Abstract
During the current period of Sino-American tensions, historians should contribute to policy-making deliberations. The rich literature on
Three recent works capture common perceptions of current Sino-American relations: Graham Allison's Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?; Michael Beckley and Hal Brands's Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China; and Andrew F. Krepinevich's article “The Big One: Preparing for a Long War with China.” 1 We could also cite other titles echoing alarms found in media coverage and government commentary, many offering auguries of dangerously escalating conflict between the two superpowers of the early twenty-first century. 2
Portentous times should prompt leaders and citizens to maximize the analytical efforts required to shape effective policies. Historians should contribute. Their attentiveness to patterns of thinking and behaviour over time is valuable for navigating terrain where an atmosphere of crisis may both sharpen and distort judgments. (The “fog of war” can descend before shots are fired.) As with other types of diagnoses, sensitivity to the past can contextualize case histories and help determine treatment plans.
This article offers one case history. Consideration of Sino-American relations during World War II can yield additional insights into current circumstances, dangers, and opportunities. Part I discusses the complexities of Washington's engagement with China between 1940 and 1945. While countervailing forces involving security considerations, economic interests, and identity perceptions made for constantly fraught interactions, a workable cost-benefit balance for all parties was sustained even amidst frustrations and anger.
Although eight decades later the two countries are dramatically different, core dynamics of complex countervailing forces and balancing efforts remain. Parts II and III of this article explore present-day echoes of the earlier period's dynamic. During World War II the two countries maintained a delicate balance that later teetered and collapsed after 1945—a development that meshes all too worryingly with the agitated speculations of the 2020s.
Comparison, of course, does not guarantee simple analytical results–far from it. In a context characterized by intense disagreements among political leaders, economic analysts, media commentators, and IR scholars, it would be impossible to escape the fraught atmosphere that envelops discussions of the tensions among China, the US, and other “Western” countries in the 2020s. Because perspectives clash on the sources, dynamics, and prospects of present-day relations, comparative historical analyses will do so as well. This article's contention, however, is that even intense debate is desirable–if it involves serious and respectful engagement.
Total consensus on how to map tensions or apportion responsibility for causing or curing them is unlikely to emerge here (an understatement, of course). This does not mean that intermediate rewards are out of reach, however. Scholarly dialogue can contribute to what Ken Booth and Nicholas Wheeler call “security dilemma sensitivity” or the awareness of how one actor's behaviour is read by another, spurring chain reactions that may spring from misperceptions.
Note that the two historians authoring this article–one Chinese, the other Canadian-American–seek to model the value of dialogue. By exploring Chinese and Western perspectives on current and World War II-era Sino-American relations, they are offering insights that might otherwise be less discernible.
I
As in 2024, it is easy to sketch a dramatic (even melodramatic) storyline for China-US relations during World War II–one extending from the exhilarating prospect of new allies struggling against brutal Japanese aggression to a victory tarnished by mutual frustration, anger, and dashed hopes.
In 1940 and 1941, hoping to avoid direct entanglement in a Pacific war, the US offered the Kuomintang party (KMT) tentative aid and encouragements. When Pearl Harbor upset that scenario, America's turbocharging of its military and economic power dramatically intensified Washington-Chungking ties. Even in the face of clear “Europe-first” priorities, the Roosevelt administration quickly developed an ambitious vision that paired short-term military collaboration with plans for a postwar regional partnership with Chiang Kai-shek's government.
On the combat front, Major General Joseph Stilwell was sent to China in early 1942 to turn KMT armed forces into a high-powered tool for use in operations like those being designed for a Burma-India-China theatre–with massive US aid complementing American training expertise. 3 On the political front, Washington moved to terminate American “extraterritoriality” in China and to modify immigration regulations by repealing the repellent Chinese Exclusion Act, attempting to demonstrate that the “US regards China not only as a partner in the conduct of the war, but also as a partner in time of peace.” 4 Building on such bilateral steps, 1943 also saw the US escalate China's importance in emerging multilateral efforts. At the Moscow foreign ministers’ conference (18 October–11 November 1943), Secretary of State Cordell Hull achieved China's designation as one of the “Four Policemen,” a council envisioned as a key force for maintaining global peace after the defeat of the Axis. Hull maneuvered to have the Chinese ambassador in Moscow sign the “Four Power Declaration” outlining various postwar planning objectives. 5 Chinese scholars generally believe that the signing of this declaration marked the beginning of China's status as one of the four strongest countries in the international arena. 6
Just ten days after the Moscow meeting, Franklin Roosevelt added an exclamation point to Hull's work by meeting Chiang in Cairo (22–26 November 1943). On his way to the Tehran Conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, the American president vigorously bolstered Chinese morale and expectations with significant commitments: US support for the return of lost territories (Formosa and the Pescadores Islands, as well as locations in north China and Manchuria), for Japanese reparations, and for continuing mutual defence agreements regarding air and naval bases. 7 Chiang grasped the significance of Roosevelt's time and words, having his wife write that “The Generalissimo wishes me to tell you again how much he appreciates what you have done and are doing for China. When he said good-bye to you this afternoon he could not find words adequately expressive to convey his emotions and feelings….” 8
