Chinese Colonial History in Comparative Perspective
Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and imperial power in
nineteenth-century China and Japan. By Pär Kristopher Cassel.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Foreigners and Foreign Institutions in Republican China. Edited by
Anne-Marie Brady and Douglas Brown. London: Routledge, 2013.
Twentieth-century Colonialism and China: Localities, the everyday,
and the world. Edited by Bryna Goodman and David Goodman.
London: Routledge, 2012.
We are currently riding the wave of a resurgence of interest among historians
of China in the nation’s colonial history. For more than two decades from the early
1980s, Western historians shied away from the topic as the field turned to “Chinacentred history,” spearheaded (though not initiated) by Paul Cohen. This was a
necessary corrective to a tendency to see modern Chinese history solely through the
lens of its interactions with the West: the “Western impact–Chinese response” model
denigrated by Cohen, though his presentation of the argument of his former teacher,
John King Fairbank, on “China’s response to the West” was a somewhat crude
caricature.1 Cohen’s criticism of the field came of course in the context of broader
convulsions in imperial history and area studies, with the emergence of subaltern
studies similarly challenging the traditional narrative of South Asian history (the
imperialism-nationalism dialectic). Rather than advocating a reassessment of the role
of imperialism in Chinese history, however, Cohen demanded that the foreign
influence be relegated from the forefront of its interpretation to the background, going
far further in this regard than the subaltern school. This period produced a fine body
of local and micro-studies and encouraged scholars to examine social, economic and
cultural aspects of China’s modern history. But William Kirby’s bold statement in
1997 that “nothing mattered more” than China’s foreign relations in the Republican
era of 1911–49 is entirely justified by the ways in which China’s politicians,
intellectuals and revolutionaries of the time viewed the problems faced by the young
republic. 2 The significance of China’s foreign relations is equally true of the late
Qing, the last dynasty, which was finally toppled with comparative ease in 1911.
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
Significantly, historians in China never stopped stressing the significance of
the nation’s interactions with foreign powers. The Chinese state-sanctioned narrative
is of a “century of national humiliation” from the First Opium War of 1839–42, when
China was first forced to accept the terms of an unequal treaty, to the Chinese
Communist Party’s victory in 1949, when foreign imperialists were thrown out of the
country. In fact, the legal underpinnings of foreign privilege in China ended in early
1943 with the agreements to end extraterritoriality made in rapid succession by all the
foreign powers, while the process of expelling foreign business people from mainland
China (they remained, of course, in Hong Kong and Macao) was much more gradual
and pragmatic than this sharp periodization would allow. 3 The narrative of the
century of national humiliation is accepted and promoted because it contributes to the
legitimacy of the ruling party, which claims to have freed China from its semicolonial shackles. The limits of this narrative do not mean that the importance of
Sino-foreign relations can be dismissed, however, and Chinese recognition of this
importance follows on consistently from the views of those early Republican Chinese
intellectuals and leaders.
China-centred history, ironically enough, was thus
predicated on the arrogant assumption that Western scholars knew better about
modern Chinese history than their Chinese counterparts.
Happily, in recent years there has been an accelerating production of work on
China’s foreign relations, specifically on the practice and consequences of
colonialism in China. The three volumes under review here are taken as particularly
revealing examples of the kind of work being done.
They allow a valuable
comparative perspective, Pär Cassel contrasting China with Japan and all three
considering different parts of China and the different colonial powers that exerted
influence over it. Each volume investigates the effects of colonialism on people’s
lives, whether Chinese or foreign, though attention is also paid to institutions and
structures. In doing so, they build on work by Robert Bickers,4 among others, and
draw on wider trends in imperial history to combine social, economic and political
historiographical approaches to build a clearer picture of the realities of colonialism
on the ground.
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
Colonialism is placed front and centre of Bryna Goodman and David
Goodman’s Twentieth-century Colonialism and China.
