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Open Door Policy/Notes

Term in foreign affairs initially used to refer to the United States policy established in the late 19th century and the
early 20th century, as enunciated in Secretary of State John Hay's ..., dated September 6, 1899 and
dispatched to the major European powers. The policy proposed to keep China open to trade with all countries on an
equal basis, keeping any one power from total control of the country, and calling upon all powers, within their spheres
of influence, to refrain from interfering with any treaty port or any vested interest, to permit Chinese authorities to
collect tariffs on an equal basis, and to show no favors to their own nationals in the matter of harbor dues or railroad
charges. The ... was rooted in the desire of U.S. businesses to trade with Chinese markets, though it
also tapped the deep-seated sympathies of those who opposed imperialism, with the policy pledging to protect China's
sovereignty and territorial integrity from partition. In practice it had little legal standing, and was mainly used to
mediate competing interests of the colonial powers without much meaningful input from the Chinese, creating
lingering resentment and causing it to later be seen as a symbol of national humiliation by many Chinese historians.
There was an essential conflict in the policy. The U.S. announced its ... with the dual intentions of
avoiding the actual political division of China and taking financial advantage, but only in a fair way, acknowledging
equal rights for all nations to trade with China. All the imperial nations gave a green light to the American decision except Russia. The next result was that China remained undivided, but in the coming years the imperial nations
continued to exploit China to a large extent.

Boxer Rebellion

In 1900, in what became known as the ..., a Chinese secret organization called
the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists led an uprising in northern China against the spread of Western
and Japanese influence there. The rebels, referred to by Westerners as ... because they performed physical
exercises they believed would make them able to withstand bullets, killed foreigners and Chinese Christians and
destroyed foreign property. From June to August, the ... besieged the foreign district of Beijing (then called
Peking), China's capital, until an international force that included American troops subdued the uprising. By the
terms of the ... Protocol, which officially ended the rebellion in 1901, China agreed to pay more than $330 million
in reparations.

Boxer Protocol

Signed on September 7, 1901, between the Qing Empire of China and the Eight-Nation Alliance that had provided
military forces (Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United
States) plus Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands after China's defeat in the intervention to put down the ... at the hands of the Eight-Power Expeditionary Force. It is often regarded as one of the Unequal Treaties.

Treaty of Portsmouth

Major defeats convinced Russia that further resistance against Japan's imperial designs for East Asia was hopeless,
and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated a peace treaty at ..., New Hampshire, in August 1905. (He
was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this achievement.) Roosevelt was concerned about the Open Door status
of China. Japan emerged from the conflict as the first modern non-Western world power and set its sights on greater
imperial expansion. The Russian military's disastrous performance in the war was one of the immediate causes of the
Russian Revolution of 1905.

Panama Canal

Following the failure of a French construction team in the 1880s, the United States commenced building a canal across
a 50-mile stretch of the ... isthmus in 1904. The project was helped by Roosevelt's encouragement and backing
of the Panamanian Revolt, the elimination of disease-carrying mosquitoes, while chief engineer John Stevens devised
innovative techniques and spurred the crucial redesign from a sea-level to a lock canal. His successor, Lt. Col. George
Washington Goethals, stepped up excavation efforts of a stubborn mountain range and oversaw the building of the
dams and locks. Opened in 1914, oversight of the world-famous ... was transferred from the U.S. to
... in 1999.

Roosevelt Corollary

President ... assertive approach to Latin America and the Caribbean has often been characterized
as the "Big Stick," and his policy came to be known as the ... to the Monroe Doctrine. Although the
Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was essentially passive (it asked that Europeans not increase their influence or recolonize
any part of the Western Hemisphere), by the 20th century a more confident United States was willing to take on the
role of regional policeman. In the early 1900s ... grew concerned that a crisis between Venezuela and its
creditors could spark an invasion of that nation by European powers. The ... of December 1904
stated that the United States would intervene as a last resort to ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere
fulfilled their obligations to international creditors, and did not violate the rights of the United States or invite
"foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations." As the corollary worked out in practice,
the United States increasingly used military force to restore internal stability to nations in the region. ...
declared that the United States might "exercise international police power in 'flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence.'" Over the long term the corollary had little to do with relations between the Western Hemisphere and
Europe, but it did serve as justification for U.S. intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.