National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, having faked a stomach illness in Pakistan to slip away undetected, landed in Beijing to begin two days of secret negotiations with Premier Zhou Enlai. The talks, kept hidden from allies and even most of Nixon's own cabinet, arranged the groundwork for Nixon's historic 1972 visit and the eventual normalization of US-China relations after over two decades of Cold War estrangement.
For more than twenty years the United States and the People's Republic of China had barely spoken, locked in mutual hostility since the Communist victory in 1949 and Chinese intervention against American forces in Korea. Nixon, a lifelong anti-communist, saw an opening: a rapprochement with Beijing could pressure Moscow and reshape the entire Cold War chessboard.
To pull it off, Kissinger needed absolute secrecy. On a trip ostensibly focused on South Asia, he complained of stomach trouble in Pakistan, retreated to a guest house for rest, and instead boarded a Pakistani plane to Beijing under an assumed low profile. Even the US ambassador to Pakistan wasn't told the real reason for his disappearance.
Over two days of talks, Kissinger and Zhou Enlai, feeling out old adversaries turned potential partners, negotiated the framework for a presidential visit. The secrecy held. When Nixon announced the breakthrough on television days later, it stunned the world, upended Taiwan's diplomatic standing, and set in motion the normalization that would remake global power alignments for the rest of the century.