mankind.”
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