China and America: 1941-1991

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1991/92

Article preview: first 500 of 6,624 words total.

Summary:  The primary importance of China to the USA has been one of the "most enduring legends" of Sino-American relations. In reality, China has been of only secondary significance, "important simply in the context of crises with other countries", and this has been reflected in the pattern of US diplomacy towards China over the title period. The end of the Cold War era requires US foreign policy to assess the importance of China afresh, and not merely as a counter-weight to Soviet power.

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker teaches in the School of Foreign Service and the Department of History at Georgetown University.

How important is China to the United States? Among the most enduring legends of Sino-American interaction has been the insistence that Americans and Chinese have shared a special relationship, a friendship unusual in international affairs. But in truth China has always been of secondary significance to the United States-important simply in the context of crises with other countries. Only now, for the first time, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the absence of a new credible enemy must the United States deal with China for its own sake and decide where the Chinese fit in the American concept of a new world order.

The history of Sino-American relations in the past fifty years has been a tale of how Americans, preoccupied with the affairs of Europe, thought they could use China, subordinating its needs and interests to the realization of weightier objectives elsewhere. China played a role in defeating Japan and Germany in the 1940s, slowing Soviet industrialization in the 1950s and 1960s, and complicating Moscow's defenses in the 1970s and 1980s. The United States did not focus on China, as China, because its lack of wealth and its purely regional power did not necessitate direct attention.

Not surprisingly, disappointment plagued this distorted relationship. Neither country seemed willing or able to fulfill the expectations of the other. Americans saw the Chinese both as allies and adversaries, as people to be helped and feared, as potential customers and competitors, as strategic partners and expansionist aggressors. Such contradictions colored the efforts of statesmen to structure policy and of the public to understand what has transpired between the two states.

Differences in political objectives were aggravated by cultural discord. Americans determined to elicit political and social reforms commensurate with their investments-financial and emotional-felt frustrated by the Chinese rejection of Western values. Both before and after the communist takeover in 1949 China sought to modernize without having to Westernize.1 A source of tension throughout the Third World, the clash between change and tradition has been nowhere more powerful than in China and nowhere more troublesome than in Sino-American relations.

II

Possibly the most striking illustration of China's peripheral status and the thwarting of both Chinese and American expectations can be found in their respective responses to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. What President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a day of infamy was a blessing to Nationalist (Kuomintang) Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek in his fog-enshrouded wartime capital. According to an observer in Chongqing, "The military council was jubilant. Chiang was so happy he sang an old opera aria. . . . The Kuomintang government officials went around congratulating each other, as if a great victory had been won."2 The divergence between America's distress and China's joy underscored the differences between American and Chinese national interests. Washington, although now China's ally and a more forthright participant in the anti-Japanese struggle, put the war in Europe and the defeat of Hitler first. Roosevelt wanted to use the Chinese to ...

End of preview: first 500 of 6,624 words total.