The trading relationship between the United States and China, though now robust, was a recent and hardly inevitable development. Political animosity stemming from the Korean War and America's subsequent strategic embargo of China broke off economic and cultural ties. Following two decades of China's international isolation, as the United States sought to realign the geopolitical order in the 1970s, Washington began to engineer a restoration of its relationship with China. Diplomatic historians have carefully documented the formal and governmental intrigues of Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, and Zhou Enlai. As this book shows, a vigorous reconstruction of bilateral ties was unfolding simultaneously at the level of informal diplomacy, especially in the realm of US-China trade.
