Table Of ContentISBN 0-7190-5697-7
,!7IA7B9-afgjha!:t;K;k;K;k
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genneral editor John M. MacKenzie
Whhen the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ sseries was foundeed by Professor
John M. MacKenzie mmore than thirty yyears ago, emphasis was laid uponn
the conviction thatt ‘imperialism as a cultural phenoomenon had as
significcant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinaate societies’. Wiith
well oover a hundred tittles now publisheed, this remains tthe prime concerrn
of the sseries. Cross-discciplinary work haas indeed appeareed covering the fuull
spectrrum of cultural pphenomena, as well as examining aspects of gendeer
and sex, frontiers andd law, science and the environmennt, language and
literature, migration annd patriotic socieeties, and much eelse. Moreover, thhe
seriess has always wishhed to present coomparative work on European andd
Americcan imperialism, and particularly welcomes the suubmission of boooks
in theese areas. The fasccination with immperialism, in all its aspects, showws
noo sign of abating, and this series wwill continue to leead the way in
encouraging the wideest possible rangee of studies in thee field. Studies inn
Imperiaalism is fully orgganic in its develoopment, always sseeking to be at thhe
cuttingg edge, respondinng to the latest innterests of scholarrs and the needs of
this eever-expanding arrea of scholarshipp.
Britain in China
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Britain in China
COMCMoUmNmIuTnYit,y ,C CUuLlTtuUreR aEn dA ND
COLCOolNonIAiaLliIsSmM 1 910900-109-41 9949
Robert Bickers
MANCHESTER
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Manchester and New York
MANCHESTER
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Manchester
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Copyright i&': Robert Bickers 1999
The right of Robert Bickers to be identified as the author of this work has
Copyright © Robert Bickers 1999
been asserted by him/her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988,
The right of Robert Bickers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
him/her in acPcoubrdliashnecde bwy iMtha ntchhee sCteorp Uynriivgehrts,i tDy ePsreisgsn s and Patents Act 1988.
Oxford Road, Manchester M 13 9NR, UK
Published by aMnda nRcohomes t4e0r0 ,U 1n75iv Feirfsthit yA vPerneuses, New York, NY 10010, USA
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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Distributed exclusively in the USA by
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue reDciostrrdib fuoter dt hexisc lbuosiovkel yis i na vCaainlaadbal eb yfr om the British Library
UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
Library of ConVgarnecsosu vCera,t BalCo,g Cinang-aidna- PVu6Tb liIcZa2t ion Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
ISBN 0 7190A 5c6at9a7lo 7gu pea rpeecorbrda cfokr this book is available from the British Library
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
First published 1999
First digital onIS-BdNem 0a 7n1d9 0e d5i6t9i7o n7 ppraopderubcaeckd by Lightning Source 2005
First published 1999
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CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
At a couple of seconds to midnight on 20 June 1997 the union jack was
hauled down at a sober, spartan ceremony held inside the hurriedly
constructed Hong Kong International Convention Centre, and shortly
afterwards the flag of the People's Republic of China was raised in its
stead. The territory once known as the Crown colony of Hong Kong
reverted to rule by the Chinese state as a Special Administrative
Region. The ceremony marked the end of 157 years of British rule over
the island of Hong Kong, and ninety-nine years of control of the leased
area known as the New Territories. It also marked the end of a seventy
year process during which the British presence throughout China was
dismantled piecemeal. This book examines the nature of that pres
ence, particularly the semi-autonomous status of the settler commu
nities on the China coast, and identifies the processes by which
Sino-British relations were brought under the control of the British
state by 1943.
It was more than a diplomatic or political process. The British com
munity in China was rooted in the diverse cultures of imperial Britain.
It was part of a world opened up through empire, both formal and infor
mal, offering opportunities for migration, for personal advancement,
for employment and even escape in the new communities forged out
side the British Isles. New identities were constructed by Britons over
seas, and new British identities formed within the British Isles as a
result.1 Dismantling the British presence in China before 1943 meant
rooting out one set of such new communities, constructed over the
previous century and a half. Such weeds clung fast. This book offers an
analysis of the creation and maintenance of the new identities acquired
by Britons in China. Here the culture of the coloniser stretched from
London's Limehouse by the side of the Thames, through Hong Kong to
Hankou's Bund on the middle Yangzi, and incorporated metaphori
cally, as it existed literally, both these locations. The empire of the
l
[ 1
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BRITAIN IN CHINA
mind has been much dissected in the last two decades, but in the
process it has become divorced from the empire of place, and of con
tingent individual experience. This book reunites them.
