Old China Hands and the Foreign Office
From Urban Press
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Summary of, and selected quotes from Old China Hands and the Foreign Office. These annotations are provided for educational purposes only and copyright is retained by the original author. If you find this information interesting seeking out a copy of texts in their entirety is, as always, recommended.
Introduction: Folklore of the Treaty Ports
When the Mackay Treaty was being nego- tiated at the turn of the century, merchants and Chambers were some- what wearily demanding the same rights, the same broad interpretation of Articles 12 and 28 of the Tientsin Treaty that their fathers had demanded in the 1860's: more open ports, steam navigation on inland waterways, railway development, inland trade and residence, recogni- tion of the total immunity of foreign goods from inland taxes, the firm, immediate and local redress of grievances; in general, as they put it, "enforcement" of treaty rights and the maintenance of British prestige in the face of Chinese industrial backwardness and governmental du- plicity...
The clash between Old China Hands and the Foreign Office -- some- times exhibiting the nature of a feud, at others, as during the honey- moon between China Association and Foreign Office in the period im- mediately following the Sino-Japanese War, lying dormant -- was a constant struggle between the mercantile demand for an all-out attack on Chinese backwardness at whatever cost, and governmental reluctance to undertake the responsibility even of quasi-sovereignty in China. It was, fundamentally, a clash between the merchants' folklore which pic- tured the infinite potentialities of the China trade and official convic- tion that this vision had been grossly exaggerated.(Pelcovits 1949, p 2)
The mercantile view was a derivative of the folklore which had been built up around the China trade... China was the Eldorado never fully explored, whose riches in concessions and customers were immeasurable. Never, in his soberest or most despairing moments, would the Old China Hand admit the devastating charge of official critics that the very nature of China's domestic economy, its self-sufficiency, was bound to condense the fabulous dream into a relatively meager reality.(pp 3-4)
