Americans in Eastern Asia: A Critical Study of the Policy of the United States With Reference to China, Japan and Korea in the 19th Century (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Americans in Eastern Asia: A Critical Study of the Policy of the United States With Reference to China, Japan and Korea in the 19th Century

The reader is entitled to some intimation as to what he may find in the following pages.

This is a study of the origin and development of American policy in Asia - in China, Japan, Korea, with passing attention to Siam, and the regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans - in the 19th Century. It is an entirely fresh study, based on original records and documentary sources, the first book ever attempting to cover the entire field. In large measure the human interest and the peculiarly personal qualities of the record of Americans in Asia have been retained. The actors are permitted to speak for themselves in their own words.

The viewpoint is from Washington, not from Tokio, or Peking. American relations with the separate nations of the East, with the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans, have developed not separately but as a unity which the student disregards at his peril. There has not been one policy for one country and another policy for another. The policy has, in principle, been the same; the results of the policy were different because the peoples were different.

The tap-root of American policy has been not philanthropy but the demand for most-favored-nation treatment. One frequently meets the assumption that the Open Door Policy was invented by John Hay and first applied in 1899. The Open Door Policy is as old as our relations with Asia. It was pronounced in China as early as 1842, and the spirit of the policy is as old as the Declaration of Independence. The policy was not limited to China. It was enunciated on the coast of Africa in 1832, and was repeated in Japan and Korea many times before 1899.

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