The American Mis-imagination of China
Dealing with China when it’s up, down, or ascendant.
Let me begin, Zhuqing, by commending you and your students. I couldn’t join your December colloquium on John Hay and the Open Door Policy, but I have since watched the video of it. I learned a lot from it. The presentations your students gave were a credit to them, to you, and to Brown. It’s an honor to join you today.
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 civilizational 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 travelers of European imperialism. They view us now as somewhere near the center of their “century of humiliation.”
In 1853, the same U.S. side-wheel frigate that Commodore Perry had used to force Japan to open trade relations with us steamed up the Yangtze. Eventually, the "Yangtze River Patrol" was incorporated into the "United States Asiatic Fleet." This purpose of this expanded naval presence was to uphold the U.S. "Open Door" policy in China – the subject of your December colloquium – 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 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”[1] 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 modernization 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 twenty 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 tracked this turbulent history and the oscillations each decade brought. Even as racism denied Chinese a place in American society, Americans empathized with Chinese in their faraway country. The 1920s saw an explosion in the numbers of American missionaries in China. They combined religious zeal and cultural idealism with a paternalistic belief that introducing China to American ways would transform it and uplift it socially and politically. The horrors of Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s reduced the missionary presence there but increased the sympathy of ordinary Americans for ordinary Chinese.
Vocal expressions of sympathy for the Chinese did not at first elicit practical measures to align with them against Japanese depredations. Americans wrung their hands while sitting on them until mid-1940, when the U.S. government imposed a ban on exports of aviation fuel and high-grade scrap iron to Japan. A year later, the United States froze Japanese assets and cut off all but a fraction of Japan’s oil imports. This got Japan’s attention, which responded by attacking Pearl Harbor. America joined China at war with it.
China was a major strain on Japanese manpower and logistics. The United States therefore treated China as a “protected state” of which not much was expected but whose geopolitical survival was essential to the defeat of Japan. As is the American habit in times of war, our Japanese enemy was demonized, while its Chinese opponent was beatified. Chiang Kai-shek, the dictatorial director-general of a Leninist party, the KMT, was portrayed to the American people not just as a defender of freedom against fascism but as a Christian avatar of democracy.
This wartime branding and American anticommunism made it virtually inevitable that the United States would lean toward the KMT in its post-war contention with the Chinese Communist Party to determine which would rule China. The KMT’s defeat coincided with the outbreak of the Cold War in Europe and China’s new Communist government’s decision to embrace the Soviet model of politico-economic development. This was followed by north Korea’s invasion of south Korea. Americans saw this not as an effort by Korean nationalists to reunite their divided country but as an attempt by the Soviet Union and the newly established People’s Republic of China to break out of containment. We found ourselves at war with China in Korea.
Our erstwhile Chinese wards had gone over to the enemy. Americans felt betrayed. Rather than accepting the outcome of the Chinese civil war, we continued to recognize and defend the deposed KMT government in Taipei as the government of all of China, while ostracizing the regime in Beijing as a mere pretender to that status.
Vicious arguments over “who lost China” in the 1950s and China’s entry into the Korean War led to bitter American estrangement from China. The Chinese people were dehumanized. China was denigrated as “the empire of the blue ants,” a reference to the blue unisex boiler suits in which all Chinese were then clad. After a few years of relative stability and economic progress, China launched a mad effort to accelerate its modernization in a “great leap forward.”
The 1960s then convulsed the country in the incomprehensible violence of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” obscuring the fact that China had broken with its “socialist big brother,” the Soviet Union.
At the end of the 1960s, Americans finally came to grips with the reality that the People’s Republic of China – not the Taipei-based “Republic of China” – governed all of China beyond Taiwan. Alarmed by the possibility that the Soviets might gain a decisive advantage in the Cold War by removing China from the geopolitical chessboard, newly elected President Richard Nixon moved to protect Beijing and enlist it in the containment of Moscow. The 1970s saw the United States once again treat China as a “protected state,” paralleling American strategy in World War II. This was a liaison arranged out of strategic necessity, not love (which came later).
The 1980s saw a rebirth of both America’s infatuation with China and of its missionary impulse, inspired by wishful thinking that inside every Chinese there must be some sort of liberal American waiting to be coaxed out. Our politicians sold their embrace of avowedly Communist China by predicting its inevitable democratization and embrace of the rule of law as it achieved prosperity. But the Chinese proved stubbornly determined to remain wedded to their own non-Western civilizational traditions, rather than to liberal American ideological fantasies.
One must have illusions in order to be disillusioned. Americans found the 1989 suppression of the student and worker protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen and elsewhere in China profoundly disillusioning. That same year, the Soviet empire imploded, depriving the United States of the strategic rationale that had overcome ideological differences to power politico-military cooperation with China during the Cold War. Then Taiwan democratized, gradually replacing its Leninist system with an increasingly robust democracy and aligning itself with both liberal and anticommunist Americans against the mainland. The warmth was sucked out of the American relationship with the People’s Republic of China.
