The seed of paranoia had been sowed back in 1954, when US secretary of state John Foster Dulles refused to shake Zhou’s hand at the Geneva Conference, where diplomats from Asia, Europe and the US came together for three months to try to settle the conflicts in Korea and Indochina.

Only a year had passed since fighting in Korea had ceased. In Indochina, the French army was about to capitulate, and the US would be drawn into the fight. “Communist China”, as it was called in Washington, was on the opposite side of both of those conflicts, and Dulles was in no mood to shake the hand of an enemy.

And the story goes that almost 20 years later, Zhou had not got over the slight.

Writers on both sides of the Pacific have long been devoted to this narrative. In her 2006 account of the meeting, Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan wrote, “Nixon’s first moments in China had been worrying both sides ever since the trip had been arranged. The Americans feared that Nixon might forget to shake hands with [Zhou]; the Chinese suspected that he might repeat Dulles’ snub.”

Historian John Garver added a sense of drama to his 2016 recounting, writing, “With careful discipline, Zhou waited until Nixon extended his hand before raising his own hand to reciprocate.”

Gao Wenqian, who is credited with writing an official biography of Zhou when he was a researcher at the Communist Party’s Central Research Office, amped up the drama when he wrote in 2007, “Workers rolled a gangway up to the jet entrance in double-time. The entire world was watching.

“When the hatchway opened, Nixon, a man of tremendous pent-up energy, bounded down the steps, hand outstretched, so eager was he to grasp the hand of his host. Zhou Enlai did not raise his hand in greeting until the president was advancing at him on hard ground. Then, and only then, did he offer his own hand, and he raised it to the level of his elbow only, because a war wound that had maimed his forearm many years earlier prevented him from lifting it any higher.”

All good material. Too bad none of it is true.

The American press creating such drama around the handshake was consistent with most Americans’ under­standing of China at the time. Which was not great. Nixon characterised them to Zhou as “our rather naive American press” and Nixon and US national security adviser Henry Kissinger were determined not to let them derail what they viewed as their legacy – rapprochement with China.

The Dulles slight, in fact, had been put to rest the previous July, when Kissinger made his secret trip to Beijing, where upon Zhou’s arrival at the Diaoyutai State Guest House to meet the American delegation, “I ostentatiously stuck out my hand,” Kissinger later wrote. “[Zhou] gave me a quick smile and took it. It was the first step in putting the legacy of the past behind us.”

The year before Handshake-gate, James Reston of The New York Times had secured an interview with Zhou that stretched into a 10pm dinner and ended past midnight. Reston’s injection of his own politics into the interview with a foreign leader seems unusual in a 1971 context, but was perhaps a preview of times to come, when journalists seem intent on building their personal “brands” by making the news, not reporting it.

Among other things, Reston expressed – to the premier of China and Times readers in capitals and embassies around the world – his own views about Taiwan’s place in the United Nations and, indeed, its importance to the world. These were part of a verbatim, full-page printing of the interview in the Times, a condition Zhou had set before the interview.

“You asked me before about what did I mean by favouring China and the end of the Taiwan relationship,” Reston said to Zhou. “We cannot resolve the problems in the world without China. It’s just that simple. We can resolve the problems of the world without Taiwan.”

The volatile China-Taiwan dynamic was hardly “just that simple” for Nixon and Kissinger. Worse, after telling Zhou, “I should say one thing to you privately about this,” Reston commented on Nixon’s history as a staunch anti-communist, suggesting that he may be trying to “rebuke his own past […] and the role he has played in the Cold War” by trying to normalise relations.

Zhou didn’t take the bait. “Critical as he was of past United States policy in China, Taiwan, Indochina and Japan,” Reston wrote, “he said nothing that could be regarded as critical of the President personally.”

Nixon read the interview and flipped. The man who had made his mark as a young congressman from California hunting communists in the US government in the 1940s knew how politically complex it would be to succeed in re-establishing relations between the two countries. The last thing he needed was a Times reporter stirring things up.

