Welcome to the Cynic Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SubChina.

Subscribe to SubChina's daily access newsletter to keep on top of all the latest news from China from hundreds of different news sources.

Or check out all the original writing on the site at subchina.com, including reported stories,

editorials, and regular columns, as well as our growing library of videos and, of course, podcasts.

We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs,

from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs

and other Muslim people in China's Xinjiang region, to China's ambitious effort to eliminate poverty.

It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world.

I'm Kaisa Guo, coming to today from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

In the late 1960s, the United States,

mired in Vietnam, faced with mounting Soviet advances in post-colonial Africa and in the Middle

East, watching as the Kremlin put a quick end to the Prague Spring in 68, the U.S. began a deft

set of diplomatic moves calculated to balance Soviet power by signaling the possibility

of an opening to China. And in doing so, not only making a relaxation of tensions with the Soviet

Union possible, the period of detente, which lasted from about 69 to the Soviet invasion

of Afghanistan in about 1980, but also signaling to Hanoi that it wouldn't enjoy the unconditional backing of

Moscow and Beijing and that it should probably, you know, hurry up and negotiate with the U.S.

Of course, this was made a bit easier by the fact that China and the Soviet Union were then

at one another's throats.

They actually had bloody skirmishes on the Amur River in 69, and Mao was convinced that a

nuclear strike by Moscow was imminent. There were, of course, other reasons for the opening to China.

Kissinger believed that by entangling China in a network of connections to the U.S.

...