Western Colonialism in China

From Urban Press

Shanghai was one of five "treaty ports" mandated by the treaty of Nanking (1842). This treaty, which concluded the Opium War, was the first of several so called "unequal treaties" China would sign over the next hundred years. Unequal because, although the Chinese were forced to make significant concessions, other parties to these treaties were given no obligations in return (Hoe and Roebuck 2009, p 203). Both the treaty of Nanking and the later treaty of Wanghia, between China and America (1844), had the declared purpose of opening up China to trade. However the Treaty of Wanghia would also place both the Americans and British - as well as the citizens of other countries granted "most favoured nation" status - outside the grasp of Chinese Law. In the International Settlement this would be leveraged into de facto sovereignty by the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), thereby establishing what the North China Herald called the most "unconventional municipality in the world" (quoted in Sergeant 1991, p 17) and effectively dividing the city in three. The southernmost portion of Shanghai, including the old walled city center remained in Chinese hands; the French Concession in the middle was governed by the French Consul, alongside the Conseil d’Administration Municipale (CAM); while the northern third of the city, the International Settlement, was run as a quasi-republican microstate in its own right (Wasserstrom 2009, p 3). Both the French Concession and the International Settlement refused to pay Chinese taxes, while they each levied taxes against their Chinese inhabitants; both formed their own police forces and militia and both reserved the right to land troops while denying Chinese troops the right to enter their respective territories. The assumption of administrative independence from China, by the International Settlement in particular, had little or no legitimacy under international law and certainly no precedent. What the settlements lacked in legal authority however, they made up for with "bluff, maneuver and force majeure" (Murphy quoted in Sergeant 1991, p 17).

In addition a relatively small amount of Chinese territory was directly ceded to foreign powers during the wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Following China's defeat in the First Opium War, for example, the islands of Macau and Hong Kong became colonies of Portugal and the United Kingdom respectively ( Ford 2010, p 151; Hoe & Roebuck 2009). Both remained under foreign control until they were handed back to China in the late 1990s. The island of Taiwan was also ceded to Japan in 1895 and remained a colony until Japan's defeat in WWII (Ford 2010, p 158). No foreign power ever gained complete control of mainland China and even the areas conquered by the Japanese in WWII were quickly placed under the nominal authority of Chinese puppet governments . For these reasons the degree to which China, and Shanghai in particular, can legitimately be referred to as having been colonised continues to be debated (Goodman 2000, p 889; Osterhammel 1986). Until recently Chinese sources have tended to refer to China in this era as a semicolonial and semifeudal society (Xiaorong 2005, p 85). A number of western scholars also use the term semicolonial to distinguish colonialism in China from more fully realised forms of colonial domination; as practiced in India during the same period for example (cf. Osterhammel 1986;Goodman 2000). There is also an emerging revisionist trend in the recent literature which argues against colonialism being a fundamentally negative factor in Shanghai's history. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences has argued that:

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.

quoted in Wagner 1995, pp 425-426)

Wagner in turn questions whether the term 'colonial' should be applied to Western expatriates in Shanghai at all, regardless of the prefix. His claim, in support of this idea, that the Settlements Chinese inhabitants were not barred "from access to education, from jobs in the sensitive public media or from political activities" (p 442) is somewhat problematic. Firstly, while these methods of control might be seen as symptomatic of colonial oppression, they are clearly not always present. Secondly the Shanghainese were denied political representation in the International Settlement until 1928, despite providing the bulk of the council's revenue (Goodman 2000, p 893); were denied access to many of the settlements schools; and were subject to many other restrictions (Bickers 1998, p 187; Bickers and Wasserstrom 1995). The idea that Westerners "were not a colonial threat" (Wagner 1995, p 442) because they were never in direct competition with the Chinese government for control of the entire country is also suspect. By Wagner's own admission the foreign concessions were established and maintained with colonial military force (p 441) and provided refuge for "reformists, revolutionaries, gangs and refugees" (p 440). His view that this acted "as an integral... part of the Chinese body politic" (p 441), without which cultural and social change would have been impossible, radically downplays the destabilizing influence foreign intervention has had in China, and ignores the resulting human cost of that change.

