The United States and China Since World War II: A Brief History

A Brief History

Chi Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317454120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book surveys the complicated history of U.S.-Chinese relations. After two brief chapters providing historical context, the focus shifts to the mid-twentieth century, the wartime alliance, the war's bitter aftermath, and the decades since World War II, including the path from normalisation to China's hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics. The author traces the ways in which the two countries have managed the blend of common and competitive interests in their economic and strategic relationships; the shifting political base for Sino-American relations within each country; the emergence and dissolution of rival political coalitions supporting and opposing the relationship; the evolution of each society's perceptions of the other; and ongoing differences regarding controversial topics like Taiwan and human rights.

The author's early years in China, American education, and career as a China expert and an advisor on U.S.-China relations and cultural affairs for over fifty years, have afforded him unique opportunities to observe and participate in the development of this important relationship.

—1—

Historical Background

From Ancient China to the Early Twentieth Century

China has a rich and proud history dating back thousands of years before the birth of Christ. Historical China was primarily a feudal society. Governed by feudal kings until 221 BCE. and by emperors thereafter, it was relatively isolated from the West. Although Taoism and Buddhism had significant influence. Confucianism was the dominant unifying influence over a diverse population; the ideology emphasized conformity and obedience to superiors. With its general isolation, China gradually fell behind the We st economically, technologically, and militarily after the Enlightenment.

American interaction with China began in 1784 when the ship Empress of China brought American goods to what Chinese termed the Middle Kingdom and returned with abundant amounts of tea and porcelain.¹ Thus began years of robust trade between China and the United States. Americans imported items such as tea, spices, silk, and cotton, and exported items such as ginseng and furs.² Meanwhile, American missionaries came to China to try to spread Christianity, in the process building schools and hospitals, publishing books, and distributing written materials.³

The primary goal of the United States was to increase the amount of commerce. Other Western nations, however, sought to dominate China. In 1839. Great Britain went to war with China over the destruction of British and American opium supplies in Guangzhou (Canton). Britain’s victory in the Opium War led to the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. This document, which provided for the creation of live treaty ports for trade, began a hundred years of diplomatic contacts, although it was regarded by the Chinese as the “century of dishonor.”⁴

While the United States neither threatened force nor actually used it, it did benefil from the concessions made to other powers. In the Treaty of Wanghia of 1844, China agreed to grant America any trading concessions it made to other countries.⁵

In the nineteenth century, China suffered not only from foreign aggression, but also from internal unrest. The Christian-oriented Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and 1860s claimed approximately 20 million lives.⁶ The Boxers, a secret, anti-Western, anti-Christian society, staged an uprising in June 1900 in which several hundred Westerners, including the German minister to China, died.⁷ The United States sent Marines to join the Eight-Nation Alliance expedition to help free the hesicgcd foreign compounds in Beijing (Peking) and crush the rebellion.

Chinese Sovereignty Undermined

While the United States helped the Europeans quash the Boxer Rebellion, it also gradually played an increasing role in supporting control by the Chinese over their own country. When U.S. Secretary of State John Hay first promulgated the Open Door notes in September 1899, China was a weak imperial state ruled by the foreign (Manchu) Qing dynasty and exploited by the Europcan empires and Japan. The Open Door policy called for the imperialist powers to stop interfering with the interests of other powers in each of their respective spheres of influence; for China’s government to be the only body collecting customs fees; and for no power to institute preferential harbor or railroad fees in their respective spheres.⁸

In 1900, Hay’s supplementary, second set of notes condemned any expansion of spheres of influence and endorsed China as a “territorial and administrative entity.” That language later was changed to “territorial and administrative integrity.”⁹ Far from using the indemnity it received from China for the Boxer Rebellion for selfish purposes, the United States used the funds to bring Chinese students to study at American colleges and universities, and to establish Qinghua University in Beijing.¹⁰

Because the United States did not seek to dominate China, the Chinese came to see it as a protector against the predatory interests of the European powers and Japan. America helped prevent China from being fully colonized and partitioned; the competition among the various powers also helped save China from this plight.¹¹ (No power wanted any other slate to enjoy disproportionate gains from exploiting China. )

The End of Imperial Rule

The American policy toward China remained relatively consistent even as China underwent a momentous transformation. In December 1911, Chinese revolutionaries met in Nanjing and formed a republic to replace the imperial system of rule. Sun Yat-sen was installed as temporary president.

