This chapter analyzes how diplomacy over Sino-American scientific cooperation was central to the final agreement for China and the United States to establish official diplomatic relations, finally reached in December 1978. In the wake of Mao Zedong’s death in September 1976, China’s emerging post-Mao leadership prioritized the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s scientific development, believing that drawing on scientific knowledge from outside of China – including from the United States – was critical to the country’s development. The Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC had long been arguing that China’s interest in US science provided leverage to the United States and, after President Jimmy Carter recruited the top leadership of the CSCPRC into his administration, utilizing this leverage became a critical part of US China policy. Thus, Chinese and US leaders, working hand-in-glove with the nongovernmental CSCPRC, achieved a simultaneous upgrading of the Sino-American scientific and diplomatic relationship in 1978 that offered a final demonstration of the symbiotic relationship between exchange and high-level Sino-American diplomacy in the pre-normalization era.

This chapter traces the history of the limited but nonetheless significant transnational contact between Americans and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) before 1969. The chapter posits that these earlier interactions acted as a precursor to the far more numerous and frequent – but in other ways not wholly dissimilar – exchange visits of the 1970s. The chapter also places these earlier Sino-American contacts in two broader contexts: the PRC’s overall people-to-people and exchange diplomacy before 1971, and the role of cultural exchanges in the Cold War era foreign relations of the United States. The chapter reviews a substantial historiography that demonstrates that the governments of both the PRC and the United States saw exchanges as a critical part of their country’s relations with the outside world before 1971. The chapter concludes with a section detailing the context in which, in the mid-1960s, the National Committee on US-China Relations and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with Mainland China (later the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China) were founded.

This epilogue briefly considers the landscape of the Sino-American exchange program as and after the establishment of official diplomatic relations – or normalization – was realized in 1979. It argues that, despite the changes in the US-China diplomatic relationship, there were as many continuities as there were changes between pre- and post-normalization exchange contacts, at least in the immediate wake of the establishment of official diplomatic relations.