The Avoidable War

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A Short History of the US-China Relationship

Chinese leaders have long made it their business to understand America in a manner that their American counterparts have rarely felt the need to reciprocate. This is because the Chinese Communist Party, since its founding in 1921, has believed that its ultimate survival and success depends on understanding those countries and forces in the world capable of destroying it, principal among which is the United States. By contrast, even today, among American political elites, with few notable exceptions, there is little sense of urgency to understand the domestic drivers of China’s international policy behavior. Whereas understanding China may have been seen by some Americans as important for US national interests, very few have seen this as essential, let alone existential. Moreover, because America’s geopolitical footprint is so large, the US-China relationship—which has long seemed problematic but rarely critical—has had to compete for attention for decades: first with the Soviet Union and then with rolling crises in the Middle East.

Belatedly, that may now be changing. This is driven in recent years by a destabilizing mix of ill-considered strategic panic and domestic political opportunism in a race to the bottom on who can sound the toughest on China during a given election season. The policy appetite and political space for a more rational American approach, the product of seasoned analysis of China’s and America’s changing political, economic, and strategic circumstances over time, remains limited. Indeed, in the view of the American strategic establishment, China has been transformed from a strategic partner to a strategic competitor—and, for most parts of the American elite, to a strategic adversary—all roughly in the handful of years since Xi Jinping came to power in China in 2012. By contrast, China, under the Communist Party, has long exhibited a deep strategic realism toward America where the limitations of strategic and economic collaboration with Washington have always been recognized, particularly given the underlying Marxist-Leninist nature of the Chinese party and state.

When the American republic was in its infancy in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, China was at its height as the largest, wealthiest, and most populous country on earth. The Qing dynasty (1644–1911) extended the territorial reach of the Celestial Kingdom to its greatest extent since China first became a unified kingdom in 221 BCE. Under the Qianlong Emperor (1735–1796), the Chinese economy represented 40 percent of global GDP, despite the fact that relatively little of China’s wealth was derived from external trade.

Some earlier eras, including the Han (206 BCE–CE 220), Tang (618–907 CE), and Song (960–1279 CE) dynasties, as well as the Mongol Yuan (1279–1368) and early Ming (1368–1644), witnessed considerable political and economic engagement with the rest of the world, including when the Silk Road was at its height and China’s flourishing commercial sea routes were connecting its merchants with their central Asian, Middle Eastern, and European counterparts. But even during these high periods of China’s international commerce, historians have calculated that probably no more than 25 percent of GDP came from sectors of the economy involving trade.

Given the history of periodic political and military incursions, China has long been suspicious of foreign “barbarians” of any stripe. Chinese official culture has also long taken pride in its ability to Sinify intruders within a generation of their arrival through the inherited norms, practices, and procedures of China’s formidable Confucian bureaucratic state. On multiple occasions, foreign conquerors, including the Mongol Yuan and Manchu Qing dynasties, had little choice but to first adopt Chinese practices and norms in order to rule the vast Chinese state and then find means of accommodation between their own ethnic practices and those of the Confucian state. Still, the fact that multiple ruling dynasties had themselves been the product of invasion by non-Han peoples living along China’s borders made China’s leaders all the more aware of possible threats from abroad.

Over the millennia, China also developed its own philosophical and religious traditions (Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism) without reference to the wider world. All three predated the arrival of Buddhism from the Indian subcontinent during the Han dynasty (at approximately 150 BCE), and successive Chinese dynasties then spent a thousand years varying between attempting to assimilate it entirely and attempting to eliminate it. They finally resorted to the next best thing to Sinifying it, which was subordinating this new foreign teaching to the political imperatives of the Chinese Confucian state. Islam had traveled along the Silk Road during the Tang dynasty (around the mid-seventh century), but its primary impact was limited to minority ethnic communities along China’s western borders and some other pockets, with little penetration of the vast Han majority. Christianity, having arrived first in the seventh century with the Nestorians and then again in the seventeenth century with the Jesuits before the arrival of Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth, had fared considerably worse, leaving little appreciable imprint on the Middle Kingdom, at least until the last decades of a declining Qing empire.

