Arts, Faculty of
History, Department of
DSpace
Zhou, Huanjun
Evolutionary Revolution: Sino-British Extraterritoriality Negotiations and the Reconstitution of Chinese Foreign Relations, 1929-1931 By Huanjun Zhou [周焕竣] Course: HIST 449, Honours Graduating Essay Instructor: Dr. Bradley Miller A graduating thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in The Faculty of Arts Department of History We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard Supervisors: Dr. Timothy Cheek and Dr. Christopher Rea Committee Member: Dr. Leo Shin The University of British Columbia 22 April 2024 i Table of Contents Table of Figures ........................................................................................................................iii Note on Languages ................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... v Introduction: Extraterritoriality and A Briton’s Disappearance from Shanghai 引言：治外法權與英人自滬失蹤案 ....................................................................................... 1 Lingering Questions About Extraterritoriality Before the Manchurian Incident................... 9 From ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’ to Pragmatic Incremental Progress ............................... 13 Chapter I: ‘Long Live the Nanjing National Government!’ Purifying the Anti-Imperialist Revolution 第一章：“南京國民政府萬歲！”整肅反帝革命 ............................................................. 16 The 1929 Mandate and Nationalist Discourse in China ...................................................... 21 Handling Domestic Rivals ................................................................................................... 26 The Demise of the GMD’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’ ..................................................... 35 Chapter II: Elite Diplomacy: The Anti-Imperialist Revolution in Practice 第二章：精英外交：踐行反帝革命 ..................................................................................... 40 From Professional Diplomacy to ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’ ............................................ 44 Unequal Treaties and Chinese Diplomacy in Wang Zhengting’s Worldview ..................... 46 Extraterritoriality and Wang’s Worldview in Practice ........................................................ 54 The Demise of Wang Zhengting’s ‘Appropriate Diplomacy’ [適度外交] ......................... 62 Chapter III: When in Rome: Reforming the British Informal Empire in China 第三章：入鄉隨俗：變革英人在華之非正式帝國 ............................................................. 65 A Mediator in Sino-British Relations .................................................................................. 69 Representative of the Empire in Retreat .............................................................................. 72 ii Impartial Policy Inspired by Informal Circles ..................................................................... 78 The Unexpected Continuance of the British Empire in China ............................................ 87 Conclusion: Revolution by ‘Dinner Parties’: Reappraising Sino-British Extraterritoriality Negotiations 終章：“請客吃飯”的革命：回望中英治外法權談判 ......................................................... 89 Appendix I: The Chinese Mandate of 28 December 1929 ...................................................... 93 Appendix II: The Chinese Mandate of 4 May 1931 ................................................................ 95 Appendix III: Twelve Regulations over Foreigners in China 《管轄在華外國人實施條例十二條》.................................................................................. 96 Abbreviations ......................................................................................................................... 100 Glossaries ............................................................................................................................... 101 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 103 iii Table of Figures Figure I: Auditorium of Central University in Nanjing ........................................................... 18 Figure II: Table of the Identities of Telegram Petitioners who Advocated the Abolition of Extraterritoriality...................................................................................................................... 24 Figure III: Photograph of the building of the Zhenjiang Municipal Council .......................... 41 Figure IV: Photograph of the building of British Consulate-General, Nanjing ....................... 66 Figure V: The ‘interaction’ model, for a case-study. ............................................................... 