If the Cairo conference suggests a heady peak in wartime relations, however, both Chinese and American historians describe rapid decline and dramatic tumbles in 1944 and 1945. Of particular importance were the US's continual critical appraisals of the KMT's military contributions to the war against Japan. Through this period, Chiang continually restrained General Stilwell's army reorganization plans while keeping KMT forces out of operations like the campaign to re-open a land route for delivery of supplies through Burma. Even in 1943, US Army chief of staff and general George Marshall spoke of “the ‘let the other fellow do it’” attitude in Chungking–adding that “This attitude, combined with the present low combat worth of the Chinese Army, must be reversed before we can fully realize the Chinese potential in this war.” 9 Despite continually pressing his military advisers to keep patiently working with Chiang, even Roosevelt grew exasperated in 1944. A sharply worded letter to Chungking focused on the long-planned operation on the Burma-China border: “I have urged time and again in recent months,” the Generalissimo was reminded, “that you take drastic action to resist the disaster which has been moving closer to China and to you.” “Catastrophic consequences” were now at hand and “all your action and our efforts to save China are to be lost by further delays.” 10
Chinese scholars have elaborated on the main reason for Chiang's resistance to engagement with Japanese forces: his prioritization of the KMT's struggle with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As Hu Zhixin explains, [Chiang] carried out a passive anti-war policy of war-watching and war-avoidance and hoarded large quantities of US aid to China in preparation for the elimination of the Communists after the war…. [He] carried out an active anti-Communist policy of blockading the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region with a 300,000-strong, well-equipped army.
11
Frustration with Chungking's failure to contribute to the war effort was exacerbated by disgust with the scale of KMT corruption–which was seen as further undercutting the original intent of massive US aid for operations against Japan. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau worried about “the bunch of crooks” surrounding Chiang and routinely tracked the vast amounts of US aid being siphoned into private hands. General Stilwell became the most vitriolic local critic of what he lambasted as “this stinking gang,” headed by a “grasping rattlesnake.” 12
The Yalta Conference (4–11 February l945) has been seen as a particularly troubling reversal of Cairo. Roosevelt's negotiations with Stalin have provoked intense controversies to this day, with agreements about China among the hot-button points. Stalin brought two things of value to the bargaining about Asian matters: a commitment to soon enter the war against Japan and a readiness to support Chiang as the leader of a projected KMT-CCP coalition government. Roosevelt saw these contributions as deserving of US support for a variety of Soviet demands for economic, military, and political privileges in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia. The president presumed that follow-on Moscow-Chungking negotiations would yield a treaty formalizing such terms, but he was equally definite at Yalta about delaying the communication of specifics to Chiang. In essence, he was acting on China's behalf as if he were a guardian with an underage ward. China was being treated more as a cadet-in-training that a full-fledged peer among the Four Policemen. 13
Chinese historians see the Yalta agreements as a naked violation of China's sovereignty. Wang Zhen has written that Roosevelt's efforts to raise China's international status were premised on controlling China and bringing it into the US sphere of influence, because China had to act in accordance with US intentions, whether in terms of curbing Soviet expansion or resolving the Japan-US conflict…. [T]he US policy of “making China a great power” is only a nominal and theoretical great power, not a substantive one…. This superficial and illusory nature of China's great power status is mainly manifested in the way China's territorial sovereignty became a bargaining chip for the USSR to trade.
14
A quick sketch of China-US relations during World War II lends itself to stark imagery–high points and betrayals. Black-and-white drama, however, leaves little room for sensitivity to important complexities–which poses one of the analytical challenges (and opportunities) that link these earlier years to the present day.
Closer examination of the period suggests that the US and China were travelling a rocky highway marked with potholes. Volatile circumstances produced by the war against Japan and evolving postwar planning concerns further handicapped the prospects of a speedy, smooth, or satisfying ride. Nonetheless, the two countries remained on the highway; if travel was often rough and precarious, neither (including the KMT and the CCP in China) showed any inclination to look for an exit ramp.
The earlier years of the wartime alliance show a pattern in how American hopes and commitments were always accompanied by reservations, doubts, and frustrations. Overarching analytical assessments among top-level policymakers, for example, revealed a consistent tinge of “wait and see” amidst optimistic imaging. In a mid-1943 conversation with T.V. Soong (the younger brother of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and a high-level official in the KMT government), Secretary of State Hull offered a subtle distinction to soften the American unreadiness to give China formal membership in the allied agency controlling allotments of munitions: The US “looked upon China as having great potential strength and development, politically, economically, et cetera….” He added, “[T]hat development is reasonably certain in the not distant future,” leaving unspoken the clear implication that the “potential” had not yet been achieved.
