China and United States

The history of United States-China relations tells a story of distrust, exploitation, naivety, and conflicting viewpoints, but also one of a struggle to bypass those differences. In recent decades, the two nations have been increasingly reliant on one another, but America still cannot overcome many of the divisions established between the U.S. and Maoist China Michael Schaller argues. Though relations became hostile the era following the end of the Second World War, China's diplomatic view of the U.S. and the West had always been quite reserved. China's attitude towards America never deterred it (America) from pursuing its interest within the Far East. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, America sought to open the Chinese market to expand trade and increase the amount of missionary work within China. From the collapse of the Qing until the end of the "loss of China" in 1949, the U.S. sought to insure that the Chinese market and potential military power remained U.S.-friendly in the post-war era. After Mao's Communist Party of China seized the mainland, the U.S. began to point fingers for the loss of Chang Kai-shek's pro-American state. Tensions eventually cooled in the 1970s with Nixon's outreach to China, ushering in a détente between the powers. In this new stage of relations, America and China sought to forward mutual interests towards the containment of the Soviet bloc.

America began its history with China "from their initial contact in the 1780s" during the twilight years of China's imperial era (4). The aristocracy of the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing, clung desperately to preserve not only China's sovereignty but also its own relevance as the power structure with the region as Western powers s...

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...ew] Bush administration... took to describing China as a 'strategic competitor' or rival" (3).

Throughout history Sino-American, relations have tedious, but there are moments of cooperation between the two powers. A lack of understanding for cultural and political differences has repeatedly led these nations to conflict. America's outlook of China has many times been naive; Americans imagined China the way they wanted not the way it really was. Within China, the struggles of modernization and America's attempts to control the region have caused drastically varied reactions throughout China's history with the United States. Cooperation for mutual benefit has pushed differences into the background several times in Sino-American relations, and the current partnership between the two nations continues to be one of the most important in modern geopolitical history,