69 Figure VI: The revised ‘interaction’ model, in the context of the early Nanjing Decade, 1928-1931.......................................................................................................................................... 71 iv Note on Languages Since this study covers a period when traditional characters were the standard, I provide the traditional Chinese that appears in primary sources when quoting and citing Chinese texts. English versions are my translations unless specially noted. When romanising Chinese characters, I use hanyu pinyin [漢語拼音], except for Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi 蔣介石) and Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan 孫中山), whose names are more commonly known by the Wade-Giles romanisation. Where sources refer to the Republican calendar [民國紀年法], which begins in 1911, I translate to the AD year. I have written some terms according to their common usages in Sino-British communications of the 1920s and 1930s, e.g., Legislative Yuan (行政院 Legislative Council) and Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Official documents capitalise some terms, such as ‘Government’ and ‘Power’. In these correspondences, ‘Power’ was often used to refer to a state, and it did not concern any of the connotations of ‘great power’ [列強]. I refer throughout to ‘Beijing’ [北京], even though the GMD changed the name of that city to ‘Beiping’ [北平] when they moved the capital of the Republic of China in 1928. More importantly, I use ‘extraterritoriality’ [治外法權] throughout the study, even though foreign residents in China also used the shortcut ‘extrality’ and Chinese nationalists mainly targeted one subset of extraterritoriality: ‘consular jurisdiction’ [領事裁判權]. The Introduction elaborates on the differences between the two terms. v Acknowledgements This thesis has witnessed an anxious student’s inner struggles over the past two years. Ever since my first engagement with relevant chapters in Documents of British Foreign Policy in Spring 2022, I have always been ambitious to write something substantial in Republican Chinese history, but that dream encountered numerous unforeseen obstacles. These setbacks stoked my passion yet prompted me to retreat from the original fantasy – however reluctantly. Indeed, the more I read and write, the more I reconcile the flaws in my writing style, the limits of my research, and an overarching clumsiness in my personality that all hindered the making of a better thesis. The process of putting this thesis together stresses the indispensability of help from my surroundings. My utmost gratitude goes to my supervisors, Professor Timothy Cheek and Professor Christopher Rea, who have endured my impatience, and offered insightful feedback – as well as kind encouragements and generous opportunities – to support my growth as a scholar. Over the past months – from the Honours thesis, to the Thorburn case paper, and various other issues in my Fourth year – my supervisors have motivated and supported me to embrace failures, internalise them, and bravely use their inspirations to encounter new challenges. Professor Bradley Miller, our Honours Chair, has kind-heartedly relieved my mental distress during his office hours and provided incredibly extensive critiques of my thesis chapters. This time, I hope my thesis really has a lot of promise, rather than what Dr. Miller has always put as an encouraging remark! The development of this project is also indispensable to other UBC professors who have warmly supported my research: Professor Sara Ann Knutson, Professor John Roosa, Professor Shoufu Yin, and Professor Eagle Glassheim. Professor Leo Shin, the third member of my defence committee, has also read my entire thesis draft and offered insightful feedback. vi I thank the UBC History Department’s Honours research fund for twice supporting my archival research, when I reoriented my project over Summer 2023. UBC’s Chinese librarian Jing Liu and archivists in the Second Historical Archives of China and Shanghai Municipal Archives have kindly advised my primary source research, especially when I searched for recently-declassified documents. I owe them a big ‘thank you’. I want to extend my appreciation to my friends outside the Department and the Archives’ reading rooms. Zhang Yi 张翼 from Fudan University helped me nurture the incredibly helpful habit of reading primary sources and monographs. My friends – in Canada, the United States, and in China – have shown no detestation when listening to my opinionated words on research projects and unrealistic future plans. The History Honours cohort of Class 2024 has embraced me as a member of a big family. Thank you all; my life has been far less