Thomas W. Zeiler’s “Projecting China: Trade Engagement in Beijing’s Half Century,” chronicles the oscillations in US foreign economic policy for China from the Nixon to Biden administrations. Zeiler offers a focused study of a bilateral relationship predominantly through the lens of a multilateral free-trade theory known as the capitalist peace doctrine.[1] For nearly fifty years of US policymaking, the capitalist peace doctrine “centered on the notion that trade was deeply embedded not only in grand strategy,” Zeiler explains, “but in cherished principles and policy traditions that epitomized the U.S. role and aims in the world” (10). The article is valuable both for its theoretical contextualization of the United States’ China policy as well as for the timeliness and recency of its subject matter. Fixing his gaze on President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, Zeiler concludes that “the ‘America First’ agenda did not dignify the role of a superpower.” Rather, as the last fifty years have shown, the capitalist peace doctrine “was, and remains, the only means of successfully containing the new Asian monolith” (34; 41).
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Article Review 166
Thomas W. Zeiler, “Projecting China: Trade Engagement in Beijing’s Half Century.” Journal of American East-Asian Relations 29:1 (May 2022): 7-46. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/18765610-29010003
Reviewed by Daniel DuBois, Saint Leo University
19 December 2023
PDF: http://issforum.org/to/JAR-166 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
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Thomas W. Zeiler’s “Projecting China: Trade Engagement in Beijing’s Half Century,” chronicles the oscillations in US foreign economic policy for China from the Nixon to Biden administrations. Zeiler offers a focused study of a bilateral relationship predominantly through the lens of a multilateral free-trade theory known as the capitalist peace doctrine.[1] For nearly fifty years of US policymaking, the capitalist peace doctrine “centered on the notion that trade was deeply embedded not only in grand strategy,” Zeiler explains, “but in cherished principles and policy traditions that epitomized the U.S. role and aims in the world” (10). The article is valuable both for its theoretical contextualization of the United States’ China policy as well as for the timeliness and recency of its subject matter. Fixing his gaze on President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, Zeiler concludes that “the ‘America First’ agenda did not dignify the role of a superpower.” Rather, as the last fifty years have shown, the capitalist peace doctrine “was, and remains, the only means of successfully containing the new Asian monolith” (34; 41).
Foundational to US President Woodrow Wilson’s global economic vision popularized amid the Great War, the adherence of US leaders to free trade as the key to unlocking China emerged during the nineteenth century and was famously codified in 1899–1900 by Secretary of State John Hay and the proponents of his famous Open Door circulars.[2] Zeiler’s article covers another millennial turn, and yet there are striking parallels between the people and policies that make up his analysis, and what Michael Hunt coined as the “Open Door Constituency” in his landmark study The Making of a Special Relationship, published forty years ago. Distinguished “by their faith in the religion of free trade,” wrote Hunt, the constituency’s “high priests argued that international trade directed by the dictates of the market materially benefited all parties involved while contributing to peace by insulating economic questions from political quarrels, and bringing far-flung parts of the globe into harmonious contact.”[3] Separated by two world wars and the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Zeiler’s capitalist peace constituency envisioned something similar. Beginning with President Richard Nixon, he argues, its advocates were “devoted to the idea that multilateral, cooperative, internationalist free trade must undergird foreign policy to promote prosperity, peace, security, and democracy. The capitalist peace took liberalization as integral even to morality in global affairs” (11). For nearly 125 years, US policymakers have misunderstood and undervalued the other side of the Open Door thesis—the recognition of Chinese sovereignty and the primacy of territorial integrity—yet compared to the merits of either imperialist or nationalist applications of protectionism, Zeiler contends that free trade offers the only plausible path to peace between China and the United States.
The return of liberal economics to US trade policy for China occurred in the context of détente. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger forecast that normalizing relations with the PRC—epitomized by Nixon’s surprise visit in 1972, but linked to other policy changes, including granting the PRC Most Favored Nation (MFN) status—would benefit the United States on multiple levels. They included: smoothing the US withdrawal from Vietnam; accelerating the administration’s “wedge strategy” aimed at a fraying Sino-Soviet alliance; and creating a beneficial situation for US farmers, pharmaceutical companies, and globally minded corporations. “This was good diplomacy,” Zeiler contends, although many Americans disagreed (12). Rock-ribbed anti-Communists and fundamentalist Christians saw softening trade deals as capitulation to the “spread of a “new order” of Communist ‘absolute, atheistic, amoral, and merciless tyranny’” (13). The flow of trade continued to grow and diversify through the presidency of Ronald Reagan, even over prescient concerns that widening the flow of goods to include computer and aeronautical technologies “might develop the PRC into a national security threat with advanced weaponry and surveillance capabilities” (21).
Further complications to this capitalist peace rested on the PRC’s growing record of human rights abuses. On Capitol Hill, a handful of lawmakers from both major parties denounced the practice of engaging with authoritarian regimes like the PRC. But well into the twenty-first century, the disciples of capitalist peace carried the debate by arguing that a reformed PRC was predicated on market integration, not vice versa. Following the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, for instance, the consensus “saw [China] as a rising power that integration into the world capitalist economy would moderate” (16). A major element in Zeiler’s essay is his analysis of policy decisions around the PRC’s MFN and then later Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status, followed eventually by the debate over World Trade Organization (WTO) membership in 2001, all of which gestured at some desired reforms within China. And to be sure, there were instances of military, diplomatic, and economic sanctions that inflicted moderate pain on the PRC due to its intransigence. But when true reform failed to materialize, Washington ultimately relented, falling back on the idea that free trade “would encourage a Chinese middle class to moderate the government’s harsh policies” (22).