The editors’ introduction
provides one of the best summaries available of the development of the historiography
of colonialism in China, including the dichotomy of “China’s response to the West”
and the “China-centred” approach. They explore debates over the use and definition
of such terms as semi-colonialism (Lenin’s term, adopted by Marxist historians) and
hypo- or sub-colonialism (preferred by Sun Yat-sen and his followers) in attempts to
capture the difference between the partial imperialism under which China always
retained an albeit compromised sovereignty and the full imperial subjugation
associated with Africa and South Asia. The influence of postcolonial studies has
encouraged historians to view colonialism in India as the measure by which to analyse
empires everywhere, but it is a poor fit with China. While noting the prominence of
Britain in the colonisation of China, Goodman and Goodman highlight the number of
nations involved and how many of them had formal colonial possessions in China
rather than a mere influence: the Portuguese had held Macao since the sixteenth
century, Britain had Hong Kong and Japan had Taiwan. On a less permanent but still
durable basis, Russia leased Lüshun port, Britain leased Weihaiwei, Germany leased
Qingdao and France leased Guangzhouwan. Then there was the more restricted
colonialism of the treaty ports, of which there were 92 by 1917, varying from the
major cities of Shanghai and Tianjin with multiple foreign settlements, to ports with
just one like the Japanese settlement at Suzhou, or those with no demarcated
settlement at all—merely the right for foreigners to trade in the port. Goodman and
Goodman are critical of the tendency for “China’s distinctiveness [to be] deemphasized” in order to show that China suffered from imperialism in the same way
as other parts of the colonised world (7). They single out the vague concept of
“colonial modernity” for particular opprobrium, binding as it does all places touched
by it to a Eurocentric understanding of the modern without appreciating local
variation. 5 It is the variation in colonialism in different parts of China and by
different colonial actors that the contributors to this volume emphasise.
Robert Bickers opens the discussion on the complexities of colonial
governance in China with his essay on the Chinese Maritime Customs, a British
imperial asset from the 1850s to the 1930s that nonetheless belonged to the Chinese
state and controlled a major source of government revenue. Bickers identifies the
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
Customs as a “hybrid institution” occupying “at least two worlds” (27): China and the
British world of work and opportunity (drawing on Carl Bridge and Kent
Fedorowich).6 Bickers uses the example of the Customs station at Nanning, which
existed more to provide a buffer between British influence in China and French
Indochina than to collect meaningful revenues, but was ultimately closed in response
to Chinese nationalism, to demonstrate the diverse influences on Customs policy.
Change and adaptability are strong themes in the volume: in another chapter on the
southwest, Florence Bretelle-Establet reveals the high degree of flexibility among
French doctors seeking acceptance and access to more patients. French and British
colonialism both had to accommodate Chinese responses.
Continuing the exploration of the diverse European colonial presence, Klaus
Mühlhahn’s essay draws on Foucauldian understandings of the growing
“governmentality” of imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in
contrast to the earlier use of force to extract resources and riches, to understand
German colonial governance in China. Maurizio Marinelli’s essay on “colonial space”
in the Italian concession in Tianjin also takes inspiration from Foucault, but his
emphasis on space and juxtaposition leads to very different conclusions about this
contrasting colonial project.
Italian colonialism in China was predicated on an
imagined “Italian neighbourhood” celebrating Italian culture in an effort to exert
cultural dominance over the Chinese population and parity with other colonial powers.
The German approach was to seek total control over the environment in what was
intended to be a model of effective colonialism. The German navy ran Jiaozhou and
its port Qingdao with a high degree of central control from Berlin. Like Victoria Peak
in Hong Kong, the subject of John Carroll’s essay, Qingdao was reserved exclusively
for Europeans: Chinese workers were settled in the suburbs. Racism, as expressed in
the tropes of the risk of unhygienic Natives contaminating superior European
colonialists, was especially pronounced in Qingdao, matched by fierce Chinese antiimperialism from political reformers to violent Boxers. By contrast, resistance to the
segregation of Victoria Peak was very limited, though Carroll does not suggest why.
Chinese anger over the extreme racial inequality in Qingdao contributed to a new
political rhetoric and consciousness that conceived of Chinese being bound together
as a race or nation (minzu) rather than the more traditional ties of family and clan
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
relationships. The contrasting German, Italian and British approaches to colonial
governance met with different Chinese responses.
The reaction to the colonial encounter in Qingdao represents a local
expression of a global phenomenon in the rise of anti-imperial nationalism.
Nationalist aims were also developed and furthered by contact with the imperial world
beyond China, as John Fitzgerald explores through analysing how émigrés to
Australia argued for the rights of China’s citizens to equal treatment throughout the
British Empire.
The treaties that underpinned extraterritoriality and foreign
imperialism in China only came to be termed “unequal treaties” in the late nineteenth
century as Chinese political thinkers gradually took on the Western notion of
expecting equality between states. These treaties provided for the free movement of
people transiting through Hong Kong or the treaty ports to any part of the British
Empire, allowing many Chinese to migrate to colonies like Australia. New ideas of
egalitarian ethics provided the context for some to challenge the racist inequality in
Australia. As Fitzgerald points out, the standard narrative of Chinese liberation from
foreign imperialism does not accommodate the transnational stories of émigrés who,
“because they understood what it meant to be humiliated,… inspired, funded and in
notable cases led the revolutionary movement to overthrow the Qing Empire and to
restore China’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity” (196). Fitzgerald calls
for historians to shift our focus “beyond China-centred histories” to appreciate the
transnational context in which colonialism and Chinese nationalism interacted. Just
as the galvanising effect of Gandhi’s time in South Africa or attempts by Punjabi
Sikhs to settle in Canada on Indian nationalism is well understood, so must the history
of Chinese nationalism be understood in a global context.
