Winston Lord, in the room with Mao and Nixon, examines US-China relations then and now

Name: Winston Lord, then-special assistant to Kissinger, recalls Nixon's historic China summit
Uploaded: 2022-02-20T14:35:23.000Z
Duration: 5 min 45 s
Description: Winston Lord, then-special assistant to Kissinger, recalls Nixon's historic China summit

‘We opened up for geopolitical, economic reasons, and we hoped this would loosen up the Chinese political system. But engagement was not preconditioned on that’

A former registered Republican, Lord says the Republican Party’s embrace of Trumpism represents ‘single biggest threat to our China policy’

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Owen Churchill

Published: 10:35pm, 20 Feb 2022Updated: 8:05am, 21 Feb 2022

In February 1972, US president Richard Nixon defied conventional foreign policy wisdom when he arrived in Beijing for meetings with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. In recognition of the trip’s historical significance, the South China Morning Post is running a multimedia series exploring interesting points of the past 50 years in US-China relations. This second piece in the series, by Owen Churchill, explores the perspectives of Winston Lord, the veteran diplomat who was in the room for that historic first meeting.

Winston Lord, one of the architects of Richard Nixon’s efforts to forge ties with Beijing, would like to correct the record.

Contrary to popular belief, it was Lord – not Nixon’s then-national security adviser, Henry Kissinger – who was the first American official to enter the People’s Republic of China more than 50 years ago.

“I was in the front of the plane, Kissinger was in the back,” Lord, who was Kissinger’s special assistant, said of their secret trip to Beijing in 1971. Breaking into a grin, he added, “So I got into China’s airspace and territory to be the first American official after 22 years to visit China.”

Humour and nostalgia permeate many of Lord’s recollections of that trip to China, the subsequent groundbreaking presidential visit by Nixon in 1972, and Lord’s years as US ambassador to Beijing in the 1980s.

But turning to the present day, the 84-year-old is – in his own words – both saddened by the turn that US-China relations have taken in recent years and concerned that Washington is squandering the very assets it must lean on in its “long-range competition” with Beijing.

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Winston Lord, then-special assistant to Kissinger, recalls Nixon's historic China summit

SCMP Series

50 years since Nixon visited China

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