Mao zedong once wrote that a revolution is not a dinner party, so it's probably a good thing that he wasn't around on the Saturday evening following the Beijing Olympics' opening ceremonies. Amid the gardens of Jianfu Palace, tucked away in the northwest corner of the Forbidden City, the power brokers who forged the ties that today bind China and the U.S. gathered to put a punctuation mark on the end of an era-and make it an exclamation point, not a period. Jianfu's formal name translates as the Garden of the Palace of Established Happiness, its choice an elegant if subtle acknowledgment that the Americans present contributed to this extraordinary moment in China's long history. Henry Kissinger, the architect of U.S. rapprochement with China in 1972, was there. So, too, was former President George H.W. Bush, who took considerable political risks at home to rebuild Sino-American relations in the wake of Tiananmen Square.
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