Strategic Cooperation-1970s to Present

This is probably the most fluctuating period for Sino-American relations. This bilateral relationship experienced ebbs and flows in these three decades.

In these three decades, we see three main periods of time when the United States and China cooperated strategically to meet their respective national interests in different international circumstances.

The first strategic cooperation was the opening of U.S.-China Relations due to geostrategic commonality to converge against the Soviet Union. The dramatic turnabout leading to the opening and then normalization in U.S.-China relations at the end of the 1960s and 1970s has been subject to concerns and assessments. The U.S. reconfigured the calculus of China’s position in world politics and its implications for the United States. This view highlights the importance of an apparent trend whereby U.S. leaders privately came to see China in the late 1960s as less threatening than in the past; eventually they came to view the Maoist regime as potential asset in American strategy focused increasingly on dealing with a rising and threatening Soviet Union. Despite these and other divergent views, assessments of this period and the opening in Sino-American relations find it hard not to give primacy to interpretations focused on the acute strategic necessities of both the United States and China amid circumstances of regional and international order featuring a rising and powerful Soviet Union challenging their core national interests. Similar concerns regarding national security as the U.S., the real danger of the Soviet Union military invading China, destroying its nuclear and other strategic installations, and forcing China to conform to Soviet interest moved Chinese leaders out of their self-initiated isolation.

The second strategic cooperation was in 1980s. The new U.S. leadership in 1980s shifted U.S. policy toward a less solicitous and accommodating stance toward China, while giving much higher priority to U.S. relations with Japan, as well as other U.S. allies and friends in East Asia. There was less emphasis on China’s strategic importance to the United States in American competition with the Soviet Union, and there was less concern among U.S. policy makers about China possibly downgrading relations over Taiwan and other disputes. This policy is seen to have added dimension related to a changing balance of forces affecting Chinese security and other interests in Asian and world affairs, which prompted heretofore demanding Chinese leaders to reduce pressures on the United States for concessions on Taiwan and other disputed issues. The Chinese leaders grudgingly adjusted to the new U.S stance, viewing their interests best served by less pressure and more positive initiatives to the Reagan administration, seen especially in their warm welcome for the U.S president on his visit to China in 1984. Cooperative Chinese relations with the United States were critically important to the Chinese leadership in maintaining Chinese security in the face of continuing pressure from the Soviet Union and in sustaining the flow of aid, investment, and trade essential to the economic development and modernization underway in China.

Reagan's visit to China in 1984

The pattern prevailing into the twenty-first century saw the U.S. administration and the Chinese administration generally continue to seek closer ties, including frequent high-level leadership meetings and various senior official dialogues, in order to develop areas of common ground while managing differences. Both administrations typically highlighted the many positive results from U.S.-China cooperation and dialogue. There have included cooperation in facilitating mutually advantageous trade and investment relations, cooperation in managing such regional crisis and threats as the Asian economic crisis of 1997-1998, the crisis in 1994 and again beginning in 2002 over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the global war on terrorism beginning in 2001 and the ongoing economic crisis. Under the rubric of engagement or cooperation, the U.S. administration officials and their Chinese counterparts presided over an ever-increasing economic interdependence between the United States and China, supplemented by growing cultural and political contacts and developing military contacts.

U.S.-China Relations(2)-1949 to 1970s

China and the United States held the most confrontational attitudes towards each other from 1949 to the beginning of 1970s. Even though there were some conciliating events between the U.S. and China during this period, conflicts and containment are the main themes for this bilateral relationship, including ideology conflicts from China’s perspective and strategic containment and conflicts from America’s perspective.

Ideology Conflicts from China

The Cold War was from the beginning a confrontation between two contending ideologies-communism and capitalism. The compositions of the two Cold War camps were defined along ideological lines, and the conflict between them, at its core, represented not only a contest to determine which side was stronger but also, and more importantly, a competition to demonstrate which side was superior.

