International Competition in China, 1899-1991

The Rise, Fall, and Restoration of the Open Door Policy

Bruce A. Elleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415563932
• eBook ISBN: 9781317537779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

China's recent economic reforms have opened its economy to the world. This policy, however, is not new: in the late nineteenth century, the United States put forward the Open Door Policy as a counter to European exclusive 'spheres of influence' in China. This book, based on extensive original archival research, examines and re-evaluates China's Open Door Policy. It considers the policy from its inception in 1899 right through to the post-1978 reforms. It relates these changes to the various shifts in China's international relations, discusses how decades of foreign invasion, civil war and revolution followed the destruction of the policy in the 1920s, and considers how the policy, when applied in Taiwan after 1949, and by Deng Xiaoping in mainland China after 1978, was instrumental in bringing about, respectively, Taiwan's 'economic miracle' and mainland China's recent economic boom. The book argues that, although the policy was characterised as United States 'economic imperialism' during the Cold War, in reality it helped China retain its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

1 The origins of the Open Door Policy in China

China’s nineteenth-century history was tumultuous, with the first and second Opium Wars opening up China to foreign influence and, in some cases, territorial invasion. The British are usually cited as the worst imperialists, because of their permanent colony on the island of Hong Kong, even though the total territory transferred from China to Britain was minuscule. It was Russia, in point of fact, that took the most land from China. Just as Siberia was traditionally considered to be Russia’s final frontier, the Far East was seen as Imperial Russia’s best chance for territorial and economic expansion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹

Between 1858 and 1860, Russia signed a series of treaties with China – the Treaty of Aigun, the Treaty of Tianjin, and the Treaty of Beijing – ceding to Russia the Amur region, the Maritime Province, and significant territories in Central Asia adjoining Xinjiang, which together equaled in size France and Britain combined. Russia’s territorial appetite was not satisfied, however, with St. Petersburg next setting its sights on Mongolia and Manchuria. If the Qing dynasty collapsed in China, then Russia was prepared to take its share of the spoils. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Russia’s foreign policy in the Far East largely revolved around finding ways to increase its influence. This territorial encroachment, in turn, compelled Japan and the other Great Powers to follow suit.

Only the United States had a different view. When France and Britain started the second Opium War in the mid 1850s, the United States refused to participate in “securing larger commercial privileges by intimidation, or possibly by force;” by contrast, in 1856, Secretary of State Lewis Cass stated that U.S. policy was not motivated by “territorial aggrandizement or the acquisition of political power” in China.² The U.S. government promoted free trade throughout Asia. Rather than invading and taking land in China, as many of the other Great Powers were doing, when General Ulysses S. Grant visited Asia in 1879, he stated that U.S. policy supported the territorial integrity and independence of China. Twenty years later, Secretary of State John Hay proclaimed in 1899 that China should not be divided into competing spheres of interest, but should be open for all countries to invest in and trade with. This doctrine was called the “Open Door Policy.”

America’s friendly relations with China

It is often overlooked that the American Revolution was intimately linked with the China trade. The 1773 Boston Tea Party was protesting the high British taxes on Chinese tea. Soon after the American Revolution, the United States opened direct trade with China when its merchant ship Empress of China arrived in Canton (modern-day Guangzhou) in 1784. This event led to the gradual development of triangular trade among Europe–China–America that was highly beneficial to all parties.

U.S. merchants sold a wide variety of goods to China, including opium. U.S. opium sales from Smyrna, Turkey, began in 1805. By the 1830s, opium sales accounted for one-quarter of all U.S. exports to China. However, the U.S. portion of this trade only equaled about 10 percent of the total opium trade. When China cracked down on the sale of opium beginning in 1839, U.S. merchants stopped importing opium. The opium trade was much more important to British merchants. When war broke out between China and Great Britain, the United States remained neutral and did not participate in the first Opium War (1839–1842).

