The Revolutionary Meeting :

President Nixon Goes to China, 1972

with Christopher Goscha,

Professor of International Relations at the Université du Québec, Montreal.

Who could have thought it possible? In 1972, one of the staunchest enemies of communist China during the Cold War, American President Richard Nixon, travelled to China to shake the hand of his long-time enemy, Mao Zedong. In so doing, he set China and the United States on a new diplomatic path. What happened to make this revolutionary meeting possible? What did this new relationship mean at the time? And why did it not last beyond the end of the Cold War in 199?

Christopher Goscha, professor of international relations at the Université du Québec à Montréal, will use Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 to explore some of the major themes in the relationship between China and the United States since Mao’s China first came into being in 1949.