Page 11 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

who deserved the benevolent reward of China's trade. But

the Americans, although they refused to join the English in

opposing China, realized that military power gave the English

the leverage to dictate the terms of their future relations

with the Celestial Empire. When the English forced the Chin­

ese to accede to their demands, the "Canton system" was dead.

Even though Imperial authorities offered American merchants

the same commercial rights and privileges yielded to the

English under duress, the Americans feared that Chinese prom­

ises were no longer sufficient. The United States believed

that its commercial rights in China now had to be protected
by treaty, not against Chinese usurpation but against that of

other Western powers, especially England. In this belief lay

the seed for the future Open Door attitude and policy of the

United States toward China. Americans had also fostered ties

of friendship with Chinese merchants and officials. In the

future the Chinese, as during the Opium War, would continue to

look upon Americans as "respectful barbarians" and, unlike

many other Westerners, their friends.

Consequently, the first six decades of American contact

with China, based on commercial relations, were crucial in de­

fining American and Chinese attitudes which influenced subse-

quent diplomatic relations between the two countries. Several

American diplomatic historians have ventured to discuss this

period. Kenneth S. Latourette was the first to deal solely with

early American relations with China in The Story of Early Relations

between the United States and China, 1784-1844 (1917). Five years

later Tyler Dennett, in his massive Americans in Eastern Asia (1922),

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