In Beijing, the two leaders stood together, in a show of diplomacy and convenience, against a common superpower foe. There are many unresolved issues between them, but it seems clear there is enough shared interest in holding the third power in check that the meeting was worth the risks. This may describe the recent meeting between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping, who discussed their alignment of interests against their mutual adversary the United States. But that description applies also to the meeting, 50 years ago this week, between Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung, who changed the arc of the Cold War by aligning the two countries’ interests against the Soviet Union.
Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, a former actress and member of the Gang of Four architects of the Cultural Revolution, used traditional Chinese opera to create a revolutionary body of work extolling the virtues of the party. One of those works, the ballet The Red Detachment of Women, was performed for Nixon during his trip. The story mythologizes the all-woman infantry unit that survived an onslaught by the Nationalists on Hainan Island in the 1930s. (The Nationalists, of course, later moved their capital to Taiwan and served as convenient antiheroes in PRC propaganda.)
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