Richard Nixon’s twenty-thousand-mile pilgrimage to the center of Chinese civilization—“the week that changed the world,” as he put it—may not actually have changed the world, though it quite probably did turn a new page in world history by making it unlikely that the international politics of East Asia, at least, will ever be the same again.

But whatever their global effect, one thing the Kissinger-Nixon bold strokes of 1971-72 most strikingly did do was to open a new chapter in that small but curious subdivision of world history, the 188-year-old tale of Chinese-American relations.

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