Empire of Impartiality: Managing Indebtedness to Foreigners in Eighteenth-Century China (original) (raw)
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In the light of recent scholarship, this article revisits the conventional understanding of the origins of ‘Western’ imperialism in China. I argue, in particular, that global factors must be taken into account to explain the silver crisis that precipitated Qing China’s conflict with the ‘West’, as well as the British decision to go to war and ‘Western’ military performance in the two Opium Wars. Utilizing concepts from New Qing History, I will further demonstrate that although Britain and other imperialist powers tried to impose their concept of sovereign equality on the Qing Empire by force, the treaty port system that evolved from the Opium Wars also owed a great deal to Qing Imperial policies of border control and legal arrangements. Instead of Chinese passivity, I emphasize Qing agency in the establishment of ‘Western’ transnational imperialism in China.
In this ambitious study, Li Chen excavates the early formation of European characterizations of China as the " quintessential oriental despotism " over the roughly 150 years preceding the First Opium War. By then, the stereotype of Chinese law as irredeemably brutal and unjust had emerged as a dominant narrative with sufficient strength to underwrite western demands for extraterritorial privilege. While a growing number of scholars have of late begun to deconstruct this orientalist discourse, Chen's contribution begins with a disarmingly simple question the answer to which is usually merely assumed: precisely how did this particular discursive formation acquire such normative and epistemic authority as to eclipse alternative historical narratives and continue to shape western views of China for the next two centuries? Chen's answer to this question is an empirically as well as theoretically masterful study that revisits divergent and often competing discursive formations beginning with the first publication of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in 1748 to the Opium War. Chen begins with a critique of the once paradigmatic narrative that Sino-western conflict grew inevitably from a clash of incommensurable cultures. By itself, this is not particularly new or insightful. What sets Chen apart is his challenge to revisionist historians, including Edward Said, who presume a pre-existing internal coherence and " totalizing hegemony " of colonial power and discourse. With an abundance of archival documentation , Chen demonstrates that from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the position of western nations vis-à-vis the Qing Empire was manifestly not marked by strength or hegemony but, rather, by precarious vulnerability and anxiety. The discursive structures of Euro-American dominance did not spring full-blown into existence but were instead very much constructed in a process of cultural, racial, and national boundary-making within the " contact zones " of empires. Throughout his study, Chen uncovers the multiple voices, competing interests and internal contradictions at the emergence of universalizing discourses of liberalism, humanitarianism, international law and, indeed, modern civilization. Chen sets forth his arguments over the course of five roughly chronological case studies, each of which can be read alone but which nonetheless build upon each other to form a satisfying whole. He begins with a reexamination of the Lady Hughes case of 1784, wherein a gunner aboard a British ship anchored near Guangzhou fired in salute to a departing Dutch ship, hitting a Chinese vessel and killing one of its crew. Several days later, the gunner was turned over to Chinese authorities, tried and executed.
English monograph: Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Columbia, 2016), 2015
This book investigates how the dominant images of China or Chinese law were created and how and why they acquired extraordinary and lasting power in the context of Sino-Western encounters from approximately the 1740s through the 1840s. By studying a series of pivotal moments of Sino-Western contact and conflict during this period that culminated in the famous First Opium War, I examine the formation and transformation of Western knowledge and perception of Chinese law and society over time. I argue that the resulting Western discourse of China or Chinese law was not only central to many of the disputes that structured the trajectory of Sino-Western relations but also a key site at which the cultural or national boundaries were constructed or negotiated. Unlike many earlier studies, this book concentrates on the century-long period of Sino-Western, especially Sino-British, encounters before 1840, a formative century that has profoundly shaped modern Sino-Western relations but has received only scant attention among scholars of China since the 1930s. Moreover, instead of studying this period as a diplomatic, intellectual, or literary history, this book provides an integrative, critical analysis of the archival, popular, intellectual, and political dimensions of the Sino-Western encounter to historicize the processes of knowledge production and transcultural boundary making in the age of empire. A central concern of the study is to find out whether such a multidimensional