China, therefore, as seen through the framework of its national historiography, had been a relatively successful self-contained, self-referential political, economic, philosophical, cultural, and religious system. Foreigners, by contrast, were viewed with a combination of suspicion and condescension: as episodic invaders; culturally inferior; and, in most practical respects, irrelevant to China’s essential national needs. It was within this wider frame that, by the mid-nineteenth century, neither the West nor the British, let alone their distant American cousins, loomed large in the collective Chinese imagination.

The Opium Wars

This isolated status quo, however, would be turned on its head in the decades following the First Opium War (1839–1842), when Britain forced China to open its ports to international trade, imposed a series of unequal treaties on the Qing (including granting foreigners in China impunity from Chinese law under the principle of extraterritoriality), and gradually forced China to accept foreign missionaries. While the Americans may have been officially squeamish about the colonial methods used by their European cousins in forcing open China’s doors, they were soon demanding the same access to the country—both for commerce and Christian evangelism. American businesspeople were no more noble than any other country’s. Boston merchants did a significant trade in opium, sourced from Ottoman suppliers, and then plied across the Pacific to China’s newly opened treaty ports.

During the course of the nineteenth century, America’s trade and investment interests in China continued to grow. However, China represented only about half the overall value of America’s economic engagement with Japan. Together, China and Japan made up an even smaller proportion of total US trade and investment than did Europe, which had captured the vast bulk of American economic interests abroad. By contrast, over the course of the next one hundred years, American Protestant missionaries became the dominant Christian presence in China. Beyond their core mission of saving human souls, American missionaries also led the way in the establishment of Western hospitals, colleges, and universities in the late Qing and (after the revolution that overthrew the Qing in 1911) early Republic of China. Tens of thousands of young Chinese professionals were trained and educated either through American philanthropic institutions in China or, increasingly, at America’s public universities. Relatively quickly, America became the single largest foreign destination other than Japan for Chinese students studying abroad.

As anticolonialists themselves (at least in their conception), the Americans brought to China a different sensibility than the Europeans did. Nonetheless, while the US government regularly protested the growing depredations of Western colonialism in China, its diplomatic emissaries continued to insist on equal treatment for its nationals to ensure that American interests would not be sacrificed at the altar of political purity. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising of 1900 (a violent antiforeign and anti-Christian movement that attacked foreign legations with the tacit support of the Qing), the US sent troops to help put down the Boxers’ siege of the foreign legations in Beijing. They took part, with the armies of seven other imperial powers, in the brutal foreign occupation of Peking and in the extraction of exorbitant financial indemnities from the Qing government, equal to six times the court’s annual revenue at the time, to be paid in silver over the following forty years.

Washington, however, under pressure from American missionaries objecting to the indemnity, later remitted a large part of its share back to the Chinese government to fund scholarship programs for Chinese students going to America. Yet this did not fundamentally ameliorate Chinese perceptions of America’s semicolonial behavior in China or place the United States in a significantly more benign light than the other imperial powers of the time.

With the dawn of what would in time come to be called the American Century, the fundamental dynamics of the relationship changed as the US supplanted Britain as China’s principal interlocutor with the West. The United States had become one of four major powers with which the new republican government—itself unstable and under constant threat from local warlords—was forced to deal to secure its territorial integrity. Imperial Russia effectively annexed more than a million square kilometers of territory from the Qing dynasty through a series of unequal treaties. Imperial Japan, following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, seized de facto control over the Chinese tributary state of Korea (which it would then annex in 1910) as well as Taiwan. France effectively took control of China’s southern tributary state of Annam (Vietnam). America, however, maintained an official stance of supporting the continuing “integrity of the Chinese Empire,” in contrast to its continuing dismemberment by the colonial powers. Still, Washington proclaimed its open-door policy, under which the United States would not allow American traders, investors, or missionaries to be squeezed out by those of the other, openly imperialist powers.

