The history of relations between China and the USA has been a complex path, which went from an initial philosophical admiration to the alliance in the Second World War, up to today’s geopolitical clash, in which these two antithetical systems competing for economic and technological hegemony.
From the first contacts to the “Open Door” policy
When the USA was born in 1776, China was still reigning Qing dynasty. Initially, i American Founding Fathers they look with deep admiration for the Far East, whose prosperity and meritocracy widespread in the world of army officers they admire.
Already in 1784 the first peaceful commercial contacts were inaugurated.
However, everything came to a head during the 1800s, when the European powers, with their military and technological supremacy, began to force China to sign the “Unequal treaties” (totally disadvantageous economic agreements). .
The ancient Celestial Empire he is soon forced to concede enormously commercial privileges to the Western powers, as well as authorizing the iimport of opium. This drug, forcibly imposed by British warships, quickly spread among the Chinese population, destroying the social fabric of the country and draining its gold and silver coffers.
For China it was the beginning of a profound crisis and a long period of economic subjugation, defined in today’s school textbooks as “Century of humiliation”.
Arrived late on the scene, Washington attempted to impose the policy of “Porta Aperta” (Open Door Policy), searching safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and promoting better fairness in trade relations.
All of this not out of generosity, but to prevent Europeans and Japanese from dividing China into exclusive colonies, blocking access to American goods.
The idea, which later failed, was to prevent the Asian theater from suffering the fate ofAfricaentirely divided among the Western colonizers.
1912-1970: Wars, betrayals and iron curtains
In the 1912 a violent one revolution overthrew the imperial dynastyin office for more than 200 years, transforming the Forbidden City in a museum. There China thus became a Republicwhich in 1928 was unified by the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.
The USA immediately supported him in key terms anti-Japanese and anti-communist. It will be precisely the American defense of China from the Japanese invasion that will trigger the economic blockade against Tokyo, culminating in the attack on Pearl Harbor of 1941 and the entry of the USA into the Second World WarAnd.
The 1945 victory guaranteed China a permanent seat at the UNbut the peace did not last long: the war soon exploded again civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and the communists of Mao Zedong. In 1949 Mao wins and the nationalists flee toisland of Taiwan.
In Washington the shock is total; in the public debate the question arises: «Who lost China?” (Who lost China?). At the height of the Cold War, the USA decided to apply “containment”: relations with Beijing were frozen, the UN seat was frozen (leaving it to Taiwan) while a rigid trade embargo was imposed.
American fears of a monolithic communist bloc (sealed by the Mao-Stalin pact of 1950) are confirmed in Korean War (1950-1953)which splits the country in two. Throughout the Sixties the hostility was total, fueled byChinese occupation of Tibetfrom Mao’s support to Viet Cong in Vietnam and from first Chinese atomic test in 1964.
Ping-pong diplomacy, the thaw and explosion of markets
The turning point came at the end of the sixties with the Sino-Soviet crisis: Beijing and Moscow end up clashing militarily on the borders. The American president Richard Nixon he understands that he can exploit the rift to isolate the USSR from China.
The thaw comes from sport: in April 1971 the American table tennis team was invited to Beijing (theping-pong diplomacy”), paving the way for the secret journey of Henry Kissinger in July. The results are immediate: in October Mao’s China obtains a permanent seat at the UN by expelling Taiwan, in 1972 Nixon historically flies to Beijing and the January 1, 1979 official diplomatic relations arrive.
From here begins a phase of very strong commercial normalization.
In the 2001 China joined the WTO (the World Trade Organization): in the space of fifteen years (1980-2004) Chinese exports to the United States went from 5 to 231 billion dollars.
Despite the business, the thorns remained: China is not democratizing and Taiwan claims its political independence (celebrating its first presidential elections in 1996), while Beijing redeems Hong Kong from the British in 1997closing the European colonial era and the “century of humiliation” forever.
The new strategic competition in the 21st century
Today we are in the midst of what the Nobel Prize Joseph Stiglitz he consecrated as the “Chinese Century”. In just a few decades, China has become the “factory of the world”, overtaking Japan in 2010 as the world’s second largest economy and aiming to overtake the USA.
In parallel, Beijing has initiated a powerful military rearmament and the construction of artificial islands to control the Pacific.
In the early 2010s, smiles among the American president Barack Obama and the Chinese namesake Xi Jinping and the signing of the Paris Agreements on the climate seemed promising, but behind the facade the tension was already very high.
The US soon accused China of unfair competition, patent theft and human rights violations; Beijing responded by accusing America of wanting to sabotage its rise and meddle in its internal affairs. The battle was thus divided into three moves:
- Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”: The USA is shifting the geopolitical axis from Europe to the Pacific, redeploying ships and military resources to stem Beijing’s expansionism in the South China Sea.
- Trump’s trade war (2018): America breaks the rules and applies billions of tariffs on Chinese goods. Beijing responds point by point. It is the beginning of the open trade war.
- Biden’s Chip War: The clash becomes technological. Whoever controls advanced microchips and Artificial Intelligence controls the future. Washington blocks the export of semiconductors to Beijing and isolates the Chinese giants (such as Huawei), aiming at decoupling (decoupling) to eliminate industrial dependence on China.
Trump 2.0 and the (open) epilogue of an infinite challenge
The geopolitical chess game has accelerated further with the return to the White House of Donald Trump for his second term. If anyone thought that the 2018 trade war was just a parenthesis, today’s reality has demonstrated the opposite: the second chapter of the Trump administration has left an even stronger shock.
Washington’s new course has upped the ante, threatening and enforcing even heavier customs tariffs on Beijing’s goodswith the declared aim of bringing manufacturing back to American soil and eliminating the trade deficit with the Dragon.
However, what made the history of this new phase was the swing between the very tough clash and the attempts at direct dialogue at the top.
Despite the inflammatory statements and the cross accusations of espionage and cyber-activism, the face-to-face and bilateral summits between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping showed the world a very clear dynamic: the two superpowers they are now too interconnected to ignore each other, but too distant to be trusted.