interdisciplinary study may shed new light on the history of Sino-Western contact or other transimperial encounters. This book does not seek to offer a comprehensive coverage of this period. Rather, by using a combination of case studies and selected themes and events to slice through history temporally and spatially, it hopes to illustrate the complex power dynamics in the contact zones of empire that have created some of the still influential ideas of Sino-Western difference, identities, and modernities at a time when these ideas remained seriously underdeveloped, contradictory, or contested. This book builds on critical scholarship in multiple disciplines to explore the intersection of the discourse of Chinese law and society, Euroamerican modern transformation, and imperial ideology and practice. Table of contents: Introduction Chapter 1. Imperial Archives, History, and Origin Myths of Extraterritoriality Chapter 2. Cultural Translation of the Qing Code and Start of Comparative Chinese Law Chapter 3. Chinese Law and Society in the Formulation of European Modernity Chapter 4. Sentimental Imperialism and the Global Spectacle of Chinese Punishments Chapter 5. Law and Empire in the Making of the First Opium War Conclusion Bibliography Index The five substantive chapters of this book are organized around the interrelated archival, intellectual, popular, and official domains of the production, circulation, consumption, and codification of the knowledge of Chinese law mostly from the 1740s to the 1840s. It begins by examining the imperial archives of Sino-Western legal disputes to reinterpret the origins of foreign extraterritoriality in Chapter 1 before moving on to explore how such disputes led to the production of Western knowledge of Chinese law and society in the next chapter. Chapter 3 then analyzes the reception and multifaceted influence of such knowledge on European debates about the ideals of modern law and government in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Related to such archival and intellectual discourses was the rise of popular and sentimental representations of Chinese judicial punishments that came to redefine Chinese and Western law and subjectivity in the nineteenth century, which is the subject of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 illustrates the influence of these archival, intellectual, and popular discourses of Chinese law and society on the decision making of British diplomats, traders, and politicians in waging the First Opium War, which then established by force extraterritoriality and the credibility of earlier narratives of Chinese law. The short conclusion will provide a detailed summary of the major arguments of the book and offer reflections on the subsequent Chinese efforts to engage with the Western discourse of Chinese law and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Keywords: cultural boundaries, Orientalism, contact zone, imagine community, emotional community, Chinese law, international law, imperialism, Opium War, sovereignty, Sino-Western relations, Chinese punishments, modernity, transnational relations, humanism, liberalism, sentimentalism, sympathy, spectacle, extraterritoriality, Canton,
History Compass, 2012
In the light of recent scholarship, this article revisits the conventional understanding of the origins of 'Western' imperialism in China. I argue, in particular, that global factors must be taken into account to explain the silver crisis that precipitated Qing China's conflict with the 'West', as well as the British decision to go to war and 'Western' military performance in the two Opium Wars. Utilizing concepts from New Qing History, I will further demonstrate that although Britain and other imperialist powers tried to impose their concept of sovereign equality on the Qing Empire by force, the treaty port system that evolved from the Opium Wars also owed a great deal to Qing Imperial policies of border control and legal arrangements. Instead of Chinese passivity, I emphasize Qing agency in the establishment of 'Western' transnational imperialism in China. 'Western' imperialism has long occupied a central place in explaining the emergence of modern China, both in 'Western' and Chinese scholarship. In Chinese historiography, its 'beginning' in 1842 is the watershed between 'ancient', dynastic history and the 'modern' period, characterized by the dynamics of social and cultural change. 1 The patriotic concern underlying this periodization is reinforced in the discourse on China's 'century of national humiliation' (bai nian guochi) from 1842 to the Communist takeover in 1949, which originated in the early twentieth century and has made a remarkable comeback since the 1990s, riding the tide of resurgent nationalism in the People's Republic of China. 2 Although their political standpoint more often than not differed from Chinese Marxist or nationalist interpretations, 'Western' China historians writing in the second half of the twentieth century would have agreed on the significance of imperialism for China's modern history. For the eminent German China scholar Wolfgang Franke, 1842 marked the beginning of a century not of humiliation, but of revolution in China. 