“Open Door” Policy

“Open Door” Policy. The “Open Door” notes, issued by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899–1901, represented the U.S. hope and expectation of maintaining access to the China market at a time when European colonial powers and Japan, taking advantage of China's weakness after the Sino‐Japanese War of 1894–1895, threatened to exclude U.S. business by carving out exclusive spheres of influence for themselves. Seeking to prevent this without resort to force, and drawing upon ideas already developed by British observers, Hay articulated a series of principles for the interested nations—Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States—to adopt. Hay's first note, issued as a circular letter on 6 September 1899, asked the other powers to follow most‐favored‐nation practices in China, permitting equal access to commercial activity within their spheres of influence. Despite evasive and ambiguous answers, Hay announced in March 1900 that his principles had been accepted. That the other powers did not object demonstrated America's growing power, the largely unobjectionable content of the notes themselves, the tactful manner of their presentation, and the unwillingness of the Europeans and Japanese to appear manifestly rapacious in their Chinese dealings.

The second note, dispatched on 3 July 1900, came during the Boxer Uprising, when groups of antiforeign Chinese calling themselves Boxers (after a martial‐arts style) attacked foreigners, especially Christian missionaries and their Chinese converts. In response, the outside powers, including the United States, sent military forces to suppress the Boxers, protect the lives and property of their citizens, and restore order. In this context, Hay's second note pushed for guarantees of China's territorial and administrative integrity, which he feared was endangered by the foreign intervention.

Down to the communist victory in China in 1949, the “Open Door” policy stood for safeguarding U.S. access to the China market. In a larger sense, it also reinforced self‐serving notions of American exceptionalism and disinterestedness. Indeed, the views set forth in the “Open Door” notes rested on two divergent, yet symbiotic, sets of ideas about American foreign policy. One was the belief that the “Open Door” policy embodied the principles of fairness, equal opportunity, and reasonableness in U.S. treatment of China. (In the late twentieth century, similar ideas would reappear in the argument by U.S. policy‐makers that China's repressive political system would change if the Chinese opened their markets to free trade by entering the World Trade Organization.) Also embedded in the “Open Door” policy, however, were underlying imperialist pretensions and commercial assumptions. In seeking to shape the China policy of the major world powers, Hay never consulted Chinese officials themselves about how they defined their nation's best interests. Moreover, Hay was persuaded that the “Open Door” policy would not only prevent the Japanese and Europeans from carving up China, but would ultimately lead to American commercial dominance in China. The “Open Door” policy thus illuminates not only certain illusions about America's world role, but also the U.S. government's growing activism in shaping an international environment conducive to the expansion of American trade and investment.
See also Business; Capitalism; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Foreign Relations: The Economic Dimension; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Asia; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Multinational Enterprises.

Bibliography

Marilyn B. Young , The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901, 1969.
Michael H. Hunt , The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914, 1983.

T. Christopher Jespersen