“Military Engagement with a Responsible Stakeholder: The Taft Administration and Qing Imperial China”.

In the early 20th Century, the Taft administration and the Qing Empire developed a working relationship that went beyond transactional “Dollar Diplomacy” to include military engagement. Military and official visits, arms contracts, and opportunities for military education signaled a shift away from both President Theodore Roosevelt’s pro-Japanese policies and the Qing Empire’s isolation from the international order. The massacre of over three hundred Chinese at Torreon, Mexico in May 1911 inadvertently assisted this rapprochement, which presented the Qing Dynasty with an opportunity to demonstrate power and influence when it dispatched the cruiser <italic>Hai Qi</italic> to the Caribbean. The swift response to the massacre shows that Qing diplomats were capable of using an integrated and mutually reinforcing set of legal, diplomatic, and military tools to attain their political objectives. The incident also demonstrates that the Taft administration was willing to allow a foreign military vessel to coerce Mexico for monetary gain in a direct violation of the Monroe Doctrine. The Qing Empire’s very effective use of gunboat diplomacy revealed a highly competent Chinese government, as well as how u.s. officials arranged a sophisticated rapprochement with Imperial China in the 1909-1912 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]