Remember A Day | The US and China’s rapprochement complete, a stock-trading schoolboy and deregulating toilet seats: headlines from four decades ago
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A journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history
A journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history
Washington and Beijing’s resumption of diplomatic relations after 29 years, an Australian teenager banned from playing the stock market and a US state legislature lifting a decades-old restriction on oval toilet seats made headlines four decades ago this week.
December 17, 1978
● China and the US declared world peace was more important than any dispute between them and said they would establish normal diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979. The two countries ended a 29-year “abnormal relationship” by issuing a communique in which Washington recognised Beijing as the only government of China and severed ties with Taiwan.
December 18, 1978
● A 16-year-old “whizz kid” student speculator was ordered by his school to stop playing the Singapore Stock Exchange after running up transactions totalling S$300,000 (about HK$600,000). Andrew Kirk of West Beach, South Australia, a student at Singapore International School, attacked the school’s administration for being “autocratic, authoritarian and bureaucratic”.