boring than it would have been. I have the fortune to share my projects with my partner and a great listener Zhang Runtan 张润檀, who has tolerated my emotional ups and downs – for example, moments of eureka from the overall arduous process of archival research. I am indebted to my family: my parents Zhou Yanchang 周焱昌 and Feng Yaning 冯亚宁, who have encouraged me to explore my interests and offered countless insightful suggestions for my life path, and my younger brother Zhou Chuyuan 周楚渊, who never stints his brotherly love and shares tiny gifts that he apparently attaches much significance to as a ten-year-old kid. I dedicate this thesis to my grandparents Zhou Yuejie 周月杰 and Zhang Youda 张友达, my living encyclopaedias who witnessed and participated in the making of modern Chinese history, and cultivated my childhood with the seed of passion for the discipline of history. vii 1 Introduction: Extraterritoriality and A Briton’s Disappearance from Shanghai 引言：治外法權與英人自滬失蹤案 On 1 June 1931, British Shanghai expatriate John Thorburn disappeared from Shanghai for adventures in China’s interior. One day later, he had some conflict with Chinese soldiers and died at their hands. During the Chinese National Government’s [國民政府] four-month search for Thorburn’s whereabouts, angry British press commentators accused the Chinese Government of expropriating Thorburn’s right to trial and of being unable to enforce the ‘Rule of Law’. Chinese commentators, meanwhile, criticised the British communities for their condescending insistence on preserving extraterritoriality – a foreign special right that Thorburn possessed and that the Chinese deplored.1 In China’s nationalist rhetoric, foreigners’ special privileges derived from the ‘unequal treaties’ and created an abnormal reality. The unequal treaties were a series of treaties signed between the defeated China and foreigners since the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842, which Britain used to force the Qing Empire to open four ports to international commerce and to cede Hong Kong to the British Empire. Over the following decades, numerous treaty provisions gradually reinforced foreigners’ privileges in China and gave birth to an all-encompassing treaty port system, particularly in cosmopolitan Shanghai – a ‘state within a state’ with foreign-controlled administration, law, taxation, and even military. As China’s Foreign Minister (1928-1931) Wang Zhengting argued in one of his speeches in 1 For a development of the case and overall assessment of the British receptions, see R. A. Bickers, ‘Death of a Young Shanghailander: The Thorburn Case and the Defence of the British Treaty Ports in China in 1931’, Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 2 (May 1996), 271-300. Chinese press reception is in, for example, ‘Enlightened Buddhist Monk’ [覺僧], ‘The Unreasonably Troublesome Thorburn Case’ [無理取鬧之韜朋事件], Central Daily《中央日報》, 1 August 1931, 8. 2 early 1929, five provisions of the treaties were particularly objectionable: foreign control of Chinese Customs, extraterritoriality, settlements and territorial concessions, the stationing of foreign troops, and foreign shipping in inland rivers (especially the Yangzi River).2 Over the eighty years leading up to 1943, thanks to these privileges, foreign residents in China nurtured a collective treaty port identity and a psychological superiority over the Chinese – as best identified by the ‘no Chinese and dogs allowed’ policy in the park of the Huangpu River Bund, which persisted until 1929.3 Chinese nationalists focused their critiques on consular jurisdiction [領事裁判權]. As an extension of extraterritoriality from a diplomatic protocol to the jurisdiction of civilians, consular jurisdiction dictated that foreign defendants were not subject to rulings of Chinese courts, but should be transferred to consular courts for trials according to home laws.4 In Shanghai until 1927, foreign legal counsellors even co-ruled in Chinese courts – known as the ‘Mixed Court’ – when foreigners sued the Chinese.5 As recollected by the China-hand Carl Crow (1884-1945), extraterritoriality offered much convenience for foreign businessmen; they could simply give foreign citizenship to their Chinese workers and thus free the latter from the interference of Chinese authorities.6 Crow’s words were a window to 2 ‘Diplomatic might and the abolition of unequal treaties’ [外交力量與廢除不平等條約], 14 January 1929 (speech at Jinan University, Shanghai), WZTRS, 45-49. 