After defeating China, British diplomats opened peace talks in Nanjing. On October 8, 1842, the U.S. representative in China, Commodore Lawrence Kearny, wrote to the Governor of Canton requesting “the attention of the Imperial Government might be called with respect to the commercial interests of the United States, and he hopes the importance of their trade will receive consideration, and their citizens in that matter be placed upon the same footing as the merchants of the nation most favored.”³ The next year, Kearny repeated that the U.S. government intended to ask for the same rights that China “grants to the traders from other countries.”⁴

Taking advantage of the most-favored-nation clause that was included in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, U.S. diplomats negotiated the Sino-U.S. Treaty of Wangxia. This treaty, signed on July 3, 1844 and ratified by President John Tyler on January 17, 1845, included commercial clauses by which the U.S. government acquired many of the same preferential trade privileges that Great Britain had won two years earlier through military force. This was an important point, and some scholars even argue that the U.S. Open Door Policy dates back “to the most-favored-nations clauses in the first U.S.–Chinese treaty in 1844.”⁵

Although U.S. merchants were not major importers of opium when compared to the British, the “American share seems to have been largely distributing the opium up and down the coast in small, fast opium clippers.”⁶ Unlike Britain’s continued support for the opium trade, U.S. trade in opium was declared illegal. The U.S. government even agreed to hand offenders over to the Chinese government for prosecution. The U.S. negotiator, Caleb Cushing, told China: “We do not desire any portion of the territory of China, nor any terms and conditions whatever which should be otherwise than just and honorable to China as well as to the United States.”⁷ In addition to its merchants, another major U.S. influence on China was its missionaries. Elijah Coleman Bridgman was the first U.S. Protestant missionary in China, arriving in 1830. After the first Opium War ended in 1842, five additional treaty ports were opened to foreign influence, and even more Chinese ports were opened after the second Opium War, 1856–1860. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, about 8,500 Protestant missionaries served in China, almost half of them from the United States. Foreign missionaries had an enormous impact on China, bringing not just religion but Western medicine, education, and scientific thinking. Even more important, once U.S. missionaries returned home, they “enthralled their friends, church organizations, and other groups all over the United States with accounts of their adventures in fabled Cathay.” Not only did this create a “deep sympathy” for China, but later “popular enthusiasm” for the Open Door Policy could in part be attributed to “the sentimental feeling toward the Chinese, a feeling inspired by the missionaries.”⁸

Cultural exchange did not occur simply in one direction. Thousands of Chinese men came to the United States seeking their fortunes after the 1848 “gold rush.” Their numbers increased rapidly during the tumultuous years of the Taiping Rebellion from 1851–1865. Chinese laborers found employment constructing the Transcontinental Railway between 1863 and 1869. Relations were generally good, and China and the United States later signed the Burlingame Treaty on November 23, 1869. Concerned about the large number of contract workers, called “coolies” – meaning “bitter labor” in Mandarin Chinese – this treaty outlawed coolie labor, which often differed little from indentured servitude or outright slavery.

The Burlingame Treaty was widely considered to be China’s first equal treaty. Free trade unhampered by imperialist encroachments was the bedrock of Sino-U.S. relations. U.S. foreign policy decried invading and cutting out foreign concessions in Asian countries. In 1858, Secretary of State William H. Seward even told the Senate how valuable the Pacific Ocean would soon become to America: “The Pacific, its shores, its islands and the vast regions beyond, will become the chief theater of events in the world’s great hereafter.”⁹ In 1879, General Ulysses S. Grant was on a tour of Asia when he stated: “It is likewise the policy of America in the Orient … that the integrity and independence of China and Japan should be preserved and maintained.”¹⁰ From this period onward, the United States supported China’s territorial integrity.

Relations were not always smooth. The number of Chinese workers in the western United States grew quickly. Newly arrived European immigrants feared what they called unfair competition from the Chinese. In 1882, Congress signed the Chinese Exclusion Act suspending China immigration for ten years. During this period, tensions between the Chinese and other immigrant groups increased. The “Rock Springs” massacre of September 2, 1885, in particular, led to the death of twenty-eight Chinese miners and property destruction exceeding $100,000. Even though it was not required to do so, the U.S. Congress indemnified China $147,748.74 in damages. By 1890, there were approximately 110,000 Chinese men living and working in the United States, compared to only about 4,000 Chinese women. However, Chinese communities, such as San Francisco’s “Chinatown,” prospered.