Nonetheless, given its foreign and domestic circumstances, the late Qing reformers and the early Republican revolutionaries increasingly looked to America to assist China in resisting further external territorial depredations and in reforming its national political institutions. American strategy, however, continued to be divided between higher political principle and basic commercial instincts. American liberal intellectuals, such as John Dewey, provided guidance on the formation of the new legislative and executive institutions of the fledgling Chinese republic. Despite such well-intentioned private interventions, the official American response to the needs of the emerging Chinese state ranged from ambivalence and indifference to outright hostility. US policies toward China were also influenced by questions of race. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by the US Congress in 1882 and made permanent in 1902, was an explicitly racist piece of legislation effectively banning further Chinese immigration to the United States on the grounds that their presence was seen as a “threat to the working conditions of the white man.” Other federal and state acts that explicitly targeted Chinese immigrants followed. In reaction to both the Chinese Exclusion Act and anti-Chinese violence in the US, a large-scale movement to boycott American goods erupted across China in 1905.

When the US finally entered World War I in 1917, Washington prevailed on China’s recently established Republican government to also declare war on Germany. As a result, Beijing dispatched hundreds of thousands of Chinese laborers to the western front to dig trenches, build field hospitals, deliver ammunition, and work in French factories to relieve the Allies’ manpower shortages. Thousands of them lost their lives in the war. All this was on the understanding that the former German territories in the Chinese province of Shandong would be returned to China once the war was won.

After Germany was defeated, President Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points for the Paris Peace Conference and the postwar international order that was to follow, including the right for all peoples to self-determination. For doing so, he was heralded as China’s hero across Chinese domestic public opinion. Chinese patriots believed their country would be able to recover Qingdao and other German-occupied parts of their country where local people had lived like second-class citizens. Chen Duxiu, dean of letters at Peking University, who went on to become a founder and first secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, described Wilson as “the number one good man in the world.” Chinese university students were reportedly able to recite Wilson’s Fourteen Points by heart. But when the “Big Three” met at Versailles (Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French prime minister Georges Clemenceau), they rejected all of China’s key demands—including the abolition of the unequal treaties, the ability to control its customs revenue rather than have the treaty powers collect it on China’s behalf, and the return of Germany’s possessions in Shandong. Back in China, America’s betrayal triggered a wave of disillusionment, anger, and protest. The insult was made worse by Wilson’s decision to cede the Shandong territories to the Japanese for fear that if the US alienated Japan, Tokyo might not join his prized creation, the League of Nations. (Japan had fought on the side of the Allies in the war and had preemptively occupied the German concessions.)

The decisions made in Paris immediately sparked widespread protests in China and radicalized Chinese politics. America’s status, in the eyes of China’s emerging political class, collapsed overnight from national savior to spineless hypocrite. Mao Zedong (1893–1976), who had been one of many young Chinese who had been initially inspired by Wilson’s commitments to China, now described the United States and the other Western powers as a “bunch of robbers” who “cynically championed self-determination.” Had Woodrow Wilson stood up to Japan at Versailles, the twentieth-century history of China may have been significantly different.

Enter the Chinese Communist Party

A principal political beneficiary of the Versailles Treaty was the newly formed Bolshevik government in Moscow. Lenin refused to attend the peace conference or sign the treaty. The new Soviet government also unilaterally repudiated Russia’s extraterritorial rights in China, automatically securing acclamation from all of China’s newly emerging political parties. Chinese students protesting over the Paris treaty took to the streets in what became known as the May Fourth Movement—an intellectual watershed moment for Chinese politics, including the subsequent foundation of the Chinese Communist Party. Li Dazhao, who, along with Mao and Chen, became one of the first members of the CCP, commented that World War I was won by Lenin, Trotsky, and Marx rather than Woodrow Wilson. At the party’s founding in Shanghai in July 1921, two members of the Kremlin’s Comintern, dedicated to promoting world communism, were also in attendance.

By 1922, however, Moscow’s representatives from the Comintern were providing financial and military assistance to both the ruling Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang, or KMT) and the CCP. The new republic was in danger. Warlords were carving up the country into personal military fiefdoms. Moscow insisted that the KMT include the Communists in the government in those parts of the country it controlled and helped establish a military academy for training both CCP and KMT forces so that they could jointly defeat the warlords and reunite the country.

