na policy to reflect the reality of China's growing economic and military power while not sacrificing vital American political, economic and military interests. The United States should focus more of its attention on dealing with Chinese international behavior and less in trying to shape its internal affairs, over which, as the history of Sino-American relations shows, American policy has little influence. The key features of a successful future China policy will be maintaining policy on a fairly even keel and avoiding emotionally-driven extremes.
1784-1898. For more than a century after the first Yankee clippers docked in Canton harbor in the 1780s, American official contacts with China were fragmentary and marginal. The first treaty between the two countries (in 1844) followed the pattern set by the unequal treaties imposed by the British after the Opium Wars of 1839-1842, which incorporated the principle of extraterritoriality, which, according to Fairbanks,
became a powerful tool for the opening of China because it made foreign merchants and missionaries, their goods and property . . . immune to Chinese authority.
In 1899-1900, Secretary of State John Hay articulated the United States' Open Door Policy with respect to China which called for 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 tottering Manchu Empire and its successors after the Chinese Revolution of 1911. As George Kennan noted, the difficulty with the Open Door Policy was that:
time after time we would call upon other powers to make
public confession of their adherence to these principles,
[but] in no instance would we be prepared to use force to
According to Stoessinger, "Americans since the Open Door... saw themselves as th...