China and treaty-port imperialism

1 China and treaty-port imperialism CATHERINE LADDS Hong Kong Baptist University, China Foreign powers initially came to China to trade rather than to conquer and therefore, with a few notable exceptions such as Hong Kong, they extended their influence through a series of treaties instead of through direct territorial control. These treaties, signed between 1842 and 1917, are often referred to as the unequal treaties because they granted privileges to foreign nationals and foreign-owned businesses while conceding China s sovereign rights. The foreign powers usually used gunboat diplomacy to impose the treaty system, resulting in a series of conflicts on Chinese soil between 1839 and 1901. As a result the foreign powers expanded foreign trade and exerted control over key political and economic institutions. Foreignadministered enclaves emerged in the towns opened to foreign trade and residence, which were known as treaty ports, thus compromising China s territorial rights. In the face of rising Chinese nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, combined with the growing threat from Japan, Western powers gradually retreated from China, a process that culminated with the Chinese Communist Party s rise to power in 1949. BUILDING THE TREATY SYSTEM The latter half of the 19th century saw a rapid expansion of foreign influence in China achieved through a dual-pronged approach of gunboat diplomacy and unequal treaties. By 1917, the treaty system had opened 92 ports to foreign trade and residence, ceded Hong Kong and Taiwan as British and Japanese colonies respectively, and established longterm foreign leaseholds over territories such as Weihaiwei and Port Arthur. The process of foreign expansion began in 1839 with the outbreak of the First Opium War, a conflict that had cataclysmic long-term consequences for China s relationship with the West. By the early 19th century foreign merchants were increasingly dissatisfied with what they saw as the excessively restrictive conditions of trade in Canton, the port to which the Qing had confined all Chinese trade with the West since 1757. Furthermore, the huge growth of illegal opium imports carried to China on foreign ships in the 1820s and 1830s put unbearable pressure on the Canton authorities attempts to monitor foreign trade. Concerned about the social and economic costs of drug addiction, the Qing government launched a crackdown on the importation and sale of opium in 1836, which culminated in the seizure and destruction of opium stockpiles held in foreign warehouses in 1839. In response to the lobbying efforts of China trader William Jardine and several Lancashire textile firms intent upon gaining access to the China market, foreign minister Lord Palmerston sent an expeditionary force to Canton in 1839. After reaching the southern coast of China in the spring of 1840 this naval force, which included four steam-powered gunboats, blockaded Canton harbor and the Pearl River Delta before proceeding north and taking the island of Chusan (Zhoushan). The conflict culminated with the British occupation of the Yangzi River city of Nanjing and the signing of China s first unequal treaty with the West in August 1842. The treaty The Encyclopedia of Empire, First Edition. Edited by John M. MacKenzie. 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118455074.wbeoe079

2 ceded Hong Kong to Britain, levied a punitive indemnity on China, opened five ports to foreign trade and residence (Fuzhou, Amoy, Canton, Ningbo, and Shanghai), and made provisions to establish a low customs tariff on foreign trade. An important addendum to the Nanjing treaty was the Treaty of the Bogue signed with Britain in October 1843. This supplementary treaty established the principle of extraterritoriality, whereby treaty-power nationals accused of committing crimes were tried by representatives of their home countries rather than in Chinese courts. It also granted Britain most favored nation status, according to which all treaty privileges extracted by other foreign powers would be automatically extended to Britain. Anxious not to be outcompeted by Britain in the China trade, America and France followed suit with similar treaty demands, thus laying the foundation for the multinational penetration of China. There is considerable debate about the significance of the First Opium War to China s historical trajectory. The orthodox narrative in the People s Republic of China maintains that the conflict began China s century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. Yet, although the treaties signed in 1842 1843 undoubtedly established the major pillars of foreign imperialism in China, the immediate effects were not far-reaching. Nor were the unequal treaties unprecedented. The Nanjing Treaty was modeled on an unequal treaty signed between China and the central Asian Khanate of Kokand in 1835. Extraterritoriality was part of a longheld tradition of granting legal autonomy to merchant enclaves, rather than a clear affront to Qing sovereignty. Moreover, despite the opening of new ports, foreign trade did not increase substantially and opium imports were still illegal. Therefore, by the 1850s foreign powers were once again dissatisfied with the conditions of trade on the China coast. A pretext for forcing further demands upon China arose in 1856 when the Chinese authorities in Canton boarded a Chineseowned and Hong Kong-registered ship named Arrow