From The Washington Post, via A Glimpse of the World: China Makes Its Move:
“The storm center of the world has shifted to China,” Secretary of State John Hay said in 1899. “Whoever understands that mighty Empire has a key to world politics for the next five hundred years.”
Well, everything is different and nothing has changed since Hay announced the famous Open Door policy, which demanded American commercial access in China equal to that of other major nations. A century of Sino-American ups and downs ” with far more of the latter ” followed, but today, in very different ways, the United States still seeks an open door; the secretary of the Treasury and an enraged Congress are hammering China to revalue its currency to give U.S. companies a better chance to compete with the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
