This paper will present a historiography of the United States policy towards the Peoples Republic of China during the Nixon administration. The first part of the paper will briefly recount the events surrounding the policy, including the change in foreign policy during the administration and the public spectacle of the Nixon visit to China. The second part of the paper will examine the interpretations concerning the true authorship of the policy introduced by the administration, specifically focusing upon the question of whether Nixon or Kissinger was primarily responsible for the idea of rapprochement with China. The third part of the paper will discuss the motivations behind the change in policy and the interpretations of these motivations. The fourth part of the paper will look at the interpretations concerning the reactions of the American people to the policy change. The last part of the paper will present interpretations of the overall effect of the policy and its success or failure.
In March of 1972, President Richard Nixon visited the Peoples Republic of China, reversing more than twenty years of enforced isolation on the world's most populous nation. His visit had been announced a mere six months earlier and there had been little public notice that the traditional U.S. policy towards the communist nation was going to be changed. The China trip was quickly followed by a summit with the leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, in Moscow. This opening of relations with two of the traditional enemies of the United States signaled a dramatic change in the overall direction of U.S. foreign policy, a change which has become one of the two hallmarks of the Nixon presidency (the other being the Watergate scandal). Although popular writers tend to focus upon the supposed moral bankruptcy of the administration and the paranoia of Nixon himself, political and diplomatic historians of late Twentieth Century America have l...