Projecting China: Trade Engagement in Beijing’s Half Century

Abstract

The People’s Republic of China has confronted the United States with diplomatic challenges ever since Washington recognized Beijing in January 1979. Basic to this engagement was and continues to be economics, and particularly trade, which elicited American responses ranging from enmity, fear, and uncertainty to cooperation, amity, and hope. Scholarship has not focused enough attention on the ideals and values that undergirded commercial relations as the principal American approach to China. Beginning with President Richard M. Nixon’s opening to Beijing and ending with President Donald J. Trump’s trade war (with touchstones in the Nixon, George H. W. Bush, William J. Clinton, Barack Obama, and Trump years), this article analyzes how a bilateral trading relationship that so transformed the world evolved from recognition to rivalry. The answer to the wax and wane lies in the near-century long practice of American free-trade internationalism that followed the principles of the “capitalist peace” paradigm, long embraced by the United States as a pillar of its foreign policy.