15
Roosevelt was less veiled than Hull in a conversation with Stalin in Tehran. Addressing Soviet doubts about the appropriateness of China being equal in status to the “Big Three”—doubts that Churchill also shared–the president replied that he had insisted on the participation of China in the Four Power Declaration at Moscow not because he did not realize the weakness of China at present, but he was thinking further into the future and that after all China was a nation of 400 million people, and it was better to have them as friends rather than as a potential source of trouble.
16
Lower estimations of China's strength consequently set limits on American engagement, evident as early as 1942 when Stilwell was sent to begin major training operations seen as vital to the war effort. A year later, Chiang was not invited to the Tehran Conference that immediately followed the meeting in Cairo (where Roosevelt proceeded to conduct military planning directly with Stilwell); nor was the KMT granted the seat it desired on an Allied Joint Military Command Organization for the Far East (where it might play a more direct role in determining military strategy). Even a decision to create a joint command structure was delayed.
As US expectations declined, so did Chungking's. Chiang's diary is revealing here. American officials “were extremely contemptuous and endeavoured to slander” Chinese military leaders,” he wrote. After the Cairo and Tehran meetings, he expressed particular dissatisfaction with the fact that “The US and Britain still do not have a specific organization for the whole war situation and the Pacific war situation, but only the US and Britain have a joint staff organization for the war affairs of the two countries, and our country has been discarded outside the major powers…. Such contempt for our country is so extraordinary that it should be severely questioned.” 17
If warm China-US relations in 1942 and 1943 were tempered by almost constant complaints, frustrations, and doubts from both sides, 1944 and 1945 saw cautious improvement. While this later period was also fraught with anger, tantrums, and crises, we must nonetheless appreciate that (yet again) neither prickly party came close to breaking from the other.
Roosevelt's stern message to Chiang in September 1944, for example, was drafted after months of warnings about the consequences of the Generalissimo's obstreperous resistance to armed forces reform and action. Stilwell had reached a point where he was contemplating either a bold new initiative or a drastic change in strategy. In a cable to the army's chief of staff Marshall he mused: “Somehow we must get arms to the Communists who will fight.” 18 Moreover, in his diary, Marshall described a meeting in which Soong was warned that continued KMT inaction would lead Stilwell to recommend that the US “withdraw entirely from China and set up base elsewhere.” 19
Chiang was used to being infuriated by Stilwell, but Roosevelt's apparent readiness to escalate criticism of Chungking intensified his own anger. “The pressure from our allies is more overwhelming and anxiety-inducing than the offensives from our enemies,” he wrote in his diary. “I can hardly find words to describe the agony I feel under such pressure.” 20 In another entry he contended, “The oppression and unfair treatment we are currently experiencing while fighting alongside the Allied forces are unprecedented in the thirteen years since the war began.” 21 As Chinese scholars have pointed out, Chiang's personal pique was melded with pragmatic political calculations. In mid-1944, China was experiencing pressures emerging from the Second Constitutional Protection Movement 22 and, as Wang Jianlang suggests, “Chiang, of course, understood that the influence of the army was not confined to the military struggle against the Japanese, but that it necessarily involved the stabilization of political power.” 23 Chiang (like Mao Tse-tung) was aware of the principle that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
As before, the Generalissimo channeled his indignation into counterattack, demanding Stilwell's recall for behaviour offensive to Chinese sovereignty. This was a successful defence since Roosevelt was not prepared to follow Stilwell's thinking and, in fact, shortly thereafter ended Stilwell's tour of duty in China. In this decision the president was influenced by two factors: amidst the pressures of his 1944 re-election campaign, he wished to avoid the problematic headlines that would have flared with any serious blow-up in relations with a vital ally. And other presidential advisers were more optimistic about Chiang's ultimate value than Marshall and Stilwell had been. Roosevelt had sent Patrick Hurley to Chungking as his personal emissary, for example, despite Hurley having only a few weeks of previous experience in the immensely complicated terrain. 24 Hurley soon became a passionate Chiang supporter and also recommended that Stilwell be recalled. “My opinion is that if you sustain Stilwell in this controversy you will lose Chiang Kai-shek and possible you will lose China with him,” he wrote to Roosevelt. “If we permit China to collapse, if we fail to keep the Chinese army in the war, all the angels in heaven swearing that we were right in sustaining Stilwell will not change the verdict of history. America will have failed in China.” 25
The president's decision to relieve Stilwell (despite ongoing respect for the general's views) offers a striking demonstration of his ability to balance the countervailing forces that had been rocking the Washington-Chungking relationship throughout the war years. He shared the frustrations and aggravations of some of his advisers, but by and large accepted that these were an unavoidable price to pay to have a decent working relationship with a country on its way to Great Power status–and thus a country with the potential to augment multilateral peacekeeping efforts after Japan's defeat. Even Chiang himself was deemed worth the trouble he could cause. As Roosevelt explained to General Marshall, the Generalissimo was the “undisputed leader of 400,000,000 people” who had brought China to a point that “it took us a couple of centuries to attain”: one did not “speak sternly to a man like that or exact commitments from him as we might do from the Sultan of Morocco.” 26 For his part, the often disgruntled Chiang also found it possible to balance costs and benefits in the KMT-US accounts. As he put it, “China does not wish to follow the leadership of any other country except the US and China will not participate in any international organization without the participation of the US.” 27
The precarious balance that American and Chinese leaders achieved during World War II barely survived Japan's surrender. The summer of 1945 saw the beginning of a new cycle of Asian crises, with wartime plans on a trajectory to profound collapse. Within China, KMT-CCP tensions that had been partially restrained soon burst into flame–until the former fled the mainland and the latter proclaimed the birth of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Outside China the hopes of 1940–1945 were soon obliterated. The US and the Soviet Union caromed from being victorious allies to Cold War enemies–with the PRC making its own national security calculations by mounting large-scale military operations in response to America's dramatic incursion into the Korean peninsula in 1950.
