Hayamaru Kazumasa, ‘A Critique of Chinese Diplomatic Modernization Narratives: Reinterpreting Shifts in Qing Foreign Affairs Institutions in the Early 1860s from the Qing Perspective’, trans. Thomas P. Barrett, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 22, no. 1 (2022): 1-30. (original) (raw)
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Cambridge University Press, 2018
Prior to the nineteenth century, the West occupied an anomalous space in the Chinese imagination, populated by untamable barbarians and unearthly immortals. First-hand accounts and correspondence from Qing envoys and diplomats to Europe unraveled that perception. In this path-breaking study, Jenny Huangfu Day interweaves the history of Qing legation-building with the personal stories of China's first official travelers, envoys and diplomats to Europe. She explores how diplomat-travelers navigated the conceptual and physical space of a land virtually unmapped in the Chinese intellectual tradition and created a new information order. This study reveals the fluidity, heterogeneity, and ambivalence of their experience, and the layers of tension between thinking, writing, and publishing about the West. By integrating diplomatic and intellectual history with literary analysis and communication studies, Day offers a fundamentally new interpretation of the Qing's engagement with the West.
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The China Quarterly, 2008
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Tribute and Treaties: East Asian Treaty Ports Networks in the Era of Negotiation, 1834–1894
European Journal of East Asian Studies, 2002
The Beginning of the Era of Negotiation From the 1830s to the 1890s, the nations and regions of East Asia entered into a period that can be called the Era of Negotiation, one characterised by multilateral and multifaceted intra-regional negotiations. Three sources account for the era's dynamism. The historical issues they present, however, originate in general not from the conventional understanding of the so-called initial period of modern Asian history as Asia's 'forced' opening as a result of the 'impact of the West' but rather from a point of view focusing on internal changes in the East Asian region. The period can be summarised as follows: 1) The beginnings of change in the historical international order of East Asia, that of tribute relationships centred on the authority of the Qing emperor. Tributary states and trading nations (hushi guo) on the periphery of the Qing empire, backed by their own new economic strength, no longer strove to maintain as close a relationship with the Qing as before, and, in each of them, internal confrontation set in between reformist and conservative factions. A variety of negotiations were consequently opened with the Qing empire. 1 2) The impossibility, under Qing rule, of continuing to implement as strong a centralised control as in the past. As central authority declined, criticism and resistance mounted against the rule by aboriginal officials (tusi/tuguan) of ethnic groups and against the rule by the Court of Colonial Affairs (Lifan Yuan) of 'barbarian areas' (fanbu). As a result of weakened control, economic activity in the coastal trading region picked up, and various forces on the periphery began to advance their claims. 3) Exploitation by local officials and merchants in South China in opposition to the weakened Qing centre, facilitated by the changing East Asian regional tributary order, of American and European efforts