WASHINGTON — Richard H. Solomon, a China scholar who assisted in the historic ‘‘Ping-Pong diplomacy’’ that led to the opening of US-Sino relations in the 1970s, who became an authority on China’s pressure tactics during negotiations, and who, as a top American diplomat, helped end a long-running conflict in Cambodia, died March 13 of brain cancer at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 79.
He had retired in 2012 after 19 years leading the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded research group for conflict resolution.
Dr. Solomon was an intellectual polymath whose interests also encompassed science and photography. His career took him from academia to senior positions in government and think tanks.
At the State Department, he was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and from 1989 to 1992 he represented the United States in peace talks on Cambodia. He also served six months as ambassador to the Philippines.
His State Department portfolio, at various times, included democratization movements from Manila to Santiago, Chile, and nuclear arms talks with Moscow and Pyongyang. Secretary of State George Shultz praised Dr. Solomon’s skill in strategic long-term planning, particularly on the ‘‘evolving relationship’’ with the collapsing Soviet Union.
But the central focus on his life’s work was China.
In his books — perceptive volumes on revolutionary leader Mao Zedong and Chinese political negotiating strategies — he sought to help US policymakers comprehend a land that for decades was an almost hermetically closed society, hostile toward the West.
Roderick MacFarquhar, a China scholar at Harvard University, said the books revealed Mao as a man who, as a matter of character, ‘‘loved upheaval and revolutionary upsurge.’’ He said Dr. Solomon provided ‘‘very important insight’’ into how Mao shaped China’s Communist system to mirror his own tumultuous personality.
Dr. Solomon had an extraordinary opportunity to help shape China policy when, in the fall of 1971, he was hired by the National Security Council.
Virtually no Americans had been on the Chinese mainland since the Communist revolution in 1949. But several diplomatic overtures by the Nixon administration, spearheaded by then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger, helped set in motion a thaw in US-China relations.
