How America’s 250-year China dream became its greatest strategic challenge
Historians trace how US hopes of trade, reform and friendship gave way to rivalry with the power it once sought to transform
One morning in February 1784, a converted privateer called the Empress of China sailed out of New York harbour. It was bound for a country almost no one aboard had ever seen – China, then ruled by the Qing dynasty.
Six months later, it dropped anchor at Canton, the only port where the Qing government allowed Western maritime trade.
At the time, the Declaration of Independence was less than a decade old, and the Treaty of Paris recognising American independence had been signed less than a year before.
The newborn republic had no navy and little standing in the world. What it did have was a dream of China.
Two and a half centuries later, the country that once drew American merchants across the Pacific has become Washington’s principal competitor. The United States and China, now the world’s two largest economies, are locked in a struggle over trade, technology, security and the shape of the global order.
For historians, that first voyage marked the beginning of a relationship in which America repeatedly reinvented what China represented – from coveted market to admired civilisation, from missionary project to strategic rival. Each reinvention said as much about America as it did about China.
Even during his visit to Beijing in May, US President Donald Trump invoked the Empress of China during the state banquet hosted by President Xi Jinping, recalling the first American merchant ship to reach Chinese shores.
The market
It is easy to forget how important the idea of China was to the founding of America, according to Xu Guoqi, the David H.Y. Chang Professor of Chinese History at the University of Hong Kong (HKU).
The tea that was dumped into Boston harbour in 1773, the act of defiance that helped ignite the revolution, was Chinese tea.
“The dream of independence for future Americans came, to a certain extent, from their dream of the China market,” said Xu.
Tea, which Americans called “green gold”, was effectively a hard currency, he said.
“Everybody seemed obsessed with Chinese tea after the British brought it to the West.”
That fascination predated the US itself, Xu added. “Europeans had dreamed of finding a route to China since the days of Marco Polo, a quest that famously sent Christopher Columbus across the Atlantic in 1492,” Xu said.
“That is the irony of the shared history between China and America – it was interconnected from the very beginning.”
When the Empress of China sailed to Canton in 1784, it embodied a belief that access to the Chinese market could help to secure America’s future.
That belief endured for more than two centuries.
In the 19th century, it took the form of the China trade and, later, the Open Door Policy – Washington’s call for equal commercial access to China rather than allowing foreign powers to divide it into exclusive spheres of influence. It was an era when a weakened Qing empire, battered by the opium wars and unequal treaties, was being forced open by imperial powers.
A century later, the same aspiration reappeared in the language of reform and engagement.
By the time China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, many in Washington and on Wall Street believed opening up the Chinese economy would not only create one of the world’s largest export markets but also reinforce the assumptions of the American-led global economic system.
These hopes were captured in then-US president Bill Clinton’s 2000 remarks supporting China’s WTO accession.
“Economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street. It requires China to open its markets – with a fifth of the world’s population, potentially the biggest markets in the world – to both our products and services in unprecedented new ways,” he said.
But rather than converging towards the American economic model, China developed a state-led system that Washington increasingly viewed as a strategic challenge instead of an opportunity.
The first Trump administration launched a trade war in 2018. The second expanded it in 2025, signalling a new consensus that China itself had become the challenge.
A mutual misunderstanding
If Americans first imagined China as a market, they also imagined it as one of the world’s great civilisations. But the China they admired was often one they barely understood.
“Americans now easily forget that the United States was a very small country back then, when everything was just being founded,” said Wang Yuanchong, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware.
“At the start China was strong and America was small, and only slowly did that situation reverse,” Wang said.
When the Empress of China arrived, Wang said, its crew carried a “sea letter”, a kind of all-purpose passport, addressed to no one in particular and merely listing every title its bearers could think of.
“That actually proves they knew nothing,” he said.
“They were completely in the dark about China’s administrative system, its society, its history and culture. They simply came.”
Qing officials, for their part, knew little about the new republic. They saw foreign visitors through the old imperial lens of tribute and trade.
Ordinary Chinese, he said, could name several American presidents, while many Americans “can’t name a single Chinese leader”.
As Americans imagined China, historians suggest that they were also constructing an image of themselves.
Unlike the European empires carving up Qing China, the young republic preferred to see itself as a more progressive kind of power.
One reason was America’s comparatively restrained presence in China during the 19th century.
Unlike other Western powers like Britain and France, the US seized no colonies on Chinese soil and championed the Open Door Policy, which called for equal commercial access rather than exclusive spheres of influence.
In 1868, the Qing court invited the departing US minister to China, Anson Burlingame, to represent China on a mission to the West. Burlingame acted as a mediator between China and Western countries and won the trust of Chinese officials.
The Burlingame Treaty that followed recognised that the two peoples could travel between the countries as equals and study in each other’s country.
Later, the US returned part of the Boxer Rebellion indemnity to fund Chinese schools and scholarships for study in America, benefiting the predecessor of Tsinghua University.
But historians warn that this picture of a kinder America leaves out a lot.
Xu at HKU argues that America’s difference reflected a genuine sense of exceptionalism. Having recently broken from the British monarchy, the US saw itself as fundamentally different from Europe’s imperial powers.
“The US looked down on the old European countries,” Xu said. “They thought they were corrupt.”
Wang of the University of Delaware said that throughout the 19th century, “America’s main focus in China was commerce.”
