Traders As Diplomats: Trade, Soft Power, and U.S.-China Relations in the 1970s

The Study of Sino-American trade during the 1970s is an important yet understudied field of history. There is no published research that examines this topic systematically. Therefore, my paper fills an important gap in the scholarship. In this paper, I focus on how a group I called “academic-legislative complex”– members from the American academia and Congress – worked together with the U.S. business community to promote trade with China during the 1970s. Their efforts not only launched a new era of Sino-American business tractions, but also  shaped the two countries’ perceptions and deliberations of each other’s economic power, potentials, and developmental models. Viewed from this perspective, the dynamics of Sino-American relations during the 1970s can be best understood as a discourse on modernization. Furthermore, while the development of U.S.-China relations from rapprochement to normalization was often initiated by political and strategic concerns, the discourse of modernization constituted a much broader and deeper foundation upon which the range of these possible initiatives was based.

The paper is divided into three parts. First, it examines the rise of a new China policy, “containment without isolation,” during the last years of the Johnson administration and its impact on U.S.-China trade. Second, I will examine the role played by the growing Sino-American economic relations in the U.S.-China rapprochement. Finally, I will use the Canton Trade Fair as a case study to show the impact of Sino-American economic relations on China’s economic development. By focusing on U.S.-China trade during the 1970s, this paper goes beyond the traditional geopolitical interpretations of Cold War Sino-American relationship and explores the broader social and cultural dimensions of that relationship.