American Foreign Policy Toward CHINA

This paper outlines and discusses the principal features of American foreign policy toward China during the past thirty

Before the beginning of the 20th Century, American official contacts with China were fragmentary and marginal, mostly the result of efforts by American merchants since the 1780s to profit from and obtain a larger share of the China trade and of American missionaries to convert Chinese to Christianity. The first treaty between the United States and China, the Treaty of Wanghia of 1844, followed generally the pattern set by the unequal treaties imposed by the British after the Opium Wars of 1839-1842. Fairbanks (1971) says "extraterritoriality became a powerful tool for the opening of China because it made foreign merchants and missionaries, their goods and property . . . immune to Chinese authority" (p. 145).

The Open Door Policy (1898-1937). In 1899-1900, just after the United States became a Pacific power through its seizure from the Spanish of the Philippines and its annexation of Hawaii, Secretary of State John Hay announced the United States' Open Door Policy with respect to China. It had two components: preserving the territorial integrity of China; and the equal (and preferential) treatment of all foreigners there. Over the next 40 years, it would be invoked by American statesmen to protest efforts by the European powers, Russia and Japan to carve up the tott

etnamese toward a settlement, Kissinger was conceptualizing in longer range terms. Isaacson (1992) says that Kissinger felt that after the Vietnam War was settled, "the U.S. should shape an overall framework of global order by creating a triangular balance with the Soviet Union and China" as part of a "rational attempt to scale back America's commitments so that they were more in keeping with its resources and will" (pp. 239 & 242). For Kissinger in 1969, China policy was definitely on the backburner. According to Kalb and Kalb, he regarded the Cultural Revolution as "unchecked madness" (1974, p. 217). Other foreign policy issues, the stalled Paris peace talks and reviving the SALT arms control talks with the Russians, claimed priority. When White House Chief of Staff Robert Haldeman told him in early 1969 that Nixon wanted to visit China before the end of his second term, Kissinger replied: "fat chance" (Isaacson, 1992, p. 336). Isaacson says that "Kissinger was at first skeptical about any quick opening to China, and it was Nixon's dogged vision that propelled the initiative" (p. 336). Kissinger supplied the intellectual real politik framework for the opening to China, Nixon the driving force toward its accomplishment. Prelimi