This article is the first of a series examining Communist China, which is an existential threat to the US in every way: military, economic, ideological, and political. The series will include a brief overview of the history of US-China relations, key strategic initiatives of Communist China, the People’s Liberation Army, Chinese Communist (ChiCom) corruption of US institutions, and other specific threats posed by Communist China. Let’s get started with the history of US-China relations before the Communists took control of China in 1949.
US-China history is long and complicated, but current American-Chinese political-military tensions resulting from the deleterious effect of the ChiCom virus on the world economy – and the US in particular – make sense when that history is considered. Here are just a few of the highlights, presented in summary form.
Origins. The US began trading with “Old China” in the 18th century just after the American Revolution:
In 1784, when the American War for Independence was barely over, the first ship to sail under an American flag left New York. It was the merchant ship Empress of China, bound for Canton (now Guangdong), China.
Nascent American manufacturing and whaling/fishing concerns were interested in opening markets in China while the Chinese were interested trading tea, spices, and opium (the latter which was highly prized in the medicinal form as laudanum in those days).
Early Diplomatic Relations. Formal relations between the US and China were first established with the Treaty of Wangxia signed in 1844. The primary US goal in signing this treaty with the Qing dynasty who ruled China at the time was to establish the same rights for the US that European nations had previously negotiated with the Chinese. A key provision negotiated was that only U. S. Consul officials could try Americans for crimes committed in China. The Treaty gave the US the right to buy land for churches and hospitals in China and established fixed tariffs in Chinese ports (in lieu of the arbitrary changing tariffs established beforehand by corrupt local Chinese officials). Finally, the Treaty enabled Americans to learn the Chinese language which had previously been forbidden by Chinese law.
Chinese Emigration. After the Treaty of Wangxia, the first of the “overseas Chinese” (people of Chinese birth or descent who live outside China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) began to emigrate to the North American continent. Some 300,000 Chinese emigrated to the US during the California Gold Rush alone. Others later worked on the transcontinental railroad on the multiple lines that were built across the US heartland in the late 19th century to provide fast transportation to California. Because the mass influx of Chinese into the US, there were intense political pressures in the US Congress for controlling that in-flow of immigrants, as the vast majority of Chinese immigrants were involved in the trades and competed with Americans for business and jobs: miners, construction, day laborers, fisherman, railroad workers, and many more. As a result, the 1868 Burlingame-Seward Treaty was signed which formalized Chinese immigration. Chinese women were not permitted to immigrate to the US until 1872. The children of Chinese immigrants could become US citizens, but no naturalization of immigrating Chinese was permitted – a policy quite different than that for immigrating Europeans. Nevertheless, the treaty in essence granted China the modern equivalent of “most-favored nation” status by promising “the Chinese the right to free immigration and travel within the United States, and allowed for the protection of Chinese citizens in the United States.” Lastly, in the 19th century, there was very little early assimilation of Chinese immigrants in American culture. This was particularly true in the religious sense, as many were advocates of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship. For this reason, American missionaries were particularly interested in establishing Christian missions in China – to “convert the millions of heathens to Christianity.”
The Chinese Diaspora in America. A diaspora is defined as the mass dispersion of an indigenous population to distant lands/countries. By the late 19th century, Chinese immigrants could be found in many American cities and states, totaling over 100,000 by 1880. Racial animosity and competition for unskilled jobs with Americans of European descent led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 which effectively ended Chinese immigration to the US for 60 years. Around 1893, California expelled Chinese workers from the agriculture industry (at that time totally 75% of the workers), and these people moved to the cities to form the nucleus of “China towns” in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Oakland, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. The Expulsion Act was possibly when Chinese resentment of Americans first became widespread among the political elites in mainland China.
Industrialization of China – late 19th Century. For decades after establishing diplomatic relations with Chinese emperors, Europeans and the US had tried to industrialize and exploit China, especially at the end of the 19th century. This was codified by America’s “Open Door Policy” that was eventually endorsed by all of the so-called “Great Powers” (Britain, Japan, Germany, and France):
The Open Door Policy was a major statement of United States foreign policy issued in 1899 and 1900 intended to protect the rights of all countries to trade equally with China and confirming multi-national acknowledgment of China’s administrative and territorial sovereignty. Proposed by U.S. Secretary of State John Hay and supported by President William McKinley, the Open Door Policy formed the foundation of U.S. foreign policy in East Asia for more than 40 years.
Chinese xenophobia and resentment of the foreign presence in China led to the Boxer Rebellion in 1899. After the Boxers were defeated by a joint US-European military force, China was forced to indemnify the victorious nations, including the US and Imperial Japan, further adding to Chinese resentment of the foreign presence in their country. In 1908, the US remitted the $11 million remaining in from the “Boxer indemnity”, and the Qing dynasty used the remittance to finance the education of 50-100 Chinese students in the US per year. (This trickle of Chinese students became a flood beginning in the 1980s, growing to an average of 500,000 students per year by 2020.)
