Transcript: Improbable Diplomats: Historian Pete Millwood on how Scientific and Cultural Exchange Remade U.S.-China Relations

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The following is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast recorded June 11, 2024. Thanks to the great folks at CadreScripts for the transcript, and to Elizabeth Shoup for checking and formatting.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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We all know the story of how, against all odds, and in defiance of all expectations, Richard Nixon, with that diplomatic eminence, Henry Kissinger — half Machiavelli, half Cardinal Richelieu — whispering sagely in his ear, undertook a risky gambit with his 1972 trip to Beijing, toasted with Mao, opened a new era of U.S.-China friendship. Finally, Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping showed up. They completed the work that Nixon and Mao had started. Somewhere along the way, there was a sideshow, really, some shaggy hippie named Glenn Cowan got on the wrong bus in Japan and met some Chinese ping-pong players. At some point, some acrobats came to the U.S., did their contortions, spun plates. Then the Philadelphia Orchestra went to China. We signed some scientific exchange agreements. But, you know, really it was all about Nixon and Kissinger, Mao and Zhou Enlai, right? 

Well, not so fast, says my guest today. 

Pete Millwood is an historian of international and transnational history at the University of Melbourne, and he’s the author of an excellent book called Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade U.S.-China Relations. It tells a much more inclusive and therefore much more comprehensive story of the opening and the eventual normalization of ties by looking at the organizations that played a vital role in bringing it about, even salvaging it at crucial moments. Those organizations include primarily the National Committee on United States-China Relations — the National Committee, as those of us familiar with them call it, or NCUSCR — and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China.

But it also examines everything from Black leftists and Black leftist organizations, some quite radical, pro-mainland groups, such as the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association, as well as the Committee of Concerned Scholars that was so instrumental in some of the earliest visits to the PRC by American scholars, people who you’re very familiar with, people like Susan Shirk, who’s been on this program many, many times, and Paul Pickowicz. It’s a terrific corrective to the story, as it’s too often told, and I’m really pleased to welcome today, Pete Millwood. Pete, great to have you on the show.

Pete Millwood: Thank you, Kaiser. A long time listener, but first time on the show, I’m very excited.

Kaiser: Well, I’m very happy to have you. Pete, first off, you describe yourself as a transnational historian. What is transnational history? How does it fit with or differ from international history or the history of international relations?