and arrested its crew on suspicion of piracy. British officials erroneously claimed that the ship had been flying a British ensign and that the Chinese authorities actions therefore violated the terms of the Nanjing Treaty. After negotiations broke down, British naval forces bombarded Canton, marking the beginning of the Second Anglo-Chinese War (also known as the Arrow War and the Second Opium War). France soon joined Britain s campaign, motivated by the execution of a French missionary found guilty of illegally proselytizing in Guangxi province, while the United States provided naval support. This set a precedent for joint military interventions by foreign powers eager to share in the spoils of war. Two major treaties resulted from the fouryear conflict, in which Britain, France, Russia, and the United States gained wide-ranging privileges. The Treaty of Tianjin, signed in 1858 after the belligerents captured the Dagu Forts, opened ten more ports to foreign trade, permitted the establishment of diplomatic legations in Beijing, allowed foreign vessels to sail on the Yangzi River and foreigners to travel inland, and levied another indemnity upon China. Fighting broke out again in 1859 after the Qing refused to allow military forces to accompany the British and French envoys to Beijing to establish legations. As the Anglo-French force neared Beijing the emperor and his court fled to Chengde, while foreign troops looted and burned the imperial Summer Palace as a punitive gesture. The conflict eventually ended with the signing of the Beijing Convention in October 1860, which ceded the territory of Kowloon to Britain, permitted Christian missionaries to proselytize, and finally legalized the opium trade. While the effects of the Treaty of Nanjing

3 could be accepted within the usual framework of Qing foreign relations, the 1858 1860 treaties dealt a much more devastating blow to China s sovereignty. Besides the fact that foreign people, ships, and Christian evangelists could now roam freely in inland China, the treaties established a permanent diplomatic presence at the heart of Qing power. Thus, foreign diplomats were now able to pressure the imperial court directly. A pattern emerged between 1860 and 1890, in which foreign powers would follow up a perceived violation of the treaties with the threat of military action, thus resulting in further treaty privileges. In tune with the global acceleration of colonial competition, imperialism in China intensified in the 1890s. China s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894 1895), which resulted in Japan s annexation of Taiwan, laid bare the Qing s weaknesses and precipitated the scramble for concessions (1897 1898). Foreign powers concerned about the potential effects of Japan s predations on their own interests competed to establish spheres of influence in China. As a result they extracted leased territories in which Chinese sovereignty was suspended, including German Jiaozhou Bay and French Guangzhouwan. Additionally, they gained rights to construct railways and, according to the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), the right to build factories in the vicinities of the treaty ports. Foreign powers vacillated between imperialist competition and collaborating in joint actions against the Qing. In 1900 1901, soon after the scramble for concessions, an eightnation foreign army invaded and occupied northern China. This invasion, ostensibly designed to put down and punish the antiforeign Boxer Uprising, resulted in the retributive Boxer Protocol treaty in 1901. By the time of the fall of the Qing in 1911, China had signed approximately twenty treaties with Japan and Western powers. Between 1842 and 1911, the ambitions of foreign powers had grown from simply opening up the China market to controlling key components of China s economic infrastructure. What is more, China had become a battleground on which rival imperialist powers jostled for influence. GOVERNANCE, ECONOMY, AND SOCIETY IN THE TREATY PORTS Because foreign powers did not fully extinguish China s sovereignty, many scholars have labeled imperialism in China as informal empire or semi-colonialism (Goodman and Goodman 2012: 3 9). While it is true that the Chinese government remained nominally in control of China s affairs, foreign powers curtailed its authority by exerting influence over policy and institutions and by carving out extraterritorial enclaves. By 1913 foreign nationals controlled the two principal revenue-collecting organs of the Chinese state: the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) and the Salt Inspectorate. The CMCS (1854 1949), which was known as the Imperial Maritime Customs Service (IMCS) until 1911, employed a large multinational staff and enjoyed a semiautonomous status. In addition to calculating the duties on foreign trade in all the treaty ports, the CMCS undertook a host of other responsibilities, including building and maintaining lighthouses, advising on currency reform, and running China s post office (founded 1896). Furthermore, a portion of the CMCS revenues was earmarked for repayment of the financially crippling indemnities and loans owed to foreign powers. The Salt Inspectorate, established 1913, which taxed the production and sale of salt, also operated according to the principle of joint Chinese foreign administration. Thus, foreign powers exerted immense influence over the income and expenditure of the Chinese state.