Given China's ongoing economic reforms it is to be expected that both the Chinese Communist Party and its pro-freemarket fanciers might feel compelled to reexamine the this period through a neo-liberal lense. Under this logic, however, a direct line of causation exists between the Treaty of Nanking and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and Tianamin Square, to say nothing of many of China's contemporary challenges. Futhermore both the International Settlement and the French Concession expanded their boundaries several times over their nearly 100 year existence (Bickers 1998, pp 172-174). The cities British residents were seldom shy in demanding the Home Office play a more active role in Chinese affairs either (pp 203-204; Ransome 1927). Despite recent attempts at revisionism then, colonialism clearly played a significant role in Shanghai's history.

During it's first fifty years as an international city Shanghai existed primarily as a trade port. The cities foreign inhabitants, the Shanghailanders, imported opium and used the proceeds to export Chinese trade goods; such as tea, silk and porcelain, back to the West where such things were in heavy demand. It wasn't until the Japanese secured the right to manufacture in the city, not just for themselves, but for all of the "most favoured nations", that the industrial potential of Shanghai began to be exploited in earnest. According to Harriet Sergeant,

Foreign traders soon copied the Japanese and built their own factories along the Wangpoo. Electricity and coal were cheaper and interest rates lower than the rest of China while the inflated price of land allowed foreign and Chinese landlords to raise credit with ease . Continual unrest in the interior provided a labour force willing to work long hours for a small wage.

(ibid, p 23)

By the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai was a city renowned for opulence and excess on the one hand, and moral depravity and grinding poverty on the other. This, often romantacised image has been depicted in films from Sternberg's Shanghei Express (1932) to Speilberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). It is a persistent image, and one against which the 'real Shanghai' has since frequently been measured (cf. Wasserstrom 2009, pp 1-11). Since the beginning of economic reforms the media has portrayed Shanghai as "bidding to regain the glory it once enjoyed" (Blustein 1994, p 15A); or as being helped "to reclaim its status as the Paris of the East" (Mathewson 1998). The degree to which the myth of Shanghai ever actually reflected Shanghai as it was, or is remains open to debate. Writing in 1936 Cocteau lamented that, "nothing in Shanghai was the least like the picture I had formed of it. Yet I am convinced that there exists a Shanghai corresponding to the city of our dreams; perhaps excelling it" ((quoted in Wasserstrom 2009, p 6). His mythical Shanghai has the feeling of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and perhaps there is an element of truth in that. The Shanghailanders, certainly had more in common with the corporate expatriates of today than with their more obviously colonial contemporaries. Unlike the colonial enterprise, where the attempt is at least made to justify exploitation in terms of national interest or 'the White Man's Burden', semicolonial Shanghai was, for the foreigner, first and foremost a money making enterprise (Sergeant p 137). In a very real sense this prefigures the free market business practices of today. As Harriet Seargeant argues, "goodness had nothing to do with Shanghai's business life. Energy, ingenuity and graft had. Like New York and Tokyo today, the only immorality was failure." (p 166).

Given these parallels, a review of the available literature on semi-colonial Shanghai seems prudent. A well known early attempt at describing the culture of the foreign settlements, responsible for popularising the term the 'Shanghai mind', argued that, "Shanghailanders of English extraction belong, if they belong to England at all, to an England that no longer exists" (Ransome 1927). Such cultural conservatism is often a feature of migrant communities (cf. Baumann 1996, p 192). For Ransome, though, concern within the foreign settlements, surrounding the growing power of Chinese Nationalists, was easily dismissed as fear of change, and Shanghailanders demands for British intervention were merely an indication of how out of touch they really were. In a slightly later exploration of the often fraught relationship between Shanghailanders and the Foreign Office, Nathan Pelcovits points to a narrative he describes as treaty port folklore, in which "China was the Eldorado never fully explored, whose riches in concessions and customers were immeasurable" (1949 pp 3-4). This "land of plenty" myth is also a common feature of both migrant and colonial discourses (Arnold 1981; Bridgewater & Buzzanell 2010).

Predictably, Shanghailanders were also the object of Chinese mythmaking. A notorious sign placed at the entrance of a Shanghai park which allegedly read "Chinese and Dogs Not Admitted", though it almost certainly never existed, continues to be a potent symbol of Shanghai's semi-colonial period. For many years the Shanghai Museum of History displayed a mock-up of this sign as if it were the genuine article (Wagner 1995, p 425 and the 1950's a commemorative plaque was erected in the park. It read, in part, as follows:

Before liberation the park bore silent witness to the imperialists' aggression against China and their wanton trampling on her sovereignty. The gate of the park was guarded by police of the "International Settlement" and Chinese were refused admittance. To add insult to injury, the imperialists in 1885 put up at the gate a board with the words "No Admittance to Dogs and Chinese" written on it.

