American “Imperialism” in China?
Many allegations have been made to America’s treatment of Pre-Red China, with one of the claims being of Colonialism or Imperialism. However, these allegations are false and misrepresent actual US Policy Objectives in China. The U.S. wanted to preserve the Open Door and protect China from being carved up into colonies by the Europeans and Japanese.
America joined in a multinational expedition to rescue the besieged legations in Peking. While the European and Japanese participants were determined to carve out their own spheres of influence in China, the United States pointedly committed itself to maintaining free trade for all the Open Door.
Unlike other nations, the U.S. did not seek to carve out its own quasi-colonial sphere of influence; the U.S. policy, first articulated in two famous diplomatic notes in 1899 and 1900, was to preserve the “Chinese territorial and administrative entity” and safeguard “for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.” Commerce with China amounted to less than 4 percent of U.S. foreign trade during the 1920s, but Washington felt responsible for securing American treaty rights. “It is our wish,” said Rear Admiral William Phelps, YangPat commander in 1923, “to make every American feel perfectly safe in coming to the Yangtze Valley to live or to transact business.”
The U.S. presence in China was resented over the years by many Chinese, and repented of by many guilt-ridden Americans, because it carried the taint of imperialism. Many Chinese felt as affronted by the U.S. Navy being on the Yangtze as Americans would have felt had the Chinese navy tried to patrol the Mississippi River; as offended by the garrisons in Shanghai, Peking, and Tientsin as Americans would have been by Chinese garrisons in Washington, New York, and Baltimore. Perhaps even more galling to many Chinese were the petty slights and indignities — the stray look, the odd word, the sudden outburst of violence — by which the white man made plain that he did not regard the “yellow” race as his intellectual or social equal. All this is undeniable and understandable, yet much can be said in defense of the U.S. role.
To start with, the U.S. did not carve out its own quasi-colonial sphere of influence, as Japan and the European powers did. Instead America helped prevent the Europeans from dividing China into formal colonies. The Open Door policy was codified in international law through the Nine Power Treaty of 1922. The U.S. also pushed for a reduction in the number of treaty ports; the total shrank from a high of almost 80 to 13 by 1937. The unequal treaties were not finally nullified until 1943, but by then this was a mere formality. The Europeans and Americans had long ceased to be a threat to Nationalist China; they were now Chiang Kai-shek’s allies in his fight against the Japanese and the Communists
The primary mission of American forces in China was not aggressive, though it may have seemed that way to many Chinese; “their primary function,” as the State Department stated in 1937, “is protecting American nationals, secondarily, American property.” This would not have been necessary if China had had an effective national government capable of enforcing law and order, but it did not. One could argue that repeated foreign interventions helped undermine the legitimacy of China’s governments, and there is some truth to this. But for the most part foreigners merely revealed the rot in the Celestial Empire’s institutions; they did not cause it. Japan, though considerably smaller in land area and population than China, had stronger political and social structures that allowed it to withstand European and American bullying.
The Western missionaries and businessmen who rushed into China under the protection of Western navies unsettled its traditional society but also provided real benefits to the Chinese people. By the 1920s the old missionary impulse to win “China for Christ” had been largely channeled into running medical, educational, and social-welfare programs, much as the Peace Corps would later do. Americans helped set up numerous schools and colleges, such as Nanking University and Yenching University, that provided a Western education to thousands of Chinese scholars, women included.
The Rockefeller Foundation created Peking Union Medical College, China’s premier research and training hospital. YMCAs and YWCAs sprouted across the land, offering, among other programs, public health seminars and anti-opium campaigns.Ironically, many of these educational institutions fostered nationalist and xenophobic feelings by exposing Chinese students to Western ideology. The most fervent supporters of both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party were some of the most Westernized Chinese.
Foreign investors introduced modern technology and the entrepreneurial spirit, and financed many modern industries. Their success created an environment in which profit from industrial undertakings was demonstrably possible, thereby prompting the Chinese to follow their example. Additionally, the employment and training of Chinese in foreign factories and business establishments produced a native pool of technical knowledge of production and managerial skills which later were to be profitably tapped by and for the Chinese. Nor should one lose sight of the fact that foreign-leased areas and treaty ports provided a certain degree of peace and order necessary for industrial growth; and that foreign establishments had already borne most of the cost of ‘social overhead,’ such as public utilities, roads, and communications facilities, which eased the development of Chinese industry.
Many of these achievements would be forgotten during the horrors that engulfed China in the decades that followed — civil war, famine, the Cultural Revolution — but in the 1980s capitalism would experience a resurgence, building on the almost-forgotten foundations of the distant past. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, then, Western “imperialism” could be seen as neither a blind alley nor a crippling burden but as a promise delayed, an opportunity deferred.
It goes without saying that Western businessmen did not provide these benefits in a spirit of altruism; that is not how capitalism works. But while Americans did reap some profits in China, it was never as much as either boosters of China trade or its critics would suppose. From 1890 to 1920, China represented just 3.5 percent of U.S. exports and 1.4 percent of U.S. foreign investment. For Britain, businessmen were the driving force behind its China policy; but in the case of America, it was the missionaries who were more important. This hardly supports the theories of a Smedley Butler that all military policy is driven by pursuit of material gain.
What is most striking is how long the American military stayed in China — and how successfully. The sinking of the Panay was the only military disaster suffered by the United States during almost a century of peacekeeping duty in the Celestial Kingdom, from the 1840s to 1941. That the mission went so smoothly is, in retrospect, remarkable. There were seldom more than a handful of U.S. sailors, soldiers, and marines on the China station, far from home, and surrounded by all manner of potential enemies: various Chinese armed forces, the militaries of other foreign powers, and of course the Chinese people themselves, 400 million strong in the early twentieth century, who, if aroused, easily could have expelled the small number of intruders from their midst.
The U.S. armed forces in China were never adequate to deal with a determined foe. They could perform only a policing role, and that mainly through bluff and swagger. There is no shortage of examples in American history of similar missions that came to a sad end; one thinks of the marines being blown up in their Beirut barracks in 1983. In China, by contrast, the Americans’ bluff worked almost until the very end.
Conclusion:
U.S. motives weren’t wholly benign, of course. But neither were they always malign.The U.S. presence in China from the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 through World War II was largely economically motivated — but it was hardly exploitative, at least relative to the European powers present. Indeed, America’s sincere concern for the welfare of the Chinese people led straight to Pearl Harbor.m