Deepening economic interdependence between China and the United States coincided with declining mutual trust and rising strategic suspicion. In the early 1990s, Americans sought to coerce China into respect for human rights as we defined them. This soon failed. As both Taipei and Washington abandoned the understandings that had kept the peace in the Taiwan Strait, they returned to confrontation over the political status of Taiwan. Beijing’s opposition to Taiwan’s increasingly open aspirations for self-determination and separation from the rest of China reinforced American animosity to it.
By the end of the decade, charges that China was engaged in intellectual property theft, industrial espionage, and unfair economic competition had begun to entrench an American perception of the country as a strategic rival rather than partner. In 1999, the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade triggered the largest and most violent anti-American demonstrations in China in fifty years. Hostility between the United States and China appeared to be evolving into enmity.
The 21st century’s first decade began with yet another explosive development, as an American spy plane and Chinese interceptor collided near Hainan Island. As it proceeded, optimistic American commercial engagement with China was offset by rising anxiety about job losses as U.S. industrial production migrated to the fast-growing Chinese economy. In 2010, the United States began to oppose China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and to make it clear that we viewed its growing military capabilities as a threat to continued American primacy in Pacific Asia.
In this century’s second decade, the United States embraced economic nationalism, adopted ever more strident criticism of Chinese human rights practices, launched a trade war with China, and doubled down on the effort to contain it technologically. In 2020, a pandemic originating in Wuhan made unfavorable American views of China the norm.
The Biden administration and its intensified technological containment policies toward China bowed to an anti-China consensus that had become bipartisan. Since 2025, the erratic protectionism of the second Trump administration has consolidated this consensus. It has been matched by a corresponding anti-American trend in Chinese politics.
American views of China are now dominated by mirror-imaging and a priori reasoning. As Karl Rove infamously asserted, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Politicians who know nothing of China and have never been there feel free to project historic American ambitions, policies, practices, and ideological conceits onto it. It has become politically incorrect to challenge their imaginative mis-imaginations of China. So, few do.
America’s political elites now confidently assert that China is ideologically messianic, insistent on global hegemony, financially exploitative, bullying, and militarily interventionist. Ironically, these are all characteristics that much of the world now attributes to the United States. Ours has become a country that:
· insists on English as its national language,
· is engaged in the often-violent roundup of its nonwhite and non-English-speaking minorities, and
· has banned immigration by people with religious heritages or racial characteristics that differ from those of Christian Americans of European descent.
Ironically, however, we charge China with intolerance and mistreatment of its minority peoples and their languages.
Nobody’s perfect.
Some might argue that we are in the process of becoming less perfect than we were. We appear to have developed a bad habit of invading and occupying other countries, intervening in them to engineer regime change, and backstopping the war crimes of our client states. One wonders what John Hay would have thought about that and the world order it is creating.
Hay came up with a way to serve American interests with a China that was weak, vulnerable, and oppressed by foreign imperialists. How would he propose that Americans best serve our interests now that China is strong, wealthy, able to assert itself internationally, and apparently on track to eclipse the global preeminence we have enjoyed for the past 150 years?
Hay practiced statecraft in an era in which American power was rising to match that of our European global competitors. He sought to ensure equal access for the United States to the Chinese market. He saw the preservation of China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty as the most efficacious means by which to do so. Hay’s America sought to benefit from a halt in China’s decline, from its modernization, and from its participation as a respected member in the international community.
Our current situation and policies are the antithesis of Hay’s. We are in relative competitive decline, not just in relation to China but to other rising and resurgent powers in Asia and elsewhere. We seem less concerned with access to the China market than with curtailing Chinese access to our own market and markets abroad. We seek to constrain China’s return to wealth and power, not to profit from it as we did in the Open Door. We have replaced our past commitment to the unity of China with policies designed to preserve its division by civil war and Cold War containment. We strive to inhibit China’s scientific and technological advance and to limit its regional and global influence.
Hay’s “Open Door” policy worked. Our current policies are not working. There may be something to be learned from this.
Our current policies toward China combine protectionism, technological containment, the disruption of supply chains born of comparative advantage, economic warfare aimed at the exclusion or displacement of China in third-country markets, and the rejection of threat reduction through diplomacy in favor of deterrence by purely military means. These policies have:
· Stimulated industrial growth in countries open to Chinese investment and technology transfers, with little or no “reshoring” of the manufacturing to the United States they were supposed to promote.
· Done nothing to enable us to compete effectively with China in foreign markets.
· Not reduced our global trade deficit but increased it at the expense of American consumers.
· Boosted, not retarded, Chinese technological innovation.