World War II. Japanese aggression in China in the early 20th century subsequently led to a series of Sino-Japanese wars prior to WW-II. The US sided with China and placed diplomatic pressure on the Japanese which had no real effect on continuing Japanese atrocities, including the “Rape of Nanking” in 1937. At that time, Nanking was the capital of China, and the Japanese executed an “estimated 150,000 male ‘war prisoners,’ massacred an additional 50,000 male civilians, and raped at least 20,000 women and girls of all ages.”
After Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy, the US and China formed an official wartime alliance in 1942. The US provided massive material support to China throughout WW-II. A main supply line was via air over the Himalayas from India to China in support of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang-led Chinese Republic (the “Chinese Nationalists”). In addition, the American Volunteer Group (AVG) Flying Tigers were volunteer airmen from the US and Britain who manned the fighter aircraft that attacked Japanese bombers operating in East Asia during the early years of the war:
The first combat for the A.V.G. occurred over southern Yunnan Province on December 20, 1941. In their first combat, [they] shot down nine out of ten Japanese bombers with a loss of one A.V.G. aircraft. The A.V.G. was finally disbanded on July 4, 1942. The group celebrated its final day in the air by knocking down five enemy fighters over Hengyang and escorting U.S. Army Air Forces B-25’s to bomb the Japanese air base at Canton.
US General Chennault, the founder of the AVG, later stated, “The group had whipped the Japanese Air Force in more than 50 air battles without a single defeat. With the R.A.F., it had kept the port of Rangoon and the Burma Road open for 2 1/2 precious months while supplies trickled into China. With less than one-third of its combat strength it saved China from final collapse on the Salween. Its reputation alone was sufficient to keep Japanese bombers away from Chunking. It freed the cities of East China from years of terror bombing and finally gave both Chinese and American morale an incalculable boost at a time when it was sagging dangerously low. All this cost the Chinese $8,000,000 – about $3,000,000 in salaries and personnel expenses and $5,000,000 for planes and equipment.”
For their part, the Chinese helped Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders who survived the carrier-launched B-25 bomber attack on Tokyo in 1942 and crashed in Manchukuo, the China “protectorate” in northeast China that was then occupied by the Japanese. Doolittle’s raid and the assistance afterward provided to surviving US airman by local Chinese was dramatized in the 2019 remake of the movie “Midway.”
American relations were initiated with Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist group in 1944 when a US Army Observation Group established a liaison at the Communist base camp at Yan’an. Beginning in the 1930s, the Nationalist Kuomintang and Mao’s ChiComs had maintained an uneasy peace while fighting the Japanese invaders until civil war broke out between the two groups after WW-II ended in late 1945.
WW-II Aftermath. The US supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (the “Nationalists”) during the Chinese civil war against Mao’s Chinese Communists. Gen George Marshall (the creator of the Marshall Plan that reconstructed Europe and helped prevent the Soviet takeover there after WW-II) failed to broker a truce between the two Chinese sides, and eventually the Nationalists fled to Taiwan (where they had previously accepted Japan’s surrender in 1945 and had an established presence there) after the more disciplined and effective ChiCom troops defeated the Kuomintang forces on the mainland. Marshall had attempted to implement a “Marshall Plan for China”:
Under Marshall’s guiding hand, the Nationalists and the Communists agreed to a cease-fire in a civil war that had raged on and off for two decades. They settled on the principles of a democratic government, listening as Marshall explained the Bill of Rights and read aloud from Benjamin Franklin’s speeches. They signed off on a plan to merge their troops into one army.
[T]he groundwork Marshall laid for a peaceful, democratic, American-allied China would not survive. Discussions moved from the high-level accord to the details of implementation, and apparent agreement gave way to irreconcilable differences about China’s future.
Marshall struggled for another 10 months to avert a breakdown—and the consequent risk of Communist victory and renewed world war. … Only at the end of 1946 did he finally give up.
As a side note, a Soviet spy who was President Truman’s assistant secretary of the treasury (Harry Dexter White) facilitated the ChiCom victorying 1949 by blocking US loans and a transfer of $20 million in gold bullion to the Kuomintang at the height of the Chinese civil war. This Cold War episode has been denied by Communist apologists in the US down through the years, but the release of the declassified Venona cables in the 1980s removed all doubts by confirming White was indeed a Soviet source under the code names “Lawyer,” “Richard,” and “Jurist.” The Nationalist army was a mercenary army and continued direct payments in gold may have prevented the ChiCom victory (or at least delayed it while other solutions could have been devised). The subsequent fall of China to the ChiComs was another turning point in history!
Here ends Part I of this series. Part II will finish the brief summary of US-China relations during the Communist era, setting the table for future articles that will discuss various aspects of the Chinese Communist threat to the US and the world.
The end.
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There’s a lot here that I didn’t know about. Thanks, Stu.