Nonetheless, the ability to sustain balance throughout the war years is an important marker of diplomatic achievement. It is also relevant to the obvious precarity of the present day–as are the factors that led to the failures that caught such dramatic fire after 1945. The transition from success to fiascos warrants further attention below.
II
Present-day relations between China and the US reveal two countries that are intensely connected yet conflicted, as during World War II, generating a complex interplay of rewards and hazards. For the moment, at least, there is evidence of sufficient yet precarious capacities for the management of fraught relations, even as national and global changes after the 1940s were dramatic and cumulative enough to transform China and the US from the countries they were during World War II.
The battered China of World War II, with its most developed regions occupied by Japan and its remaining territories teetering on the edge of civil war, has become an economic behemoth. Some analysts see it as already the world's largest economy, while others believe it is at least closing in on the US. 28 China's National Bureau of Statistics reports that the country's performance accounted for 38.6 percent of global economic growth from 2013 to 2021, the largest share of all nations. Additionally, in 2020, China surpassed the US to become the world's largest trading nation, a position it maintained in 2021. 29 China's enormous investments in “research and development” have also been telling: a 1,700 percent increase in funding since 2000, yielding distinctive successes in areas like electric car production, solar photovoltaic cell development, and wind-power generation. 30
In the military domain, China has likewise undergone impressive transformations. From its early inability to manufacture even a single artillery piece, China now boasts a fully modernized military-industrial complex capable of producing advanced weaponry, including aircraft carriers equipped with electromagnetic catapults, hypersonic missiles, and fourth-generation stealth fighter jets. The latest report from the US Department of Defense acknowledges that China is now minimally reliant on foreign arms imports and has the capability to independently develop and manufacture weaponry on par with the most advanced equipment of the US and Russia. 31 Global Firepower's (GFP) recent ranking of world military strength places China third globally. 32 Against this backdrop, Beijing has become more assertive internationally. Western critics see this as aggressive behaviour–citing muscle-flexing against Taiwan and in the South China Sea, in particular. The Chinese refusal to join condemnations of Russia's war in Ukraine is also seen as problematic–though a more positive example of global leadership is seen in China's active efforts towards normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. 33
The US of 2024 has not traveled quite so far from World War II as China. American productive and military power were already of fundamental importance to victory over the Axis powers (though that should not prevent recognition of Soviet, British, and other contributions). Even if the US emerged from war in 1945 with unequalled wealth and power, however, growth continued by leaps and bounds. GDP figures offer one core example: the US's GDP of $135 billion in 1945 grew to $21.4 trillion in 2020. 34 (China's GDP was 73 percent of this–or 77 percent in 2022 according to Chinese statistics.) 35 Even after decades of significant economic advancement in many other countries, the US still accounted for 31 percent of global research and development funding in 2020 ($720 billion as opposed to China's $582 billion). 36
Further growth of already unparalleled American wealth and productive capacity was matched in the military realm across the decades since World War II. Although the 2.8 million soldiers currently in China's armed forces are double those of the US's, there is no doubting the overall scale, reach, and technological sophistication of full-fledged American power. The US defence budget in 2021 was $801 billion–while joint operations with allies (such as the British-American air strikes against the Houthis in Yemen) 37 demonstrated the supplemental value of separate military spending by numerous allies. (China's military expenditures, second largest in the world, were $295 billion.) 38
If China and the US have each changed dramatically since World War II, however, their relationship maintains shared core characteristics. For all the granular differences, they continue to be intensely connected
The combination of connection and tension is evident in multiple facets of the China-US relationship–although that tension regularly sparks commentary in public discourse, particularly when economic competition is concerned. Consider the clash of Beijing's “Belt and Road Initiative” and the US-led G7 “Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment” 39 —each a massive modern-day version of the shipping, railroad, communication, and financial enterprises that, at various points in history, have enabled both countries to draw (or tie) far-flung regions into profitable networks. Also consider the tangles over cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and semi-conductors. The US has taken what has been called “a small-yard and a high-fence” approach to limiting Chinese access to certain realms. 40 They have attempted to suppress and sanction companies like ZTE, Huawei, DJI, and TikTok–as well as restrict the entry of Chinese students studying abroad. 41 A complementary strategy involves “reshoring” as well as “friend-shoring”—shifting production operations in sensitive fields away from China and towards countries like India and Thailand. Beijing believes that these actions constitute “typical economic and technological bullying and a serious violation of international trade rules…. Stifling China's technological progress is nothing but a move to contain China's high-quality development and deprive the Chinese people of their right to development.” 42
It is ultimately impossible to separate trade or technology from the full and tightly knitted web of concerns that inform determinations of overall “national interest.” For great powers, in particular, the very definition of “power” entails strategic calculations that are multi-faceted and multi-layered–calculations in which economic stresses and opportunities are pervasive, but only one part of a sweeping landscape.
