Event Summary:
Margaret MacMillan
Author of "Nixon in China"
Co-Sponsored with the Canada – China Business Council (CCBC)
Friday January 19, 2007
Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel - City Hall Room
Summary by Eldwin Thay, CCBC
University of Toronto historian Margaret MacMillan spoke to a sold-out luncheon in Toronto January 19 sponsored jointly by CCBC and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA) - Toronto Branch.
MacMillan, named warden of St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University in 2007, is the author of the recently-released Nixon in China, already considered the definitive work on the events leading up to and the results of US President Richard Nixon’s surprise "playing the China card’ with a surprise visit to China and Chairman Mao Zedong in 1972.
MacMillan told the assembly that Nixon was motivated by a desire at the height of the Cold War to increase diplomatic and military pressure on the Soviet Union. For his part Mao was under pressure by blatant Soviet military build-up along its border with China and worrisome skirmishes between Soviet troops and Chinese boder patrols. Mao’s decision to open a door to the West was not the first time such an event had occurred in Chinese history, the noted historian said. While China remained closed to other countries for most of its history, the past several hundred years had been marked by periods of openness and closure to outsiders motivated by the political currents in China. Mao’s invitation to Nixon, while unexpected at the time, was not without precedent.
That being said, MacMillan noted, the diplomatic significance of Nixon’s visit was profound. The visit and the subsequent new relationship with the West led, after Mao’s death in 1976, to the opening of China with the economic reform which began in 1978 followed by easing beginning in 1979 of American trade sanctions against China.
The ultimate result of those events, she said, is the Chinese reality today – an economy not merely integrated with the West but vital to world trade and the emergence of China as a global political power.
In a question and answer session after her address MacMillan said the developing interconnectedness between China and the western world would make it difficulty for China to consider reverting to a more politically and economically closed society.
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