Leads a delegation to Beijing as the first U.S. Secretary of Commerce to visit China, advancing early U.S.–China commercial ties.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Juanita M. Kreps, then U.S. Secretary of Commerce, to lead a delegation to Beijing, making her the first Secretary of Commerce to visit China. While the exact day of the trip is not documented in available sources, the mission marked a milestone in U.S.–China commercial diplomacy.
The visit followed the formal normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China at the start of 1979. Kreps’s delegation sought to translate political rapprochement into concrete economic ties, exploring opportunities for trade, technology exchange, and industrial cooperation. For a department often seen as primarily domestic in orientation, her journey symbolized a new era of outward‑looking commercial policy.
The barrier she broke was both gendered and institutional. No previous Secretary of Commerce—always male—had undertaken such a mission. As a woman economist from Appalachian origins, Kreps stood at the intersection of multiple historic shifts: the opening of China’s economy, the expansion of global trade, and the emergence of women as principal actors in high‑stakes international negotiations.
Accounts of her tenure emphasize that this visit helped lay groundwork for an historic trade agreement between the U.S. and China later in 1979, and it reinforced the perception of Commerce as an active instrument of foreign economic policy. In women’s‑history terms, her first‑of‑its‑kind visit underscores how female leadership was reshaping not only domestic policy but the global economic landscape.