Nixon put a blackout on White House staff talking to the Times. “I want the goddamned staff to understand,” he told Kissinger on the phone the day after publication in August 1971, “that the blackout on the Times is total. We are not going to get anything out of Reston except a bad shake and he did us in – he did his best to do us in – it didn’t turn out that way particularly, due to Zhou Enlai’s cooperation.”

As February 1972 neared, Nixon tried to ban both the Times and The Washington Post from the trip. It took repeated warnings from his staff about how bad that would look to ultimately secure a seat on the plane for one reporter from each paper.

Nixon was crucially aware of his need for the media – his enemies – to publish the photos and stories he and Kissinger wanted the world to see and read. And they knew the image of the handshake would endure long after the words were forgotten. Nixon had been undone by television during his 1960 debate with John Kennedy. He was determined to use the power of imagery to convey his historical endeavour with China.

The logistics behind the media’s efforts were themselves a massive undertaking, led by a White House advance team. The Chinese, who had nowhere near the communications technology the US had in 1972, built an empty “television station” – a shell – that the big three American networks equipped with 25 tonnes of their own state-of-the-art transmission equipment, including a portable satellite earth station, all flown to China on a TWA Boeing 707.

They also established a press centre in the Cultural Palace of Nationalities, which the Times wrote, “[met] virtually every requirement of the coddled American communicators. [It had] 24-hour telephone and telegraph service and refreshments, 10 soundproof broadcast booths, blackboards and bulletin boards and television monitors and lounges and other assorted conveniences that the resident foreign correspondents found simply staggering”.

Indeed, the technology from the country that had landed men on the moon was awe-inspiring to the Chinese. And the number of members of the American press on the trip – about 150 – was overwhelming in a society where the function of the press was mostly to transcribe what they were told.

In the US, while millions would see and read about the event, most would do so on one of three major TV networks or one of the few dozen newspapers or magazines whose journalists had obtained credentials to join the trip. During and afterwards, there was much com­plain­ing by the media that they were being managed, both by their hosts – who restricted where they could go and followed them even there – and by the White House team.

As Air Force One taxied towards the terminal that February morning, it passed a line of billboard-sized white characters on bright red backgrounds, “Workers of the world unite!”, lining the runway with a mile of leafless trees behind it.

ABC news anchor Harry Reasoner described the staircase pulling up to the plane as “handsome and shiny, self-propelled steps”. It looked like an aircraft stairway affixed to the back of a pickup truck, its top jutting out over the vehicle’s bonnet. Whatever it was, it was not “rolled up […] double time” by “workers” as Zhou biographer Gao wrote.

The driver leaned his head out of the window for a look, then eased it skilfully into place below the hatch, which someone inside had opened seconds earlier. A couple of dozen photographers jockeyed for position on a temporary viewing stand erected about 14 metres from the plane. A White House cameraman was lurking at the pilot’s door to capture Nixon from inside the plane. “LIVE FROM PEKING” appeared on the screens of Americans viewing around the country that night.

Nixon and his wife, Pat, stepped out, the gentleman half a step behind the first lady, paused briefly, then started down together. After a step or two, Nixon applauded lightly, his hands at waist level, as if to say, “Yay, we made it.” It did not look presidential, but what TV viewers could not see, and had to strain to hear, was Zhou and others in the Chinese delegation applauding first at the foot of the stair­case, a Chinese custom, Nixon later recalled – not the act of anyone worried about Nixon not shaking hands.

Far from “bound[ing] down the steps, hand outstretched, so eager was he,” as Gao wrote, Nixon descended slowly and deliberately, with Pat at his side; no other American appeared in the plane’s doorway until they were almost at the bottom of the stairs. It was his moment.

Knowing the image he wanted the cameras to capture, Nixon reached out as he stepped onto the landing of the staircase, and kept his arm extended as he took one step towards the instinctively raised hand of Zhou, whose elbow was perma­nently bent, not from a war wound but from being set poorly after a fall from a horse years earlier.

