US-China Relations and Global Empire

 Harry Targ

United States/Chinese Relations in the Twenty-First Century

In a speech on July 23, 2020 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the Nixon opening to China in 1972 was a mistake.  “We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come: that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done.  We must not continue it and we must not return to it.” (Edward Wong, Steven Lee Myers, “Officials Push U.S.-China Relations Toward Point of No Return,” The New York Times, July 25, 2020).  If it is true that the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy toward China did in fact facilitate the weakening of socialism as a world force, why is the Secretary of State now calling “playing the China card” a mistake?

 

The Long Troubled United States Relations with China: US Globalism, the Open Door Notes, and the Centrality of China for Building a Global Empire

The developing United States obsession with China (leaving aside the super-exploitation of Chinese labor and profound anti-Chinese racism in the United States) has its roots in the rise of the US as a great power.  As historians such as William Appleman Williams have pointed out, the United States emerged as an industrial power on the world stage between the end of the Civil War and the 1890s.  Not only was the US economy experiencing industrialization, but private entrepreneurs were building a transcontinental railroad, with Chinese labor, to create a continental empire.  Coupled with industrialization and a vast transportation network, there were agricultural surpluses well beyond the consumer needs of persons in the United States.  Williams concluded that by the 1880s the United States, because of increased agricultural productivity, began to seek world markets for its goods.

Increasingly the industrial and agricultural revolutions in the United States were leading to increased competition with European imperial powers and the rising Japanese empire.  A sector of the United States political class, exemplified by former Secretary of the Navy and soon-to-be president Theodore Roosevelt, argued for the United States to develop a global vision and a naval military capability to facilitate becoming a global empire, particularly to challenge Europe. After diplomatic skirmishes with Great Britain over who should have dominant influence in Latin America, the United States entered the Cuban anti-colonial war against the Spanish empire in 1898.  (Over the subsequent years until 1959 the United States replaced Spain as the colonial overseer of Cuba).  In addition, the United States took Puerto Rico, reaffirmed its dominance over the Hawaiian Islands and seized control of the Philippines.  To further the globalization of US empire President Roosevelt was able to get Congressional support for a “two-ocean” navy.  The United States was on the road to becoming a world power.

But the lack of control of the political economy of China remained an obstacle to the completion of the imperial project.  The 4,000-year-old Chinese empire, with vast lands and people, and neighboring tributary countries, had begun to deconstruct in the nineteenth century.  The Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856 were carried out by Great Britain and later France; Germany and Russia joined in to force China to open its domestic markets to foreign capitalist penetration.  The imperial powers carved out concessions and spheres of influence in China.   Japan defeated China in the war of 1894-95 and annexed Taiwan. 

The devolution of the Qing Dynasty and expanding foreign presence led to movements within China of reform and resistance.   A secret martial arts society known as the Boxers rose up in 1899 to attack foreigners and foreign culture.  The Boxers were at first supported by the imperial court but eventually were defeated by an international army which marched to Beijing.  The US sent troops along with European powers and Japan.  The defeat of the Boxer Rebellion and its nationalist program solidified growing European and Japanese control over the vast Chinese empire.

Fearful of being frozen out of the vast potential Chinese market, President William McKinley’s Secretary of State, John Hay, issued two “notes” to European powers in 1899 and 1900 indicating that the United States would insist upon equal access to Chinese markets, even in areas of the country that had been seen as part of the “spheres of influence” of the colonial powers.  Traditional interpreters of United States foreign policy, such as George Kennan, regarded John Hay’s Open Door Notes as examples of typical US diplomatic bluster; empty threats that could not be backed up by economic or military power.  Williams in his classic, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, argues that the Notes were emblematic of the development of United States global imperial power.  

 

What had been the nineteenth century vision of US domination of Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine, was being applied to Asia as well.  The defeat of the Spanish, the occupation of the Philippines, the development of a two-ocean navy, burgeoning agricultural products, a vision of American exceptionalism often articulated by Theodore Roosevelt and spokespersons of both political parties, all made it clear that domination of China was to be a key global project of the twentieth century.

Revolution and Civil War, the Missionary Spirit, World War II, and the Victory of Communism in China

The Chinese state continued its steady decline after the Boxer Rebellion.  A democratic revolutionary movement led by Dr. Sun Yatsen emerged to overthrow the Qing Dynasty in the uprising of 1911.  The goal of the Kuomintang (KMT) was to establish a modern democratic republic and secure independence from the imperial powers.  The Qing dynasty collapsed but China soon fell into disunity and conflict among competing feudal warlords.

