This project has received funding via the EUI ESR call 2026, dedicated to Early Stage Researchers, with the contribution of the EUI Widening Europe Programme. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
This project examines the 1971 pioneering encounters of Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai to re-narrate US-China normalisation as the making of a new relationship in diplomacy. While the literature studying this particular case is considerable, most of it assigns a reductive role to diplomacy, and normalisation is used as an umbrella term covering the 1970s and ending with the US recognition of China on 1 January 1979. Though diplomacy is thus always there, it never really becomes the protagonist despite the fact that the story, as the PI suggests in the project, is about the making of a new relationship – the most significant of achievements by diplomacy. Instead, the approach is usually one of geopolitics, with a focus on national interests prior to rapprochement or their congruence in the negotiations of the early 1970s. A recurring finding is that normalisation between Washington and Beijing had been a foregone conclusion because of the latter’s split with Moscow in the late 1960s, while another is that American and Chinese concern with the balance of power led to a modus vivendi on controversial issues, such as the status of Taiwan. Even when diplomacy is accorded an explicit presence, such as in studies of China’s "ping-pong diplomacy", it refers to a one-sided affair and is primarily a vehicle for signalling.
The objective of ‘DIPLORELATE’ is to challenge these arguments by showing that diplomatic interactions and their outcomes were neither epiphenomenal of a latent, pre-existing compatibility between Chinese and American interests, nor were they simply about finding the right fit on pressing issues of the international equilibrium. Instead, the project prioritises a relational and dialogical approach by foregrounding the centrality of face-to-face diplomacy in achieving belonging between people representing estranged communities. It also establishes a new narrative of the historical episode by privileging three key phases: getting to the dialogue of 1971, engaging in dialogue itself, and making sense of the dialogue afterwards.
First, the project argues that getting to dialogue was largely facilitated by the Nixon administration’s estrangement of thinking about, as well as practising, US foreign policy towards China. Second, it shows through a meticulous analysis of memoranda of conversations documenting the encounters that engaging in dialogue happened through a negotiation of identity claims revolving around, above all, the un-Americanness of the Nixon-administration. Third, it demonstrates that making sense of dialogue took place in Kissinger’s reports of the encounters to President Nixon. In them, Kissinger articulated the making of a new relationship in terms of a great convergence between two countries committed to the same philosophy of international relations, realpolitik.
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