Open-Door Policy is a term used in international relations. It means that
powerful countries have equal opportunities to trade with colonial or developing
countries. When countries agree to observe the Open-Door Policy in an area, they
simply agree to permit their merchants and investors to trade freely there.
John Hay, United States secretary of state, started the idea of the Open Door in
1899. At that time, several Western powers had special interests in China. Each
power was trying to get all the trading rights for itself. Hay sent notes to the
competing powers, asking them to maintain complete equality for all nations that
wished to trade with China. The competing powers accepted Hay's proposal, and
they signed treaties agreeing to observe the Open-Door Policy.
Contributor: Robert J. Pranger, Ph.D., Managing Editor, Mediterranean Quarterly;
Adjunct Prof., American Univ.
Although Americans were reluctant imperialists, the United States was an important Pacific power after 1898, and American businessmen had inflated ambitions to tap what they thought was the huge Chinese market. The doors to that market were being rapidly closed in the 1890s, however, as Britain, France, Russia, and Japan carved out large so-called spheres of influence all the way from Manchuria to southern China. With Britain's support (the British stood to gain the most from equal trade opportunities), on Sept. 6, 1899, Secretary of State Hay addressed the first so-called Open Door note to the powers with interests in China; it asked them to accord equal trade and investment opportunities to all nationals in their spheres of interest and leased territories. With considerable bravado, Hay announced that all the powers had agreed to respect the Open Door, even though the Russians had declined to give any pledges. On July 3, 1900, after the Boxer Rebellion—an uprising in China against foreign influence—Hay circulated a second Open Door note announcing that it was American policy to preserve Chinese territorial and political integrity.
Such pronouncements had little effect because the
United States was not prepared to support the Open Door policy with
force; successive administrations to the 1940s, however, considered it the
cornerstone of their Far Eastern policy. President Theodore Roosevelt
reluctantly mediated the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 in part to protect the Open
Door as well as to maintain a balance of power in the Far East. When Japan
attempted in 1915 to force a virtual protectorate on China, President Woodrow
Wilson intervened sternly and in some measure successfully to protect Chinese
independence. Victory for American policy seemed to come with the Nine-Power
Treaty of Washington of 1922, when all nations with interests in China promised
to respect the Open Door.
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