Consider the correlation of notionally “economic” and “military” developments. While cutting-edge technologies have obvious export and financial resonance, for example, they are also crucially important to traditional security concerns like defining external dangers and military capacities. Relatedly, a major competitor's productive muscle and market reach may prompt economic concerns–which country, for instance, will make the most impressive strides in electric vehicle design? At the same time, sales and product development help to generate the wealth necessary to support a country's military strength.
Such notionally “economic” and “military” developments also correlate to a nation's political power in the global arena–to the situations where it can achieve objectives without resorting to armed force. When China perceived challenges to its stance on Taiwan, for instance, Beijing was able to use its economic clout to pressure those seen as insufficiently respectful of its priority concerns, including the US's National Basketball Association and South Korea's tourist industry. 43 For its part, Washington has tried to use intensive economic sanctions to hamper both Russia's war with Ukraine and Iran's regional ambitions. 44
Overall, tensions in China-US relations emanate from each country's distinct calculations of its strategic priorities. Both consider economic, military, and political necessities for furthering their respective power, security, and opportunities. Each emerges with assessments that clash–regularly and seriously, but not yet completely–with the other's priorities. In this way, the sheer number and range of disagreements have given rise to a perception of systemic struggle at a global level.
In the US, policymakers and analysts have not hesitated to foreground this dramatic theme. The Joseph Biden administration's Interim National Security Strategic Guidance document of March 2021 referenced the high priority being accorded to China policy: Washington was confronting the reality that the distribution of power across the world is changing, creating new threats. China, in particular, has rapidly become more assertive. It is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.
45
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has offered regular variations on this theme. In a major 2022 foreign policy address, he said, China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it. Beijing's vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world's progress over the past 75 years.
46
Outside of government, scholars and other commentators adopt similar imagery. In his Destined for War?, Allison taps into millennia of great power history to explain why he is raising the question. The US is the current exemplar of a hegemon confronted by a rising upstart–with the twenty-first century variation pitting defence of a carefully constructed global order against challenges seen as threatening the legacy of decades in which World War III was avoided and many lived in prosperity. 47
A sense of troubling and systemic change is evident among Chinese scholars and leaders, as well. Previously, the prevailing sentiment regarding Chinese-American relations was that they were neither as good nor as bad as they could be. This assessment was based on a recognition of substantial common interests between the two. In recent years, however, the most frequently used terms for the relationship have included “severe,” “competitive,” and “crisis.” Fudan University's Wu Xinbo believes that the atmosphere surrounding Sino-American relations has deteriorated, with damaged strategic mutual trust and structural contradictions. Sino-American relations have shifted from a mode of balancing cooperation and competition to one dominated by competition. Looking ahead, Sino-American relations will remain extremely challenging in the short term as they face unprecedented challenges. 48 A study from a research centre connected to China's Ministry of State Security describes the change as “a center-periphery structure for the global economy and security” that is moving “towards a period of polycentric competition and co-operation.” 49 This account echoes Washington's sense of shifting international currents–but with apparent acceptance rather than resistance.
As in the US, public comments by political leaders in China reflect–and inform–academic observations. Chinese president Xi has on multiple occasions related his sense of a shifting twenty-first century landscape. In 2019, during his address at the twenty-third St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he described a world facing profound changes unseen in a century…. Unprecedented inadaptation and asymmetry are emerging between the global governance system and the changes of the international situation, as emerging-market economies and developing countries are rising at an unprecedentedly high speed, and the new round of technological and industrial revolution is leading to unprecedentedly fierce competition.
50
At the seventy-fifth session of the UN General Assembly in 2020, President Xi reiterated this theme, but in a less explicitly confrontational tone than the one found in official US pronouncements: At present, the world is battling the COVID-19 pandemic as it goes through profound changes never seen in a century. Yet, peace and development remain the underlying trend of the times, and people everywhere crave even more strongly for peace, development and win-win cooperation.”
