The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere
From Urban Press
| Journal Article |
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The Shanghai portrayed in [Urban Studies on Modern Shanghai], a glorious economic and cultural centre of China between 1850 and 1949, and China's most modern and Western city, does not seem to be a relative of the city familiar from earlier PRC depictions of a bridgehead for imperialist exploitation characterized by all the evils of Western decadence, a symbol of ongoing national humiliation summed up in the famous sign supposedly posted at the entrance of Shanghai's public park and known to every Chinese schoolchild, "No dogs and Chinese admitted." There was in fact no such sign, but a museum curator in the early 1950s felt there could very well have been, and thus helped improve the poor historical record by painting it himself for his exhibition on Shanghai history.(Wagner 1995, p 425))
[The Authors] do not mention that Shanghai was in fact the most open part of the Chinese public sphere where practically all the important challenges to governmental orthodoxy of the last hundred years were articulated in books and newspapers and by political organizations operating under the protection of foreign authorities. Similarly, the volume tells of a "rich anti-feudal tradition" but makes little mention of Shanghai as the birth- place of Chinese nationalism and of the city leading the nation in nationalist anti-foreign agitation. The foreigners are mentioned, however, in one paragraph, on the dust jacket:The operations of the Western colonialists in the Shanghai concessions in the last count served - however vicious their intentions might have been - as an unwitting instrument of history in stimulating the progress of Shanghai's society.(pp 425-426)
What might otherwise be attributed to the role of extra-territoriality in China is thus treated in terms of the intrinsic dynamics of a big urban agglomeration with an important but not decisive role assigned to the unwitting Western instru- ments of history, whose main contribution is seen as keeping the city out of the turmoil plaguing the rest of the country and thus creating a safe business environment... In this form, the city's history can become a blueprint for its future. The West can now be consciously invited by Communist leaders who have mastered the laws of history to be again the unwitting instrument of history in promoting the development of Shanghai without any danger of a loss of sovereignty or the risks involved in establishing a public sphere beyond the government's rigid control.(p 426)
The Foreign Stimulus to Develop a Public Sphere: The Case of Shanghaie
At the same time, the foreigners never formed more than a small percentage of the concession's population, ranging from about 2,000 people to a height of 36,000 in 1930 among a population which by then had grown to about four million. Of these 36,000 a bare 3 per cent qualified for the Foreign Ratepayers' Meeting which elected the Munici- pal Council. The International Settlement was a Chinese city attracting not only refugees from impoverished or disaster-stricken areas who were looking for work, but also many officials, scholars and wealthy people.(p 428)
The hypothesis is that the International Settlement in Shanghai was not only a stimulus to the development of an open Chinese public sphere, but was by and large co-determinous with it, and that it was the protection from the Chinese government's institutional control together with the open borders to China that allowed Shanghai to assume this role.(p 429)
The cultural construction of Shanghai... isolated two important elements from China's mainstream culture, the honest pursuit of profit and legitimate remonstrance, from the overarching notion of unity and homogeneity which informed and deformed the entire state machinery of the Qing. Both were allowed to develop in a strictly commercial setting under foreign control on Chinese soil, with the result that both blossomed to make Shanghai quickly into the trade, industrial, media, cultural, innovation and crime capital, in short the modernizing engine for the entire country...
This question was in fact discussed during the early 1930s. Under pressure from Chinese merchants and intellectuals to change the Settlement's constitution the Municipal Council asked a South African Supreme Court Judge, the Hon. Mr Richard Feetham, to come up with an impartial proposal for the future status of the city. Feetham conducted large-scale interviews with Chinese and foreign members of the Shanghai business community to find out "the main causes which have led to such concentration" of business. The answers given by the foreigners were almost unanimous in stressing that the political status of the International Settlement had been the essential condition for the growth of the city, while some of the Chinese respondents expressed confidence that under Chinese government control the city might prosper equally, given its excellent geoeconomic position.(pp 431-432)
Conclusion
Reformists, revolutionaries, gangs and refugees all operated and could operate within this public space as long as it was guaranteed by foreign powers. The innovation of Chinese society hinged on the fact that somewhere on Chinese soil alternative options were present which could not be removed by a government which was bound to feel pressured to re-establish homogeneity even if it had, like both Communists and the Kuomintang, only been able to establish itself in terms of organ- ization, ideology and public opinion by means of the Shanghai enclave.(p 440)
A radical reading of this evidence would have to conclude that the Chinese body politic is to this day structurally unsuited for innovation beyond reproduction, because without the legitimate presence of diverse orientations in the public sphere no alternatives can develop and mature to the point of becoming viable social practices. While some scholars like Mark Elvin, Jin Guantao and Sun Longji have in fact argued that this is largely true for the deep structure of Chinese society, the visible surface of the country shows a tremendous amount of change and innovation over the last 150 or so years. The introduction of Western ideologies such as Christianity, republicanism and Marxism, the development of modern industries and the marked changes in attitude especially among city dwellers are just some of the evidence.
...While the institutional framework of these en- claves was set up and secured by foreign powers, and while the busi- nesses operating there, like newspapers, presses, theatres and libraries, were often owned by foreigners, the population of these enclaves in general and these institutions in particular were foreign only to a minimal extent. There is thus reason for an approach which treats these enclaves not as an outpost of the foreign powers on Chinese soil, but as an integral and in terms of the long-term interests of the society even necessary part of the Chinese body politic.
In a radical formulation, the Shanghai enclave was the place where the separation of state and society in China had gone furthest, where society was best secured against the state's onslaught, and where in fact a relatively independent public sphere could and did develop. The core feature of this enclave community is not its ethnic composition but its "foreignness" in the sense of it neither being subject to the central government's orders, nor forced into accommodation and integration by the bad conscience of the Chinese operating there of having "sold out to the foreigners."(p 441)
The enclaves clearly represent the most radical separation of state and society because the direct impact of the government on the enclave communities was limited at best. The governmental institutions in the enclaves did not compete with the Chinese government for control over the entire country and thus posed no real colonial threat. They did not, as fully-fledged colonial governments often tended to do, bar the local population from access to education, from jobs in the sensitive public media or from political activities. In relation to the Chinese government, their role was thus mainly to deny it control over the enclaves. This particular situation not only created favourable conditions for the evol- ution of an independent public sphere for the people in the enclaves, but attracted people from all over the country who for economic, political or individual reasons looked for a place on Chinese soil where their untradi- tional ambitions could be realized beyond the government's heavy- handed control, be it as businessmen, journalists, agitators or gangs.(p 442)
