East Asia, American Presence in

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East Asia, American Presence in

Having gained independence from Great Britain in 1783, the new United States looked to Asia for new markets for trade. The American merchant ship Empress of China left New York on February 22, 1784, carrying mostly ginseng, a root that grew wild in the Hudson River Valley and that the Chinese highly prized for medicine. Reaching Canton (Guangzhou) on August 28, 1784, the Empress returned to the United States with a cargo of tea, silk, and porcelain, realizing a substantial profit from the venture and contributing to the rapid growth of port cities such as Providence, Salem, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

Thereafter, merchant ships carrying cotton from the South and furs from the Pacific Northwest sailed to China, and by the 1840s some New England whaling ships were operating in the North Pacific. The 1844 Sino-American Treaty of Wangxia greatly expanded trade between China and the United States, and the technological superiority of American "clipper ships" led to a brief period of U.S. dominance in the China trade. Opposition at home to preferential governmental treatment of China's trade interests, combined with the greater lure of more proximate and more certain markets, meant that the United States was only a minor player in the China market until the turn of the century.

The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California in 1848, combined with territorial continental conquest, led to great interest in Japan and China as ports and markets. In the mid-1850s, Commodore Matthew Perry (1794–1858) sailed to Japan with a small fleet of warships, and persuaded the Japanese to sign a treaty with the United States, ending Japan's two centuries of self-imposed isolation, and obtaining coaling and naval stations for the United States. More Americans followed—some merchants, many Protestant missionaries seeking to convert East Asians, and sailors and soldiers to protect these merchants and missionaries. For the most part, however, Americans were content to follow where Britain led. A severe economic depression in the 1890s sharpened the search for markets, and victory in the Spanish-American War (1898) brought the United States the building blocks of an empire in the Pacific—the Hawaiian Islands, the Philippines, Samoa, Midway, Guam, and Wake Island.

At the same time, the United States dealt carefully with Japan. The Meiji Restoration (1868) propelled Japan from feudalism into modernity. Japan subsequently defeated China in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), seized Taiwan and the nearby Pescadores in 1895, and then defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), gaining control over Korea and the Liaotung Peninsula in Manchuria, a region in northeastern China. The strength of the Japanese Navy, along with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, an agreement signed with Britain in 1902, led the United States to consider holding on to the Philippines in case a war with Japan broke out.

The Filipino Insurrection that followed the 1898 Spanish-American War proved difficult to contain, and Japan could easily interdict American communications with the distant islands. Tensions were eased by the Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905), in which the United States recognized Japan's control of Korea in return for recognition of U.S. influence in the Philippines, and the Root-Takahira Agreement (1908), in which the two countries agreed to respect each other's territories in the Pacific and to honor the open-door policy toward China.

By the time of World War I (1914–1918), the United States considered itself a friend and even a protector of China. Some years earlier, during the "scramble for China," U.S. Secretary of State John Hay (1838–1905) had issued the "Open Door Notes," calling for equal access to China's markets and the preservation of China's territorial integrity and political sovereignty. In addition, the United States returned most of the onerous indemnity that China had been forced to pay the imperial powers after the antiforeigner Boxer Rebellion (1900), though the agreement stipulated the use of the money for bringing Chinese students to American colleges and universities. When Japan forced the Twenty-One Demands on China in January 1915, designed to secure Japanese control over China, the U.S. government helped China avoid acquiescing in what would have been a virtual loss of sovereignty.

The decade of the 1920s was one of lost opportunity. The United States took the lead in internationalizing the open-door system with the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922), officially known as the Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, attended by representatives from nine countries: the United States, Japan, China, Belgium, Great Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal. The conference led to the signing of three treaties in 1922. The Nine-Power Treaty guaranteed respect for China's territorial and administrative independence, the centerpiece of the Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900. The Four-Power Treaty, signed by the United States, Japan, Great Britain, and France, helped prevent an extension of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, and its signatories agreed to respect one another's rights regarding their holdings in the Pacific. The Five-Power Treaty, signed by the United States, Japan, Great Britain, France, and Italy, led to a ten-year moratorium on battleship and aircraft production; to further assuage Japan, the United States and Britain agreed not to fortify territory in the Pacific west of the Hawaiian Islands and north of Singapore. The Nine-Power Treaty also guaranteed China's independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, and it accepted the American idea of an "open door" for trade. In effect, these treaties sought to create a framework for a more peaceful and hence more profitable exploitation of China and the Chinese people.

Japanese and Chinese nationalism competed to fill the resulting vacuum. America's Republican presidents of the 1920s largely avoided foreign entanglements outside of the Caribbean region, and they certainly did not wish to take the lead in the complicated politics of East Asia. In September 1931 Japanese army officers manufactured the Mukden Incident, and within a year Japan had seized control of Manchuria. Throughout the remainder of the 1930s, Japan continued to seize more and more of China. While presidents Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) and Franklin Roosevelt (1882–1945) did not approve of such naked aggression, they felt largely powerless to intervene, given the Great Depression of the 1930s and, later, America's preoccupation with events in Europe.

World War II (1939–1945) changed America's role in East Asia. Japan, Germany, and Italy signed an alliance, and Germany plunged a wider world into war after September 1939. In the spring of 1940, as German forces seized control of Western Europe, the fate of European empires in Asia and the Pacific hung in the balance. When Japan moved to seize these resource-rich areas to help it win the long conflict in China, the United States confronted Japan, and in December 1941 entered the war after the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. For nearly six months, Japan enjoyed great success, gaining a vast empire in the southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia. However, American productivity in industries converted to military purposes, along with Japan's strategic mistakes, resulted in Japan's overwhelming defeat and surrender in August 1945.

When the war ended, the United States had defeated Japan, and U.S. armed forces accepted the Japanese surrender in the Pacific and in southern Korea. U.S. Marines helped Chinese Nationalist armies repatriate Japanese troops in northern China. And the U.S. government acquiesced in allowing Britain, France, and the Netherlands to regain colonies that had been temporarily held by Japan.

From 1945 to 1954, France engaged in a long, drawn-out, and ultimately unsuccessful colonial war in Indochina, dragging in the United States. The United States seemingly had extricated itself from the Chinese civil war when, in June 1950, the outbreak of war in Korea brought the United States and the People's Republic of China into armed conflict. Leftover issues from these long-ago conflicts, including the status of Taiwan and tense relations between the two regimes in Korea, continue to bedevil American foreign policy and America's presence in East Asia.