51
While the serious tensions in current US-China relations cannot be ignored, nor should countervailing dynamics. As during World War II, the two countries are still profoundly important to each other in both positive and problematic ways–hence the value in thinking about linkages at opposite ends of an eighty-year span.
Day-to-day and year-to-year scripts played out differently “then,” of course. The fraught side of the relationship was much less in the spotlight while Chiang and Roosevelt were the top-level actors. Even behind the scenes, constant and complex management efforts (especially by Washington) kept achievements and problems in a reasonable and mutually satisfying balance until 1945. In recent years, complex management efforts have again become the norm, alongside a more obvious dynamic of mutual frustrations and precarity. But both countries are still invested in maintaining an acceptable balance–even in the face of perceived systemic challenges. That such a balance exists owes much to US and Chinese leaders’ capacities for cost-benefit analysis. As during World War II, the rewards of a sustained bilateral relationship are seen as substantial or even vital. Both countries see the value of paying some price if it helps preserve peaceful competition and fruitful cooperation. 52
Frequent high-level visits and meetings demonstrate the active diplomacy involved in maintaining this delicate balance. In the last two years alone, prominent US officials including Blinken, treasury secretary Janet Yellen, special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry, commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer have visited China. In October 2023, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi visited the US and met with President Biden, and there was an especially noteworthy “summit” meeting between Biden and Xi in California a month later, in tandem with a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). 53
What encourages Chinese and American leaders to invest such time and energy into their bilateral relationship in the 2020s? What are the contemporary counterparts to the ways in which Chungking and Washington avoided a full-scale break during World War II, using a less than rock-solid alliance (the KMT government) to limit Japan's power and reach? Perhaps more significantly, are there present-day parallels to the intellectual and emotional adjustments that leaders of both countries made during 1940 to 1945—even in a highly strained environment that nonetheless allowed enough room for these players to work toward making China a more fully sovereign state as well as a larger player in global affairs?
Trade and financial ties developed over half a century retain great potency. Statistics for 2022 and 2023 are telling: the US imported $536 billion of goods from China and exported $154 billion (with American agricultural exports reaching a record $42 billion and service exports to China an additional $41 billion). 54 US foreign direct investment in China was $126 billion while China's in the US was $28 billion; China also held almost $1 trillion in US treasury bonds. Bilateral economic ties of such magnitude create a symbiotic relationship impossible to sunder without grave costs. These would include the loss of both established and new business opportunities: even in a period of rising tensions, for example, US exports of services to China grew by 5.2 percent from 2021 to 2022 and the utilization of US capital in China increased by 25.5 percent year-on-year from January to July 2023. 55
Nor is the powerful appeal of economic benefits fully captured by focusing on a strictly bilateral relationship. The intertwining of the US and Chinese economies reached its current intensity in an era of globalization, with historically unique multinational networks emerging from technological and engineering advances, financial innovations, and political and diplomatic activism, among other forces. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has shown how even a regional conflict can send shock-waves far afield in the twenty-first century (for example, by producing European energy problems and impacting Russia-India-Iran trade). 56 It is all too easy to imagine even greater implications reverberating outward from a sharp break or fissure in the relationship between the US and China–each with an economy much larger than Russia's, and each more enmeshed globally.
If economic interests continue to remind leaders in both countries of the rewards of maintaining respect and sensitivity in their relationship, there are other prompts as well. Here we provide two examples–one obvious, the other easy to miss.
On one hand, Beijing and Washington have lived experience with the rewards of diplomatic cooperation. Initiatives like the Six Power Talks (begun in 2003) have reduced the potentially incendiary effects of North Korea's behaviour. As recently as February 2024, China and the US publicly committed to continued communication in the face of renewed weapons testing by Pyongyang. 57 Bilateral discussions have also become a regular feature of multilateral efforts to deal with global climate change. In 2023 Biden's envoy Kerry held two extended meetings in Beijing and in California with China's special envoy on climate change Xie Zhenhua, generating a “Sunnylands Statement” outlining steps to enhance cooperation in this field. 58
On the other hand, agitated rhetoric and media can deflect attention away from the essential rewards of even a fraught relationship: there has thus far been no World War III (no Pelopponesian wars) between the two major twenty-first century powers. In recent decades there have been flashpoints, including the incident stemming from the US bombing of China's Belgrade Embassy in 1999 and the 2001 Hainan Island incident 59 as well as re-intensifying defence relationships between the US and Taiwan, concerns over weather/spy balloons, and South China Sea tensions involving American allies. These sparks, however, have not escalated to fires–thanks to the core sensitivity of top-level leaders regarding the cataclysmic consequences of direct military clashes between great powers in the nuclear age. Both Beijing and Washington cautioned Moscow when Vladimir Putin began lobbing provocative references to the possibility of using smaller-scale nuclear weapons against a determined Kiev 60 —suggesting that both Chinese and American leaders continue to respect the power of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD).
