CRI听力:Nixon in China - "I was there"

"So we're looking at your laptop and you have some old film of Beijing when you were there. Can you describe, what are we looking at?"

"What we're looking at is Nixon's plane. This is the airport in Beijing, with Nixon about to arrive and the American flag flying over the Beijing airport, which was mind-blowing in itself."

The year was 1972. The US and the People's Republic of China had no diplomatic relations and remained wary of each other. So news of Nixon's visit was unexpected to say the least.

"It was hugely important for Mao to meet with Nixon as soon as possible so as to put the approval of the top Chinese leader on the trip. And after that Chinese officials all relaxed quite noticeably."

Chairman Mao's health was not good so he only met Nixon the once. Negotiations were led by Nixon and Mao's deputy Zhou Enlai…

"…who were talking about the world, global politics. Getting to know each other, finding out about each other's views on the way the world worked and the way China and the United States fitted into it."

Ambassador Platt joined the trip as an aide to Secretary of State William Rogers. He remembers one encounter with Mao's deputy, Zhou Enlai.

"He said, 'I have to give toast to president Nixon this evening and I want to quote from chairman Mao's poem, which says, in effect, you're not a real man till you've been to the Great Wall. Do you think that would be appropriate?' Well, I was so stunned first of all that he bothered to approach in effect the junior most person in the room, and, two, that he was so well briefed that he knew that person spoke some Chinese. I was stunned and I said, 'of course Premier Zhou, it's just right thing to say.'"

During the talks Ambassador Platt remembers the Chinese asking if they needed to give fingerprints when entering the US. But nobody knew the answer.

"So Secretary Rogers looked at me and said, 'Go find out.' And so I went – the miracle of presidential travel is that there's always a Whitehouse telephone nearby. It doesn't matter where you are, whether you're in the emperor's palace in Japan, or whether you're in the Great Hall of the People, there's a Whitehouse phone nearby. So I went out of the meeting room and I said, 'Where's the Whitehouse phone?' And, behind a pillar in the Great Hall of the People, was a phone on a little table and it had a little picture of the Whitehouse on it."

It was 3am in Washington and the Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs had to be woken up. But within minutes they found fingerprints were not necessary.

Some say these talks changed the world. Ambassador Platt says this is no understatement.

"I think it did change the world. The diplomatic and international world that we knew was run on a bipolar dynamic. You had the 'we' and the 'they', the Chinese communist bloc, Russia and China united. That's what people really thought even though we'd been watching them beat up on each other for years and knew that there was a lot of tension and difference between the two. Nixon understood that. The trip really turned international diplomacy into a much more realistic multipolar operation."

It wasn't until 1979 that the US opened an embassy in Beijing. But Nixon's trip seven years earlier laid the foundations for what many believe is one of the most important international relationships in the world.

For CRI, I'm Dominic Swire.