As far as the foreign policies of Mao’s China are concerned, the role played by ideology is evident. The CCP leadership adopted the “lean-to-one-side” approach when it established the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which, in a practical political sense, meant allying China with the Soviet Union as well as other socialist countries and confronting the American leading “imperialist powers.”In a series of internal discussions and correspondence, Mao used highly ideological language to argue that if China failed to intervene, the “Eastern revolution” and the world revolution would suffer. Throughout this period, even longer, Beijing’s foreign policy towards the United States consistently demonstrated a strong ideological color. For example, Chinese Communist leaders launched domestic mass ideological propaganda campaigns to root out pro-American influence and seize control of U.S. cultural, religious, and business organizations that remained in China. In the mid- 1960s, Beijing, under the banner of fulfilling China’s duties of proletarian internationalism, provided Vietnamese Communists with substantial support, including the dispatch of 320,000 Chinese engineering and anti-aircraft troops to fight against America-backed forces in North Vietnam.

Ideology matters for China’s foreign policies towards the United States, yet not without fundamental limits. As indicated by China’s Cold War experience, while ideology was central in legitimizing important foreign policy decisions, ideological terms alone could not guarantee “legitimacy.” Thus Mao and his comrades always tried to present important foreign policy decisions towards the U.S. in terms of both ideological and other concerns. For example, when Beijing’s leaders decided to enter the Korean War, they announced to the Chinese people and the whole world that if they did not participate China’s security interests would be seriously jeopardized. In the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1958, the CCP argued, according to Chen Jian, that shelling Jinmen was necessary to prevent the U.S. imperialists from permanently separating Taiwan from the socialist motherland. In these cases, security concerns were real, but they also help justify decisions made primarily based on the leadership’s ideological commitments.

What that generation went through in that period of time strongly sharpened what they are thinking now. My father is a perfect example. He was born 1960s and educated by anti-Americanism. Although the reality in current world makes him reevaluate America and realize that what he learned as a child is not the total truth, he still always criticizing America’s politics with many harsh words.

Strategic Conflicts and Containment from the U.S.

At the start of the Cold War, Asia seemed secondary in U.S. strategy. When the Korean War broke out unexpectedly, the United States abruptly began what became massive commitments of military power and related assistance to stop the spread of perceived communist expansion in Asia.

 Longstanding U.S. interest in sustaining a balance of power in East Asia favorable to the United States, as well as ongoing U.S. interests in fostering free economic access to the region and the spread of American values there, now were seen to require the United States to undertake the leading role in bearing the major cost, risks, and commitments associated with a system of containment that came to dominate U.S. policy in Asia in the 1950s and 1960s and to determine the course of American policy toward China during this period. The United States began wide-ranging U.S. strategic effort to contain the expansion of Chinese power and Chinese-backed Communist expansion in Asia. A strict U.S. economic and political embargo against China; large U.S. force deployments, eventually numbering between one half and one million troops; massive foreign aid allocations to U.S. Asian allies and supporters; and a ring of U.S. defense alliances around China were used to block Chinese expansion and to drive a wedge between China and its Soviet ally. The American approach saw strategic concerns with shoring up the regional balance of influence against communist expansion in Asia dominate the U.S. foreign policy calculus towards China. Strong efforts by the U.S. government to mobilize domestic American support for the costs and risks associated with U.S. leadership of the containment effort overshadowed private calculations of American leaders and strategists that appeared to favor a more nuanced and flexible American approach that would have allowed for possible efforts to seek contacts and accommodation with Communist-ruled China. Eventually, U.S. elites and supporting groups began to chafe publicly in the 1960s at what they saw a counterproductive U.S. tendency to try isolating China as part of the Cold War containment strategy in Asia. Their efforts to encourage greater U.S. flexibility in dealing with the Chinese Communists failed in the face of strident Chinese opposition to the United States and a wide range of other adverse foreign influences at the start of China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966 and the concurrent large increase in U.S. combat forces fighting Chinese-backed Communist forces in Vietnam.  

The dramatic and massive shifts in China’s domestic policy and direction occurred frequently in conjunction with crisis and confrontations with the United States and its allies and associates around China’s periphery in Asia. At one level, the Chinese determination to work against and confront the US-backed forces in Indochina and the Taiwan Strait reflected a deeply held determination to confound and wear down the American-fostered containment system. The Chinese Communist leadership held a strong revolutionary commitment to change the international order dominated by the United States and its allies and to support Communist-led forces struggling against this foreign imperialism.

