USA - China Trade History

This Week in China’s History looks back at U.S. Secretary of State John Hay’s 1899 “Open Door Note” that purported to support China’s sovereignty and the principles of free trade, but arguably did just the opposite.

It’s a cliche among historians to define particular decades — almost any decade, if we’re given the chance — as “pivotal.” With that in mind, I’d still argue that the importance of the 1890s for China’s foreign relations is hard to overstate. The Qing empire entered the decade with hopes that the self-strengthening program reinvigorated after an 1884 defeat by France was finally bearing fruit. 

The 1894 war with Japan ended any illusions about that: China was unable to defend its territorial interests. The rest of the decade was the “carving of the melon,” to use the parlance of the day, as Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan divided the ailing dynasty.

The process had actually begun decades earlier. The Opium Wars spawned a British colony at Hong Kong and a handful of semi-colonial “treaty ports,” which grew in number and autonomy over the course of the century. The 1858 Treaty of Aigun ceded more than 230,000 square miles of Manchuria to Russia. But it was in the 1890s that China seemed truly in peril.

The spark to the fuse on China’s partition was not lit by Europeans, but by Japan. The terms of the 1894-95 war gave Japan the Liaodong Peninsula, jutting south from Manchuria toward Shandong. The Japanese claim was soon renounced thanks to international pressure.

The Europeans, it would seem, did not appreciate the Japanese usurping their colonial prerogative — yet the move suggested that the informal imperialism that had guided much of European policy toward China might need to be reconsidered. Might it be time to divide China, formally, among the European powers?  READ MORE