China headed to Versailles in Paris with great expectations, hoping, among other things, to overturn the unequal treaties that had been imposed on China since the end of the Opium War in 1842, as well as the return of Shandong province, which had been a territory ceded to Germany in 1897, but seized by Japan during the war. This was not to be, as Shandong ended up being ceded back to Japan by the Big Three—the United States, Britain and France.

For China, Versailles was an epic betrayal that would result in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the undercurrents of which remain as a historical context of Sino-American relations to this day.

During World War II, China was the first to face Japanese aggression, fighting alongside American and British forces in Burma (Myanmar) trying to secure the Stilwell Road—a major logistical route to Kunming in Yunnan province. China managed to pin down around six hundred thousand Japanese troops and keep them from being deployed to other areas in Asia, even while it was desperately short of armaments. Its reward in the aftermath was a permanent seat with a veto power at the United Nations Security Council; hardly just compensation for the tens of millions of lives lost and displaced through Japanese atrocities that included biological experimentation.

It is remarkable, to say the least, that this level of Chinese support came during a period of unequal treaties, economic concessions and other surrenders of sovereignty that gave Britain and the United States special positions and their citizens special privileges. It was a century of national humiliation, to which the Yuan Ming Yuan imperial “Garden of Gardens” (near the Peking and Tsinghua Universities in Beijing) continues to bear witness, according to the BBC News Magazine.

In his book, Political Order in Changing Societies, Samuel Huntington observed that “the stimulus to nationalist mobilization may be furnished either by a foreign political, economic and military presence in a country before the collapse of the old order or by foreign political and military intervention after that collapse.” In China’s case, the stimulus was furnished by all three. It’s little wonder then that each foreign intervention during this period added renewed pressure to revolutionary forces and broaden their mass appeal.

Mao’s admiration for George Washington

One person who bore witness to the calamities of the two world wars, and whose political philosophy was deeply shaped by them, was Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao had admired George Washington, and he had read of Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. While Mao had studied other western heroes, it was Washington that captured Mao’s imagination. He believed that China needed a model like Washington, and that if Washington could persevere and ultimately defeat the British to build up America, so too could China build itself up to become a powerful nation.

Like other Chinese, he had found inspiration in Wilson and placed his hopes in the United States. But those hopes were never to be realized. Not only were China’s hopes dashed after Versailles, but the Americans then threw their support behind General Chiang Kai-Shek and the nationalists after World War II. These life-changing events would compel Mao to declare that “We made mistakes during the previous period . . . it was the first time for us to deal with the U.S. imperialists. We didn’t have much experience. As a result, we were taken in. With this experience, we won’t be cheated again.”

While normalization of U.S.-China relations finally began under Mao’s helm, he was not to see the ultimate fruits of his labor, dying in September 1976—two years and four months before the Joint Communiqué establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and China.

China opens up and Trump closes down

When President Deng Xiaoping assumed the mantle of leadership after Chairman Mao, Deng recognized that China could not prosper under a continuous state of revolution. While the old veteran of the Long March by no means embraced western democratic ideals, Deng nonetheless set China on a course for economic reform. With trade liberalization and market opening up to the United States in 1979, China gained most-favored-nation treatment in 1980 and joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Since then, bilateral trade relations have expanded sharply. China has increased from a $2 billion a year export market to a more than $20 billion a year market for American farmers and ranchers in 2016. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative estimated that, in 2015, China was America’s largest goods trading partner, and the country was America’s third largest goods export market. In the same year, Iowa alone, for example, exported to China agricultural products worth $1.4 billion. In recent years, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have invested in Kansas, Ohio, Virginia and other states. In 2016, the renminbi joined the U.S. dollar, the euro, Japanese yen and pound sterling as one of the International Monetary Fund’s five reserve currencies—a significant economic achievement for China.

The suggestion that China is stealing American jobs makes for a specious argument. But it is not entirely true. Surely, manufacturing jobs have been on the decline, but that has been due more to enhanced productivity through automation than trade. That being said, bashing China resonates more with the jingoism of the manufacturing sector, and is a far more effective tool for tugging at the heartstrings of voters. There is also no argument that American jobs have been lost due to trade. However, it is worth remembering that with rising costs and stiffer foreign competition (including competition from the United States) in China’s export producing zones, a number of companies have had to relocate out of China to lower-cost manufacturing locations like Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. This trend is likely to continue to exert pressure on China as it moves up the value and supply chains just as it has experienced the American manufacturing sector.

President Trump’s assertion that China is guilty of currency manipulation is certainly true, but not in the way he thinks. Indeed, for the past two and a half years, the People’s Bank of China has intervened in currency markets, but the intervention was to prevent the renminbi from falling too sharply against the U.S. dollar. If China were to allow the markets to determine the value of the renminbi, it would depreciate even faster and greatly enhance China’s trade competitiveness with the United States. China has also eliminated subsidies for its exporters in seven diverse sectors that range from textiles to agricultural products.

Where to go from here?

Chairman Mao’s premier Zhou Enlai once suggested to Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, that even with its history of two hundred years, China was younger than the United States, if one dated it from the founding of the People’s Republic of China. This is a poignant observation because while China’s cultural history is thousands of years old, its economic development, in history, has been very slow, due in no small part to invasions and internecine conflicts. Lucian Pye once suggested that China was a civilization pretending to be a nation-state.

The amount of centralized control in China’s economy reflects a Hamiltonian-centric, mercantilist approach similar to America’s period of development after the Revolutionary War. Indeed, this belief was likely further solidified during the 2008 financial crisis. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson was privately told by Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan during the Bilateral Strategic and Economic Dialogue: “You were my teacher, but now here I am in my teacher’s domain, and look at your system, Hank. We aren’t sure we should be learning from you anymore.”

Far from a China apologist, it is simply an observation that, in China’s economic development, the sometimes chaotic approach in the American capitalist system can seem disquieting to the Chinese, who prefer more Confucian order and stability. While China’s trade policies are at times manipulative, according to the Congressional Research Service, the country does still have obligations to the World Trade Organization such as reducing tariffs, subsidies and ending discriminatory trade policies. And it is worth recalling that it is this centralized control that has been largely responsible for China’s growth and effective economic self-guidance.

China has unified and arisen, and will never again surrender its sovereignty to a foreign power trying to impose its will. If there is any doubt as to the impact that the century of humiliation has had on China, the celebration of the ninety-fifth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement in 2014 should put that to rest.

Speaking at Peking University, President Xi Jinping emphasized that “young people’s values determine the values of the future society, and more efforts should be made to ensure young people’s cultivation of sound [Confucian] value systems, which are still in the formation stage.” Drawing a direct connection between the May Fourth Movement and China’s current position on the world’s stage, Xi Jinping said that it is “just like buttoning a coat. If the first button is done wrong, all others will be buttoned wrong.”