The Five Reasons the U.S. Never Conquered China
The United States possesses one of the most powerful militaries in the world, yet it has never successfully invaded the territory of its greatest rival, China. There are many reasons this has happened, but we’ll explore five of the main ones in this article. Here’s why the U.S. never conquered China—and why it probably never will.
America wanted to trade, not colonize
The United States had no intention of establishing a colony in China, at least not initially. By 1853, Americans were producing $15 million worth of goods in trade with China and they wanted to keep it that way; an American colony would have disrupted their newfound business partnership with Beijing. In 1854, Secretary of State Daniel Webster made clear America’s intentions: We shall consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of these regions as dangerous to our interest and safety… We could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them or controlling in any other manner than by free commerce, as friendly.
Americans were ill-prepared for war
For a variety of reasons, American soldiers were ill-prepared for war against China at every level. The first is that there simply weren’t enough of them to actually conquer it; as one historian puts it, the nation was militarily too weak to even cope with its most peripheral region: Asia. There were just a little over 7,000 troops in Alaska in 1900 and even fewer in Hawaii, which became an American territory only two years earlier. To put that into perspective, Western Europe had nearly 35 million residents and Russia another 170 million people—numbers far beyond what America could muster on short notice—making a successful conquest extremely unlikely.
Chinese resistance
A number of factors kept Chinese resistance to Western encroachment alive, even after Washington entered into trade agreements with Beijing, including the Unequal Treaties in 1844 and 1860 that effectively gave foreign powers control over many aspects of Chinese life and society. When allied with Manchu Empress Dowager Cixi, they ensured that efforts to modernize China using Western technology could be thwarted at every turn. The most notable example came in 1901 when a major military revolt put an end to reform efforts under Kang Youwei, who was exiled as a result and later became one of Sun Yat-sen’s chief allies during his push for democratic change in China.
A lack of American military interest in Asia before WWII
There was never a real military threat from Asia in pre-WWII America and therefore no need to commit large amounts of American resources to Asia during that period. With Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, America was pulled into war with Japan and suddenly a whole new group of islands became strategically important: The Pacific Islands. However, after WWII ended in 1945, American attention shifted away from its new island possessions back toward Europe.
Japan was a bigger threat to America than China
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, forcing America to join World War II and essentially destroy Japanese military power. Japan was an existential threat to America’s core values; had it won, all of Asia would have fallen under its brutal rule for generations. China is a different story—it lacked Japan’s resources and industrial capacity and didn’t present any sort of real physical threat to America at that time, especially given that the Soviet Union still posed a danger from Europe with its large army and powerful navy. Sure, it would have been easy for American forces to crush Chinese resistance in North Korea or Manchuria before then expanding into Peking and beyond, but we’d also be leaving one dictatorship (Japan) only to replace it with another—and who knows how things would have played out long-term?