Bryna Goodman also explores the relationship between colonialism and
nationalism, but through Chinese rather than colonial institutions. Chinese stock
exchanges in Shanghai were cast by their proponents as the nationalist alternative to
their foreign-run competitors, but the rush to invest resulted in a securities bubble in
1921–22 which inevitably burst. Tales of suicidal businessmen and ruined women,
seduced by brokers and the appeal of a quick profit, produced a “soul-searching
public reflection upon the loss of Chinese morality,” blamed on foreign influence (73).
This episode mixes satisfyingly the China-centred with the Western impact–Chinese
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
response models: contemporary observers agreed the crash would not have occurred
without foreign influence, but the stock exchanges and investors were all Chinese. A
very different chapter on Shanghai, Christian Henriot’s micro-study of its cemeteries,
adopts a novel approach to the colonial use of space and the practicalities of colonial
rule. Racism and inequality extended beyond the grave as Chinese were excluded
from foreign cemeteries. The foreign municipal councils purchased more and more
land to provide for the ever-increasing number of dead, demonstrating the piecemeal
nature of imperial expansion in China. Shanghai’s art scene is the focus of Yiyan
Wang’s essay on the relationship between art, colonialism and nationalism. Although
Wang’s comparisons of Shanghai’s semi-colonial cosmopolitanism with the artistic
mecca of Paris are well-rehearsed, her thorough research drawing on numerous
contemporary publications provides an original take on the ideological battleground in
Chinese art in this period. In essence, modernists welcomed all artistic styles while
realists favoured social function in art and stressed the need to appeal to the masses.
Modernists lost the intellectual debate as Chinese art increasingly placed the politics
of nationalism and anti-imperialism at a premium. Wang’s claim that this was an
inevitable result of Western dominance in the city suggests an unnuanced acceptance
of the Western impact–Chinese response approach to the period, but the relationship
between colonialism and nationalism benefits from an artistic angle. These chapters
contribute to the sub-field of research on Shanghai and show how even the city that
has attracted more interest than any other in modern China has many new facets to
explore.
Prasenjit Duara and Carolyn Clayton incorporate Hong Kong and Macao into
the story of colonialism in China.
Duara explains how post-war Hong Kong,
sandwiched between Taiwan and the People’s Republic, “gained considerable
leverage” and an unusual degree of autonomy from imperial control in what became a
strong colonial state (197).
Hong Kong outstripped metropolitan Britain
economically, resulting in a near absence of nationalism. The strength of the colonial
state in Hong Kong contrasts with its Portuguese neighbours in Macao whose
weakness, according to Clayton, enabled traditional Chinese associations to step into
the breach and flourish. When the colonial authorities attempted a violent crackdown
on Cultural Revolution–inspired demonstrations in the winter of 1966–67, they were
forced to capitulate to the authority of powerful Chinese interests. “From then on,
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
Macao became known as a ‘half-liberated area’” (212). Macao, the most durable
expression of colonialism in China, nominally Portuguese from 1557 to 1999, was
arguably also the weakest. It is useful but surprisingly rare to find studies of Hong
Kong and Macao alongside those of mainland China, and these final two chapters
provide perhaps the most interesting explorations of the limits and peculiarities of
colonialism in China.
Anne-Marie Brady and Douglas Brown’s volume, Foreigners and Foreign
Institutions in China, focuses unapologetically on colonial sojourners in China. They
are clearly unconcerned about potential accusations of failing to adopt a sufficiently
China-centred approach; such a book would not have been published ten or twenty
years ago. It is not, however, a rehashing of the Western impact–Chinese response
model, but rather examines the influence and counter-influence of foreigners living in
and interacting with China. The approach bears the hallmarks of recent literature on
the movement of people around the globe in imperial contexts, exchanging culture
and ideas as they traded.7 The editors and contributors place peripheral foreigners at
centre-stage, so rather than dominant British imperialists we are presented with the
stories of English teachers, sexual tourists and female activists, and Italians, Koreans
and New Zealanders. These groups and individuals were “participant-observers” (1)
in the changes taking place in Republican China.
