Improbable Diplomats: Historian Pete Millwood on how Scientific and Cultural Exchange Remade U.S.-China Relations

This week on Sinica, I chat with University of Melbourne transnational historian Pete Millwood about his outstanding book Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade U.S.-China Relations. The road to normalization is told too often with a focus only on the Nixon-Kissinger opening and official diplomatic efforts culminating in the final recognition of the PRC in January 1979, but there's much more to the story than that, and Millwood tells it deftly, drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with many of those directly involved.

3:33 — Transnational history

4:44 — The early, “pioneering” trips to China in the 1950s and ‘60s and China’s shift in invitations

11:14 — The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (NCUSCR) in the 1960s

16:27 — The role of the Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars (CCAS)

20:43 — Why Nixon’s opening to China was seen as so surprising, and the impact of the UN’s shift in recognition from the ROC to the PRC on American thinking

24:57 — The Glenn Cowan and Zhuang Zedong ping-pong diplomacy story

31:21 — Edgar Snow’s meeting with Mao

33:43 — The return leg of ping-pong diplomacy and the National Committee’s “baptism by fire”

36:33 — The significance of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s tour of China with Eugene Ormandy

42:23 — Jiang Qing and the controversy around the cancelled performing arts tour in the U.S. in 1975

46:03 — Kissinger’s thinking in the early 1970s after the first communiqué

48:48 — The U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association

50:42 — How scientific cooperation smoothed the process toward normalization under the Carter administration, the state of play in ’77, and how Frank Press CSCPRC argued for greater reciprocity

1:02:25 — The politics in China in regards to the grander bargain and the decentralization of exchanges

1:05:43 — The disbandment of the CSCPRC and the reinvention of the NCUSCR

1:08:58 — Pete’s suggestion for continuing academic and cultural exchange

1:12:51 — How Pete got interested in such an American and China-centric topic

1:18:02 — Pete’s current projects

Recommendations:

Pete: Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism by Wendy Cheng; Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim (also available as an audiobook read by the author)

Kaiser: We Met in Beijing, a book of poems by Anthony Tao

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