At the same time, the presence of Christian missionaries, many from the United States, continued to grow.  Several of these missionaries and their descendants would later influence US foreign policy toward China.  Pearl Buck, a popular American novelist, who wrote The Good Earth, would bring Chinese culture to a US audience.  Henry Luce, later the founder of the Time, Life, Fortune magazine empire was raised by a missionary family in China.  As an adult in the post-World War Two period, he would use his influence to shape US public opinion in support of Chinese nationalist forces against the Chinese communist movement.  In addition, Walter Judd, a powerful Republican congressman from Minnesota, who was influenced by his experience growing up in a missionary family in China, strongly advocated the emerging anti-communist US approach to China, particularly giving support to the KMT forces. 

The Russian revolution of 1917 helped spread Marxism in China.  In 1921, Chinese Marxists organized the Communist Party of China (CPC), which became affiliated with the Comintern, the “center” of international Communism in Moscow.  The early CPC leadership included Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu and well as Mao Zedong.  The Comintern urged the young CPC to enter into a coalition with the much larger KMT to advance the democratic revolution. 

After the death of Sun Yatsen in 1925, one of his deputies, Chiang Kai-shek, gained control of the KMT.  He was a military man who transformed the nationalist party to serve the interests of Chinese land owners and capitalists. He sought to solidify control of the growing nationalist movement into a political and fighting force that would defend the interests of wealthy Chinese.  He also wanted to secure the support of friends of China from missionary and political circles in the United States.

Chiang, aware of the rising popularity of communism and the party’s increasing membership among youth and urban intellectuals, launched a massive terror campaign in 1927 to exterminate Chinese communism. The terror campaign was vividly portrayed in Andre Malraux’s novel Man’s Fate.  Those communists who survived the urban arrests and massacres fled to the countryside to establish a base area.  In the course of fighting over years, the CPC built a strong guerrilla army, now largely peasant-based, to defeat the forces of Chiang. Since the Kuomintang defended the interests of the land owners, the Communist movement and its democratic reform program increasingly resonated with the rural population.

Japan invaded northeast China in 1931 and established the puppet state of Manchukuo.   In 1937 Japan launched all-out war on China and attacked the whole country.  Millions of Chinese civilians were killed in the course of this long, brutal war.  Chiang Kai-shek was forced by the desperate character of the invasion to establish a nationwide united front against the Japanese invasion with his communist adversaries.

During World War Two, US military forces arrived on the Chinese mainland as part of the alliance to fight the Japanese empire.  Despite the KMT/CPC truce, many observers reported that the KMT used the cease fire in the civil war to solidify their military position rather than to fight the Japanese. General Joseph Stillwell, a representative of President Roosevelt, warned the president that the Kuomintang was unpopular and that the US after the war should refrain from taking sides on any return to civil war. This view was confirmed by reports sent back to Washington by State Department Asia experts stationed in China. Later these experts would be castigated by Congress for being “soft on communism.”

After the Japanese were defeated in Asia, the United States resumed active support for the Kuomintang, including leaving troops in parts of China.  In 1946 the US allotted one billion dollars in assistance to Chiang’s forces.  Secretary of State George Marshall participated in a year’s negotiation in 1946 between the KMT and CPC to end the civil war.  Ultimately these negotiations failed and full-scale civil war resumed.   After three years of fighting, the civil war ended in October 1949 with the victory of the communist forces and the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The defeated KMT fled to and occupied the island of Taiwan. For US domestic purposes, Chiang's regime on Taiwan represented the "real" China. Thus, there would dawn a new era of US/Chinese relations because of “the fall of China.”

US Chinese Relations: Korea to Playing the China Card Today

1949 was an apocryphal year for the United States. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in August and Chinese communist armies marched into Beijing, ending the thirty-year civil war in that country. The leader of the CPC, Mao Zedong, visited Moscow and signed a treaty of peace and friendship with the Soviet Union. From the vantage point of the historic vision of US empire, the fact that at least a quarter of humanity and one-third of the land mass of the globe was “communist” stimulated fear and generated a campaign of anti-communist hysteria at home and advocacy for an escalated arms race internationally.