· Encouraged U.S. scientists (not just those of Chinese origin) to depart the U.S. for the more favorable research and development ecosystem that now prevails in China.
· Deprived us of Chinese investment in our industries and agriculture or access to China’s increasingly innovative technological advances.
· Jeopardized the monopoly position of the U.S. dollar in trade settlement.
· Absented us from international organizations and groupings, enabling China and other countries to displace any American role in shaping the rules they make or influencing the decisions they take.
· Encouraged Pacific Asian countries to coordinate their trade and investment policies with China and with each other rather than us.
· Increased the danger that China will conclude that the Taiwan issue can only be resolved through the use of force, and
· Set off a nuclear arms race with China.
These policies are based on unrealistic views of China and the emerging multi-nodal world order. They do not serve our interests.
Nine weeks ago, Israel and the United States went to war with Iran for reasons that defy simple explanation. The disastrous results should remind us that there are a great many matters that the use of force cannot settle and may instead exacerbate. The return of China to wealth, power, and preeminence in its region is one such. China is once again able to defend itself against any enemy tempted to assault. This does not threaten the United States unless we choose war with China over peace with it.
China has an unfinished civil war, but it threatens none of its neighbors with conquest. It does not covet Lebensraum – territories beyond those internationally recognized as “Chinese.” It believes in market access through trade, not mercantilist colonial capture. It is as respectful of democracies as of all other political systems. It lacks any impulse to impose its ideology or political system on others. China has no aggressive military presence at our borders, though we maintain such a presence on its.
To treat China as a military rather than economic, scientific, and technological challenge says almost all you need to know about today’s America and nothing significant about contemporary China. We are making the same mistake that the Soviet Union made when it spent itself into oblivion in an effort to outdo us militarily. We are setting ourselves up for China to do the same to us.
The United States has misdiagnosed the politico-economic challenges of the 21st century, including its industrial challenges. China is out-competing us not with subsidies or low labor costs but through technological innovation and the integration of industrial software, factory deployment, and an increasingly well-educated workforce. China once struggled to overtake other countries. Today those countries strive to catch up to China. Tesla’s plant in Shanghai produces twice as many cars per worker as its plant in California. We should be asking ourselves what elements of the Chinese ecosystem enable it to do what it does, not how we can reduce Shanghai or Beijing to the condition of Tehran.
Deng Xiaoping’s abandonment of top-down direction and control of China’s economy in favor of market economics and political and financial incentives for entrepreneurship and job creation was inspired in part by Chinese study of our example. Deng knew what it would take to make China great again. He cut the budget for the Chinese military and downsized it to fund reforms and productive investment in education, agriculture, industry, and science and technology. He thereby laid the basis for a rejuvenated China. We are now doing the opposite. To compete with the increasingly wealthy and powerful China that Deng’s “reform and opening” created or with other rising or resurgent powers, we need to reexamine our priorities. Getting our own act together is far more important than trying to impair China’s.
John Hay was onto something when he saw an Open Door as the key to China’s modernization. This is not surprising. It was very American. The United States became the pre-eminent society on the planet in part through our unique openness to foreigners and foreign ideas. The reversal of this openness now taking place promises to debase and debilitate us. It is no accident that international respect for China’s leadership has now overtaken our own. China’s future role in world affairs will be determined not just by its interaction with us but by its interactions with others. Our role will be determined in no small measure by how we handle our relations with China.
Today’s world is very different from Hay’s. There is no Pax Britannica or Pax Americana. The West no longer dominates global politics or the world economy. Old alliances have died or are decaying. Global disorder contrasts with emerging regional orders. Countries that were once vassals of imperial powers are themselves emerging as great powers, not just in their own regions but globally.
Several geopolitical epochs have passed. World affairs are no longer bipolar. There is no “G-2.” We are in a new age of multi-nodality, in which middle-ranking powers can twist, turn, and adjust their political, economic, cultural, and military relationships to their advantage as they see it. The connections between great and lesser powers and in the networks they form are not just more diverse but more dynamic.
The emerging world order is one from which China cannot be excluded and from which the United States cannot afford to exclude itself. The current Sino-American relationship is marked by minimal aspirations – a search for modest strategic stability and the pursuit of minor tactical adjustments, rather than breakthroughs.
In Hay’s time, China needed the protection of a rising America to pull itself together. It was endangered not just by predatory foreign powers but by its own internal chaos and confusion. Today, in some ways, the tables are turned. We Americans need time and a peaceful international environment in which we can pull ourselves together. For this, we need a realistic and respectful relationship with a rising China.
For at least 120 years, both China and Sino-American relations have flipped and flopped in different directions with each passing decade. China need not be our Nemesis. It can yet be a partner in the rejuvenation of our republic. Another decade will soon be upon us. Let us do what we can to ensure that the changes that inevitably accompany it are positive for both Americans and Chinese!