(quoted in Bickers and Wasserstrom 1995, p 452)

Although this myth has been extensively examined, by both Western and Chinese scholars, I will focus on Bickers and Wasserstrom's frequently cited deconstruction of the narrative (1995) as it provides a clear summary of the debate surrounding this issue. Attempts to expose this myth clearly fit into the wider revisionist trends in Chinese scholarship identified above. The controversy these claims caused in the Chinese press is illustrative of the degree to which the old Communist metanarratives of Western oppression remain an active, though contested, part of the discourse. To what extent this is reflected in the attitudes of Shanghainese towards the contemporary expatriate community is something this research aims to establish.

Bickers and Wasserstrom contend that the reported text of the sign is most likely a condensed version of the parks 1913 "Revised Regulations", which included these points:

1. These Gardens are reserved exclusively for the foreign community.

2. No dogs or bicycles are admitted.

(quoted in ibid, p 445)

They speculate that Chinese domestic staff, who were allowed into the park if accompanied by their employers, may be responsible for popularising the myth. In their view "amahs and other servants, who could not read English but 'knew' what the signs said point by point, told other Chinese about the notice: point one, no Chinese; point two, no dogs" (p 461). The regulations were changed in 1917, and, perhaps because of the controversy, point two was moved to point four (pp 445-446). Cosmetic changes like this can have done little to appease the cities Chinese residents or to conceal the underlying structural implications of the rule. The fact that dogs were often permitted entry carried the implication, for some Chinese observers, that the cities foreign inhabitants saw them as less than dogs (p 453). The effect of these segregationist policies on Shanghailanders perceptions of the Chinese is also likely to have been significant (cf. Arrow et al. 2000, p 280). According to Bickers and Wasserstrom, attempts by Shanghailanders to exclude the Chinese were as much an issue of class as they were one of race (p 465). This too seems an oversimplification. In his examination of Shanghailander identity on the otherhand Bickers suggests that the park:

had become a key symbol in the struggle to maintain an identity as a 'civilized community', in the face of the financial and other problems facing the SMC in the 1930s. The band playing on summer's evenings in the Public Garden has often been the subject of florid reminiscence, but the ceremony of attendance - in 1919 often by over 2,000 residents - was symbolic of the wholesomeness of the community and also of its civilized nature.

(1998, p 200)

While race and class were clearly important in justifying Chinese exclusion from the "public recreation ground", it seems plausible that underlying reason for the restriction was the creation of a "western bubble", a public space for the performance of western identities in Shanghai (cf. Fechter 2007;Kivisto 2003). The cities parks were not the only places Shanghainese faced discrimination though. According to Harriet Sergeant:

Chinese attempting to enter a foreign hotel, however smartly dressed, found himself directed round to the tradesmen's entrance. The open-air swimming pool in Kiangwan Road only allowed Chinese to bathe if they produced a card of approval from the Shanghai Municipal CounC11 Health Department. The Cathedral Boys' School, Shanghai's foremost British public school, did not offer Chinese as a subject until 1937.

(1991, p139)

The line between race and class was also blurred, according to Bickers, by the Shanghailanders tendency to isolate themselves from the Chinese. The only Chinese most foreigners ever saw were "rickshaw-pullers, servants, compradores and staff, and sometimes interpreters" (1998, p 187; see also Sergeant 1991, p 211). The fact that Shanghailanders were most commonly confronted by those on the bottom of a hegemonic structure, which they themselves were largely responsible for, certainly helped propagate "prevailing notions of 'Orientals', and Chinese, as 'racially' different, and 'racially' unequal" (Bickers 1999, p 184). These attitudes are perhaps best illustrated by the story of a European diplomat, who, having held a dinner in honor of the members of the Nationalist government, was confronted by a British businessman. "I heard you invited those so called members of the govermment to dinner yesterday," he said, "Tell me, in Peking do you also dine with coolies?" (quoted in Sergeant 1991, p 139). For Bickers, there is a contradiction here, between the Shanghailanders' attitude of "isolation and derision" and the degree to which their lifestyles and the survival of their community were dependent on the Chinese. This echoes Albert Memmi's belief that colonisers typically try to dismiss the colonised from their minds:

to imagine the colony without the colonized... But the colonist realises that without the colonized the colony would have no meaning. This intolerable contradiction fills him with rage, a loathing, always ready to be loosed on the colonized, the innocent, yet inevitable reason for his drama.

