America’s China policy at the turn of the century, called the Open Door, aimed to guarantee the free and equal access to Chinese markets and to prevent imperial powers from carving the “celestial kingdom” into a contentious patchwork of spheres of influence and special concessions. On September 6, 1899, Secretary of State John Hay circulated a note to the capitals of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan requesting that they agree to allow equal commercial opportunity in each other’s spheres of influence in China. Only Italy, which had no sphere of influence, agreed wholeheartedly, while the others equivocated to varying degrees. Nevertheless, on March 20, 1900, Hay audaciously proclaimed that all the powers agreed, but it was essentially an American policy and binding on no nation.
The Boxer Rebellion that spring, which led to an international expedition of imperialist powers to rescue their besieged legations in Beijing, immediately threatened Hay’s Open Door policy. Concerned that the great powers would utilize the presence of their troops to expand their spheres of influence, Hay on July 3, 1900, circulated a new note stating that the United States stood for the territorial integrity of all China and commercial equality for all throughout the land. Hay, however, had merely announced a policy that the United States had neither the means nor the moral fortitude to enforce. In the late summer of 1900, Russia occupied Manchuria, using the large number of troops that it had mobilized to help quell the Boxer uprising. When queried by the Japanese as to what the United States planned to do to prevent its annexation by Russia, Hay admitted that the United States would not resort to armed force to make Russia abide by the Open Door. Furthermore, in November 1900, Hay himself was negotiating with China for rights to a naval station in Samsah Bay, which was within the Japanese sphere of influence.
Not surprisingly, the good will and the presumption of American honesty that were the policy’s binding force quickly dissipated, and the policy was viewed abroad henceforth as mere empty rhetoric. What territorial and administrative integrity China retained resulted not from the forbearance of the great powers but from the stalemate produced by their fears of each other.
Further reading: Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York; Columbia University Press, 1983); Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American East Asian Relations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967).
—Timothy E. Vislocky
World History
