Robert Bickers

Shanghai's "Dogs and Chinese Not admitted" sign: Legend, history and contemporary symbol

This article examines the potency and persistence of myth and language in the context of the dispute, now over 80 years old, about the officially-sanctioned wording of regulations in the municipal parks of foreign-administered Shanghai. Specifically, it examines the potent symbol of the sign placed in Shanghais Huangpu Park that allegedly read: “Chinese and Dogs Not Admitted.” This symbol has secured a totemic position in the historiography of the Western presence in China before 1949 and is deeply embedded in contemporary Chinese and Western perceptions and representations of that era, and of the whole question of Western imperialism in China. It is the subject both of popular discourse and official fiat in China today. Drawing on a series of revisionist writings and new archival research this article shows that the true facts of the case are both beyond dispute and irrelevant, but that the legend survives undiminished. For over 60 years before June 1928 most Chinese certainly were barred from the parks administered by the foreign-controlled Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) of the International Settlement in Shanghai. As shown below, the enforcement of the ban varied over time but for the first three decades of the 20th century it was rigidly administered. Dogs, ball games, cycling and picking of the flowers were also forbidden, but the alleged juxtaposition of the bans on dogs and Chinese became notorious. The potency of “dog” as an insulting and dehumanizing epithet in China undoubtedly exacerbated the insult, and also made the story of the signs outrageous wording seem all the more plausible.

Conflict and Cooperation in Sino-British Business, 1860–1911: The Impact of the Pro-British Commercial Network in Shanghai . By Eiichi Motono. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. ix, 229 pp.

Acknowledgements - List of Tables - List of Figures - Abbreviations - INTRODUCTION - An Economic Principle for Disciplining Chinese Merchants - The Co-existence of Different Economic Principles - PART I: SINO-BRITISH DISCONTENT COMMERCIAL RELATIONSHIP - The Frozen Debt Question - The Outward Transit Pass Question - PART II: SINO-BRITISH COMMERCIAL CONFLICTS IN SHANGHAI - Conflict Over Foreign Silk Filatures - Conflict Over the Opium Trade - PART III: THE COLLAPSE OF CHINESE MERCHANT-CONTROL SYSTEM - The Changed Situation - The Collapse of the Merchant-control System - Conclusion - Appendix - Bibliography - Glossary - Index

69.95.

Between 1862 and 1949, foreign communities in Shanghai memorialised in stone and bronze a pantheon of local imperial heroes, as part of a strategy to insert themselves into orthodox circuits of formal empire. The article explores this story, the history of these monuments and their contemporary legacy

Moving Stories: Memorialisation and its Legacies in Treaty Port China

For John King Fairbank the establishment of the foreign inspectorate of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service was a key symbolic moment in modern Chinese history. His landmark 1953 volume Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast culminates with the 1854 Inspectorate agreement,which,heargued,‘foreshadowedtheeventualcompromise between China and the West—a joint Chinese and Western administration of the modern centers of Chinese life and trade in the treaty ports’. Without the CMCS, he implied, there could be no modern China. It was the ‘the institution most thoroughly representative of the whole period’ after the opening of the treaty ports down to 1943, he wrote. 2 By 1986 he was arguing that it was the ‘central core’ of the system. ‘Modernity, however defined, was a Western, not a Chinese, invention’, he claimed, and Sir Robert Hart’s Customs Service was its mediator. 3 Sino-Western administration in the treaty port world—‘synarchy’ as Fairbank dubbed it—became a key strand in Western historical writing about modern China and its foreign relations. Fairbank and others located it in a long tradition of joint administration practised by successive rulers of China. Younger, politically radical scholars such as Joseph Esherick in the late1960s argued that the idea of synarchyobscuredtherealityofaWesternassaultonChina,offoreign

Purloined letters: history and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service