III
For the moment, the counterpoint of mutual tensions and interests is keeping the China-US relationship from full-fledged disintegration. In some respects, this was also the case during World War II. Then and now, the two countries might be seen as balancing on the edge of a volcano–with the stability of that balance being as notable as the potential for eruption.
Between 1940 and 1945, policymakers knew enough of the opportunities offered by a relationship with China to lessen the impact of American anger over Chungking's reluctance to fight the Japanese and KMT corruption. Likewise, Chungking had enough appreciation for the value of American largesse to at least somewhat restrain any moves to act on its resentment of Washington's condescension and control. Leaders on both sides had the shrewdness and tactical skill needed to tread a path that remained a tolerable if often uncomfortable distance from calamity.
During the 2020s, the stresses are different, but so far the players have not obliterated safe and mutually beneficial relations. Xi and Biden each paired assertive presidential leadership with appreciation for potential consequences, overseeing policies aimed at serving respective national interests without (they believe) excessive risks. Each was committed to continual communication, for example by spending time together during multilateral gatherings and supplementing in-person meetings with phone conversations. The bilateral meeting preceding the November 2023 APEC meeting in California found each emphasizing the importance of serious discussion. “I value our conversation because I think it's paramount that you and I understand each other clearly, leader to leader, with no misconceptions or miscommunication,” Biden said. “We have to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict. And we also have to manage it responsibly….” For his part, Xi affirmed a determination to maintain “the most important bilateral relationship in the world”: It is an objective fact that China and the US are different in history, culture, social system[s], and development path[s]. However, as long as they respect each other, coexist in peace, and pursue win-win cooperation, they will be fully capable of rising above differences….”
61
To point to the functional balance between countervailing forces in World War II and the 2020s is not reassuring, after all. Quite the opposite. The tightrope walking of the 1940s preceded the implosion of the relationship and decades of disaster (witness the Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954 to 1958, and the Vietnam conflicts). Do the increasing strains so clear in recent China-US relations portend another period where balance gives way to calamity?
The problematic trajectory of the 1940s offers insights into the nature of present-day risks and, more broadly, the circumstances, attitudes, and behaviours again threatening the sustainability of effective relationship management capacities. Two examples will be offered here: first, a problematic weakness shared by the leaders who played dominant roles in China and the US; and second, the immaturity of the international system within which bilateral relations were conducted.
Surrounded by cohorts that shared key personality traits and policy impulses, Chiang and Roosevelt each had flaws that contributed to the post-1945 fiasco. Chiang's were the greater flaws and his the more complete failure. He trod commanding heights for a remarkably long time during China's tumultuous revolutionary decades, thanks in no small part to his genuine charisma and his political, intellectual, and military skills. His eventual undoing, however, owed a great deal to an amalgam of appetite and arrogance. Complete personal and KMT control of China became his only acceptable goal–meaning that compromises or power-sharing with revolutionary leaders and rivals of other stripes were seen as merely temporary. When, even with large-scale US aid, the KMT failed to obtain the power necessary to defeat the CCP, Chiang remained convinced that he could somehow achieve the impossible. He saw no reason to ascribe this failure to the authoritarianism of his regime or the gangster-like corruption of his inner circle; he preferred instead to blame the villainy of others. In the end, despite Chiang's blind confidence, he won only a perch on Taiwan–and even that was primarily secured by a US preoccupied by the Cold War. 62
Roosevelt was also driven by ego–but his self-confidence played a more constructive role during his tenure. It boosted the energy needed to build the transformative New Deal, helped win four presidential elections, and fueled the inspirational leadership that took the US to victory in World War II. 63 The line between the virtues and the perils of ego can be hard to discern, however, and Roosevelt sometimes slid across it–as in his handling of China policy. The president seriously overestimated both his own and his country's ability to manage China's revolutionary turmoil in the 1940s. He could meet with Chiang in Cairo; he could send a steady flow of emissaries and advisers, and he could astutely envision a new role for China in the global arena–but he never grasped the limits of US power on the far side of the globe 64 nor the limits of his own powers. Roosevelt was insensitive to his lack of time and inclination to more searchingly investigate the gap between the positive forecasts of Hurley and the doubt-saturated reports of General Stilwell. Like many leaders of powerful states throughout history, neither Chiang nor Roosevelt fully appreciated that seeing could not always be matched by doing–and that having breadth of vision might entail sacrificing deep understanding of specific challenges.
The impacts of the human flaws of leaders during the 1940s was compounded by the evident weaknesses of the international “system” informing the China-US relationship. The combination of the Great Depression and World War II generated ambitious plans in many quarters–including multilateral institutions and processes for dealing with what had increasingly become global crises and stopping problems from escalating into explosions. Architects of the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF, for example, hoped that their institutions would provide the infrastructure to solve emergent problems and foster the fruitful trade and financial linkages needed to sustain peace and prosperity. What might be called “global management” concepts, however, were only beginning to move from vision to execution by 1945. It would take decades before a reformed international system would have any value in tempering China-US antagonisms. Indeed, before the 1970s–and after the establishment of the PRC–Washington was far more likely to use newer institutions to punish or pressure Beijing (as in mobilizing the UN's refusal to seat the PRC and the 1950 resolution authorizing international military action on the Korean peninsula). 65
Are there present-day echoes of the leadership and systemic weaknesses of the World War II era–those that helped pave the way for the disastrous trajectory of China-US relations after 1945? Yes. Obviously there are enormous differences between “then” and “now,” but there are also similarities that suggest resonance across time–not least in evident patterns of thinking and behaviour.
