China-U.S. Relations
The China-US competition is heating up. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described China-US relations as "competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be." The last global realignment took place immediately following WWII. Washington wants to hold on its global dominance for as long as possible while Beijing is eagerly working to supplant the US’s superpower status, first in Asia, then in Africa and the Middle East. The Chinese strategy in achieving its objectives is quite clear: unlike the US’s disproportionate investments in military power, China is keen on winning its coveted status, at least for the time being, using soft power only.
In China, the period between 1842 and 1949, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded and the country ceased to march to the beat of a Western drum, is called the “century of humiliation.” Even now, Chinese President Xi Jinping only expects China to have caught up with the West once again by 2049, a century after the country resumed its course of development.
China has warned the US against starting a new cold war and said it's not trying to replace America's role in the world. Many are saying the Phase One deal reached by the US and China was precarious to begin with and there was little chance of it being renegotiated. China had weakened its currency to its lowest level since 2008 after renewed threats from the US to slap fresh tariffs on the Chinese economy. China was committed to increasing energy imports from the US but this didn't look likely.
After the American Revolution ended, a Philadelphia financier in 1784 sent the ship Empress of China for the first voyage of direct trade between the United States and China. In the 60 years following the Empress of China's voyage, relations among US citizens and Chinese were private and largely commercial. Nevertheless, Sino-American trade grew under the Chinese system that limited foreign traders’ access to a single port city, Guangzhou (Canton).
Formal recognition by the United States of the Empire of China, and by the Empire of China of the United States, came on or about June 16, 1844, when US Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary Caleb Cushing presented his credentials and met with Chinese official Qiying to discuss treaty negotiations. Prior to this, the United States had dispatched consuls to Guangzhou as early as 1784—the first was Samuel Shaw, the supercargo on the Empress of China—but these had never been formally received by Chinese officials as state representatives. The two countries had acknowledged each other’s existence before 1844, but the negotiations and treaty of that year marked the first recognition under international law.
The US intervened in China twice in the 19th century, helping the British to take the key trading city of Guangzhou in the Second Opium War and then sending troops as part of the multi-national imperialist effort to crush the Boxer Rebellion, the widespread 1899-1902 rebellion against the Western powers that had all but taken over China. At home, in 1882, the US also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all immigration from China - again, on the argument that such immigrants posed a threat to the integrity of American society. The law was not fully repealed until 1965.
Diplomatic relations were interrupted on February 12, 1912, when, as a result of the Chinese Revolution, the Manchu Emperor abdicated his throne in favor of a provisional republican government. The United States withheld recognition of this new provisional government while awaiting the organization of a permanent government. Diplomatic relations were resumed on May 2, 1913, when the Legation in Beijing communicated a message from President Woodrow Wilson to President Yuan Shikai of China upon the convening of the National Assembly for the new Republic of China.
Diplomatic relations were interrupted on December 9, 1924, when the Legation in Beijing informed the newly declared Provisional Government of the Republic of China that the United States would maintain “de facto relations” with it, pending the establishment of a formal government. On July 25, 1928, following a period of governmental instability and the emergence of the Nationalist Government of the Republic of China, US diplomatic representatives in China signed a tariff revision treaty with Nationalist officials. The Department of State declared that this act constituted full recognition of the Nationalist Government of China, with which diplomatic relations would be conducted.
As the PLA armies moved south to complete the communist conquest of China in 1949, the American Embassy followed the Nationalist government headed by Chiang Kai-shek, finally moving to Taipei later that year. US consular officials remained in mainland China. The new P.R.C. Government was hostile to this official American presence, and all US personnel were withdrawn from the mainland in early 1950. Any remaining hope of normalizing relations ended when US and Chinese communist forces fought on opposing sides in the Korean conflict.
After the Communist Party of China won the civil war against the Republic of China, which then became Taiwan, the CIA reportedly spent nearly $100 million funding a guerrilla force inside the new PRC. The CIA also had an entire program aimed at destabilizing Tibet by funding guerrilla forces there - a program US President Richard Nixon only abandoned in 1971 - and the US has provided extensive support to Taiwan, even after legally acknowledging the PRC as the sole legitimate government of all of China in 1979.
US policy toward China during President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration remained essentially what it had been during the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations — non-recognition of the People's Republic of China (PRC), support for Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government and its possession of China's seat in the United Nations, and a ban on trade and travel to the PRC—but the consensus that had once supported US policy was eroding. President Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, preoccupied with Vietnam, resisted changes in US policy, but even Johnson privately acknowledged that the United States would eventually have to recognize the PRC.
US involvement in the Vietnam conflict heightened the concern of US policymakers at what they perceived as an aggressive Chinese foreign policy. At an August 1965 meeting between Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, the emphasis was on containment. The central question, Rusk declared, was how to persuade the Chinese leaders that they were on the wrong track. Such steps as admitting China to the United Nations would send exactly the wrong message. It had required a trillion dollars in NATO defense budgets to stop the Russians in Europe, he said, and it would require a major decision by the United States and its allies to stop the Chinese. McNamara agreed, adding that the US government had not really faced the problem of generating sufficient power to “convince the Chinese of their error.” A 1966 State-Defense study defined Chinese objectives as regional hegemony and world revolution. The three options for dealing with the Chinese which it laid out were disengagement, containment, and showdown. The middle option was recommended.
China created an impression of power, and it was not clear how the US administration would proceed with China: by 2009 there was the impression of a shift within the US administration towards greater accommodation of China. The American reaction to the USS Impeccable incident in March 2009 showed a disconnect, and created the impression that the US felt the need to accommodate the Chinese. It looked like the US was adjusting to a new reality. The US response to the Impeccable fed into China's efforts to create an impression of power that might be used to coerce other nations.
During the course of the November 2014 APEC Summit in Beijing, the US and China signed a series of agreements in the military sphere that were intended to help the two countries reduce the risk of a military confrontation in Eastern Asia. The agreements establish a framework for cooperation in the event that either side takes any large-scale military actions, requiring the parties to inform each other in advance of any such steps. The document also set out a code of conduct to be followed if U.S. or Chinese military air or naval units come into contact with each other.
The countries decided to sign the agreement because lately there had been an increase in incidents (in particular, China's inclusion of the East China Sea territory in its air defense zone) that are capable of placing Beijing and Washington on the verge of a conflict that would be disadvantageous for both sides.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
