become dangerously unstable. Since the mid-1960s, a spiraling nuclear arms race had developed as the aging Soviet collective leadership headed by Leonid Brezhnev sought to achieve nuclear parity with the United States. The Soviet Union also contested American power in the Third World through its sponsorship or support of wars of liberation. After the Soviets crushed the dissident movement in the Prague Spring of 1968, their hold over Eastern Europe was becoming more tenuous. The claim of the U.S.S.R. to supremacy in the world communist movement was under stress because of Chinese ideological attacks which soon escalated into border clashes along the Sino-Soviet border.
Relations between the United States and the PRC remained frozen and hostile. As the Sino-Soviet rift deepened, China's leaders increasingly realized that their isolation rendered China vulnerable to the emerging Soviet threat to the North and American military encirclement to the South and the East. They were preoccupied, in fact transfixed, with a collective hangover from the factional strife and nationwide turmoil associated with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which was launched in 1966 and began after 1968 to attentuate in force. Hsu (1990) says "the Cultural Revolution ushered in a decade of civil strife that drove the country into bankruptcy" (p. 702).
All this meant that the initial initiative for changing Sino-American relations would have to come from the United States.
Changing Nixon-Kissinger Perspective on China
Little in the past record and statements of Nixon and his new National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, suggested in 1969 that they would together forge a new relationship with PRC. As a conservative Republican, Nixon had long been associated with the longstanding criticism by the Republicans of what they regarded as a weak Democratic foreign policy toward Asian communism. Three decades after the event, Nixon (1982) qu...