An appeal by Sun Yat-sen, the first (provisional) president of the Republic of China, to President Warren Harding in 1921 to help save China’s infant republic at “the most critical time of her existence,” meanwhile, fell on deaf ears. Instead, Washington granted diplomatic recognition to a series of warlord commanders who controlled Beijing during the 1920s. Sun had previously supported America’s democracy as a model for China’s future political development. Now, he found himself with nowhere else to turn other than Moscow. Sun dispatched his deputy Chiang Kai-shek to lead a four-man military commission to Moscow to seek strategic support. Thus began what would become a one-hundred-year-long political competition between Moscow and Washington for influence over China’s future domestic and foreign policy direction.

Over the next thirty years, between the Treaty of Versailles and the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949, China’s future was largely shaped by three great powers: Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Japan’s invasions of China in 1931 and 1937 rendered it effectively impossible for Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT government to modernize the Chinese economy, bring about basic social reforms, or begin any transition to liberal-democratic institutions. In the meantime, the Soviet Union continued to nurture close political and operational relationships with both the KMT and the CCP. However, after 1927, when Chiang sought to eliminate the Communists, Moscow’s support for the party during the course of the ensuing civil war eventually became complete. As for the United States, the KMT government looked to Washington as the only possible strategic counterweight against Japan on the one hand and the Soviet-backed CCP on the other.

Once again, however, the United States proved an unreliable ally. It was not until after the Japanese invasion of the Chinese far northeast, or Manchuria, in 1931 that the US finally agreed to an American “civilian mission” to help train the fledgling Chinese air force. Still, President Herbert Hoover reminded Americans that “Japan in Manchuria did not challenge the deep interests or values of the United States.” Even following the full-scale Japanese invasion of China in 1937, US aid to the Republic of China continued to be unofficial—primarily in the form of the Flying Tigers, under the command of Claire Chennault, a retired US Army Air Corps officer who was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek. However, US assistance fell short of Chiang Kai-shek’s military and financial needs in dealing with the combined challenges of a Japanese invasion, continued predations by warlords, and a growing Communist insurgency.

In the end, fearing it risked outright war with Japan, the Roosevelt administration held back from offering official military support for Chiang despite professing sympathy for China. Indeed, until America’s entry into the war in 1941, 80 percent of all foreign aid to China came from the Soviet Union. Even after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt pursued a policy of Europe first, regarding China as a secondary theater of operations and, therefore, warranting no serious US troop presence. Although Republican China lost more than three million troops and eleven million civilians during their fourteen-year war against Japan, thereby pinning down the bulk of the Japanese army in the Asian theater in a rolling war of attrition across the Chinese mainland, the US refused to make any significant military deployments to China itself. Instead, the US focused on its maritime campaign, including its island-hopping strategy across the western Pacific, before destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons in 1945 and finally bringing the war with Japan to an end.

The same equivocal American approach to the KMT continued after the war, when the Truman administration never effectively resolved the question of whether, and to what extent, the US would intervene to defend Chiang against Mao’s resurgent Communists. The US extended a series of significant Treasury loans to a cash-strapped KMT government that was wrestling with postwar hyperinflation and a chronically unstable currency. But as soon as the war with Japan was over, Truman announced the ending of all military assistance to Chiang. Meanwhile, the Soviets were in the process of rearming Mao’s forces and secretly relocating them to Manchuria in preparation for the final phase of the civil war against the KMT.

