Former US President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at the age of 100, is remembered in China for bringing an end to decades of hostility and establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing – at the expense of Taiwan.

Carter's most significant achievement was his announcement on Dec 15, 1978, that the US and the People's Republic of China had agreed to establish diplomatic ties on Jan 1, 1979. He emphasized that the US recognized the government of the PRC as the sole legal government of China.

On a bright January morning in 1979, then US president Jimmy Carter greeted a historic guest in Washington: Deng Xiaoping, the man who unlocked China's economy. The first leader of Communist China to visit the United States,