Forgotten Vanguard: Informal Diplomacy and the Rise of United States-China Trade, 1972-1980

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 histori...