The volume is divided into three sections, the first, “Heterotopic China”, a
catch-all for the five papers which did not fit within the more clearly defined Part II,
“Shanghaied: Morality tales from the Paris of the East”, or Part III, “With China at
War.” Among the heterotopic chapters, Eric Henry argues that English language
teachers were both vectors of Western ideas and stimulants of nationalism.
Unfortunately he uses no Chinese language sourses so is unable to develop this
interesting argument, dwelling instead on more predictable detail about the careers of
missionary language teachers. Karen Garner also neglects Chinese sources in her
essay on the Young Women’s Christian Association, reprinted from an earlier journal
article. She identifies the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, when the police force of
the Shanghai International Settlement killed Chinese protestors, as a turning point in
the YWCA’s position on imperialism (74). The YWCA’s American secretary, Mary
Dingman, declared “We are Chinese” and the association as a whole renounced its
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
extraterritorial rights (76). This is contrasted with the more cautious approach of the
US government, but it is hardly surprising that an imperial power should not share the
anti-imperial stance of an independent body. The conclusion, that the YWCA showed
how different nations could work together to solve international tensions, is
unconvincing in the context of the much more significant failure of international
cooperation to calm tensions around the world in the inter-war period. Jason Lim, a
former Singapore civil servant turned historian, undertook extensive research on the
British mercantile community during the civil war (1945–49), but it was almost all in
the British National Archives and the archives of the School of Oriental and African
Studies.
The secondary literature on the foreign business community is under-
referenced and the argument, that British merchants were braced for the Nationalists
losing the Civil War but believed they would be able to carry on much as before, is
unoriginal. These contributors apparently decided that writing about foreigners in
China justifies eliding Chinese voices, a strange throwback to an earlier era of writing
about imperialism in China.
Alexander Pantsov’s essay is much stronger, adding to what we learnt from
his monograph The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927 (2000) with
new material from Comintern and Chinese archives. He argues that minor Comintern
figures in China, less familiar than key agents like Voitinsky, Maring and Borodin,
were able to develop their own ideas independent of policy decided in Moscow.
Pantsov describes a surprisingly pluralistic atmosphere in world communism until
Stalin’s volatility in the mid-1930s reduced Comintern from a policy-maker to “a
purely intelligence-gathering body” (103).
Comintern represents a contrasting
imperialism to that of the Western powers, and by concentrating on its more marginal
figures, Pantsov contributes to the volume’s exposure of the variety of roles played by
foreigners in China’s formative Republican period. The chapter by Lee Jong-Seok (a
former leading South Korean politician) picks up on the theme of the role of
international communism in Chinese politics. Lee charts the history of communism
in Korea after Comintern disbanded the party in 1928. Korean communists such as
future leader Kim Il-sung played a key role in anti-Japanese resistance in Manchuria,
while others resisted Japanese imperialism within Korea or fought under the CCP in
China. Many thousands went on to support the CCP against the Nationalists in the
civil war of 1945–49, but this contribution was taboo during the Cold War and
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
remains difficult to research so is only now gaining recognition. Not only was
imperialism in China an international endeavour, but so too was the anti-imperial
movement.
Like many edited volumes, then, Foreigners and Foreign Institutions in
Republican China varies in quality. Many such diverse collections are criticised for a
lack of coherence, but in places here there is, if anything, too much overlap. No fewer
than three chapters deal with the New Zealander Rewi Alley, a practicing homosexual
who found his adopted home more tolerant than his homeland. Though a fascinating
figure, Alley was hardly representative. Brady published a book-length study of
Alley in 2003 and her chapter “Adventurers, Aesthetes and Tourists: Foreign
homosexuals in Republican China” uses his experience to chart the declining tradition
of tolerance in Chinese society through the twentieth century. The claimed sharp
break in attitudes brought by the communist victory in 1949 overlooks, however, the
continuation of patterns established in the puritanical communist base area in Yan’an
and the rugged conservatism of the Nationalist New Life Movement in the 1930s.
Historians have begun breaking down the barrier represented by 1949, but political
scientists are perhaps more inclined to define an era by the regime in power. Douglas
Brown’s chapter examines Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden’s Journey to a
War, written following their visit to China in 1937–38. It complements Brady’s essay
but approaches the subject of homosexual westerners in China from a literary
perspective. Brown draws out differences in the views of Isherwood and Rewi Alley
on the problems facing China and whether foreigners can or should attempt to tackle
them—Isherwood feeling powerless but Alley determined to take action—showing
how problematic it would be to attempt to generalise about even such a small
community as homosexual left-leaning Western men in China. Robin Hyde, a female
journalist from New Zealand and the subject of Megan Clayton’s essay, was another
leftist internationalist with contact with Rewi Alley. Hyde hoped her modernist text
Dragon Rampant (1939), an account of her six months in China, would rally support
for China in the West, but the outbreak of war in Europe put paid to these ambitions.
