conceptsspot.blogg.se - Nixon visits china time magazine

China is a major importer of Australian iron ore and other mineral and agricultural goods. After the United States, China is Australia’s biggest source of imported products, and a major source of students and tourists. By 2008, Australia’s two-way trade with China was worth almost $68 billion. Australia did conduct trade with China during the 1950s, but the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1972 paved the way for rapid expansion.(The Nixon visit took place in February 1972.) The 1971 Whitlam-led visit came several days before the United States announced that President Richard Nixon would visit Beijing. As Opposition leader, he led a Labor Party delegation to China in 1971-at a time when the McMahon government was still refusing to open any diplomatic ties with the country. The visit depicted here was not Whitlam’s first to China.

By the early 1970s China and the Soviet Union had also been on poor terms for many years, even though both countries had communist governments. The Cold War was a period of tension between the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, which began after the end of the World War II and finally ended in 1991.

After nearly three decades of the Cold War, Whitlam’s visit to China in 1973 began the first period of diplomatic relations between Australia and any communist country.

Whitlam, Prime Minister from 1972 to 1975, established diplomatic relations with mainland China soon after coming to power.

Prime Minister Whitlam’s 1973 diplomatic trip was the first visit to China by an Australian Prime Minister and a milestone in Australia–China relations.

Beside him, with her arms crossed, is a Chinese interpreter. Among a small crowd watching Whitlam is Australia’s first ambassador to China, Stephen Fitzgerald, dressed in a coat and tie.

Further along the wall, others are doing the same. Dressed in a long coat, Whitlam has his ear to part of the circular Echo Wall in the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. This is a black-and-white photograph of the Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during his historic visit to China between 31 October and 4 November 1973.