Although there were ups and downs, the generally positive early history of Sino-U.S. relations – in particular when compared to the more rapacious behavior of some of the European countries and later Japan – meant that the U.S. government immediately became concerned when foreign powers began to invade Chinese territory during the late 1890s. In fact, historians argue that the Open Door Policy was developed largely in response to Russia’s attempts to expand into Manchuria and Japan’s parallel actions in Korea. One historian has even dated the origins of the U.S.–Soviet Cold War rivalry to the turn-of-the-century competition over Manchuria.¹¹

The division of China into foreign spheres of interest

During the first Opium War, the British Royal Navy forced China’s Manchu leaders to open up the country to the West by taking the isolated offshore island of Hong Kong. A number of Chinese ports’ cities were opened to international trade, and certain foreign trade concessions were established in these ports, but the amount of territory involved was relatively small. During the mid 1800s, soon after the end of the Crimean War in 1856 and during the second Opium War (1856–1860), the Russian government also turned its attention to the Far East. Unlike the case with Great Britain, the Russian goal was to take from China as much territory as possible.

Between 1858 and 1860, Russia signed a series of treaties with China – the Treaty of Aigun, the Treaty of Tianjin, and the Treaty of Beijing – that are often referred to as some of the most onerous examples of China’s so-called “unequal treaties.” By these agreements, Russian gained an estimated 1,357,000 square miles of territory, which by one estimate equaled in size all of the United States east of the Mississippi.¹² In 1860, Russia proclaimed its dominance over the Far East by founding Vladivostok, which means “Ruler of the East.” When it decided to sell Alaska to the United States in 1867, future Russian expansion turned southward to China. Russia’s appetite for new territory was insatiable, and N. N. Murav’ev, the mid-nineteenth-century Governor General of Eastern Siberia, wrote that “in the event of the fall of the Empire of the Manchus our activities must be so aimed as to enable the formation of an independent domain … in Mongolia and Manchuria.”¹³

Japan was concerned about Russia’s rapid expansion into the Far East, and tried to come to terms with St. Petersburg. Japan’s first treaty with Imperial Russia was the Treaty of Shimoda, signed on February 7, 1855. According to its terms, the boundary between Russia and Japan divided the Kuril Island chain between Uruppu and Etorofu Islands, while the island of Sakhalin was split between the two countries. As a result of recurring border tensions, the Treaty of St. Petersburg was signed on May 7, 1875. This treaty agreed that Japan would control all of the Kurils in exchange for granting Russia all of Sakhalin Island.

During this same period, Japan expanded to the south, taking Okinawa in 1872, and making it a prefecture in 1879. Japan also sought to take the island of Taiwan, so as to control the important sea lanes off its shores. As a result of the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), Japan obtained Taiwan and the Pescadores (Penghu islands), plus Japan attempted to dominate Fujian province across the strait from its colony on Taiwan. As part of the negotiations leading to the treaty of Shimonoseki ending the Sino-Japanese War, Tokyo demanded a territorial concession in Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria. But the triple intervention of Russia, Germany, and France forced Japan to return the Liaodong concession in exchange for a higher indemnity. As one Japanese scholar would later lament: “Here we mark the blunder of diplomacy committed by Japan during the foreign intervention of 1895. Japan should have secured the assurance from the three powers that they would abstain from leasing or occupying the Liao-tung [Liaodong] Peninsula, the refusal of which meant an open declaration of their ambitions.”¹⁴ The Sino-Japanese War instead ignited a foreign Scramble for Concessions in China. Some even spoke of dividing up China ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Open Door versus spheres of interest
• 1. The origins of the Open Door Policy in China
• 2. Secret diplomacy undermines the Open Door
• 3. The growth of nationalism in post-1911 China
• 4. The debacle at Paris
• 5. The 1917 October Revolution’s impact on the Open Door Policy
• 6. The Washington Conference, 1921–1922
• 7. Soviet attempts to open diplomatic relations with China and Japan
• 8. Soviet–Japanese secret diplomacy undermines the Open Door Policy
• 9. The Soviet–Japanese struggle to partition China
• 10. The Open Door Policy and China’s post-war territorial integrity
• 11. The Open Door Policy and the Chinese Civil War, 1945–1949
• 12. The Open Door Policy in the era of the two Chinas
• Conclusions: a reassessment of the Open Door Policy’s impact on China
• Bibliography
• Index