President Richard Nixon spent eight days in China, during which he met Chairman Mao and signed the Shanghai Communiqué with Premier Zhou Enlai. This would begin a thaw in relations that would be made official in 1979. 

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The first Liaison Offices were established in Beijing and Washington. These functioned as informal diplomatic posts during the years prior to normalization. However, for several years the United States continued to maintain its embassy in Taiwan. 

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On January 8, Zhou Enlai – first Premier of the People’s Republic of China – passed away from bladder cancer. 

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At 3:42 a.m. on July 28, 1976, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the region around Tangshan, Hebei, China. Within minutes, 85 percent of the buildings in Tangshan collapsed or were rendered unusable, all services failed, and most of the highway and railway bridges collapsed or were seriously damaged. The official report claimed 242,769 deaths and 164,851 serious injuries in Tangshan, making it among the deadliest natural disasters in China’s history. 

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Mao Zedong suffered two major heart attacks, one in March and another in July, then a third on September 5, rendering him an invalid. He died four days later, at 00:10 on September 9, 1976, at the age of 82. 

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US President Jimmy Carter announced full diplomatic recognition of China would take place in January 1979, while acknowledging the PRC’s One China principle and severing normal ties with Taiwan. President Reagan visited China in April 1984. In June, the US government permitted Beijing to make purchases of US military equipment. 

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Deng, now paramount leader of China, launched the first “Strike Hard” Anti-crime Campaign, a massive crime-fighting effort in response to the worsening public safety of post-Cultural Revolution China. Counterrevolutionaries were one of the targets. 

After two years of negotiations, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and China’s Premier of the State Council Zhao Ziyang signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration. Under the agreement, Britain would relinquish control of the New Territories to China following the end of the 99-year lease (July 1, 1997). Britain would also relinquish control of Hong Kong Island and the southern part of the Kowloon Peninsula. China declared that following the return to China in 1997, Hong Kong would become a Special Administrative Region and retain a high degree of autonomy under the ‘One country, two systems’ principle. The intertwining of the Guangdong and HK economies accelerated after the 1984 agreement. 

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Following the death of General Secretary Hu Yaobang in April, thousands of students held demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, demanding democratic reforms and an end to corruption. On June 3, the government sent in military troops to clear the square. Tensions between the US and PRC continued into the next year. While both sides lobbed criticisms at each other, diplomatic ties were never severed and China remained open to foreign trade.