(Memmi 2003 [1965], pp 110-111)

Bickers starts his analysis by arguing that, in his view, foreign residents of Shanghai fell into two basic categories during the semi-colonial period: the China Hands - young, hard working businessmen with more loyalty to their firm than to the foreign community; and Shanghailanders, a term which he see's as applying only to the cities long term British inhabitants. I suspect that these boundaries may have been more fluid and contingent than such a firm delineation necessarily allows especially given his own admission that Americans in Shanghai were apparently as prone to colonial rhetoric as their British neighbors (1998, p 194). These categories are usefully compared with Fechter's family expatriate:young proffesional distinction (Fechter 2007, p p 128), and suggest that the latter is not a new phenomenon at all. Bickers claims that these 'China Hands' "considered themselves socially superior to Shanghailanders of all classes, who were often described by expatriate businessmen and consuls as 'low whites' or 'lesser Europeans'" (1998, p 184).

On the other hand, according to Bickers, Shanghailanders primarily saw themselves as settlers. They were there to stay and this is reflected in their rhetoric. In his view:

Shanghailanders appropriated 'Shanghai' for themselves. The phenomenal growth of the port and later its industries was portrayed as solely their creation... Like the Boers in South Africa or the Deliaan planters in Sumatra, they saw themselves as having moved into 'empty' land.':" They had their founding legend - the mud-flats of the Huangpu river had turned to mercantile gold at their touch.

(p 199)

Shanghailanders believed that their presence was so important to China that the Chinese would be foolish to limit Western privilege, and such a boon to international commerce that their own governments would never interfere (p 175). Bickers argues that Shanghailanders primary identity was local, but that British and Imperial identities also continued to be important. They also "imported their far from exotic British lifestyles, cuisine and domestic habits" (p 193) in support of their identities. In reinforcing their local identity Shanghailanders appropriated the symbolism and language of the Raj, and on occasion even the cities American inhabitants turned to British symbols of empire when they wanted to evoke their own sense of community. A real estate brochure, printed by an American company in Shanghai, clearly illustrates this. Featuring a Crusader whose surcoat is emblazoned with the St George cross, it reads:

Bickers sees this "heightened and insular Britishness of Shanghailander society as a rejection of the Chinese world which otherwise swamped them, physically as much as metaphorically" (p 193). Despite this the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism seems to have played a significant role in the maintenance of Shanghailander identity, providing, in his view, "the basis on which British settlers differentiated between their Shanghailander and their British identities" (p 170). This tension between exotic, "cosmopolitan" Shanghai and the banal and exclusionary Shanghailanders is typified by the manner in which the city chose to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the treaty port system. Shanghailanders celebrated this as the cities "triumphant Jubilee... processions, parades and fireworks marked the event, and hymns to the city's cosmopolitanism were sung" (p 199). According to Bryna Goodman though, despite this "evocation of cosmopolitan community, [the jubilee] was almost entirely Western in terms of conception and participation" (2000 p 896).

This attitude is potently symbolised in the Municipal Seal which the SMC had commissioned especially for the Jubilee. A medallion, surrounded by the motto, Omnia Juncta in Uno or "all joined into one" and containing the flags of all the most favoured nations, the seal was trumpeted as a "a daring and magnificent achievement in heraldry" (p 896). Conspicuous in its absence from the flag, however, is any acknowledgement of the other partner to the treaty port system, Imperial China itself. In Goodman's view the seal is a clear statement of Shanghailander identity, which she sees as based around "an exclusive cosmopolitanism that was fashioned in the face of the Chinese community, which was its foil" (p 896). She also points to conflicting representations of the same event to illustrate this point. Commemorative photos published in the Shanghai Mercury, of a talk given by the Reverand William Muirhead during the celebrations, show a protective cordon formed by the Navy and the Shanghai Volunteer Corps surrounding a group of Western spectators. The "dense congregation" of Chinese who were reportedly "eager spectators of the proceedings which they could not altogether follow with full knowledge, but into the spirit of which they seemed to enter heartily" (Goodman 2000, p 900) are almost entirely absent from the image, apparently ignored by the photographer and excluded by the cordon. By acting to separate "Westerners and Western women in particular from the native population" (p 897) this cordon served; not only as visible reminder of this tension between Shanghailanders dependence on the Chinese and their fears of cultural contagion, but also to set them symbolically above and apart from them.

