In a speech to a colloquium on John Hay’s Open Door Policy, former US diplomat Chas Freeman argues that America’s current approach to China is strategically self-defeating and increasingly detached from geopolitical reality.

This is the 250th anniversary of America’s declaration of independence and the 243rd anniversary of Great Britain’s acceptance of it. Back then, China was one-third or more of the global economy. British mercantilism had compelled Americans to go through British intermediaries to deal with China. We – including at least one of my Yankee ancestors – immediately took advantage of independence to bypass the British and open direct trade relations with China.

Americans coveted China’s unique commodities and technologies. Think of tea, silk, porcelain, lacquerware, and cabinetry. We combined civilisational awe and idealistic naïveté with greed as we sought to compete with the British for the premier role in the China market that their navy had gained for them. In 1835, we deployed our own naval power to the Western Pacific to protect American citizens and their commercial interests in and around China.

The United States was not a formal participant in the Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60. Nevertheless, the presence of our so-called ‘East India Squadron’ in Chinese waters enabled us to piggyback on British victories and to gain the same concessions from the Chinese that Britain had, including extraterritorial rights in five ’treaty ports.’

Despite this opportunism, Americans self-righteously conceived of our role as different from the European powers engaged in carving China up into subnational markets they could dominate. But the Chinese quite naturally saw us as fellow travellers of European imperialism. They view us now as somewhere near the centre of their “century of humiliation.”

In 1853, the same US side-wheel frigate that Commodore Perry had used to force Japan to open trade relations with us steamed up the Yangtse. Eventually, the ‘Yangtze River Patrol’ was incorporated into the ‘United States Asiatic Fleet.’ This purpose of this expanded naval presence was to uphold the US ‘Open Door’ policy in China and to defend the new American colony in the Philippines. Hay’s ‘Open Door’ initiative coincided with the emergence of the United States as an imperialist power in our own right. In 1893, we had overthrown the Hawaiian monarchy. In 1898, we annexed Hawaii. That same year, we went to war with Spain. John Hay called that a “splendid little war.”

The Spanish-American war extended ‘Manifest Destiny’ into the Caribbean and across the Pacific. It gained us the Philippines – our own colony in Pacific Asia. Hay’s proclamation of the “Open Door” a year later in 1899 was clearly more anti-mercantilist than altruistic despite seeking to position the United States as a disinterested, moral protector of China.

Most Americans viewed Hay’s policy with paternalistic pride – as having protected China against subdivision by imperialism. But the Chinese understandably saw it as yet another successful effort by Americans to help ourselves to whatever concessions and privileges other imperialists were able to bully China into conceding.

The Chinese were therefore not at all surprised when American forces readily joined British, Japanese, Russian, French, German, and Austro-Hungarian imperialists in military intervention in China a year later in 1900. The so-called ‘Eight-Nation Alliance’ relieved the “Boxer” siege of Beijing’s legation quarter at the cost of some 100,000 Chinese lives. China was then forced to pay huge reparations to the victors of that intervention.

Eight years after the ‘Boxer Rebellion,’ the United States did manage to surprise the Chinese – as well as everyone else. – when we rebated almost half of our share of Chinese reparations to set up a scholarship fund for elite Chinese students. The ‘Boxer Indemnity Fund’ enabled young Chinese to study subjects relevant to their country’s modernisation in the United States as well as in China. The Fund was a remarkably wise investment in cultural diplomacy. It aligned the United States with Chinese efforts to recover from the mayhem, chaos, and decline of their country’s post-Opium War history.

The Boxer Indemnity Fund turned out to be the most consequential foreign study program any nation has ever established, shaping generations of Chinese scientists, engineers, and politicians. Its legacy includes Tsinghua University in Beijing, now widely regarded as providing its students with one of the world’s very best educations in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Alas, China was not to have a smooth recovery of its traditional wealth and power. Its political economy swung wildly from one extreme to another, with each decade altering the pattern of its history and foreign relations.

In 1911, the Qing Dynasty collapsed. Over the following decade, the republic that replaced it failed to take hold. The 1920s saw the first stirring of modern mass politics in China amidst confusion, political fragmentation, warlordism, and foreign encroachment. Two weak Chinese governments – one in Beijing, one in Guangzhou – contended for national power.

In the 1930s, Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria as the rest of China was embroiled in a civil war between the Nationalist (KMT) and Communist parties. The Communists barely escaped annihilation by the KMT but consolidated their party structure and Mao Zedong’s leadership of it in their famous 1934 – 1935 “Long March” to safety in Shaanxi’s Yan’an.

Toward the end of the 1930s, in 1937, Japan began an effort to conquer all of China, launching an eight-year-long war in which some 20 million or more Chinese perished. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the Chinese civil war re-intensified. As the 1940s came to a close, the Chinese Communist Party gained victory and the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated KMT government sought refuge and continued American protection in Taiwan.

American views of China closely........

© Pearls and Irritations