The U.S. efforts also directly threatened China’s national security and sovereignty, often in graphic and severe ways. The Eisenhower administration threatened China with nuclear attack in order to push it toward an armistice in Korea, and the U.S. government used the threat of nuclear attack at other times in the face of perceived Chinese provocations in the 1950s. Mao’s China had no viable defense against U.S. nuclear weapons and put top priority on developing Chinese nuclear weapons to deal with such repeated U.S. intimidation. At the same time, the Chinese Communist leaders also were seen to continue to use the crisis atmosphere caused by confrontations with outside threats posed by the United States and its allies as a means to strengthen their domestic control and their mobilization of resources for advancement of nation-building and administrative competence.  

During 1970s, Sino-American relations experienced a big turn. What is that exactly and how did it evolve? Please see my next post U.S.-China Relations(3)-1970s to present.


    
   

U.S.-China Relations(1)-Prior to 1949

Sino-American relations, as one of the most complicated relations in current world, have evolved dramatically for almost two hundred years since 19^th century. With constantly changing international environment and respective unpredictable domestic fluctuations, Sino-US relations varied tremendously. Since the mid of 19^th century, China had been left behind the first and second industrial revolutions and thus had far weaker economic and military capabilities than the United States. Consequently, in a rather long time, the China’s weaker negotiation power with the United States in many critical areas often facilitated the U.S. to play an upper hand on the Sino-American relations. The dramatic changes in domestic China last century and the resulting international impacts forced the relatively stable United States to alter its foreign policies and diplomatic relations towards China accordingly.

Prior to 1949 when People's Republic of China was Founded     

China went through many historical events and transitions before 1949. In the period before World War II, western countries, including America, imposed military forces to open Chinese market to meet their tremendous demands of capitals and market. During the Japanese invasion in World War II, America helped China to defeat the Japanese. And then America tremendously involved in China's Civil War-backing Kuomingtang (KMT) against the China's Communist Party (CCP).

Paternalism

Prior to 1949, the United States tried to assume the role of a father, implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, casting China as a child. In seeking to change China through the application of social and political structures abroad, Americans tried to reassure themselves of their uniqueness and special place in history. To see China with the eye of paternalism was to see the United States as the developmentally more advanced nation, offering its knowledge and experience to a grateful recipient. Although not unfamiliar in United States, in its national attitudes toward other Asian nations, Jespersen mentioned in “American Images of China” that “this thinking toward China has been unique in this longevity and pervasiveness”.

Chiang Kai-shek(China's former President), Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Soong Mei-ling(China's former first lady) at the Cairo Conference

Growing out of the varied circumstances, exigencies, and necessities, a paternalistic outlook brought a missionary-conversion ethos together with a secular sense of national benevolence. Americans came to profess faith in a China developing along the path blazed by their notion. The U.S. attempted to remold China in their image strategically, scientifically, economically, and religiously by group lobbying for increased presence of traders, missionaries, doctors, diplomats, politicians, educators, and soldiers. Unlike the very beginning of the 21^st century when most Chinese viewed all western countries as opposing powers to maintain China’s territorial, political, and cultural integrity,  the Chinese people under the guidance of their nominal leader, Chiang Kai-shek appeared willing and eager to adopt Protestant religion and democratic political ideology. Consequently, after 1931,Chiang’s popularly accepted image in the United States became one of a valiant, heroic Christian ready to lead his people into an American-style future. An economic angle to the relationship premised on enormously profitable trading connection, one guaranteed by China’s massive population.        


First Lady Madam Chiang Kaishek 1943 Speech to U.S. Congress


The most obvious presence of America’s paternalism towards China was America’s supporting the KMT during World War II and China’s Civil War. As the “father” who cultivated China following American steps, the United States offered KMT the material, training, financial, and political supports to guarantee the nominal ruling party which favored American values and ideology at that time could survive Japanese invasion and the risk of being overturning by the CCP in order to protect America’s interest. The United States feared the victory of the CCP could completely change the developing path in China and offset all America’s previous endeavors. U.S. actions and policy choices reinforced existing American proclivities to back Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, who continued to enjoy broad political support in the United States.

We can easily identify that the Sino-American relations at this period of time was dominated by the United States following the pattern of paternalism. This is a top-bottom pattern which is largely decided by the power of the United States and China respectively at that time.