History Beckons Again

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Reagan's trip dramatized a yearning on both sides for better relations, despite the substantive differences that separate them. Yet there is still a fragile, slightly uncertain edge to the friendship. Direct American investment in China is comparatively meager. The Chinese made it plain that their continuing split with the Soviet Union is not a rift it trusts to let Washington pry wider. No wonder: after 23 years, hysterical U.S. hostility gave way to a decade of infatuation with the world's most populous country. Only now are sentiments shifting toward a more or less reasonable center. "We're achieving a stable way to manage the differences between our two countries," says a high State Department official, "without either side blowing the relationship apart."

Ties between the U.S. and China do seem to be entering a promising phase. In public and in private, both Reagan and his hosts struck a good balance between hopefulness and clear-sighted sobriety. Reagan's Pacific overtures may have consisted more of ceremony and style than substance; but the President proved to the world, and to himself, that he can sit and deal in a friendly fashion with Communists. That point, and the trip, were worth making.

—By Kurt Andersen. Reported by David Aikman/Peking and Robert Ajemian and Laurence I. Barrett with the President