A Historical Roadmap to Understanding the United States’ Relationship with China

Thomas M. Larkin

How does one make sense of the relationship between the United States and China?

Where should one even begin?

China and the United States are the world’s two largest economies by a significant margin, and entangled ones at that. A cursory glance at the current news cycle suggests that despite economic codependency, geopolitical rivalry dominates their entanglement. At the time of writing, the week’s news cycle reported a now-familiar refrain of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, tariff competition, hacking scandals, predictions about war, and territorial posturing over the South China Sea—all sensationalist headlines mapping the collision course these two global powers seem locked onto. The common narrative describes rising tensions that have compounded (excepting brief punctuations of détente) since the Chinese Civil War and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

But if this collision course seems inevitable, it is important to remember that the United States has been tied to successive regimes in China from the American republic’s inception. On February 22, 1784, just over five months following the ratification of the Treaty of Paris and the formal end of the Revolutionary War, the American merchant vessel Empress of China sailed for the Qing Empire. This voyage symbolized the beginning of the American people’s fixation on China, and of the mutually sustained myth of a “special relationship” between China and the United States. The cultivation of this relationship was not a state-led initiative and was often barely even state supported. It was the product of connections forged between private actors—merchants and missionaries; men and women; Americans, Chinese, British, and others—who collided in the entrepots and treaty ports along the China coast.

The China Firm examines the early American community that lived and traded in China during this first era of Sino-American contact. Through the perspective of the eminent American trading firm Augustine Heard & Co., founded in Canton in 1839 by New Englanders Joseph Coolidge, Augustine Heard, and George Dixwell, the book explains how American traders to China established themselves in the British colony of Hong Kong and in the Anglo communities that emerged in the treaty ports along China’s coast. Lacking federal or military support, these Americans embedded themselves in British colonial society. They became adept at navigating it and adapting the British imperial project to their own interests, leveraging Britain’s forcible opening of China to expand American interests in the region.

The cultivation of this relationship was not a state-led initiative and was often barely even state supported.

Americans represented one vertex of a triangular relationship with China and the British Empire. They played their part skillfully. They embraced colonial culture and society for personal gain, becoming invested in the British Empire’s political affairs and commercial networks. Their participation in turn sharpened the contours of the social and racial hierarchies that divided Hong Kong, Shanghai, and the numerous other treaty ports. Their complicity lent surety to the British imperial project in China.

Yet Americans maintained that they were aloof from Britain’s exploitation of the Qing. The refrain was oft repeated in different formats. Americans were neutral. Americans respected Qing sovereignty. Americans abstained from peddling opium. Americans were perturbed by Britain’s belligerence. Each convenient fiction allowed the United States and China to cultivate and preserve the myth of a “special relationship”: that China and the United States—one the current and the other the former victim of British imperialism—were kindred.

Americans represented one vertex of a triangular relationship with China and the British Empire.

A significant thread of this book interrogates why this myth persisted. Americans in China hardly believed it (in fact, they actively undermined it). The U.S. government would have been foolish to take it at face value. Qing advisors accepted its utility for mitigating the threat of foreign aggression but preached caution in dealings with Americans. And the British were downright indignant that Americans should play the allies while benefiting from the fruits of British labor, as it were. But persist the myth did, providing a foundation for Sino-American relations.

The history of Augustine Heard & Company anchoring The China Firm provides an inroad into understanding this so-called “special relationship”: an opportunity to question it and reconsider whether Americans really were unique among the foreign powers in China. It is, after all, essential to examine the relationship between the United States and China (or Britain) from the perspective of the nonstate subjects—merchants and missionaries—most invested in cultivating it.

One of the most compelling aspects of this narrative is how the Heard brothers (leading partners in the firm), their employees, and their contemporaries refined and adapted perceptions of China and of the British according to the exigencies of the moment. This community was, in some ways, the proverbial canary in the coal mine for shifting American perceptions of China that would grow increasingly prejudiced into the late nineteenth century.

In the early days of American contact with China it was useful to denounce the British and to keep trade channels open with the Qing. Yet as the American men and women whom firms such as Augustine Heard & Co. brought to China integrated into British colonial society, their interests gradually aligned with those of their “Anglo-Saxon” kin. Mapped onto the trajectory of the company is a narrative about how its partners and employees came to embrace and indeed rely upon British imperialism in China.

In the early days of American contact with China it was useful to denounce the British and to keep trade channels open with the Qing.

Broadly writ, this community was the vanguard of a more confident brand of American imperialism that grew more brazen as the century progressed. While American merchants traded, diplomatic ties became more complex. Under the aegis of neutrality, the United States signed one exploitative treaty with the Qing Empire in 1844 and another in 1858. American merchants sold arms to the imperial forces during the Taiping Civil War and also to the insurrectionary Taiping, and smuggled opium to both. American filibusters gained notoriety fighting for the Qing against the rebels. And an American diplomat, Anson Burlingame, was even appointed plenipotentiary for the Tongzhi Emperor, leading diplomatic missions to Europe and the United States. The interests of nonstate agents, commerce, and proselytizing underpinned it all.

However, the letters and memoires written and politics practiced by private American citizens in their post-China lives contained hints of more progressive ideals. The adage “proximity breeds contempt”—so useful for understanding colonial prejudices—did not necessarily hold true. Americans returning to the United States after protracted tenures in China became some of the loudest lobbyists for an accountable foreign civil service, for increased congress and commerce between the United States and China, and, tellingly, for the repeal of exclusionary immigration laws.

The current geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States often feels like a natural extension of a relationship that has always been, at its root, tenuous and transactional. But as the early era of Sino-American contact suggests, the reality is more nuanced. These two powers were and remain tethered through the interests of private agents, dense transnational diasporic and economic networks, and a shared history some 240 years in the making.

Thomas M. Larkin is assistant professor of the history of the United States of America and the world at the University of Prince Edward Island and the author of The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society.