Exactly 50 years ago, in the penultimate week of July 1972, Bonn and Beijing began to establish diplomatic relations. But not in a very straightforward way. And that was no accident. One of the people behind it was an opposition politician from the CDU and, on the Chinese side, a Xinhua journalist in Bonn. The unusual actors jumped over their shadows and, just eleven weeks later, the Federal Republic and the People’s Republic sealed their new relationship with an official document. It is also called the shortest communiqué in China’s diplomatic history.