China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Rana Mitter, Oxford University
Chair and Discussant: Arthur Waldron, University of Pennsylvania
If the nation is an imagined community, how much more so is the empire? This panel uses a rich variety of material, based on fresh archival work in China, Taiwan, and Japan, to illuminate the complexities of the imperial encounter in twentieth-century China, a topic still widely ignored. It addresses the question of how the understanding of empire moved from tianxia to diguo, taking on board ideas of modernity and nationalism (Gerth, Mitter). It also questions who the imperialists were: going beyond the old clichés of gunboats and missionaries, it shows how those who were supposedly in the imperialist camp, such as White Settlers in Shanghai, or Japanese military families in Tianjin, could construct their own agendas or be marginalized (Bickers, Dryburgh). Imperialism also constructed new ways of being Chinese: we look at consumer culture, the expansion of the press, both Chinese and foreign-owned, and cross-cultural organizations (Gerth, Dryburgh, Mitter), which enabled a continuum of mutual interaction to develop that did not necessarily operate along the imperialist/ruled divide. Following from recent work on nationalism, we present the empire not as a structure of control, but as a site of contestation between differing voices, constantly giving rise to changing and unexpected alliances of power. Discussing the papers on this panel will be a distinguished scholar (Waldron) whose most recent work has involved significant reassessments of the concepts of empire and nation, and whose contribution will link the themes of the papers together, making the session dynamic and interactive, rather than merely a series of formal presentations.
Robert Bickers, University of Bristol
The historiography of modern China outside the PRC operates with little reference to China’s partial incorporation into the world system of Western imperialism, which is merely caricatured or ignored. The foreign presence in the country, and the activities and ambitions of foreign governments, or of foreign citizens whose own activities were facilitated by extraterritoriality, and the network of concessions and settlements, needs revisiting and understanding. This paper takes Shanghai’s British-dominated International Settlement in particular and looks at the specific nature of foreign power in the city, arguing that, far from being an outpost of the British empire, the Settlement was largely run by settler interests who set their own agenda, and were largely ignored by the British official presence in China until the 1925 May Thirtieth Incident. Shanghai was many things to many people. What took place in the city was an effective cohabitation between communities of interest (Chinese and foreign), which were strained and cracked by the political disjunctures of the period of the Nationalist Revolution. Scholars have previously argued for the existence of synarchic institutions in the treaty ports, but these grey zones of empire, and of settler expansion, are best understood as areas of informal synarchic practice and Sino-foreign cohabitation only incidentally opened up by the mid-nineteenth century treaties. Only then can we get to grips with their impact, and understand how they worked, and for whom.
Karl Gerth, Harvard University
This paper examines the links between consumption and anti-imperialism in the battles to ascribe meanings to Chinese appearance surrounding the collapse of the Qing empire. The first half of the paper examines how highly politicized interpretations of dress and hair put appearance at the center of both Qing empire-building and anti-imperial rebellions throughout the entire history of the dynasty. Just as adopting queues and Manchu-style dress was a sign of submission, cutting queues and changing clothing styles explicitly signified a rejection of Qing imperialism.
Once victorious, republican revolutionaries sought to unify China by imposing a new orthodoxy in appearance. While only a few influential people opposed the removal of the queue, powerful Chinese economic interests defended other aspects of the Qing empire targeted for elimination. Above all, imposing new clothing styles, such as replacing silk gowns with suits made of imported wool, threatened the silk industry. The second half of the paper demonstrates how silk producers immediately began to fight the emerging orthodoxy by linking the future of their industry, and therefore, silk clothing, to the fight against new imperial powers, Japanese and Occidental. By examining how these links were made in one industry, this papers establishes a framework for understanding the National Products Movement (guohuo yundong). In this movement, Chinese economic interests sought to wield a discourse of anti-imperialism to compete against foreign companies in Chinese markets, making consumption of their "national products" (guohuo) patriotic, and the use of foreign products akin to treason.
Rana Mitter, Oxford University
This paper addresses the perception of imperialism in early twentieth-century China, exploring the interactions of Chinese local elites with the Japanese during the Kwantung Army’s occupation of Manchuria in 1931–33. The paper goes beyond standard models of the occupation (a switch from Japanese "informal" to "formal" imperialism, or a clash between Chinese nationalism and Japanese imperialism) and reconstructs the point of view of the Chinese who worked under occupation. This paper argues that modernity remained primarily the preserve of an educated, urban elite in the Manchuria of 1931, and although people from this background did tend to see the occupation as a imperialist violation of Chinese national sovereignty, many others with differing intellectual backgrounds found this paradigm irrelevant to them. This paper looks instead at those who were condemned as "collaborators" (hanjian) with the Japanese, and tests how far the terms "imperialism" and "nationalism" were meaningful to them. One such person was Zheng Xiaoxu, the first prime minister of "Manchukuo," who was recruited from outside Manchuria, and supported the new "state" as a base to destroy republicanism and bring about a Qing restoration. Some local elite members refused to be bounded by the nationalist/anti-imperialist paradigm, such as Ma Zhanshan, who moved between resistance and collaboration, and Zhang Jinghui, who rode a "through train" as governor of Harbin, serving first Zhang Xueliang, then the Kwantung Army. The term "collaboration" meant little to such people, and the paper examines the local networks which were more important to them than inchoate ideas such as "nationalism" or "imperialism."
Marjorie Dryburgh, Sheffield University
This paper will focus on the strategies used in prewar north China to legitimize Sino-Japanese collaboration and the extension thereby of Japanese influence. First of all, I will argue that despite the conventional treatment of ‘collaboration with Japanese imperialism’ as an alliance of convenience in which political and material advantage took precedence over the moral aspect of the transaction, Japanese and Chinese actors alike showed considerable concern for the justification of their actions.
Secondly, I will examine representations of collaborative relationships in 1930s Beiping-Tianjin, drawing on contemporary Chinese and Japanese narratives including the accounts of participants, such as the retired politician Bai Jianwu. I shall consider how these were used to justify collaboration in a context where the idea of nation, while still highly contested, was acquiring increasing moral force, and explore the significance of explanations which locate the motives of collaborators not in individual ambitions but in a wider unease with the state of China.
Finally, while the pursuit of interest cannot be discounted as a factor in decisions to collaborate, these efforts to reposition collaboration with Japan as a morally acceptable form of dissent suggest that collaborators felt not that moral questions could be disregarded, but that new answers to them must be found. I will suggest some ways in which this concern with legitimation might affect our understanding of collaboration in this context and of the moral environment in which those involved believed themselves to be acting.