This introduction outlines the central argument of this book: diplomacy via cultural and scientific exchange was critically important to the changing relationship between the societies and governments of China and the United States between 1969 and 1978. This argument challenges the established account of Sino-American relations in this period: as determined by summit diplomacy between the top leaders in Washington and Beijing. Instead, this book reveals how a far broader and more diverse cast of Chinese and Americans—athletes, musicians, scientists, and many others—played a central role in the Sino-American rapprochement of the 1970s. Transnational societal contacts were interactively connected to high diplomacy between the US and Chinese governments and these two tracks of Sino-American diplomacy were mutually constitutive. This introduction places this argument in the context of the historiography of US-China relations and provides a sense of the scale and nature of Sino-American cultural and scientific exchange in this period.