Secret tapes reveal Nixon's appreciation of Chinese people
Secret tapes of then president show he believed that Sino-US relations held key to world peace
US president Richard Nixon thought Chinese were "the ablest people in the world" and that the Sino-US relationship held the key to world peace, according to secretly recorded tapes that have just been released.
The candid discussions with David Bruce, the diplomat who was Nixon's emissary to Beijing, were captured on a hidden recording system that Nixon used to tape 3,700 hours of conversations between February 1971 and July 1973.
We've got to get along with this one-fourth of all people in the world. The ablest people in the world in my opinion - potentially
The final chronological instalment of those tapes - 340 hours - were made public on Wednesday by the National Archives and Records Administration, with more than 140,000 pages of text documents. Hundreds of hours remain sealed for security and privacy reasons.
In the discussions with Bruce, one of the most eminent US diplomats of his era, Nixon urges him to mingle with his Chinese hosts to "give us an evaluation of the people on the way up".
"We've got to get along with this one-fourth of all people in the world. The ablest people in the world in my opinion - potentially," Nixon says on May 3, 1973.
"It's no problem for the next five years, the next 20 years, but it's the critical problem of our age."