Yesterday saw the conclusion of the ten-day visit of President Nixon’s grandson Christopher Nixon Cox, heading a party of forty visitors, to the People’s Republic of China. The group, traveling under the auspices of the Richard Nixon Foundation, included former National Security Advisor Robert “Bud” McFarlane and the President’s longtime chief of staff, retired Marine Colonel Jack Brennan.
The trip marked forty-one years since the thirty-seventh President’s historic visit to China. (Colonel Brennan was the one member of the party going to China this month who also had made the trip in 1972.) It also came just two weeks after the forty-second anniversary of the US table tennis team’s trip to the country, which signaled a reconciliation between the two nations after more than two chilly decades.
Mr. Cox and his beautiful wife Andrea Catsimatidis were warmly greeted at every stop of their visit, which included many retracings of his grandfather’s steps – including banquets where he sampled the nation’s 106-proof beverage, maotai, which was such a celebrated feature of the toasts exchanged between RN and Premier Zhou Enlai.
In an informative article in the Los Angeles Times about the trip (which is illustrated with a photo of the entire group touring the Great Wall), Mr. Cox observes:
“I remember my grandfather telling me that to have one billion of the world’s most hard-working and talented people in isolation is something that is dangerous for the world,…He felt that a prosperous China was critical for peace and stability.”
It is visits like this one that bring the peoples of these two great nations closer together and go far toward fulfilling Premier Zhou’s words to President Nixon at the historic banquet on February 25, 1972:
“The times are advancing and the world changing. We are deeply convinced that the strength of the people is powerful and that whatever zigzags and reverses there will be in the development of history, the general trend of the world is definitely towards light and not darkness.”