On February 21, 1972, Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing. A Chinese account gives Zhou Enlai’s words of welcome: “You have reached your hand across the widest ocean in the world to shake mine. We have had no contact for 25 years.”
In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that he knew Zhou had been “deeply insulted” when John Foster Dulles refused to shake his hand at the Geneva Conference in 1954. “When I reached the bottom step, therefore, I made a point of extending my hand as I walked toward him.”
The Geneva story itself is disputed. Zhou told it to Edgar Snow in 1960 and raised it with Henry Kissinger in 1971. As quoted by the writer John Tkacik, the Chinese diplomat Wang Bingnan wrote in a 1984 memoir that nothing of the sort ever happened.