This research paper summarizes the historical background of American foreign policy toward China, the present state of relations between the United States and China and recommendations for the future. China and the United States have dealt with each other for more than two centuries. American foreign policy has fairly consistently supported the emergence of a stable, less impoverished, less authoritarian and friendly China. Often, those policy hopes were not firmly grounded in Chinese reality, but rather reflected a peculiarly American view of how China should conduct its affairs. In the 20th century, they were repeatedly dashed -- by the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the Chinese civil war, the Chinese military intervention in Korea, the internal convulsion of the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989 and other actions by the Chinese inimical to American interests, including the recent revelations of Chinese espionage in the United States. American policy has at times been weak or uncertain, such as during the 1930s, the mid-1970s and at times during the 1990s.
Since relations were normalized in the 1970s, American foreign policy toward China has been more firmly grounded in reality; nevertheless, relations between the United States and China have remained troubled, areas of mutual cooperation co-existing with areas of rivalry and tension. As a result of the great strides China has taken in the 1980s and 1990s to modernize its economy and governing structure, China is becoming a great power, a development which is troubling to many Americans, fearful of what to expect from a well-armed communist state with a population of 1.3 billion people and revisionist territorial and possibly expansionist aims in East Asia. American foreign policy toward China is subject to domestic political attacks from both extremes of the political spectrum.
The challenge for the United States is to adapt its
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