American postwar diplomacy, primarily through the Marshall Mission of 1945 to 1947 (when General George Marshall was dispatched to China by President Harry Truman to act as a mediator) focused on the fool’s errand of trying to reconcile Nationalist and Communist forces in a democratic government of national unity supported by an integrated Chinese army under Chiang’s control. The naivety of US policy was underlined when full-scale civil war erupted in the summer of 1946, by which time Communist forces, armed and equipped by the Soviets, were at full strength and about to begin their sweeping march south. US military and financial aid to the Nationalists resumed but was insufficient to make a material difference to the war’s outcome. In Washington, the view of the State Department and others across the Truman administration was that the Nationalists were hopelessly corrupt and that a Communist victory would not necessarily be catastrophic to American interests. Mao had also assured the wide-eyed American journalists, to whom he granted carefully arranged interviews in the CCP’s Yan’an stronghold, that he was not a Soviet proxy, that a Communist regime would be politically democratic and economically pragmatic, and that it would welcome continued US trade and investment. This included Edgar Snow, a pliant journalist whose best-selling 1937 book, Red Star Over China, had a strong impact on raising American opinion of the revolutionaries. US policy, therefore, fell between two stools: not materially supporting Chiang sufficiently to deliver victory over the CCP while sufficiently committing itself to Chiang, at least symbolically, to earn the enduring enmity of Mao and the Communists, who concluded that their only reliable ally was the Soviet Union.

The uncomfortable truth was that Mao had long seen the United States as no better than the other imperialist powers. According to Mao’s writings as early as 1923, the Chinese people had “a superstitious faith in the United States,” and Americans were “naïve people” who failed to understand that “America was actually the most murderous of hangmen.” His reasons were the familiar ones—the US had failed to repeal the unequal treaties, had insisted on extraterritoriality for its nationals, and had been of negligible assistance in effectively confronting Japan’s territorial ambitions. But Mao also recognized a second and much more lethal threat to Marxist ideology: the potential impact of American political ideals and ideas within China itself. First- and second-generation American missionaries had attracted millions of Chinese converts (far more than the Europeans had) and established hundreds of charitable institutions across the country to help the poor. Popular admiration of the efficient and uncorrupt American-trained advisors working across multiple branches of the KMT administration in Nanking was substantial. Above all, there was the continued popular appeal of the American democratic-capitalist model to Chinese political elites, notwithstanding the equivocal nature of US official support for China’s national aspirations. This was reinforced by the still significant cohort of returning Chinese students from US academic institutions, many emboldened with new ideas on the transformation of China into a modern liberal state.

All of these, Mao concluded, were corrosive to CCP claims to comprehensive ideological legitimacy. In 1937, he wrote that American “liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective.… It is an extremely bad tendency.” Therefore, from its early years to the present, the Chinese Communist Party has seen the United States, uniquely among the Western democracies, as hostile to its ideological interests and a continuing challenge to its efforts to secure and sustain political power.

The United States and the People’s Republic

Following the Communist victory in 1949, the next quarter century of the US-China relationship became its most acrimonious. For all its reservations about Chiang and the KMT, the US continued to support him after he fled with his army and supporters to Taiwan, determined to make the island his political and military base for “recovering the mainland.” In the United States, the domestic political debate for the next decade was dominated by the Cold War, McCarthyism, and a viciously partisan fight between Republicans and Democrats over “who lost China.” Meanwhile, Chinese domestic politics were driven by the convulsions of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s doctrine of continuous revolution, which saw millions of deaths, social fracturing, and the near collapse of the Chinese economy.

Chiang’s establishment of the Republic of China on Taiwan was a direct affront to Mao. But facing the considerable challenges of rebuilding a war-torn country and establishing an entirely new form of government there, Mao did not want to risk a general war with the United States. So when North Korean leader Kim Il-sung asked for his help in dislodging the Americans from South Korea, Mao gave conditional assent. He said he would come to North Korea’s aid if the Americans crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. When they did, he sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops to fight them—but not as the People’s Liberation Army. Instead, they were called “volunteers” so that the fledgling People’s Republic would not have to officially declare war on the US.

While Chinese troops were fighting American forces in Korea, China’s propaganda apparatus launched a “hate America” campaign on the home front to “cure three diseases: kongmei bing (the disease of fearing America), chongmei bing (the disease of worshiping America), and meimei bing (the disease of flattering America).” The party also used the campaign to discredit American-trained intellectuals who had stayed in China after 1949, requiring them to make public confessions of their ideological heresies while professing afresh their love for the party.