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1 1 (January 2019)

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Key  Points

  *  Although changes in American and Chinese leadership have brought current tensions
     between the two nations to the fore, the underlying reasons for the tensions are not tied to
     either President Donald Trump or President Xi Jinping coming into office.
  *  Rather, the strategic competition between the US and China is principally the product
     of regime-driven differences over both what constitutes their national interests and what
     their respective visions were for the character of China's rise.
  *  The administration's Indo-Pacific strategy is a relatively coherent response to the challenge
     China poses. But questions remain about the administration's ability to resource it sufficiently
     and carry it out steadily given President Trump's own idiosyncratic America First policy
     views.


America's ties with China are now centuries old.
The first ship to fly under the United States' flag,
the merchant ship Empress of China, left New York's
harbor in 1784 bound for Canton to swap American-
grown ginseng and silver for Chinese tea. Since then,
as US journalist and author John Pomfret has noted,
Americans and Chinese have been enchanting each
other and disappointing each other in seemingly
perpetual cycles.'
   From the American  perspective, there was the
potentially vast Chinese market to tap into, millions
of Chinese to preach the Christian Gospel to, and
cheap Chinese labor to help build the American West.
Conversely, the Chinese saw the Americans as fair
traders, when compared with the European mer-
cantilist powers. They saw the US Open Door policy
as an attempt to keep China from being broken into
pieces,
   Moreover, like other immigrants, thousands of
Chinese saw  the American West as a land of


opportunity. And when Sun  Yat-sen founded the
first Chinese republic after the fall of the imperial
dynasty, he used Abraham Lincoln's paradigm that
government  should be of the people, by the people,
and for the people as the core for his own Three
Principles of the People. But expectations on both
sides of the Pacific have never fully been met. China
has never developed into the nation Americans hoped
it would become, and, from Beijing's perspective,
the US has never fully backed China's attempt to
reclaim its once great standing on the world stage.
   This cycle of hope and disappointment was seem-
inglybroken for good when Mao Zedong's Communists
drove Chiang Kai-shek's forces off the Chinese main-
land in 1949 and Mao established the People's Republic
of China (PRC). With China's entry into the Korean
War  in 195o and years of support for insurgencies
aimed at American imperialism, relations were
virtually nonexistent. The United States was the PRC's
implacable foe, and, for Washington, the PRC was


AMERICAN   ENTERPRISE  INSTITUTE

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