West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

Chapter 2

The Open Door and Yesterday’s China

The traditional and comfortable American view of the Open Door policy considered it a well-intentioned and friendly doctrine, designed to preserve American and other legitimate commercial interests in that vast sprawling area known as China and to bolster the latter in her hour of need. By astute diplomacy and moral suasion it sought to preserve “Chinese territorial and administrative entity” from rapacious powers, which might seek to disrupt it, at first primarily Russia, later primarily Japan. The weakness of the policy lay in the lack of preparedness and unwillingness of the United States to use force to back it up, and so whenever a powerful nation saw fit to violate its tenets—in some particular aspect, place, and time—it could, and did. Nevertheless, it had a certain generalized value in keeping alive the ideal of fair play among nations with commercial interests in China and in preventing bald, outright, and complete dismemberment of that uncertain political entity. At the very least, it put the United States and the American people on the side of right, and on occasion, it could and did exert a salutary restraining effect on rapaciousness.