Not a Nixon-in-China moment

Our update on the famous photo on the right, which shows Mao Zedong meeting Richard Nixon in February 1972

This Week Those Books is chock-full of crucial context in just five minutes — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.

Go to this link for a quick read

Housekeeping note: I’m away on holiday until June 7.

The Big Story:

Donald Trump becomes the first US president to visit China in a decade but no one is expecting a Nixon-in-China moment, when leaders pivot to a new paradigm.

American presidential trips to China are no longer as startling as in 1972, when Richard Nixon became the first sitting US president to set foot in the People’s Republic of China.

• Seven of the nine men who succeeded Nixon as president visited China during their tenure, with George W Bush and Barack Obama travelling there multiple times.
• This is Trump’s second visit to China and once again, he’ll meet Xi Jinping.
• In 2017, Trump told Xi he thought the US and China working together on world problems could “solve almost all of them — and probably all of them”.
• Nearly 10 years on, there is less optimism that the US–China relationship will offer constructive solutions to the problems facing the world.

This Week’s Books:

• A political biography of US-China relations after Nixon’s game-changer.
• A thriller on a ‘reverse Nixon’ and other games countries play.

Click to read on about the books and the back story