3 Others emphasized the impact of imperialism on China's modernization, arguing that it freed China from the technological and economic ''high-level equilibrium trap'' 4 in which the country had found itself stuck by the early 19th century. By shattering the barriers to further development, the 'West' thus set a desperately needed stimulus to which China adapted, an interpretation neatly captured in John Fairbank's classic formula of ''China's response to the West''. 5 By the 1980s, the Eurocentrism of modernization theory had increasingly come under attack. One of the most influential programmatic texts of that period, Paul Cohen's Discovering History in China, effectively shredded the 'impact-response' model, while equally debunking an overly simplistic understanding of imperialist exploitation. Instead, Cohen called for a 'China-centred' history that would seek to understand China on its own terms. 6 For historians following this line, 'Western' imperialism was still 'out there', but what happened on the Chinese side was what actually mattered. 7 The problem with this
Imperialism, globalization and public finance: the case of late Qing China
This paper reviews recent revisionist studies of imperialism that demonstrate the complexities behind the late Qing state's strategy to accommodate to new challenges born out of foreign conflicts exacerbated by domestic crises. These publications have pointed scholars away from the exclusivity of external agency to the making of modern China. But looking at the role of globalization adds another dimension to understanding how imperialism engaged late Qing China's public finance system and indigenous banking institutions. China's centuries-old experience with global trade previous to the nineteenth century did not prepare the country for world-wide recession, and consequently, foreign banks acquiring a hold on the government's purse by the last decades of that century. From a 'broadbrush' perspective, the paper argues state-sponsored attempts at reform of public finance came too late, and in the long-term had grave repercussions.
Characteristics of Qing China's Maritime Trade Politics, Shunzhi Through Qianlong Reigns
Trading Networks in Early Modern East Asia. Harrassowitz, 2010
The present volume, composed of six contributions by different scholars, seeks to show the intensity of exchange relations and trading networks in the early modern to late imperial “East Asian ‘Mediterranean’”, arguing that these exchange relations and trading networks already had their roots and origins in the tenth to thirteenth centuries at the latest. In this context, the first two contributions discuss local society and socio-economic changes within local Chinese society during the Song to Ming periods – while the other four contributions concentrate on aspects of commercial exchange and administration during the Qing period. Two contributions in particular analyze the indirect and direct importance respectively of religion for social life and commercial activities as a basic precondition for success in non-religious affairs. One chapter investigates Sino-Ryukyuan trade relations during the Kangxi reign (1662-1722), another one Sino-Taiwanese trade relations in late imperial China, while one chapter is in particular dedicated to an analysis of the characteristics and developments within the maritime trade administration of the Manchu Qing (1644–1911) government, with emphasis on hitherto rather neglected aspects, for example institutional-administrative details, including questions such as if Manchus or Han Chinese were responsible for the administration of trade.
2018
Center for Korean Studies for this dissertation. Much of research for this dissertation was done at the National Palace Archives in Taipei, the First Historical Archives in Beijing, and the University of Michigan's very own Asia Library. I would like to thank all the staff members in these institutions, and special thanks go to Liangyu Fu, the Chinese Studies librarian at the Asia Library. She has made it so much easier for me to access archival and published sources in my own library carrel. I must reserve final thanks for my wife, Sara McAdory-Kim, and the rest of our family. Sara has been patient, encouraging, and inspiring as I delighted and struggled in writing this dissertation. She has also read this dissertation multiple times and made numerous helpful suggestions. My father, Sukjoo Kim, perhaps unwittingly, set me on this academic path with his decision to start his Ph.D. education at Baylor University in his late forties and write a dissertation on the Taiping Rebellion. He and my mother, Yeonja Kang, have also shown me the joy of reading and supported me with all their hearts over the years. And I would like to thank my uncles and aunts in Korea as well as my in-laws in Mississippi for all their support and encouragement. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT v CHAPTER I. Introduction 1 II. The First Qing Borderland: Boundaries in the Qing-Chosŏn Borderland, 1630s-1840s 23 III. Criminalizing and Punishing Borderland Activities: 85 Qing-Chosŏn Interstate Law, 1630s-1840s IV. Drawing and Maintaining Boundaries in the Qing-Vietnam Borderland, 1660s-1840s 145 V. Jurisdictions in the Qing-Vietnam Borderland, 1660s-1840s VI. Territorial and Personal Boundaries in the Qing-Kokand Borderland, 1760s-1840s VII. Judiciaries and Jurisdictions in the Qing-Kokand Borderland, 1760s-1840s VIII. Conclusion APPENDIX