When the first U.S. President visited China, he was no longer president. Ulysses S. Grant traveled in Asia in 1879. The Qing empire was embroiled in a dispute with Japan over territorial claims to the Ryuku Islands and wanted the U.S. to mediate. Grant met with many members of the imperial court, but his most significant meeting was in Tianjin with Li Hongzhang, the powerful Viceroy of Zhili (roughly modern day Hebei province) who, after leading a coup a few years earlier, was among the most powerful statesmen in the Qing court and the de facto leader of its military. Both men had commanded an army on the winning side of a brutal civil war: while Grant was fighting the Civil War, Li helped vanquish the Taiping Rebellion. That shared past inspired Li to believe he had found a kindred spirit: “You and I, General Grant, are the greatest men in the world,” he told his guest.
The NYRB China Archive
09.29.14
China Strikes Back!
When Deng Xiaoping arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in January 1979, his country was just emerging from a long revolutionary deep freeze. No one knew much about this 5-foot-tall Chinese leader. He had suddenly reappeared on the scene after twice being…
It was an early high point in a relationship between the U.S. and China that has not always been so easy. Of course, countries don’t really have relationships. People do. Today, contact between the U.S. and China occurs daily, through millions of individual interactions between ordinary people. Many of these connections are far more substantial and intimate than those of our leaders. But leaders’ meetings, months in the orchestrating and crammed full of pre-negotiated outcomes and committee-written speeches, nevertheless offer the promise that somehow some of the difficulties facing these two massive places really might be soluble if the two humans sitting in adjacent arm chairs could only find a way to hit it off. Sometimes, they don’t and that promise evaporates quickly. More often we don’t really know what has gone on behind closed doors and instead try to read a story into the moments captured by photographers—of forced or natural looking smiles, the guarded tilt of a shoulder, or the hopeful crinkle of two sets of smiling eyes.
Here’s our look back at images of high-level China-U.S. encounters over the years.