Prologue

Summary

This chapter traces the history of the limited but nonetheless significant transnational contact between Americans and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) before 1969. The chapter posits that these earlier interactions acted as a precursor to the far more numerous and frequent – but in other ways not wholly dissimilar – exchange visits of the 1970s. The chapter also places these earlier Sino-American contacts in two broader contexts: the PRC’s overall people-to-people and exchange diplomacy before 1971, and the role of cultural exchanges in the Cold War era foreign relations of the United States. The chapter reviews a substantial historiography that demonstrates that the governments of both the PRC and the United States saw exchanges as a critical part of their country’s relations with the outside world before 1971. The chapter concludes with a section detailing the context in which, in the mid-1960s, the National Committee on US-China Relations and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with Mainland China (later the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China) were founded.