It had no garrison in China as Britain did, and until it took the Philippines from Spain in 1898, it had little real armed force in the western Pacific, according to Wang.
“It was just a country that came to share the spoils,” Wang said. “The ones out front were mostly Britain, France, Russia and Germany.”
Gordon H. Chang, Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, similarly cautioned against romanticising America’s role.
“It’s a myth that America did the Boxer indemnity for China’s purposes,” he said, adding that former president Theodore Roosevelt’s calculation “was to advance American influence in China”.
The idea of an innocent America also sits uneasily alongside the experience of Chinese migrants within the US itself.
Thousands of Chinese labourers helped to build the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869. Thousands more worked in mining, agriculture and small businesses, Chang said.
But their contribution was soon buried by the politics of exclusion.
“The fact that it was forgotten or neglected or covered up is part of that history of discrimination,” Chang said.
The mission to change China
If commerce was America’s first Chinese dream, transformation became its most enduring ambition.
“The sense that the United States should shape, mould or change China is quite deep,” Chang said – first turning China into a Christian country through missionaries, then a capitalist one, and now a non-communist one.
The ambition, he said, was always trailed by frustration, because “China continues to be what it is, regardless of what the United States wants.”
Wang dated the start later.
For most of the 19th century, he said, Washington stayed mostly silent on China’s political system. The belief that America should design and drive change in China did not truly take hold, Wang argued, until “after the second world war, in the Cold War years”.
Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China is often remembered as a realist turn, a strategic opening designed to balance the Soviet Union. But the normalisation of diplomatic relations in 1979, Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the US and China’s reform and opening-up soon encouraged a view in Washington: that engagement itself could transform China.
After the Cold War, supporters of engagement argued that trade, investment and China’s integration into global institutions would not only expand commerce but gradually encourage political liberalisation.
China’s entry into the WTO became the clearest _expression_ of that belief.
In Beijing, however, many top leaders drew the opposite conclusion.
The strategy that Americans described as engagement was often interpreted as an effort to reshape China’s political system. That suspicion was reinforced by the Cold War concept of “peaceful evolution”, the idea that communist governments could eventually be transformed through the gradual spread of Western political values rather than military force.
It is a doubt rooted deep in the minds of generations of Chinese leaders, who have repeatedly warned that the same could happen in China – even though both the Biden and Trump administrations have assured Beijing they do not seek regime change.
Chang remained cautious about these assurances.
“If Donald Trump could snap his fingers, of course he would like to have a change in China,” he said.
“We’re going back to the past,” he said. “But the past is the 1950s, not the 1990s. The period from 1990 to around 2015 was the unusual period, and I don’t think we’re going back to it.”
The reversal of power
If America’s ambition was to shape China, history had another surprise in store: the balance of power itself would not remain fixed.
When the two countries first encountered one another in the late 18th century, China was the older, richer and more established civilisation. The US was a fragile new republic looking for its place in the world.
That balance began to shift around the turn of the 20th century.
As China reeled from the Boxer crisis and the occupation of Beijing, the US – its civil war long settled – was enjoying the prosperity of the Gilded Age and emerging as a Pacific power.
“The US is a late-developing country, founded just as the industrial revolution was beginning, so it caught the express train from the start,” Wang said.
“China’s misfortune is that its whole 19th century was a descent, while America rose the whole way – two completely opposite trajectories.”
Today, many Chinese see history as turning once again.
In January 2021, just days after the riot at the US Capitol, Xi advanced the argument that “the East is rising and the West is declining”, signalling China’s growing confidence in its development model and international standing.
The theory has since been discussed throughout official and popular Chinese discourse.
That reversal also changed how Washington viewed the world, Wang argued.
Before the two world wars, and especially before the second, Wang said, the US never had a fixed global rival. Treating first the Soviet Union and then China as its primary adversary, he said, was a strategic logic that emerged only after the US became a global power.
Fixing another country as a “main enemy” to be managed over the long term had not been a constant in more than two centuries of Sino-American contact, he said.
Hope, fear and the road ahead
If the US repeatedly reinvented China, China also reinvented the US.
Before the end of the first world war, Chinese intellectuals held up then-US president Woodrow Wilson as a symbol of idealism, hoping his principle of national self-determination would help China recover its rights.
The Paris Peace Conference’s decision to give Japan control of Germany’s former privileges in the Chinese province of Shandong shattered that hope.
After 1919, Xu said, “the Chinese became radical, became desperate, and turned to a third civilisation: Russia”.
Looking back across 250 years of contact, Chang at Stanford sees a recurring pattern.
Rather than moving steadily from friendship to rivalry, he argues, the relationship has repeatedly swung between excessive optimism and excessive fear.
Both, he suggests, have obscured a more complicated reality.
Wang believes that reality depends on maintaining contact, even as political tensions deepen.
“Without exchange, there is nothing,” he said. “Wasn’t ping-pong diplomacy exactly this?”
None of the historians who spoke to the South China Morning Post expected the warmth of an earlier age to return easily.
Chang put it bluntly: “The idea that China and the United States should become great friends has never been the case, and I don’t think it ever will be.”
But for Rana Mitter, S.T. Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, the point was that the relationship had never stood still, and never stopped mattering.
“China and the US have been rivals, enemies, partners and collaborators during the past two centuries, in particular the last century,” Mitter said.
“It’s worth remembering that history changes over time but the two countries remain important to each other.”