The economic productivity that followed integration certainly seemed auspicious. “Market policies had transformed the PRC from a poor nation, comprising just five percent of global exports in 1980,” Zeiler details, “to a juggernaut accounting by 2014 for twelve percent of world sales” (19). The 9/11 terrorist attacks only deepened Washington’s reliance on trade as a measurement of trust, which meant that the PRC counted “as a like-minded foe of terrorism and supporter of liberal values” (26). But neither soaring GNPs nor the war on terror could buffer the aftershocks of China’s boom, which had begun hammering US industry and manufacturing.
Zeiler shows how the exodus of about a million-and-a-half US jobs, the arrival of cheap Chinese-made goods, and growing concerns about the environmental and labor costs associated with China’s development made both the politics and the tenets of the capitalist peace doctrine amenable to change. The PRC was not merely becoming a global competitor. Rather, China had learned to play by different rules. In response, the Obama administration essentially weaponized the capitalist peace doctrine by signing onto the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a complex power arrangement premised on shared understandings of political, economic, environmental, and human rights. The TPP would “bind the United States to the region,” US President Obama asserted, and members like Vietnam and Singapore could hasten their own immersion into the world capitalist system (32). Meanwhile, non-members (the PRC) would inevitably surrender some share of their regional influence—unless, of course, they wanted to change. Obama officials believed that threatening the isolation of such a globally mature economy, like the PRC’s had become, now represented the best chance to compel its reform.
The TPP’s ratification lingered in the Senate through the end of Obama’s second term as the partnership’s opponents cast its outcomes as being decidedly in favor of US corporate greed and a further threat to American workers, and questioned the moderating effects it would have on China. Donald Trump wove these discontents into a broader critique of US free trade policy that included the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other international organizations which, Trump insisted, were at the root of declining US power. Zeiler writes that when “Trump won after promising to put ‘America First’ in trade relations, the TPP was an early casualty, as was strategic thinking regarding the PRC and, ultimately, the capitalist peace doctrine.” By doing so, Zeiler adds, “Trump undermined the decades of successful grand strategy of free-trade internationalism” (33-34). Zeiler describes how Trump’s unilateral approach to trade policy, refined by rabid protectionists within his administration, stumbled out of the gate and never bore the fruit it promised. US farmers needed bailouts to offset the loss of soybean sales to China; his promised tariffs actually triggered a massive surge of imports before they were implemented; and he left office with a trade deficit with China worse than when he took over (35-37). “Rather than join with the allies to shape Chinese behavior in the TPP,” Zeiler concludes, the Trump administration implemented policies that “were haphazard and weak…because they did not have the capitalist peace doctrine behind them, which welcomed the concerted power of allies” (37).
Zeiler’s article ends with a brief coda on the state of play under the Biden administration, in which he suggests that the US is slowly moving back to the path to a capitalist peace. The US has not rejoined the TPP since Trump withdrew the US from it three days after his inauguration, but a slow walk back to free trade, he argues, is “better than Trump’s extreme nationalist policies” (39).
“Projecting China” is a concise and accessible analysis of US-Chinese trade relations, covering the last fifty years. Zeiler’s source base is extensive, ranging from congressional testimony, policy statements, and White House briefings, to presidential libraries spanning Nixon to Bill Clinton, and other repositories like the Rockefeller Archive and the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center. It includes a select bibliography with an instructive list of primary and secondary sources. The only perspective that could use some elaboration is that of China’s. Spare mention is made of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, for instance, which was itself a profound reordering of Chinese trade policy.[4] But Zeiler’s article is expressly interested in how US presidential administrations from Nixon onward have confronted the forever-vexing problem of the China Market. To that end, this article helps move historical scholarship forward onto more recent terrain, and leaves readers with much to consider about the merits of a capitalist peace.
Daniel M. DuBois is Associate Professor of History and International Studies and Honors Program Director at Saint Leo University. He is the author of American Sport in International History: The United States and the World since 1865 (Bloomsbury 2023) and has written on US-Chinese relations for the Pacific Historical Review and Reviews in American History. He is co-editor (along with the reviewed article’s author, Thomas W. Zeiler) of A Companion to World War II (Wiley-Blackwell 2012; second edition forthcoming).
[1]For a full analysis on the history of the capitalist peace doctrine, see Thomas Zeiler’s book Capitalist Peace: A History of American Free-Trade Internationalism (Oxford University Press, 2022).
[2]For an excellent study on the tensions between free-trade internationalism and protectionism in the nineteenth century, see Marc William-Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). John Hay and the Open Door were once at the center of scholarship on US-China trade relations. Formative works on that subject include Thomas McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901 (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1967); and Marilyn B. Young, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895-1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). For a more recent meditation on US-China relations that includes substantive discussion of the Open Door, see Gordan Chang, Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Michael Patrick Cullinane and Alex Goodall provide a sweeping study on the Open Door and international free-trade thinking on broader US foreign relations in The Open Door Era: United States Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). On the role of the Open Door during the period of US recognition of the Republic of China, see Daniel M. DuBois, “Happy for John Hay that He is Dead: Chinese Students in America and the US Recognition Policy for the Republic of China, 1909-1913,” Pacific Historical Review 86:2 (2017), 227-257. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2017.86.2.228.
[3]Michael Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 180.
[4] See, for instance, Hong Yu, “Motivation behind China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ Initiatives and Establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank,” Journal of Contemporary China 26:105 (2017), 353-368. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2016.1245894; and Luca Bendiera and Vasieleios Tsiropoulos, “A Framework to Assess Debt Sustainability under the Belt and Road Initiative,” Journal of Development Economics 146 (2020), np. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102495.