Nixon visit paved way for China rise-author

OTTAWA, Nov 6 (Reuters) Almost 35 years after US President Richard Nixon startled the world by visiting a hitherto hostile China, the boldness of the trip and his meeting with Mao Zedong still capture the imagination.

The week-long visit in February 1972 has often been portrayed as a remarkable success that allowed a vehemently anti-communist US president to repair ties with China, put pressure on the Soviet Union and help ease Washington's path out of the Vietnam War.

''This was the week that changed the world,'' Nixon declared at the end of the visit.

But prominent Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan -- author of a new book on the event -- suggests the Americans gave too much away to Beijing, only achieved mixed results and sowed the seeds for China's formidable economic rise.

The United States had refused to recognize China after the communist takeover in 1949, and bilateral ties had been icy for years.

By the end of the 1960s, however, both nations needed each other. A diplomatically isolated and backward China, trying to recover from the disastrous reforms known as the Cultural Revolution, fretted about a possible attack by the neighboring Soviet Union.

The United States, also worried about Moscow, wanted to boost its position in Asia and hoped China could help persuade ally North Vietnam to call a halt to hostilities. So Nixon reversed two decades of official policy and went to Beijing.

Although the hour-long talk between Nixon and Mao rarely went beyond generalities, the meeting was hugely significant.

''It was an earthquake in the Cold War landscape and meant the Eastern Bloc no longer stood firm against the West,'' MacMillan writes in ''Nixon in China.'' SPY DATA DOWNLOAD MacMillan, author of the best-selling book ''Paris 1919'', says Washington took a huge risk before Nixon's trip.

As part of a bid to show good faith, national security adviser Henry Kissinger gave China reams of secret US spy data on the Soviet Union.

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