Nixon's visit to China
Nixon’s visit to China in 1972
Sino-American relations were hostile during the 1950s, due to the Korean War as well as the continuing U.S military aid to Taiwan. In the 1960s U.S involvement in the Vietnam War and China's isolationist posture and militancy during the Cultural Revolution did not do much to improve relations. However, after the Sino-Soviet split in 1966, China saw the Soviet Union as more threatening than the United States and therefore sought to establish closer relations with it. President Nixon also wanted to explore rapprochement with China as part of his doctrine of reduced military involvement in Asia and so in 1972, he visited China, during which time he signed the Shanghai Communique with Premier Zhou Enlai. The communiqué was a statement of their foreign policy views and a document that would remain the basis of Sino-American bilateral relations for many years. Kissinger also stated that the U.S. would pull its forces out of Taiwan and supported the notion of One China. Both nations pledged to work toward the full normalization of diplomatic relations.
The Shanghai Communique, included a certain degree of ambiguity that allowed China and the United States to set aside differences, especially concerning the Taiwan issue and to begin the process of normalizing relations. After the signing of the Shanghai Communique, however, movement toward United States-China normalization during the 1970s saw only limited progress. The United States and China set up liaison offices in each other's capitals in 1973, and bilateral trade grew unevenly. The United States continued to maintain official relations with the government of the Republic of China in Taiwan until 1979 when the U.S. broke off relations with it and established full diplomatic relations with the P.R.C. Relations continued to develop in the 1980s and by the second half of the 1980s, China had become the sixteenth largest trading partner of the United States.
