by Joseph Solis-Mullen

Apart from considerations of possible war or human extinction, as an advocate of constitutional, republican government, it is a fact that such a limited government is incompatible with a state powerful enough to engage in overseas adventurism and militarism as the United States does. It is economically and morally bankrupting us. In the words of Pat Buchannan, we are meant to be a republic not an empire, an example, not an enforcer.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/a-history-of-sino-american-relations/

The following lecture was delivered at Spring Arbor University, October 2023.

There is hardly anything more important to the future of the world than Sino-American relations. And that’s quite a thing to say when looking at the state of the world these days. But over the long-haul these, the two largest economies, militaries, and navies on earth must find some way to coexist, or else there is going to be trouble for everyone. The aim of this talk is to outline the course of Sino-American relations.

As I presume most everyone here is generally familiar with the history of the United States, my talk will follow Chinese history and I will be introducing the relevant intersections between the U.S. and China as we go along. The United States being less than three hundred years old, and the first recorded ruling dynasties of China dating back to the second millennia BCE, I will be beginning my narrative of Chinese history rather abruptly, and quite late. Fascinating though its antecedents are, considerations of the time allotted to us today demand that we start with the last of the several foreign dynasties that ruled the area we associate today with the Chinese state. This was the ethnically Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). These were the descendants of an earlier northern “barbarian,” that is non-Han Chinese, people who had conquered northeast China in the early twelfth century, establishing the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234), which was subsequently destroyed by the Mongol Yuan Dynasty a hundred odd years later (1271-1368).

Like their conquering predecessors, the Manchus had been effectively Sinicized. That is, in a manner not dissimilar to the case of the Normans of Europe during the Middle Ages, the ruling Manchus merged with and in important ways adopted Han Chinese culture, Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism. There were pragmatic reasons for this, and the reasons are in some ways central to the story of China in the nineteenth century, when it had its first sustained conflict with the newly industrialized states of Western Europe and the United States. You see, China is very large, the terrain is very challenging, and then as now it was extraordinarily populous. The Confucian bureaucratic elites and the existing governing structures were critical to anyone who wanted to effectively govern China, and prevent it from disintegrating into warring states, which happened at several points during Chinese history, most recently in the early twentieth century.

Marshalling the considerable resources of the Chinese state, scholars estimate that at the time China accounted for fully forty percent of global output, the Qing thereafter brought the Chinese Empire to its greatest territorial extent, adding new territories in central Asia, such as the province of Xinjiang and in the adjoining seas, such as Formosa, that is Taiwan. The centrifugal forces that would fatally weaken, undermine, and ultimately destroy the Qing dynasty were already at work, however, and these are what you see up on the screen here.

Obviously, any one of these problems is going to pose a severe challenge to any regime. Population growth strained the capacity of China’s non-industrialized agricultural sector at the same time a series of severe weather events put additional stresses on the ability of Chinese society to feed itself. Economically, local elites dominated markets that were in theory unified internally and without barriers. However, these markets were relatively limited by the vast distances involved and by the low level of urbanization and industrialization that had occurred. With regards to corruption, the problem was two-fold: on the one hand you had local elites who were resistant to obeying the central government, who were willing, for example, to let the British and Americans run opium into China in exchange for a cut of the action; while on the other hand, you have the more basic kinds of corruption like preferential treatment, bribery, et cetera. As for foreign interventions and rebellions, we’ll have plenty to say about those on the next slide.

Though internally there was relatively free movement of goods, as well as networks of finance, outwardly it was protectionist and, by the standards of the time, heavily bureaucratized. This hadn’t really mattered because for centuries there had been little the few visiting Europeans had to offer that the Chinese wanted, or that the Chinese government had wanted them to have. That last is, of course, a reference to opium. Because there was one thing the primarily British, but also American, sailors were increasingly bringing that millions of Chinese increasingly wanted and that was opium. Poppies were being run from India and later the Ottoman empire, processed into opium on a couple of offshore locations, and then smuggled into the country. This was as lucrative for the British East India Company and other traders as it was destructive to Chinese society, and so the British government was loath to put a stop to the flow when asked by the Qing. When diplomacy failed to stop the incoming opium, the Qing administration under the Emperor Daoguang took steps to try and block off and interrupt the illicit trade—going so far as to destroy British owned stocks of opium in Canton, at that time the only trading outpost open to the Europeans. A little pressure by the East India Company in London, and with that the First Opium War had begun.

Like the Second Opium War, which as you can see was fought just over a decade after the conclusion of the First, and was primarily concerned with enforcing the terms of the treaty of Nanjing, the military operations of the western powers concerned were primarily naval. That is, they primarily involved the blockading and shelling of ports. As for their aims, the wars were concerned with the expansion of the Europeans, and Americans’, privileges in China: these were things like extraterritoriality, the rights of citizens of, say, Great Britain, to not be subjected to Chinese authorities but rather to locally based British ones. The cession of so-called Treaty Ports, additional enclaves for foreign traders to do business, Shanghai perhaps being the most significant. And, lastly, the rights of Christian missionaries operating in China were protected. I’ll have more to say on Christianity in China later.

So as we can see from the conditions imposed on the Qing by the Europeans in the various treaties we see listed on the slide, neither the Opium Wars, nor any of the subsequent interventions we’re going to talk about by the European powers or the United States in China, had as their goal replacing the existing Chinese imperial system. In fact, several of the most important interventions in China by the other powers were operations conducted in order to protect the Qing from domestic opponents to its regime. Why did they do this? Well, essentially for the same reason conquering invaders like the Manchu or Mongols had allowed themselves to be incorporated into existing structures. The Europeans couldn’t possibly have occupied China, and after the experience of India few, particularly in England, at this point by far the strongest power, wanted to try. Leading intellectuals and politicians, people like William Cobden, believed colonizing India had been a mistake, and they wanted the British presence in China to be all the benefits of commerce with none of the expense and baggage of direct rule.

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