Truman’s advisors prepared a policy document, National Security Document 68 (NSC 68) which called for a dramatic increase in military spending. NSC 68 also recommended each president, while preparing an annual federal budget, give the Department of Defense all it requests before allotting any federal dollars for non-defense programs. (As analysists would compelling argue in subsequent years, the US economy was stimulated to a significant degree by military spending creating what Andrew Bacevich would call “a permanent war economy”).

There was resistance to adopting the recommendations of NSC 68 from fiscal conservatives in the Truman Administration until war broke out in Korea and North Korean troops advanced south, thus launching the three-year Korean War (a status of war that exists until this day). Six months after the onset of the Korean War, United States/United Nations troops successfully pushed North Korean troops deep into the north.  Chinese troops then entered the war on the side of North Korea.  Chinese entrance into the Korean War was prompted by US military advances all the way to the Yalu River on the Chinese border, which China perceived as a prelude to invasion of China proper.  Many influential US policy makers, particularly General Douglas MacArthur, had been calling for direct war with China to end communist rule with the goal of establishing China as a Christian nation.

US policy toward China continued to be hostile even after a cease fire was achieved in Korea in 1953. Senator Joseph McCarthy campaigned loudly on the premise that “China fell to communism” because of traitors in the US State Department.  These state department personnel, the so-called “China hands,” had warned of the corruption of the KMT in reports to Washington during and after the world war; they were fired. And Vice President Nixon and leaders of both political parties launched a campaign to “keep China out of the United Nations.” President Truman and his successors refused to diplomatically recognize the new Chinese state, the People’s Republic of China.  (The United States had not recognized the Soviet Union until 1933, and it would not officially recognize the PRC until 1979).

It is important to add that China participated with countries of the Global South, many of which has recently achieved their independence from colonial occupiers, in establishing a Nonaligned Movement.  NAM was committed, not to East or West, but to equity between North and South, particularly as to economic development.  China, India, Ghana, Yugoslavia, and other countries met at Bandung in 1955 and formally established NAM in the early 1960s.  Their call was for peaceful coexistence and their program would include the adoption of a New International Economic Order.  China, therefore, was allied with the Soviet Union and the countries of the Global South.

Turmoil erupted elsewhere in Asia as well.  The French sought to reestablish their colonial rule in Vietnam.  And when that failed the United States stepped in to create and support an unpopular regime in South Vietnam, very much like the forces the US had supported in China and Korea.  As the Vietnam War escalated in the 1950s and 1960s, the Chinese provided substantial military assistance and reconstruction projects to the North Vietnamese who were supporting their allies in the liberation struggle in the South. The Soviet Union also provided massive assistance to North Vietnam.  Despite this, some analysts and policymakers who became opponents of the Vietnam War, such as Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, claimed that the Vietnam policy was erroneously driven by an opposition to China.

So, in the context of a continued arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, an escalating war in Vietnam that was destroying the fabric of US society, liberation movements spreading in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Sino/Soviet split, Richard Nixon, a preeminent advocate for isolating China, was elected president of the United States in 1968.  He had pledged to end the war in Vietnam.  While most observers of US politics did not trust Nixon, it seemed clear that the US war on Vietnam, given the ruptures in US society and the declining relative power of the US on the world stage, had to end.

Nixon and Kissinger Play the “China Card”

Beginning in 1969 President Richard Nixon, guided by his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, fashioned a new policy toward China; what became known as “playing the China card.”  It was motivated by a desire to push back and ultimately create regime change in the Soviet Union.  Cognizant of growing hostilities between the two large communist states, Nixon and Kissinger developed this plan to play one off against the other.  Central to this policy was launching a diplomatic process that led to the 1979 US formal diplomatic recognition of China. During the 1970s, the United States and China supported the same political allies in various parts of the world, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia for example. The split in the socialist world between the Soviet Union and China contributed to the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union and the weakening of socialism, for a time, on the world stage.  Thus, from a US imperial point of view “playing the China card” worked.

So Why Is the United States Playing the China Card Differently and Returning to a Renewed Cold War?

The answer to this question, or more broadly why is United States foreign policy returning to a policy hostile to China, perhaps creating a “New Cold War,” has several parts.  First, as Alfred McCoy has described (In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, Haymarket Books, 2017), the United States, relatively speaking, is a declining power. As to economic growth, scientific and technological developments, productivity, and trade, the US, compared to China particularly, is experiencing stagnation or decline.  China has engaged in massive global projects in transportation, trade, and scientific advances and by 2030 based on many measures will advance beyond the US.