Clayton stresses the independent travel and observations of such writers, who
provided valuable first-hand accounts of China at a point of transition, but their wider
significance is unclear.
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
The theme of left-leaning foreigners in China might have been brought out
more explicitly in Brady and Brown’s volume, as almost all the subjects belonged to
this category, whether as intellectuals, activists, Comintern agents or Korean
Communist fighters.
The outlying chapters, Maurizio Marinelli’s study of the
physical Italian imperialism in Tianjin and Guido Samarani’s case studies of
individual Italians in war-torn China, seem to contribute little to the wider arguments
of the volume.
As a whole, however, these essays allow a richly comparative
approach to understanding the diverse experiences and roles of foreigners in China,
drawing on the interdisciplinary range of contributors. They correct a tendency to see
all foreign activity in China as being imperialistic, but more attention should have
been paid to the colonial context that facilitated the travel and employment of such
individuals and protected them with extraterritoriality and ultimately the threat of
foreign force.
These edited volumes provide a survey of recent work on colonialism in China,
but Pär Cassel’s monograph shows how some of the historiographical trends touched
on above can be applied to deeper investigations of new topics. Grounds of Judgment:
Extraterritoriality and imperial power in nineteenth-century China and Japan offers
the first thorough analysis of the history of extraterritoriality (sometimes known as
consular jurisdiction) in East Asia. Despite the title, Cassel’s focus is on China,
where extraterritoriality lasted for exactly one hundred years: Japan, where the
practice was much more short-lived, features primarily as a point of comparison.
Increasing numbers of scholars have the necessary language skills to undertake this
kind of comparative research on different parts of Asia, allowing a far richer
understanding of China in its geographical context.8 Extraterritoriality lay at the heart
of the foreign colonial project in China, providing the legal basis for foreigners’
places of residence; for their business dealings; and for their interactions with one
another, with any form of authority, and with Chinese. The right of foreign residents
in China to be subject to their own nation’s laws, not those of their host country, was
the prime infringement of sovereignty that enabled all the other compromises of
Chinese national integrity. It is surprising that we have had to wait so long for the
first serious scholarly treatment of the subject, but Cassel does the job very ably.
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
Cassel draws on a deep and nuanced historical understanding of Chinese legal
history and locates the Qing legal system in relation to earlier developments,
particularly during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) but as far back as the Tang (618–
906). He cannot be accused of approaching Chinese history through a Western lens,
but marries the strengths of the solid Sinological training demanded by adherents of
the China-centred school with a recognition of the important role of China’s
interactions with foreign powers in shaping its modern history. Cassel draws on John
King Fairbank’s work, particularly his concept of “synarchy” to explain the way in
which “foreigners became stakeholders in the Qing empire” (27). This is a traditional
interpretation of the integration of foreign colonial rule in Qing governance, but with
new and convincing material and with Japan on hand as the foil to show how things
might have been different in China.
Legal cases involving Chinese and foreigners increased as more foreign
traders crowded into Guangzhou (Canton: the only port in China where foreigners
were allowed to reside and trade). Tensions grew, largely due to conflict between the
Qing and European concepts of justice, the Qing punishing, for example, accidental
murders with execution. The British East India Company used such a case of a
British gunner executed for accidentally killing a Chinese in 1784 to justify resisting
subsequent efforts by Qing officials to try British nationals, developing a discourse of
alleged Chinese barbarity that would culminate in demands for full extraterritoriality
and the First Opium War. A decisive victory won British traders major gains in the
Treaty of Nanjing (1842), which established the first five treaty ports and the colony
of Hong Kong: the most important sites of foreign imperialism in China until the
Japanese onslaught of the 1930s. But it was the supplementary Treaty of the Bogue a
year later that granted extraterritorial privileges to Britain. The supplementary treaty
also enshrined the all-important most-favoured-nation principle that any privileges
granted by the Qing government in treaty to a foreign nation would apply to all other
nations in a treaty relationship with China. This treaty thus opened the door to the
overlapping jurisdictions that would complicate legal practice in China for a century
to come.