4 A motley assemblage of Western advisors and adventurers exerted varying degrees of influence over China s military, political, and education systems. Some were heavily involved in the Qing s Self-Strengthening Movement (c.1861 1895), which aimed to modernize China s military, industrial, and commercial infrastructure in the face of defeat by foreign powers. Robert Hart, inspector general of the IMCS from 1863 to 1911, frequently advised the newly formed Zongli Yamen (1861 1901), the government body that dealt with foreign affairs. Frenchman Prosper Giquel oversaw the construction of the Foochow Arsenal (1867 1874). Acting as China s envoy, American diplomat Anson Burlingame successfully negotiated the mutually beneficial Burlingame Treaty with the United States in 1868. In addition to exerting influence on the central government, foreign powers administered extraterritorialized zones in the treaty ports. These concessions were areas set aside for foreign residence and in some cases were administered according to the laws of the occupying power. In the smallest concessions, where foreign residents numbered only in the dozens, the consul performed all administrative duties. Fully-fledged councils governed over the larger concessions, such as the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), founded in 1854, which administered the International Settlement. Nine councilors elected by local ratepayers sat on the SMC, which also supervised the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) and a militia known as the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC). A separate council governed the neighboring French Concession. Across the treaty ports, a bewildering array of consular courts meted out extraterritorial justice to treaty-power nationals, in addition to the Shanghai French Concession s and International Settlement s Mixed Courts, which heard cases against Chinese and non-treaty-power foreigners in their respective settlements. By 1926 there were 32 British courts alone in China. Thus, colonial governance in China was a complicated mélange of overlapping systems and jurisdictions. The topography of the treaty ports reflected this multifaceted character of imperialism. While some treaty ports had no official foreign settlements at all, a person walking through Tianjin in the early 20th century would have passed through nine foreign concessions in addition to the Chinese-administered city, each bearing the distinctive mark of its national architecture. The composition of treaty-port society was similarly multinational and reflected the ebb and flow of imperial power politics in China. While British residents predominated until the early 20th century, the number of Japanese inhabitants grew commensurately with Japan s expansionist ambitions in the 20th century. In the 1920s, Russian refugees flocked to the treaty ports; in Shanghai alone the Russian population grew twelve-fold between 1918 and 1930. Complicated hierarchies based on nationality and socioeconomic class structured status-conscious foreign treaty-port society. Russian refugees, who were often destitute and lacked extraterritorial protection, occupied the lowest rung in this hierarchy. Although wealthy merchants feature heavily in popular imaginings of treaty-port society, a range of lower-middleclass and marginal foreigners working in occupations ranging from clerk to policeman also populated the China coast. Like other colonial communities, treatyport society discriminated on the basis of race. Despite the fact that Chinese ratepayers were the majority residents in the International Settlement, numbering 1.1 million compared with a foreign population of 57 000 in 1935, they were not permitted to vote or stand for election to the SMC until 1928. In foreign firms, Chinese employees

5 invariably worked in low-status and low-paid positions. Treaty-port leisure pursuits, ranging from golf and hunting in the outposts to night clubs and horse-racing in the coastal metropolises, were designed to distinguish foreigners from Chinese. Despite these efforts to maintain the illusion of separateness, the treaty ports were very much Chinese cities. In some ports the foreign concessions were insignificant, while the opportunities for trade and work in the more commercially successful treaty ports attracted scores of rural urban migrants. In 1930 only an estimated 22 percent of Shanghai s population had been born in the city. A distinctive urban Chinese culture, which was at once consumerist and intensely political, developed in the treaty ports and was fostered by a vibrant publication industry. The economic impact of the treaty-port system is nuanced. For instance, although foreign imports of machine-spun cotton yarn into the countryside increased enormously in the late 19th century, thereby damaging indigenous cotton