Eight decades of multilateral institutions and formal agreements on international behaviour might be seen as reassuring maturation for an international system that in the 1940s offered so little help managing tension or crises. The UN, World Bank and IMF, World Trade Organization, Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, G7, and others have created an environment in which even powerful states are influenced or constrained in ways that were much less prevalent in the past. Intensive trade and financial ties (the organic intertwining of “globalization”) also reinforce functional limitations on absolute sovereignty. This combination might mean that cooler heads in institutions and other countries will continue to restrain bellicose impulses in Washington and Beijing (and elsewhere, of course). However, no one would argue that global management tools are as strong as they could be: the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war offer bloody evidence to the contrary.
Or consider two other features of recent years. First, many twenty-first century issues, such as trade tensions or cybersecurity concerns, are as multilateral as the institutions created to foster peace and prosperity, meaning that anger can as easily be reinforced as cooled. Second, the international system is not a static entity–the twenty-first century has already seen significant developments affecting the character, dynamics, and potential influence of the institutions and processes that have already evolved across earlier post-1945 decades: as in the impacts of China's and India's rapid rises to power, for example, or the disruptive forces of climate change, artificial intelligence, and pandemics.
A transforming international system raises reasonable questions about the retention and improvement of its already limited management capabilities. Nor is it less reasonable to recognize related uncertainties about the sustainability of pragmatic leadership skills in Beijing and Washington. Thus far in the twenty-first century, those skills have been sufficiently impressive to maintain the balance required to avoid war or other disasters–testifying to important learnings from the experiences of twentieth-century conflicts and crises. Are these experiences enough to enable major powers to deal with a new century of continual stress and volatility?
Putin is one state leader breaking the restraints forged by intensified multilateralism and the temperate calculations engendered by a previous century of crises. Yet more concerning–because it involves one half of the China-US relationship–is the instability implicit in the Donald Trump phenomenon, particularly as Trump is returning to the White House. The weight of history more broadly writ only adds to doubts or anxieties. From Thucydides onward, scholars have mapped the grievous impact of hubris on the leaders (and citizens) of redoubtable states, detailing the wars emerging when expansive appetites undercut realistic assessments of both the costs and the limits of potency. 66
Conclusion
Will Chinese and American leaders in the near and medium terms be able to buck historical patterns of excessive great power ambitions? This is a formidable challenge. Among other factors, it will require genuine respect for the high priority concerns of each bilateral partner, and sustained determination to avoid crossing what have been called “red lines” of special significance to one or the other, including the future of Taiwan, cybersecurity, and adherence to agreed-upon trade practices as well as openness to revisions. 67 Will leaders be able to respect those red lines and at least maintain the current precarious balance? Will they be shrewd enough to anchor determinations of national interest somewhere between a pragmatic “good” and a hypothetical “perfect”—producing a cost-effective and damage-limiting agenda for action and interaction? Seeking answers to such questions warrants respect for the old cliché that “only time will tell”—but, in the meantime, it is not unreasonable to determine directions and dangers. This article has suggested two ways by which insights might be gained–one explicit and the other mostly implicit.
Here we have emphasized the value of comparing historical and contemporary developments. While we have briefly examined relevant events from the World War II years, other possibilities may warrant reflection: the wars, near wars, and proxy wars of the 1950s and 1960s, for example–or, to shift to a longue durée alternative, the rises and falls and struggles among great powers across centuries, seeking illuminating patterns of thinking and behaviour. Security and economic concerns have always shaped national interests. Technological developments frequently influence states’ abilities to gain and retain wealth and power over time–and spur the efforts of others to acquire status or hegemony. Comparative research of various historical periods can provide deeper perspectives on current developments.
Comparative scholarly analysis will not yield neat results. Disagreement and debate are inherent in virtually every discipline–with evolving layers of interpretation and reinterpretation. Some will question the value of comparing these two periods because of the dramatic changes in China, the US, and the world across eight decades. Others might question the absence of conclusive judgments on the recent goals or strategies of the two twenty-first century protagonists.
This article, however, models healthy debate across political divides. The authors, a Chinese historian and a Canadian-American historian, see inherent value in respectful collaborative and intellectual exploration. Consensus on many issues will likely not often be on offer, but an academic variation on “security dilemma sensitivity” may offer still meaningful compensation. Greater understanding of respective views and the evidence or analysis that support these views should hardly be unwelcome as all of us are walking on the volcano's edge.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
