Explain how relations with the United States and China have changed and the effects of the open door policy on both countries.
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Looking to learn more about the Open Door Policy? The Open Door Policy was an important policy
A brief Open Door Policy definition: The Open Door Policy was a trade agreement between the United States, China, Japan, and several European countries. US Secretary of State John Hay created the Open Door Policy in 1899/1900 in order to allow the US, Japan, and select European countries equal trade access to China, a country that previously had no trade agreements. The Open Door Policy lasted nearly 50 years, until the communist party’s 1949 victory in China’s civil war.
In the rest of the guide, we’ll dive deeper into the specifics of the Open Door Policy. We’ll discuss why the Open Door Policy was created, how it was established and maintained, and what its impacts were.
Why Was the Open Door Policy Created?
Simply put, the United States was worried it was going to lose trading access with China, and it wanted a policy in place to protect its ability to continue trading with the Chinese. In this section, we’ll look more closely as to why the US cared so much about trading with China, and why there were worried their access would be cut off.
The Open Door Policy was created during the Age of Imperialism, a period during the late 19th century and early 20th century when European powers, as well as countries like the US and Japan, were attempting to expand their global power through colonialism and territory expansion.
China was particularly seen as a lucrative prize, so multiple countries built a large presence there, and they began setting up trading stations and deploying troops to different regions of the country in order to have the best access to China’s trade.
The United States got into this game a little late. It wasn’t until after the Spanish American War ended in 1898 that the US began to take a deep interest in China. At the end of the war, the US ended up with a large amount of land in Asia, primarily the Philippine Islands. This newly-acquired land caused the US to look more closely at China, and they saw that trading with China could earn them a lot of money.
However, multiple other countries had already realized this and had established large spheres of influence in China. European powers such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium had well established colonies and influence in Asia and Africa.
Japan was also exerting significant power in China. During the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), Japan and China fought for control of Korea. After Japan won the war, it sharply increased its power in both Korea and China.
The US’s sphere of influence in China was not nearly as well-established as those of the other foreign powers there, and US President McKinley worried that the other foreign powers would limit the US’s ability to trade with China and potentially block the US from trading with China at all.
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How Was the Open Door Policy Implemented?
In 1898, US President William McKinley announced his desire for a policy that would allow countries equal access to trade with China. In effect, there’d be an “open door” to Chinese trade, and one country couldn’t close the door to another country. President McKinley was concerned the US would be forced out of the Chinese trade by Japan and other European countries, and he wanted a policy that explicitly protected the US’s right to continue trading with China.
As a result, in 1899, US Secretary of State John Hay began circulating diplomatic notes among the major world powers (Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Russia) at the time to get the Open Door Policy formally approved. Because of his work doing this, Hay is often seen as the author of the Open Door Policy.
Hay’s diplomatic notes proposed that all countries should have equal trading access to the entirety of China and those foreign countries must allow Chinese officials to regulate the trade and collect taxes from it. The purpose of Hay’s notes was to grant all the major powers equal access to Chinese trade and reduce the influence of countries that already had an especially large hold in China (such as Japan and Russia) so they couldn’t force other countries (particularly the United States) out of the Chinese market.
None of the countries Hay spoke with formally agreed to the Open Door Policy. However, none explicitly opposed it, and the European countries unofficially supported the plan, so Hay announced that an agreement had been reached, and the Open Door Policy became the de facto trade policy in China.
In 1921/1922, after challenges to the Open Door Policy by Chinese nationalists as well as Japan (discussed more in the next section), the US attempted to make the Open Door Policy official at the Washington Naval Conference.
During the war between China and Japan that began in 1937, the US continued to strenuously support the Open Door Policy and increased embargoes on many commodities to Japan as a result of Japan not following the policy.