This chapter considers the tensions in Sino-American exchange diplomacy felt in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation and replacement by Gerald Ford. Ford lacked domestic political authority and thus was unable to find the negotiating flexibility necessary to achieve a deal to establish official diplomatic relations with Beijing. The resulting deadlock in high-diplomatic negotiations was one cause of stasis and conflict over cultural exchanges in 1974 and 1975 that culminated in the last-minute cancellation of a tour by a famous Chinese performing arts troupe, news that made the front pages of US newspapers. This chapter also examines the more gradual accumulation of tension in exchanges arising from American resentment at tight controls on visitors to China and Chinese resentment at impolitic behavior by American guests, ranging from photographing evidence of Chinese “backwardness” to drunken brawls.

The high watermark in the Sino-American relationship during the Henry Kissinger era came in 1973 with the creation of “liaison offices,” or de facto embassies, in each capital: These liaison offices further deepened and formalized the diplomatic relationship after the Richard Nixon–Mao Zedong summit of 1972 and would remain the closest that the two governments would come to establishing official diplomatic relations before Kissinger left government in January 1977. This chapter reveals that – in cause, conception, and execution – liaison offices were a direct outgrowth of the exchange relationship. Other new milestones in that relationship were also set in 1973, not least during the visit of the largest cultural delegation yet to travel to the People’s Republic of China: the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, 1973 also saw the first signs of new tensions in exchange diplomacy as lingering Sino-American disagreements about Cambodia and Taiwan, as well as turbulent Chinese domestic politics, led to confrontations in cultural contacts and during a Congressional delegation to China led by Senator Warren Magnuson.

Zhang Chunqiao helped Mao launch the Cultural Revolution and became a core member of the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG). At the 10th Party Congress in 1973, Mao promoted him into the most powerful institution in the Chinese Communist Party, the Politburo Standing Committee, a rarely seen leap for a pre–Cultural Revolution vice-provincial-level official in the space of seven years. When his daughter asked him right after the congress whether he felt a sense of triumph, Zhang responded, “I don’t feel much. Which revolutionary base area did I build? Which army did I lead? Which battle did I win?” (Zheng 2017: ix) Despite his formal power, Zhang knew that since he was a writer and an ideologue instead of someone with faction followers throughout the party and the military, he had very little informal power. Given their limited political experience and narrow political networks in the party, why did Mao elevate Zhang and others in the scribblers mafia (笔杆子) into senior offices during the Cultural Revolution?

Chapter 5 focuses on the 1967 Cultural Revolution campaign against Wang Guangmei, wife of the disgraced former PRC president Liu Shaoqi. A detailed firsthand account of Wang’s emblematic and theatrical mass struggle session at Tsinghua University introduces the story, followed by background to provide context for her poor treatment, and the larger political developments which led to Wang and Liu’s ultimate downfall. These include Wang’s early elite education as scientist, her work as an interpreter for the Chinese Communist Party’s underground in Beijing, and her eventual reassignment to Yan’an and role in the land-reform movement of 1947. The extreme violence of this earlier period contrasts with leading role in the implementation of the Four Cleans campaign in rural Hebei as part of the larger Socialist Education movement in the early 1960s. Her experience with exposing allegations of cadre malfeasance in the Peach Garden Brigade of Funing County ultimately provided a model for a nationwide anticorruption campaign, with Mao’s encouragement. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the violent backlash against the top-down work-team approach of the Four Cleans, advocated by Liu Shaoqi and Wang, in favor of the more chaotic bottom-up Red Guard approach of the Cultural Revolution that brought them down.

Chapter 4 focuses on the career of the actress Shangguan Yunzhu, from bourgeois film star in late 1940s Shanghai to re-educated “art and literary worker” in post-revolutionary New China. Shangguan’s early career and education enjoyed limited success but built on her fortuitous affiliation with the left-wing Kunlun Film Company. Shangguan’s post-revolutionary private and professional life had ups and downs, including allegations against her husband, Cheng Shuyao, during the Three Antis campaign (anti-corruption, anti-waste, anti-bureaucracy) in 1951. Her return to the limelight as a re-educated “old star” came in the context of PRC cinema of the mid-1950s. The controversy surrounding a much-publicized 1956 dinner she had with Mao Zedong shaped Shangguan’s own political fortunes compared to those of her colleagues during the Anti-Rightist movement of 1957. Finally, Shangguan was denounced over a series of humiliating struggle sessions at the start of the Cultural Revolution, which coincided with a diagnosis of terminal breast cancer, together leading the actress to commit suicide in 1968. Shangguan’s legacy, with her close relationship with Mao and Jiang Qing, reveal the persistence of metropolitan modernity in spite of the Party’s mainstream revolutionary socialist discourse.