With the hand-over of Hong Kong, the government of the People's
Republic of China (PRC) belatedly concluded a process that began
under its predecessor, the Guomindang's National government
(1927-49), of terminating concessions extracted in the decades after
1842 of what is glibly constructed in China as 'National Humiliation'
(guochi).2 When the PRC was established in October 1949 this process
of decolonisation had in fact mostly been completed. The foreign pres
ence had already been divested of its colonial trappings and preten
sions. Decolonisation under the Guomindang had meant that a
network of up to thirty-four small, but economically and politically
significant, foreign enclaves - covering some nineteen cities - which
had been surrendered to foreign administration had been retroceded by
1949. The larger slices of the Chinese melon had been reclaimed: Wei
haiwei (Britain, 1898-1930), Guangzhouwan (France, 1898-1945),
Jiaozhouwan (Germany/Japan, 1898-1922), Luda3 (Russia, Japan, 1898-
1945), Manchuria (Japan, 1931-45) and Taiwan (Japan, 1895-1945).
Extraterritoriality, which underpinned these networks, had been abol
ished in treaties with individual states, beginning with Belgium (1 928),
and China's tariff autonomy had been restored (1928). Stemming from
the populist 'educational rights' recovery movement', laws had been
enacted in effect nationalising foreign-run educational institutions,
while the patchwork of treaty-based or precedent-based privileges
enjoyed by foreign residents had been abolished. By the end of Nation
alist rule on the mainland, most aspects of foreign activity in China
had been brought under the jurisdiction of Chinese law.4
The Sino-British and Sino-American friendship treaties of February
1943 were the culmination of this process, with the finer details of dis
mantling the surviving foreign-administered zones being worked out
at the close of the Pacific War. In the British case the treaty was also
the culmination of a different process: the effective 'nationalisation' of
British-Chinese relations, that is, the assertion of British state control
over its subjects in China. Far from marking any 'retreat from China',
the improvised response of British diplomats to Chinese nationalism
in the 1930s was to strengthen the position of a much more narrowly
defined set of 'national interests' than had previously been accepted
and protected. What had previously been accepted and protected by
British diplomats is labelled in this book 'Britain in China'. This neol
ogism is used to differentiate the British presence from any conven
tional expatriate trading presence. The British state had previously
preferred to distance itself from the quotidian activities of British
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INTRODUCTION
nationals (and protected subjects) in China. It was responsible, cer
tainly, for the opening up of China to British trade as a result of the
Opium Wars (1839-42, 1857-60). It also enjoyed jurisdiction over
British nationals in China under the system of extraterritoriality first
outlined in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. The Chefoo Convention (1875,
ratified 1885 ), and the Boxer protocol (1 901) both significantly
extended the scope of British activity in China. Advantages secured by
other nations' treaties also benefited Britons as a result of most
favoured-nation clauses. But the British state largely contented itself
with the protection of treaty rights and its nationals' interests; in no
way did it try to order or direct Britons in China. It did not want
another India, and it did not seek territorial acquisitions. If there ever
was a 'fit of absence of mind' in the history of the British empire, it lay
in the benign neglect by British diplomats of Britain in China, which
enabled it to grow and to acquire the concrete presence, identity and
ambitions outlined in this book.
Britain in China's particularities and problems have been lost in
wider accounts of the progress of Sino-British relations. These have
examined the processes of diplomatic innovation and adaptation
which became necessary in the face of the 1911 revolution (which
overthrew the Qing monarchy); the Versailles peace conference; the
Washington conference (1922); and the successive triumphs of the
nationalist Guomindang in 1926-27, Japanese militarism in Man
churia in 1931 and in China proper after 1937, and finally the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) in 1949.5 The metropolitan-based interest
group politics of the China Association or the China Committee have
dominated most works on this painful diplomatic process. Britain in
China gets short shrift, even in studies which have explicitly adopted
theories of imperialism for their analytical framework.6 This book
argues that the problems faced by the British state in China stemmed
from this pseudo-colonial presence. Britons who dominated the affairs
of Britain in China, moulded its identity, and represented their own
particular interests as British interests, were settlers, not sojourners or
expatriates. Through the intractable fact of their very presence these
settlers distorted British China policy; through their actions they could
destabilise Sino-British relations; through their stubborness they could
hamper policy reform.