Nixon then introduced Pat to Zhou, and the two smiled, shook hands and exchanged greetings. Zhou motioned gracefully for the Nixons to continue down the receiving line while he stayed at the bottom of the stairs to greet the rest of the Americans. Second in line was Marshal Ye Jianying, who had met Kissinger with a smile and handshake when he arrived the previous July, an event unseen by the world at the time. Ye now gave Nixon a vigorous handshake.

And so on. Nixon, Pat and the other Americans pro­ceeded down the line of the Chinese who were there to meet them. Stopping behind each member of his delegation, Ji announced to Nixon, in a clear, sharp, American voice, the name and title of each person he met. By the time Nixon arrived at the last person in the receiving line, he was shaking the hand of the deputy treasurer of the civil aeronautics board. The man graciously doffed his cap as Nixon and Pat arrived in front of him.

In marked contrast to today, few people in either country saw the other country’s press coverage. When Nixon and Mao met that afternoon and Chinese photo­graphers snapped the images that would be on the front pages of China’s newspapers the next day – to be seen by China’s 860 million people as Mao’s stamp of approval – the deal was sealed. A carefully orchestrated collaboration of images by the two sides communicated to the world a sense of optimism, a message that a hopeful endeavour was afoot.

The leaders of the two countries were deadly serious people in a deadly serious time. Overarching human­­ity in 1972 was the fear of a nuclear exchange. The US and the Soviet Union were each racing to build a larger “deterrent” than their rivals in the small club that counted only China, Britain and France as its other members.

China and the US were seeking common inter­ests as a basis for detente in the days when schoolchildren in the US were drilled in how to duck under their desks, as if that could save them from a nuclear device. In China, “the great majority of our big and medium cities [have] networks of underground tunnels”, in preparation for such an event, Zhou told Reston during his interview.

The US, embroiled in Vietnam, had seen thousands of soldiers killed in action by early 1972. Nixon had promised Americans he would extricate the country “honourably” from the war. He and Kissinger were also looking for leverage to force Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Union into a strategic arms limitation treaty. On both of these issues, they hoped better relations with Beijing would help.

And former invader-turned-US-ally, Japan, two decades into Asia’s first economic miracle, had voices in Tokyo calling for re-militarisation. Japan’s world-beating manufacturers were already exporting cars to the richest market in the world; China’s GDP per capita was US$132.

Seeking common ground on which to build some kind of relationship – one less hostile, at a minimum – could benefit both sides. Their leaders understood the import­ance of words and symbols and, perhaps above all, the importance of treating each other diplomatically.

Even dissenting voices, of which there were plenty in the US, understood the impact of their words and the value of expressing them thoughtfully and moderately. The cala­mities of World War II and the Korean war were events that occurred during the lifetimes of many whose voices could reach the public at the time.

That evening, Monday morning in the US, Zhou and the Chinese hosted Nixon and the Americans at a banquet at the Great Hall of the People. Both men made brief speeches and toasts. They are available online and worth viewing from the perspective of almost half a century later. Zhou spoke first, memorably observing, “The American people are a great people. The Chinese people are a great people. The peoples of our two countries have always been friendly to each other.”

Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China

Nixon began with a “tribute” to those who prepared the “magnificent dinner” and played the “splendid music”.

To viewers, wherever they were and whatever language they spoke, the pictures of the people of the two countries sitting and sharing a meal together spoke volumes; more than any words could. The rekindling of a relationship between the two great powers, on hold for a quarter of a century, was sparked back to life by hundreds of simple face-to-face encounters and the common symbols of friend­ship – handshakes, smiles and the sharing of a meal.

“At this very moment,” said Nixon, “through the wonder of telecommunications, more people are seeing and hear­ing what we say, than on any other such occasion in the whole history of the world.”

Wen En and Wen You provided research and translation assistance.