Confusion was inherent in the system of extraterritoriality from the start. The
text of treaties written in both English and Chinese differed, while not all legal
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
concepts could be translated readily. The English text enshrined foreign “immunities
and privileges” which were rendered in Chinese as en: “grace” or “kindness,”
emphasising the gift of the emperor (52). It was unclear whether foreigners could be
charged for infringing Chinese laws that did not exist in their own country, from
traffic regulations to laws protecting Qing officials from public disparagement. No
distinction was made between criminal and civil law. Such ambiguities enabled the
later extension of extraterritorial privileges far beyond those initially envisaged on
either side of the early negotiations. Cassel stresses, however, the attempts to limit
the reach of such clauses on the part of the Qing officials, undermining the
assumption that they were ignorant of such consequences. Both sides are studied in
equal detail, in perfect balance between the “China-centred” approach and a false
privileging of the foreign perspective.
Cassel argues that Qing officials, contrary to widespread assumption, knew
what they were doing when they agreed to allow foreigners, confined to ports up and
down the coast, to follow their own laws rather than be bound by the Qing Code.
According to Confucian principles, penalties were harsher for violent crimes against
close relations than strangers, and more lenient for theft from immediate family
members. But it was understood that “barbarians” beyond the reaches of Chinese
civilisation did not appreciate the logic of this system because they did not adhere to
the Confucian concept of the family, so officials were used to applying the Code
loosely to foreigners along its frontiers, from Russians to Tibetans. The Qing Empire
was not a “unitary state” (17) but one characterised by legal pluralism, in which
Manchus lived under different legal obligations to Han Chinese or other ethnic groups
or regions.
Qing officials spelled out the limits of foreigners’ extraterritorial
privileges, so they clearly knew what they were allowing within those limits.
Extraterritoriality was in keeping with the legal framework of the Qing Empire.
Cassel takes the Shanghai Mixed Court as a case study of extraterritoriality in
practice, superseding earlier accounts of this key institution.9 A fuller exploration of
how consular jurisdiction functioned in smaller treaty ports and beyond would be
helpful, but Shanghai was China’s most important treaty port and Cassel rightly
emphasises the surprising fragility of its legal underpinnings. The British preferred to
exercise jurisdiction jointly with the Chinese authorities through a Mixed Court,
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
rather than allowing Chinese courts to operate within the foreign settlements. The
Mixed Court was established in the British consulate in 1864 but moved to new
premises four years later in an attempt to “assert its independence” (68). The Chinese
subprefect who sat on the bench alongside the British judge expected an equal role in
judicial proceedings and decisions. From as early as 1872, however, the newly
established Chinese newspaper Shenbao complained that the British acted without
consulting the Chinese magistrate and tried Chinese cases against foreigners alone.
Complaints increased as Chinese nationalist opposition to foreign imperialism grew
and as the foreign assessors secured ever-greater control over mixed cases. In 1911
the foreign authorities took advantage of the collapse of the Qing Empire to claim full
control over the court, a move which came to be seen as shameful opportunism.
Cassel emphasises, however, that for much of the nineteenth century Chinese sources
paid very little attention to extraterrioriality. There was more discussion of it in
English texts anticipating a Chinese opposition that actually took decades to
materialise. This shows how distorting a reliance on the Western perspective on the
question of extraterritoriality could be to efforts to understand how it was viewed by
contemporaries.
Opposition came more quickly in Japan, and Cassel explains how the country
went from being subject to extraterritorial infringements to become an extraterritorial
power in China itself.
Japan was opened to foreign consular representation by
American Commodore Matthew Perry and his naval forces in 1853–54. The Harris
Treaty of 1858 established the right to extraterritoriality for Americans, later extended
to other powers through further treaties. China was among the nations that negotiated
to secure its nationals extraterritorial privileges in Japan, signing the Treaty of Tianjin
in 1871, which specified that consuls would be responsible for their merchant
communities in each country.
Both Chinese and Japanese nationals enjoyed
extraterritorial privileges in the other country, on similar terms. The treaty proscribed
Chinese or Japanese from wearing the clothes of the other country, “demonstrating
that jurisdiction was determined not by one’s race or national origin but also by one’s
acts and appearance” (105). The Chinese and Japanese both agreed to and understood
this principle, though it was alien to Western law. Cassel’s analysis of the terms of
the Treaty of Tianjin addresses a significant gap in the literature, which he argues was
due to an overemphasis on Western-language sources that privileged the treaties
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
agreed with Western powers. The treaty regulated interaction between Japan and its
largest foreign community: far more Chinese lived in Japan than vice versa at this
time, so the mutual granting of extraterritoriality was a much greater concession on
Japan’s part. Brawling Chinese sailors in Nagasaki in 1886 and other examples show
the limits of extraterritoriality in achieving justice. Significantly Cassel chooses cases
between two Asian countries, rather than between China or Japan and Western
powers, to illustrate problems brought by extraterritoriality, distancing his approach
again from a Western-centric model.
