American Policy Toward Sino-Japanese Trade in the Postwar Years: Politics and Prosperity

Abstract

Trade between American-occupied Japan and Communist China became an issue which both shaped and reflected fundamental currents of American foreign policy in Asia in the late 1940s. Historians have identified these years as a time of growing tensions culminating in the dire warnings of international struggle portrayed in NSC 68. Indeed, the fact that a draft of this document was at hand when war erupted in Korea has been considered evidence that top U.S. officials had become inflexible in their approach to world affairs before that conflict began. Some analysts have even argued that in the spring of 1950 Harry S Truman and Dean Acheson welcomed the Korean crisis to sell their new program of Asian containment and American rearmament.1 American policies on Sino-Japanese trade contradict this rigid image. Although some officials wanted to pursue a hard line, the president, the secretary of state, the National Security Council, and even the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan (SCAP) refused to build impenetrable barriers around the People's Republic of China. Japan's economic crisis had become so severe that despite the political risk the United States decided to permit a revival of Sino-Japanese commercial ties, thus preserving a degree of flexibility in its Asian policy. U.S. policymakers hoped to stimulate Japanese recovery by providing access to Chinese raw materials and markets, thus sparing American taxpayers from having to support their erstwhile enemy while perhaps encouraging Chinese dependence on Japan, thereby weakening Soviet control over the Chinese Communist party (CCP).2