FAS

FRUS on the Opening to China, 1969-72

09.05.06 | 1 min read | Text by Steven Aftergood

“Engaging the People’s Republic of China in a dialogue is perhaps the most dramatic and far reaching decision undertaken by the Nixon administration,” as noted in a new volume of the U.S. State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series devoted to that topic.

A 1972 NSC memorandum for Henry Kissinger published in the new volume expressed concern about efforts by the Federation of American Scientists and its then-President Jeremy J. Stone to promote scientific exchange with China.

“The Chinese, by encouraging Stone, are effectively undercutting the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC, a group we have recommended to Peking,” complained NSC staffer John H. Holdridge in his August 28, 1972 memo to Kissinger (see document 248).