According to McCoy, the United States has embarked on a path to overcome its declining relative economic hegemony by increasingly investing in military advances: a space force, a new generation of nuclear weapons, cyber security, biometrics, and maintaining or enhancing a global military presence particularly in the Pacific (what Obama spokespersons called “the Asian pivot”). In other words, rather than accommodating to a new multipolar world in the 21^st century, the United States is seeking to reestablish its global hegemony through military means.

Second, the United States is desperately seeking to overcome the ending of its monopoly on technological advances.  In computerization, transportation, pharmaceuticals, the US is challenging the legitimacy of Chinese innovations, claiming that China’s advances are derived not from its domestic creativity but from “pirating” from United States companies.  For example, the prestigious and influential mainstream Council on Foreign Relations issued a report last year entitled “Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge.”  The report warned that “…the United States risks falling behind its competitors, principally China.”  China is investing significantly in new technologies, the Council claims, which they predict will make China the biggest inventor by 2030.  Also, to achieve this goal they are “exploiting” the openness of the US by violating intellectual property rights and spying.  Therefore, the Council on Foreign Relations concluded, since technological innovation is linked to economic and military advantage and since US leadership in technology and science is at risk, the nation must recommit to rebuilding its scientific prowess.

Third, while the United States is engaged in efforts at regime change around the world and is using brutal economic sanctions to starve people into submission (such as in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and 36 other countries victimized by economic sanctions), China is increasing its economic ties to these countries through investments, trade, and assistance; China also opposes US policies in international organizations.  In broad terms Chinese policy stands with the majority of countries in the Global South while the United States seeks to control developments there.

Fourth, although Trump’s foreign policy is designed to recreate a cold war, with China as the target, a policy also embraced by most Democrats, there is at the same time counter-pressure from sectors of the capitalist class who have ties to the Chinese economy: investment, global supply chains, and financial speculation. Moreover, China has substantial foreign investments and the government controls over $1 trillion of US debt.  For these sectors of US capital, economic ties with China remain economically critical as they do for transnational capital, such as pointed to by writers such as Jerry Harris (Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy, Clarity Press, 2016).

Consequently, while the trajectory of US policy is toward a return to cold war, there is some push back by economic and political elites as well.  As the New York Times article above put it, “In the United States, tycoons and business executives, who exercise enormous sway among politicians of both parties, will continue to push for a more moderate approach, as members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet who represent Wall Street interests have done.”

Fifth, American domestic politics provide the immediate cause of the transformation of US/China policy.  President Donald Trump’s popularity is declining dramatically because of the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, its impact on the US economy, and the rise of racial tensions in the country. A classic antidote for politicians experiencing declining popularity is to construct an external enemy, an “other,” which can redirect the attention of the public from their personal troubles.  President Trump has sought to deflect the cause of the spreading pandemic onto the Chinese.  It is this external enemy that is the source of our domestic problems.  In this context the President is talking tough with the “enemy” of the United States, and, as Secretary of State Pompeo suggests, it is about time that the US government gives up illusions about working with China. Only a Trump administration, he suggested, would be capable of doing this (forget President Obama’s “Asian pivot”).

Finally, the ideological package of racism, white supremacy, and American Exceptionalism so prevalent in United States history has resurfaced in dramatic ways as the Trump administration and its allies have opposed nationwide protests against police violence and structural racism.  White supremacy at home is inextricably connected with American Exceptionalism abroad.  For example, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 claimed that the white race has been critical to civilization.  Years later Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration (and more recently President Barack Obama) spoke about the United States as the “indispensable nation,” a model of economics and politics for the world.  Pompeo continues this tradition claiming that the United States stands for a “free 21^st century.”  This sense of omniscience has been basic to the ideological justification of United States imperial rule.

Each of these elements, from the changing shape of economic and military capabilities to political exigencies, to the pathologies of culture, require a peace and justice movement that stands for peaceful coexistence, demilitarization, building a world of economic justice and the rights of people to determine their own destiny, and inalterable opposition to racism, white supremacy, and exceptionalism of any kind.

 

A version of the above essay appeared in Duncan McFarland, ed. A China Reader, Changemaker, 2021.