The First Sino-Japanese War was concluded in 1895 by Japan’s own unequal
treaty with China, the Treaty of Shimonoseki, whereby the Qing lost both Taiwan and
the extraterritorial privileges Chinese enjoyed in Japan. Japan, on the other hand,
could now take its place alongside the other foreign powers sending assessors to the
International Mixed Court at Shanghai.
After many attempts the Japanese
government succeeded in renegotiating its treaties with the Western powers around
the same time as the victory over China, and extraterritoriality was finally abolished
in 1899.
Cassel examines why opposition to extraterritoriality was slower to
materialise in China than in Japan, growing gradually in China with successive
perceived miscarriages of justice and focusing on the outcomes of individual cases
rather than the institution itself.
As developments take Cassel further into the
twentieth century, he begins to rush through his material, covering events like the
Shanghai Mixed Court riots of 1905 surprisingly briefly.
Bryna Goodman has
provided clear accounts of these riots and their significance elsewhere, 10 so perhaps
Cassel was wary of retreading her ground, but as an expression of popular opposition
to extraterritoriality the riots deserve fuller exploration here. The foreign takeover of
the Mixed Court in 1911 is skirted over and the final rendition of the Mixed Court in
1927 is little more than a postscript.
The conclusion of Grounds of Judgment brings the account up to the present
day. The history of extraterritoriality, aside from occasional protest at US forces’
exemption from Japanese law, is of little contemporary significance in Japan. In
China, by contrast, the current constitution specifically states that foreigners on
Chinese territory must abide by its laws, which Cassel notes is “rather curious” as this
is the international norm (182). The Chinese government fiercely resists any foreign
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
attempt to interfere in its internal affairs (as seen when Western states criticise its
human rights record), because, in Cassel’s view, of the long legacy of the unequal
treaties. The strength of anti-imperialism meant that the CCP undertook to expel all
foreigners from the People’s Republic in the 1950s, and today “both the relative and
absolute number of foreigners in China are still significantly smaller than they were in
1919” (184). Cassel concludes that “extraterritoriality was not implanted into East
Asia as a ready-made product but developed in a dialogue with local precedents, local
understandings of power, and local institutions, which are best understood within the
complex triangular relationship between China, Japan, and the West” (180). This
understanding of the institutions and practices of imperialism in their local context is
vital for all historians working in the field and Cassel shows just what can be achieved
when scholars build on but move beyond the binaries that limited earlier debates
about the study of China’s foreign relations.
All three volumes demonstrate the influence of developments in the broader
field of colonial history on Chinese history.
Stressing the role played by the
circulation of people and ideas, or drawing on Foucauldian notions of
governmentality and the colonial use of space, provides fresh perspectives on an old
subject. Chinese experience from investors in Shanghai to emigrants in Australia
demonstrates the varied nature of encounters with colonialism, inspiring nationalism
and claims to equal rights locally and on the international stage. Twentieth-century
Colonialism in China is a fine exemplar of the kind of work now being done on
colonialism in China. Foreigners and Foreign Institutions, while more limited in
scope, is valuable for the interdisciplinary nature of the research it presents,
particularly the exploitation of literary sources, which complement archival and other
sources to build a more complete understanding of colonial culture. The importance
of consulting Chinese language sources is evident from both the weaknesses of some
of the essays in Brady and Brown’s collection and by the strengths of the other two
volumes. It is no longer acceptable (if it ever was) to study a part of the world
without knowledge of its language, even if the subjects were largely Anglophone and
left records in English. Colonial practice and culture not only influenced but were
influenced by Indigenous people: it was a two-way process that will be distorted if
only one side of the historical record is studied.
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
The value of comparative approaches is also evident in all three volumes,
again highlighting variation but also enabling the reader to find points of similarity in
the colonialism of different powers in different parts of China or East Asia. While
interactions between Japan and China were distinct from the relations that either had
with Western powers, Pär Cassel shows how they both benefited from extraterritorial
status in each country. The range of subjects and geographical areas in Goodman and
Goodman’s volume encompasses British, French, Italian and Portuguese imperialism
from Tianjin in the north to Hong Kong and Macao in the south, and from Shanghai
and Qingdao in the east to Nanning in the southwest. Racism and nationalism were
common to them all, but in varying forms and degrees. No other single country was
exploited by so many different foreign powers, and the wider field of colonial history
can draw lessons from the different ways in which the various colonial forces acted in
China.