One event in particular starkly dramatises the key role of Britain in
China in Sino-British relations. Although the need for revision of the
Qing era treaties had long been recognised by foreign diplomats, start
ing with the Washington conference, it was precipitated most bluntly
for the British government by the calamitous May Thirtieth incident
of 1925. On that day Sikh police of the Shanghai International Settle-
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BRITAIN IN CHINA
Figure 1 Scene in front of the Louza police station shortly after the 30 May
1925 shooting in Shanghai
ment police force, led by an inspector, Welshman E. W. Everson,
opened fire on Chinese demonstrators, killing eleven. This incident,
and the anti-British May Thirtieth Movement which succeeded it,
almost completely undid the British position in China. In the turmoil
that followed there were separate shooting incidents involving British
troops or volunteer militia in Hankou (eight dead) and Canton (the
'Shaji massacre', at least fifty two dead). A sixteen-month-long strike
and boycott crippled Hong Kong's trade. The May Thirtieth incident
was rooted in the complacency and inefficiency of the British-domi
nated Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), which administered the
International Settlement and exercised what its chairman succinctly
described in 1893 as its 'pretty free hand'. The status quo allowed
Britons not under diplomatic control to commit such sanguine blun
ders, and then to compound them, as the SMC did, by its defiantly bel
licose handling of subsequent events in the city, and of the
investigation into the shootings. Reining-in Britain in China became a
matter of some urgency for the British Foreign Office; May Thirtieth
had changed everything.7
By way of response to these developments, and to the Guomindang's
revolutionary Northern Expedition (1926-28), which set out to con
quer central and northern China, the Foreign Office issued the so
called 'December memorandum' to the other Washington powers of
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INTRODUCTION
1926. This suggested renouncing any idea 'that the economic and polit
ical development of China can only be secured under foreign tutelage'
and furthermore that:
the Powers should yet recognise both the essential justice of the Chinese
claim for treaty revision and the difficulty under present conditions of
negotiating new treaties in place of the old, and they should therefore
modify their traditional attitude of rigid insistence on the strict letter of
treaty rights.'
These intentions announced a new set of criteria for policy in China
and specifically for policy towards the Guomindang. The memoran
dum was the touchstone of future British policy announcements and
was followed up on 27 January 1927 with a 'January Offer', which uni
laterally offered a package of concessions, most notably an offer to dis
cuss the status of the British concessions. Other compromises dealt
with the recognition of the competence of modern Chinese law courts,
the extraterritorial status of missionary institutions, the status of Chi
nese Christian converts and mission ownership of land.9 In the four
years after the high tide of the Nationalist revolution, many of these
issues were the subject of negotiation and retrocession (see chapter 4
below). The Sino-Japanese undeclared war (which began in 1937) dealt
a further and severe blow to the morale, numbers and assets of the var
ious foreign communities, and it was a much reduced and culturally
altered foreign presence which faced the transition to rule under the
Chinese Communist Party. Britain moved smoothly and swiftly to
recognise the new regime in 1950, secure in the knowledge that the
process of decolonisation in China itself had already taken place. Hong
Kong was another matter, and remained another matter for both
powers for thirty more years.10
If the history of Hong Kong became, belatedly, well known and
widely reported in Great Britain in late June 1997, the same cannot be
said for the history of the broader British presence, which has largely
been forgotten. Yet after 1842 the Sino-British relationship was inti
mately physical rather than abstractly diplomatic. British relations
with China took place mostly within China itself: in the privately
administered or dominated British concessions and settlements; in
mission stations; through British businesses; and also through arms of
the British state (consulates, the Legation and the British military pres
ence). On three occasions the British state fought limited wars against
China on Chinese soil (1839-42, 1857-60, 1900). The acquisition of a
secure depot for the China trade - a British Macao - had been an aspi
ration as early as the first British embassy to China, that of Lord
Macartney and his entourage in 1792-94. In the years after the 1842
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