spinning, the rural weaving industry probably remained unharmed. Furthermore, although Shanghai boasted the sixth-busiest harbor in the world by the 1920s, other treaty ports such as Chefoo (Yantai) were economically insignificant. Foreign interests undoubtedly dominated overseas trade. By 1921, for example, over 9500 foreign firms were doing business in China and ships flying foreign flags carried 90 percent of overseas trade by value. Yet the treaty ports were also sites for the development of Chinese capitalism, attracting a host of entrepreneurs who far outnumbered their foreign counterparts. THE WESTERN RETREAT FROM CHINA Dismantling this complex arrangement of overlapping colonial formations was a disorderly process. Germany and Austro- Hungary lost their privileges and leaseholds when China joined World War I on the side of the Allies in 1917. In 1919, two years after the October Revolution, Russia renounced the unequal treaties and in 1924 relinquished its extraterritorial claims. In addition to international forces, a growth in domestic political consciousness spurred on the Western retreat from China. The decade 1919 1928 was one of mass protests, beginning with the May Fourth Movement in 1919. On May 4, three thousand students demonstrated in Beijing against the government s feeble reaction to China s treatment in the Treaty of Versailles, which permitted Japan to retain control of Germany s former leaseholds in Shandong. Six years later on May 30, 1925 the Britishcontrolled Shanghai Municipal Police fired upon unarmed students demonstrating in the International Settlement, killing 11 and injuring scores more. The SMP s brutality on May 30, combined with the killing of 52 Chinese by British and French forces at an anti-imperialist rally in Canton on June 23, inflamed public sympathies in China and abroad, sparking countrywide anti-british protests and boycotts known as the May Thirtieth Movement. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, hoping to harness popular nationalism to their political advantage, encouraged the protests. Chiang Kai-shek s rise to power at the helm of the outspokenly anti-imperialist Nationalist Party in 1927 further threatened the foreign position in China. In the face of these challenges, the foreign powers began to relinquish their claims to the least significant concessions and leaseholds in the late 1920s. The first to go were the British concessions in Hankou and Jiujiang in 1927. Although the foreign powers held onto the economically productive Shanghai concessions until the 1940s, the Shanghai Municipal Council opened its parks

6 to Chinese patrons and permitted the election of three Chinese councilors in 1928 in a gesture intended to appease nationalists. Another nationalist success came in 1929 when China achieved tariff autonomy. Japan s aggressive territorial expansion in China after 1931 further eroded American and European privileges. Beginning in 1943, China s World War II Allies relinquished their claims to extraterritoriality. By the time of the Chinese Communist Party s victory in 1949, the pressures of popular antiimperialism and wartime disruptions had already disassembled the props of the foreign presence. The exceptions were Portuguese Macau and British Hong Kong, which remained colonies until 1999 and 1997 respectively. These colonial enclaves served as reminders of China s century of humiliation for the government of the People s Republic of China, a bitter historical memory that still informs China s interactions with Japan and the West in the present day. SEE ALSO: Anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism; China, imperial: 8. Qing or Manchu dynasty period 1636 1911; Drugs and empire; Gunboat diplomacy; Informal empire; Ports, imperial; Trade and commerce REFERENCE Goodman, B. and D. S. G. Goodman (Eds.) 2012. Twentieth-Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday, and the World. Abingdon: Routledge. FURTHER READING Bergère, M-C. 2009. Shanghai: China s Gateway to Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bickers, R. 2012. The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire. London: Allen Lane. Bickers, R. and C. Henriot (Eds.) 2000. New Frontiers: Imperialism s New Communities in East Asia, 1842 1953. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cassel, P. K.. 2012. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth- Century China and Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hevia, J. 2003. English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ladds, C. 2013. Empire Careers: Working for the Chinese Customs Service, 1854 1949. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press. Ristaino, M. 2001. Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wang, D. 2005. China s Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History. Lanham: Lexington Books.