of China continues to be governed by the successors to Mao Tse-tung. The "Two Chinas" American foreign policy remains alive and well under the Clinton Administration some 45 years after it was created during the Truman Administration.
This study examines the development of American foreign policy toward China some years prior to and some years subsequent to the proclamation creating the People's Republic of China in 1949. The period emphasized in this study is from the mid-1930s through the early-1950s; however, some earlier events that are relevant to the development of the "Two-Chinas" policy also are considered.
Events Prior to the Second World War Affecting the
Development of American Policy Toward China
Disruptive events began occurring in Asia in the post First World War period. The nine-power treaty signed at the Washington Conference in 1921 and 1922 included Japan among the eight countries that agreed to cooperate to support the independence and integrity of the ninth country--China (Iriye, 1987, p. 2). The actions of the Washington Conference powers progressively extended greater sovereign powers to the government of China through the late-1920s, by which time the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek was in power in Nanking, the then capital of China (p. 4). This action marked the beginning of American support for the Chinese Nationalists.
Some international political figures were sufficiently concerned over looming threats to world peace to seek additional agreements to reduce the probability of war. As a consequence, the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, also known as the Paris Peace Pact, was negotiated in the late-1920s (Landman & Wender, p. 71). By 1933, 62 nations, of which Japan was one, had ratified the Pact (Morison, p. 264).
Signatories to the Pact agreed to renounce war as a national policy, and to accept arbitration and conciliation for the settlement of international disputes (Landman & Wend...