Engaging China: Fifty Years of Sino-American Relations

The importance of the relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China has only grown since Richard Nixon’s epochal visit in 1972. By the early twenty-first century, when the rise of China had become an inescapable fact, most American policy makers and experts saw bilateral ties with China as the most consequential foreign-relations priority for the United States.

In recent years, even before the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S.–China relationship has rapidly deteriora...