Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

When “Wal-Mart’s imports from China amount to some $18 billion a
year and place that one company ahead of Canada, Russia and Australia as
a trading partner with the People’s Republic,” it is difficult to
remember that between 1949 and 1971, to cite “a common metaphor used
by most Americans from Nixon down, visiting China was like going to the
moon.” This meticulously researched, impeccably documented and
entertaining history tells how a new epoch began. Margaret MacMillan
demonstrated in her magisterial Paris 1919 a virtuoso ability to blend
anecdote, biography, and background while never losing sight of a great
story, and here she does the same. While acknowledging the daring
initiatives of Chairman Mao and President Nixon that led to the
breakthrough visit to China in 1972 by the American president, she shows
how “the times were ripe for each side to make a move towards the
other.” There is a masterful intertwining of the events of that week,
with biographies of the key players on both sides, a vivid depiction of
the Cold War landscape, and an outline of China’s history from its
betrayal in the post–World War I settlements through the appalling
horrors of the Cultural Revolution. Accounts of the furtive contacts
between Chinese and Americans, and the secret missions of National
Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to China to arrange the visit, make for
page-turning reading. Personalities loom large in MacMillan’s writing,
and she re-creates from transcripts and interviews stories of infighting
at the highest level. Kissinger’s jealousies and the president’s
pettiness are not spared. Throughout the book, she shows the intense
dislike both men had for the State Department, then headed by an
ill-informed secretary of state who was deliberately kept from all major
meetings.

Was this, as Nixon said in Shanghai, “The week that changed the
world”? Or should we recall Chou En Lai’s response to a query about
the significance of the French Revolution: “It’s too soon to
tell.” Certainly, MacMillan shows that on this occasion, Nixon met his
own measure of a leader: one who “can give history a nudge.”