Posted on 08/27/2008 10:35:50 PM PDT by robertvance
"I have never heard of Watergate," a close friend told me a few days ago. "All I know is that Nixon was the first president of America to connect with China. He was a great man." There are very few Americans from the past 50 years who Chinese people will laud and defend as ardently as Richard Nixon. To the Chinese, Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in the winter of 1972 was an early landmark in China’s quest to 'open doors' and promote development.The visit is also remembered fondly by many here as the first time that an American head of state officially acknowledged that there is only one China.
(Excerpt) Read more at teachabroadchina.com ...
Nixon could have been a ruler of China, that man knew how to put the iron fist in the silken glove...
Nixon was a geo-political genius. History will rank him as a great cold war president who was uncomfortable with the scrutiny of TV.
Nixon was a geo-political genius. History will rank him as a great cold war president who was uncomfortable with the scrutiny of TV.
I wasn’t born when he was prez, but I will always remember Schwarzenneger’s (for all his faults as a lib now) about his speech in 2004 RNC:
Arnold was the only speaker at the RNC that praised NIXON. When Arnold came to America and there was the 68 election (correct me if I;m wrong), he asked who are those 2 people.
One of them said Nixon. Arnold listened to both candidates and asked the person beside him ‘What his party?”
Republican.
Arnold said “then that’s my party from now on. I came from Austria, land of socialism and listening to the other candidate was like listening to my socialist leaders back home”.
Great speech, and I just turned 17 back then when I saw Arnie’s speech.
And now Ah-nold’s all growed up and is enacting Socialism just like in Austria of his childhood...
Yes, that is true and unfortunate. It is amazing that his wife converted him and not the OTHER WAY around.
Great job by Nixon of throwing Taiwan under the bus.
Thanks for this post. It is a useful reminder that the U.S. mass media have been guilty of a Soviet-style rendering of a truly great and historic American into a non-person ... or worse. As historian Stephen Ambrose once wrote, Nixon was the one, the only one, who could have pulled off the peaceful and constructive U.S. opening to China. The emphasis of the opening on the economic liberation of China (by granting them economic privileges equal to those then granted to the old Soviet Union by the U.S.) has brought more people (ca. 400,000) in a shorter time (less than 30 years) out of poverty than ever before in human history. This was largely owing to Nixon who, in his last message as U.S. president (his resignation speech) eloquently appealed for the maintenance of peaceful relations between the U.S. and China at all costs. As noted by the U.S. ambassador to China at the time, the Deng-Nixon relation during Nixon’s post-presidential years were every bit as important as the Mao-Nixon relationship had been, in getting the U.S. and China past the Tienanmen Square impasse, and allowing Deng’s economic reforms to continue. The U.S. has played its post-1972 relations with China strictly according to Nixon’s playbook (through the Carter, Reagan, both Bush and Clinton administrations) and that’s why it is the only U.S. foreign-policy initiative that has thrived with almost uninterrupted buoyancy in the past four decades.
Isn't that something how things come around full circle? Now Ah-nold sounds like his socialist leaders back home...
This is true history. For those China-haters here it would be worth your time reading a little history of this era. The China of the pre-Nixon years were much more of a threat to the U.S. than China is today. We may not like their views on human rights and their dictatorial government but all of that is much better than living in fear of a Chinese nuclear missile heading your way.
We are better off because of Nixon's China initiative. History will eventually see the truth of that view.
Of course they love Nixon. He was an American declinist and detente-ist who gave China a seat at the UN. And on top of that, he was the most socialist Republican president we have ever had - the president who gave us stagflation.
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