Source:Richard Nixon Foundation– President Richard M. Nixon (Republican, California) announcing the trip that literally opened the People’s Republic of China to the western and developed world.
“President Nixon announces that he has accepted an invitation to visit the People’s Republic of China, July 15, 1971.”
From the Richard Nixon Foundation
To understand why President Richard would do something like this which is to open up a Communist state during the middle of the Cold War and one of our arch-enemies at the time, which is what the People’s Republic of China was, I think you have to understand Richard M. Nixon’s political background and philosophy and first. And then I think this all makes a lot of sense.
Richard Nixon was a California, Center-Right, Progressive Republican, or Right-Progressive, if you prefer. I now that either sounds like an Oxymoron or makes you want to think that you should believe in flying saucers and people dancing on the Moon, as well. And of course with his involvement in the Watergate coverup in the early 1970s and his secret, personal national security state and intelligence unit that he had going on (known as the plumbers) it’s easy for someone to ask how could someone like that be a Progressive anything.
But Richard Nixon always believed in progress, whether you were talking about domestic policy or foreign policy and using government to help people and make the country better. Not to run people’s lives for them, but to use government to expand freedom in the country and to make the country as safe as possible. Which is why he agreed to open up relations with China in 1971 to try to bring the two countries together, so we wouldn’t always be fighting about everything and lessen the need for military involvement between the two countries and countries that were our allies.
The Free State 