There is a notable lack in these volumes, however, of comparison beyond East
Asia. Previous studies of imperialism often saw India as the marker by which all
other forms of imperialism were measured. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher
argued in 1953 that imperial practice shared the same motivations whether in the
formal or the informal empire, implicitly suggesting a scale of imperial control with
India at one end and perhaps Latin America at the other, which has framed the
approach of imperial historians ever since.11 China and India, the twin giants of Asia,
are obvious comparators and historians like Prasenjit Duara have shown the value of
noting their similarities and differences as colonial and post-colonial societies.12 The
absence of South Asia from the three volumes under review, despite their explicit
comparative approach, therefore requires explanation. It stems in part from the wider
development of studying colonial (focused on practice and experience in the
colonised area) as opposed to more traditional imperial (focused on the projection of
control from the metropole) history.
Frederick Cooper encourages his fellow
historians of colonialism in Africa to engage with but not simply borrow from their
colleagues working on South Asia, 13 and arguably historians of China as much as
Africa are coming out from under the shadow of South Asian historiography. There
is no doubting, however, the influence of Indian colonialism in China, and
comparison to other forms of colonialism, including that in India, will continue to
illuminate the practice of colonialism in China for many years to come. Further
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
understanding of colonialism in China would also enable a more rounded appreciation
of the nature of colonialism more broadly: it should be a two-way exchange of
research findings and ideas between those working on China and historians of other
sites of colonialism.
It seems safe to state now that the historiography has moved beyond the
binaries of the China-centred and the Western impact–Chinese response approaches.
Both schools have strengths and the three volumes under review demonstrate how
marrying the two approaches produces more compelling research than either could
alone. Recognising the negotiations on all sides in the establishment and decline of
extraterritoriality restores agency and rationality to Qing officials, while Chinese
nationalism’s influence on everything from art to communism cannot be understood
without studying the local experience of colonialism. There remain many underresearched aspects of the history of colonialism in China that would benefit from
attention: Pär Cassel’s monumental history of extraterritoriality addresses one, but
other aspects of law and colonialism demand more attention, as do the smaller treaty
ports and the complexities of the interaction between China and other parts of the
world, to name but a few topics. It is an exciting time to be working in the field.
Isabella Jackson
University of Aberdeen
My thanks to Andrew Dilley of the University of Aberdeen for his helpful comments
on a draft of this essay.
Notes
1
Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American historical writing on the
recent Chinese past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 9–15; John K.
Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The opening of the treaty ports,
1842–1854 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953); Ssu-yü Teng and
John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A documentary survey, 1839–1923
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954).
2
William C. Kirby, “The Internationalization of China: Foreign relations at home and
abroad in the Republican era,” China Quarterly 150 (1997): 433.
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
3
Jonathan J. Howlett, “‘The British Boss Is Gone and Will Never Return’:
Communist takeovers of British companies in Shanghai (1949–1954),” Modern Asian
Studies 47 (2013): 1941–76.
4
Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, culture and colonialism (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999); Empire Made Me: An Englishman adrift in
Shanghai (London: Allen Lane, 2003); The Scramble for China: Foreign devils in the
Qing Empire, 1832–1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011).
5
Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1997), is singled out to illustrate this trend.
6
Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, eds., The British World: Diaspora, culture and
identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
7
Among others, significant works in this vein include Gary B. Magee and Andrew S.
Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of people, goods and capital in the
British world, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Robert
Bickers, ed., Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the seas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010); David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across
the British Empire: Imperial careering in the long nineteenth century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
8
Jonathan Ocko and David Gilmartin stimulated a lively discussion on the usefulness
of such comparative histories with their paper on the concept of the rule of law in
China and India. Jonathan K. Ocko and David Gilmartin, “State, Sovereignty, and the
People: A comparison of the ‘rule of law’ in China and India,” Journal of Asian
Studies 68 (2009): 55–100. See also the responses to the paper in the same issue.
9
Notably Thomas B. Stephens, Order and Discipline in China: The Shanghai Mixed
Court 1911–27 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992).
10
Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City and Nation: Regional networks and identities
in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 188–90;
“The Locality as Microcosm of the Nation? Native place networks and early urban
nationalism in China,” Modern China, 21/4 (1995): 399–401.
11
John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic
History Review 6/1 (1953): 1–15.
12
Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History form the Nation: Questioning narratives of
modern China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press
13
Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking colonial African history”,
American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1516–45.
© 2014 Isabella Jackson and the Johns Hopkins University Press