In March 1912, Sun stepped down and Yuan Shih-kai became president. Yuan was a former military man who had been hired by the Manchus to fight the Republicans but made a deal with them instead. During his time as president, he displayed autocratic tendencies.¹² It was during Yuan’s tenure that, in 1913, the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party (KMT), was created by former revolution aries.

After Yuan died in 1916, different power centers arose in China. Warlords took control of various parts of the north, while Sun Yat-sen created a rival government in Guangzhou in 1917. Meanwhile, on May 4. 1919. students in Beijing protested against the Versailles Peace Conference utter World War I because it allowed Japan to assume control of former German-held areas of China it had taken during the war. The protests started what became known as the May Fourth movement, a revolution in ideas that fueled Chinese nationalism.

During this time, foreign deliberations concerning China continued. At the Washington Conference of 1921–22. the Open Door policy was sanctioned by the Nine-Power Treaty regarding China. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks had come to power in Russia, creating the Soviet Union. The USSR sent advisors to China and succeeded in persuading members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded July 1921 in Shanghai, to join the Kuomintang in 1923.

Internal and External Unrest

Sun died in 1925, and General Chiang Kai-shek gradually assumed control of the Kuomintang, In 1927, the Nationalists turned on the Communists and broke up the Communist-backed labor unions in Shanghai; most Communist leaders took refuge in the lulls of Jiangxi Province in southern China. The next year Chiang’s forces captured Beijing and held power over all of China, unifying it politically for the first time since 1916. The Nationalists, however, could not stamp out the Communist movement, which organized in the countryside and set up a rival government in southern and central China.

The Nationalist-Communist conflict continued even as China faced the external threat of Japanese imperialism. Chinese nationalism had clashed with rising Japanese imperialism as the nineteenth century drew to a close. In the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 95, Japan wrested Korea and Taiwan away from the Qing dynasty. In 1904 05, Japan virtually destroyed the Czarist Russian Pacific fleet, winning for itself privileges in Manchuria. After the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I, Japan was allowed to temporarily retain Shandong, winch it had won from Imperial Germany thanks, to the Treaty of Versailles. Eneroaehment turned to overt conquest in 1931 when Japan invaded and conquered Manchuria outright: it then renamed the province Manchukuo and set up a Chinese puppet government there. U.S. Secretary of Slate Henry L. Stimson put forth the American policy of Non-Recognition: the United States would not recognize Japan’s conquests but would not intervene, even by imposing economic sanctions. At the time, of course, America and the rest of the world were suffering through the Great Depression. Americans were offended by Japan’s actions, but the nation was in no position to intervene on China’s behalf.

Despite the Japanese incursion, the Nationalists forced approximately 100,000 Communists out of south China, forcing them to undertake the “Long March” in 1934. All hut a few thousand perished before reaching Shenxi in northern China in late 1935. It was during the Long March that Mao Zedong became leader of the CCP.

When Chiang was kidnapped in 1936 by Nationalist troops whose homeland in Manchuria had been invaded by the Japanese, the terms of his release included forming a united front with Mao’s Communists to fight the Japanese. Chiang complied with this promise, and when Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937, both the Nationalists and the Communists resisted it.

Meanwhile, the United States continued to seek to protect the territorial integrity of China and equality for foreign nationals there in the face of Japanese aggression. By 1938, America continually called for “free competition” and “fair treatment,”¹³ despite the fact that the country had much more significant trade relations with Japan than ...