Many Americans don’t realize that the relationship predates by more than 100 years, Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China. Here is former US President Ulysses S. Grant with Chinese viceroy Li Hongzhang in 1879.

There’s always been an American fascinations with the Chinese “other.” Here’s Anna May Wong, the first non-white film star in the United States, in 1924. Wong’s overt sensuality mesmerized (and scandalized) audiences in American and China. One of her most memorable lines: “I danced once before but there was trouble, men, knives….”

During World War II, China sold its story in the United States by dispatching attractive women as spokespeople for the government of Chiang Kaishek. Here’s “aviatrix” and pilot, Li Xiaqing, on a barnstorming tour of the USA in 1937-38.

There’s always been high politics as well. Here’s FDR with Chiang Kaishek and Churchill in Cairo. One of FDR’s ambitions was to elevate China to parity with the UK and the USSR.

Americans have always been most comfortable with a China that seemed wiling to become like the US. Here’s Deng Xiaoping in 1979 visiting Texas.

America was revolted at the crackdown around Tiananmen Square in June 1989 not the least because so many Americans expected China to evolve in a different, “more American” direction.

Americans were further shocked when China began to push back at the US and seek to dislodge the United States as the pre-eminent power in Asia. Here’s a 2001 photograph of Lt. Cmdr. Wang Wei, a Chinese pilot, who died in a dangerous maneuver that forced a US spy plane to land on Hainan Island in 2001.

From the earliest days of the relationship, American business played an oversize role in fashioning America’s ties to China. Here’s the US trading headquarters outside of Canton in the early 1800s.

Some Chinese businessmen, like Houqua in this @1820s portrait, cultivated special relationships with their American counterparts. Houqua was reputedly one of the richest men on the globe in the early 1800s. He invested some of his profits in building railroads in the United States.

Prominent Americans made fortunes in China. Here’s Frederic Delano, the grandfather of FDR. He profited considerably from the opium trade.

The idea of the China market transfixed Americans, such as CV Starr, who sold insurance to Chinese in the 1900s. Here’s Starr with a Chinese client in the early 1900s.

That obsession has continued to this day. The obsequious look in Mark Zuckerberg’s face as he glad-hands China’s Communist Party boss, Xi Jinping, at the White House in 2015, speaks volumes. Facebook is still banned in China.

Racism and xenophobia have also colored the relationship. This is a document from the California Workingmen’s Party in the mid-1800s. The American working class has always feared Chinese labor.

Poems, such as “The Heathen China,” published in 1870, summed up the contradictory way Anglo-Americans viewed the Chinese. The Chinese immigrant was both an object of derision but also a wily competitor.

Racist stereotypes in the United States still persist. This cover of The National Review comes from March 1997.

Another powerful view of China in America is that of a weak or sick country in need of an American cure. Here an American doctor in an 1887 woodblock print removes a tumor from the womb of a Chinese patient.

Here’s a poster appealing for American support for China’s fight against Japan during World War II, depicting China as a helpless baby.

For its part, China’s government also encouraged anti-American xenophobia among its people. Here’s a poster during the Korean War from just after China’s 1949 Communist revolution associating the US with Nazi Germany.

This cartoon, which appeared in the Communist Party’s Worker’s Daily, celebrates the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Celebrating American failure was a central aspect of Communist Chinese ideology.

Xenophobic and powerfully anti-American tropes have endured in China. On May 7, 1999, US forces reportedly accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The Chinese government encouraged anti-American demonstrations as a way to continue its battle against Western liberal ideas. Here’s then US Ambassador to China Jim Sasser looking at the destruction caused by the demonstration.

An American education was long viewed as a way to pull China into the modern world. Here’s Yung Wing, the first Chinese to be educated at Yale—in the 1850s.

American missionaries were at the forefront of the campaign to modernize China. Here’s Southern Methodist missionary Young John Allen who started the most influential newspaper in China in the 1880s.

Medical missionaries Ida Kahn and Mary Stone brought Western medicine to China and also battled their Western missionary counterparts to treat their Chinese colleagues equitably.

In addition to beauty, business and racist tropes, Americans have from time to time thought of aspects of Chinese culture as extremely cool. Here’s Bruce Lee practicing kung-fu with one of his famous students—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

American mores also fascinated the Chinese. This 2011 photograph of then US Ambassador to China Gary Locke touched off a huge controversy in China because Locke was buying his own coffee and toting his own book bag. This would never happen in China, said many Chinese, given the hierarchical nature of Chinese officialdom.

During the 1960s, China’s Communists attempted to cultivate relations with leftist activists in the United States. Here’s Robert Williams, an African-American radical, being feted in Beijing.