U.S. public television, after just appearing in Britain.

Rediscovery

"Playing the China Card" uses new interviews with members of the Nixon administration and with Chinese Foreign Office officials, as well as the documentary record and amateur films of the period, to demonstrate how Washington anxiously solicited an invitation for Nixon to meet Mao Tse-tung, and how China ignored Washington's importunate overtures for six months.

When the Nixon party finally arrived in China it conducted itself in a manner curiously like that of foreign "tribute bearers" during China's imperial period -- as if the Americans were barbarians from beyond the borders of the celestial realm.

The gifts they brought were remarkably good ones. Nixon presented Mao Tse-tung and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai with diplomatic recognition, reversing an American policy two decades old.

And withthat, the United States gave China the seat on the U.N. Security Council held until then by the former Chinese Nationalist government of China, installed in Taiwan since defeat on the mainland in 1950.

The United States got absolutely nothing in return.

The strange thing is that this pattern of unsolicited U.S. diplomatic gifts, pressed upon the Chinese, despite their failure to reciprocate, has since been repeated by both the Bush and Clinton administrations.

President George Bush and his colleagues did everything in their power to prevent the 1989 Tiananmen massacre from damaging U.S.-Chinese relations, again to no evident U.S. advantage other than the pursuit of commercial relations -- which have, for the most part, proved a disappointment to the American side.

The Clinton administration has vainly looked for a "strategic partnership"