Fifty years ago, a hand-delivered letter, a clueless ping-pong team and a series of artful signalling efforts led to a U.S-China breakthrough and a new international order. With the two countries again at a nadir, would a reprise of Kissinger-esque negotiations work again?
Illustration by Luis Grañena
From 1955 to 1971, during the height of the Cold War, U.S. diplomats carried on a series of 134 negotiations with their counterparts at the embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Warsaw. Henry Kissinger, who became President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor, mocked these efforts as “sterile” and “the longest continual talks that could not point to a single important achievement.”Many of the quotes in this piece come from Kissinger’s The White House Years and On China, Nicholas Griffin’s Ping-Pong Diplomacy, Margaret MacMillan’s Nixon and Mao, William Burr’s The Kissinger Transcripts and John Delury’s upcoming, Agents of Subversion: The United States and China from Korea to Vietnam.
Indeed, a breakthrough after two decades of steely deadlock between the U.S. and China came not via diplomats persisting in Warsaw, but via insiders in Pakistan. On December 8, 1970, Pakistan’s President, Yahya Khan, who was a close ally of China, had a double-sealed
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