#2: Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong
For most of our childhoods, China was a vast, sealed-off country. Then, in 1972, President Richard Nixon flew to Beijing, a trip people said was impossible. The handshake between Nixon and the Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong was more than a greeting. It was a signal to the entire world that decades of hostile silence were over. We watched the black-and-white footage, feeling the strangeness and the importance of it. That one gesture opened the door for relations to resume and changed the balance of world power forever.
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