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Twenty-eight years ago this month, President George Bush took a break from his vacation in Kennebunkport, Maine, to deliver a big speech about China. Bush flew from his family’s compound on the Maine coast to his alma mater, Yale, and gave a graduation speech that doubled as a policy announcement.

It was 1991, only two years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Some members of Congress were trying to persuade Bush to punish China’s human rights atrocities by refusing to renew its status as a “most favored” trading partner of the United States. But Bush said no.

He justified the decision with soaring language about the morality of engaging with China rather than punishing it. “It is wrong to isolate China if we hope to influence it,” he said.