The Shanghai Mercury images are contrasted by Goodman, with an image published in the illustrated Chinese language newspaper Dianshizhai huabao. In it Muirhead is closely surrounded by a large crowd of Chinese and there are no Western spectators in evidence. The military cordon is also conspicuously absent, replaced by an honour guard behind Muirhead. Some Chinese representations of the Jubilee made an even greater effort to present the occasion in a more sinocentric light, framing the treaty ports as an economic necessity resulting from Chinese initiative. It has been argued that, because the Chinese language press was largely owned by foreigners during this era, their representations are unavoidably coloured by Western bias and therefore can not be relied upon as a true measure of the views of Shanghainese. In conceding that ownership bias should not be altogether discounted, however, Goodman argues that the interests of the readers, and particularly the advertisers, undoubtedly had a bigger impact on editorial policy that the owners politics (pp 900-905).

Shanghainese attempts to reframe events with themselves closer to the centre are perhaps best understood as an assertion of agency. Shanghailanders clearly viewed the parade, and by extension the city, as theirs, but both were primarily dependant on Chinese contributions. On the other-hand the treaty port system also clearly benefited Shanghainese elites, many of whom made large amounts of money acting as compradores for foreign interests, or just by capitalising on the economic growth western trade provided. China's emerging middleclass were also largely employed in jobs which had not even existed in pre-treaty China. In a country frequently afflicted by war and large scale civil unrest the relative stability of Shanghai must have also been an attraction. Deprived of agency both by the process of colonisation, and in its rhetoric, Shanghainese elites were understandably conflicted when it came to celebrating this. Instead they subverted the celebration by framing themselves as, if not actually in control of the city, at least co-partners in its success. In response to the imperialistic aspirations of the Shanghailanders, Shanghainese elites reemphasized their own imperial history by also insisting on using the Jubilee festivities to simultaneously celebrate the birthday of the Empress Dowager Cixi, which fell on the same weekend. According to Goodman the Empress Dowager was not even particularly well liked during this period, nor was there any tradition of celebrating Imperial birthdays in Qing dynasty China. This did not stop the Shanghainese from inventing one though (pp 905-910). In the Chinese language press the fact that the Jubilee was being celebrated at all was presented as a sop to foreign sensibilities and a matter of face. According to one such account in the Chinese language newspaper Shenbao,

It wouldn't be proper if the [Chinesel people...only celebrated the birthday. But what the Westerner intended to celebrate was the opening of the port and the beginning of trade, which would ignore people's love and respect for the [Empress Dowager].

(quoted in ibid, p 908)

Previously mentioned attempts by some contemporary Chinese scholars to reinterpret this period of Shanghai's history in a more positive light are one indication that China continues to struggle with its historical relationship with the West. It is unclear at this stage of my research whether this translates to a contemporary tension between the foreign presence in Shanghai and China's dependence on foreign markets/desire for foreign luxury goods, though this seems likely. In some instances "issues of race, gender and class", identified by Bickers as central to Shanghailander identity (1998, p 209), have also been presented by scholars as an aspect of corporate expatriate identity, albeit one expressed much less overtly (cf. Fecter 2007, p 27; Porter 2006, p 219). Shanghai's reputation as China's most cosmopolitan city is, in many respects, as widely celebrated as it ever was during the treaty port era (Wasserstrom 2009, pp 7-14). It will be interesting to see if this leads to similar tensions for corporate expatriates as it did for their semi-colonial predecessors.

There are several important differences of course. The degree of independence and personal sovereignty once enjoyed by Shanghailanders is obviously a thing of the past. Semicolonial Shanghai was an open city. New arrivals required neither visa nor passports (Sergeant 1991, p 2). In the Shanghai of today immigration, which has recently been liberalised, is subject to controls similar to those imposed by most nations. Expatriates must pay Chinese taxes and are subject to Chinese law. Having said that corruption is reportedly a big problem in China, and so the actual, real world, effect of these changes on the lives of some corporate expatriates may not be that significant. Socio-political developments in the West should not be overlooked either. Race, class and gender biases are a much less overt feature of the public discourse than they once were, and tend to provoke censure when they are openly expressed. In the post-soviet world, on the other-hand, free-market capitalism has become a totalising system, whose pretensions of globalism implicitly devalue any culture other than the Wests own. Superficial similarities and dissimilarities are both clearly evident, between the Shanghai of today and the treaty port settlements. Whether the same can be said for the identities of their Western inhabitants remains to be established.