Tag: high officials

On April 19, 1979, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware was in Beijing, meeting with China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, when he put Washington’s nascent friendship with the Communists to the test.

That Biden was sitting there at all was remarkable. The United States and China had been implacable foes for decades. In Washington, Deng and his cadres were seen as a dangerous arm of the Red menace, their conquest of China 30 years earlier bitterly lamented as its “loss” to