Among the legacies of the era of Mao Tse-tung, the opening to the United States ranks as one of the most important. More than any other foreign policy initiative in Mao's twenty-seven years in power, the Sino-American accommodation reflected the Chairman's determination to establish China's legitimacy among the world's major powers. In a near-term sense, the restoration of Sino-American relations reversed China's international isolation and estrangement of the Cultural Revolution period. In a more long-term perspective, it ended two decades of diplomatic abnormality between the United States and China, and without it Peking's international emergence in the 1970s and 1980s would have been incalculably more difficult, and probably much less successful.

From the earliest hints of Sino-American accommodation in 1968, Mao was vital to this process. Yet even as the Chairman understood that closer relations with the West were a strategic imperative, he remained to the last highly ambivalent about the longer-term implications of incorporating China within the existing international system. Strategic and political necessity dictated Peking's reconciliation with the capitalist world, in particular the accommodation with America and with Japan, China's main adversary of the first half of the twentieth century. For psychological as much as for political reasons, Mao rarely admitted that his actions were dictated by weakness and vulnerability, or even that China sought such accommodation at least as actively as its former enemies. As a result, Mao never fully accepted the larger consequences of linking China with the outside world. Mao's ambivalence persisted to the time of his death, as he continued to sanction the struggle of his Cultural Revolution allies against leaders far more prepared to recognize the political and ideological implications of an internationally engaged China.