Could the range of interaction between the British Empire and China have been any wider? The British establishment in China encompassed a Crown Colony and leased territories, British-administered concessions and British-dominated settlements in key Chinese cities, a large naval presence on the coasts and major rivers, substantial financial investment, Christian missions and a commanding role in riverine and coastal navigation. A wide range of British state agencies were active: the Foreign and Colonial Office were both crucial, while the Admiralty, War Office and Treasury had important roles, and their own concerns and strategic considerations. The government of India had its own relationship with China, while other Dominions’ relations, not least Australian, grew in complexity in the 1930s and afterwards. And, of course, Dominions relations with Chinese – as sojourners and migrants – developed much earlier, and often much more unhappily, than even the mainstream relationship between China and Britain. In fact a large swathe of the global Chinese diaspora and British Empire were all but coterminous: leading nationalist activists in the 1920s came ‘back’ to China from the British Caribbean; key entrepreneurs in rapidly developing twentieth-century Shanghai came back from Australia, or Southeast Asia. All of this activity took place in an intensely competitive and intensely internationalised context, which overall saw more intra-imperial compromise and collaboration than conflict, but which certainly saw intense bouts of conflict, not least in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese war. There were various (sometimes competing) centres of power within the British China enterprise – the palatial legation in Peking, the Treasury and Threadneedle Street, Hong Kong’s Government House – but one of the most highly visible was at the same time actually one of the most ambiguous – this was the Inspectorate General of the Imperial, later simply the Chinese, Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) in Peking (latterly in Shanghai and then Chongqing). Between 1854 and 1943 this agency of the Chinese state was always headed by a Briton, and in 1898 the Foreign Office extracted a commitment from the Qing court’s Zongli yamen (which managed foreign relations, and until 1906 managed the Customs) that The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History Vol. 36, No. 2, June 2008, pp. 221–226

Revisiting the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1950

Shanghai’s peculiar status between 1842 and 1943, its sovereignty degraded in key ways, meant that it gave sanctuary to, and spawned, a wide range of nationalist activity and counteractivity. This essay examines five different layers of activity that the city hosted, and spawned, and explores how they interacted, and touches also on their legacies. It outlines the three key factors that gave shape to the city and to its overt and covert political communities: space, law, and time (or the calendar). The essay explores the interplay of the physical and administrative realms that cut across the city, the restrictions they imposed, and the opportunities they opened up, and shows vividly how nationalism and the urban intersected in this site of multinational imperial power.

Incubator City Shanghai and the Crises of Empires

The origins of the Foreign Inspectorate of the Chinese Maritime Customs are well known; the succession crises after Inspector Generals Hart and Aglen well covered in the literature; and the Maze Inspectorate has received a good deal of attention. However, one significant feature of the newly opened Inspectorate Archives is the weight of post-1937 material it contains, and the light it can throw upon the administration of Lester Knox Little, inspector general in 1943–50, on the Japanese-controlled Customs in occupied China, and on the erosion of foreign and especially of British dominance in the service. This paper outlines the rocky transition from Sir Frederick Maze to Little (and in Japanese-occupied China to Inspector General Kishimoto Hirokichi), and explores the impact of this transition and of the Sino-Japanese war on the position of the Customs and on its activities between 1941 and 1945. The Customs found a role for itself in unoccupied China, and remained a useful tool for the Guomindang state, although British diplomats surrendered their long-held claim that a British national should run the service. What preserved a foreign role in the Customs after Pearl Harbor was not the support of foreign diplomats, but the relations of senior staff with high-ranking Chinese government officials.

The Chinese Maritime Customs at War, 1941–45

Within a comparatively short text, Lu and Tang have succeeded in analyzing a very complex area in an accessible way and have provided extensive tables of data. This is a book for specialists interested in economic developments in China, rather than for the business generalist; it addresses issues that are rarely brought together, giving an overall analysis of scope and impact of government intervention. However, as the authors suggest, this is an area of fast-moving change and the main conclusions should be seen in the light of a 1997 publishing date, the change of status of Hong Kong and Macao and changes driven by the WTO application process.