3 See, for example, Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900-1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). In Chinese nationalist myth, the Bund Park had a sign that explicitly wrote down the ‘no Chinese and dogs allowed’ policy. No such sign existed, but the policy was a historical fact. See Robert A. Bickers and Jeffrey A. Wasserstrom, ‘Shanghai’s “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted” Sign: Legend, History and Contemporary Symbol’, The China Quarterly 142 (June 1995): 444-466. 4 See, for example, Yang Peng [楊鵬], ‘Consular Jurisdiction in its Last Struggles’ [最後掙扎中之領事裁判權], Guowen Weekly《國聞週報》 8, no. 17 (4 May 1931): 1-10. 5 For a brief history the Mixed Court in Shanghai, see Pär Kristoffer Cassel, ‘Excavating Extraterritoriality: The “Judicial Sub-Prefect” as a Prototype for the Mixed Court in Shanghai’, Late Imperial China 24, no. 2 (December 2003): 169-180. 6 Carl Crow recognised the legal complications of extraterritoriality in Shanghai, especially when defendants of different nationalities were tried for the same case. Carl Crow, Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2011), 103-105, 113-115. 3 the unceasing Sino-foreign clashes surrounding the right of jurisdiction in and out of China’s treaty ports. This lingering question of extraterritoriality made the Thorburn case matter to both the Chinese and the British. Nationalist conflicts surrounding extraterritoriality extended to officialdom. Between 1929 and 1931, Wang Zhengting pressed for negotiations to abolish extraterritoriality.7 His efforts paralleled the Guomindang’s (GMD) long-time mission to fully recover China’s conceded sovereignty.8 The Party’s proclaimed means to achieve this goal was ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ – a rhetorical claim that envisioned incorporating the power of Chinese nationalism to revolutionarily rewrite Sino-foreign relations, first and foremost by abolishing the unequal treaties. Following the Northern Expedition of 1927-1928 against the Northern warlords, the GMD Wuhan and Nanjing Governments successfully abolished several European Concessions, especially the British ones in Hankou (Hubei Province) and Jiujiang (Jiangxi Province).9 In 1928, directed by Wang Zhengting, Nanjing succeeded in its negotiation-based approach to re-acquire tariff autonomy, which encouraged him to seek the wholesale relinquishment of foreign extraterritoriality.10 Approximately a week after Thorburn disappeared from his Shanghai residence, on 6 June 1931, British Minister to China Miles Lampson exchanged with Wang a draft Sino-British extraterritoriality treaty. The draft treaty did not represent any formal diplomatic 7 Lee En-han [李恩涵], The Nationalist China’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’《 北伐前後的「革命外交」》 (Taipei: ‘Institute of Modern History Archives, Academia Sinica’, 1993), 1-16. 8 The GMD’s interpretations of ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ changed alongside the change of Foreign Ministers. See Lee, The Nationalist China’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’, 1-16. For another survey of the GMD’s foreign policy, see Edmund S.K. Fung, ‘The Chinese Nationalists and the Unequal Treaties 1924-1931’, Modern Asian Studies 21, no. 4 (1987): 793-819. 9 Lee, The Nationalist China’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’, 49-84. By 1929, French and Japanese Concessions remained unabolished, while the German, Russian and British ones were relinquished. See See Li Dijun [李迪俊], ‘Before and after receiving the British Concession in Zhenjiang [鎮江英租界接收之前後], 21 November 1929’, in CDDROC Fifth Volume, 777-778. 10 Lee, The Nationalist China’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’, 85-146. 4 commitment and never came into force. In fact, it did not even dictate the immediate abolition of extraterritoriality. Articles 16 (excluded areas), 21 (treaty duration), and 22 (treaty ratification) remained outstanding obstacles throughout the negotiations, and Chinese nationalists could only obtain the British Legation’s consent with significant compromises. The agreed texts recommended a five-year countdown for British extraterritoriality in Tianjin and a ten-year maximum for that in Greater Shanghai, if subsequent negotiations five years after the treaty’s ratification would fail to go through.11 To make matters worse, 1931 was another turbulent year for the unstable Chinese Republic. Intra-Party dissidents established a separate Government in Guangzhou, the heartland of the GMD, communist guerrillas remained active in inland Jiangxi Province, while the Yangzi River basin suffered a devastating flood, which impacted fifty million people from sixteen provinces and severely damaged the prosperous Hankou city in central China.12 Complicated by these circumstances, the Nanjing Government lacked enough power to enforce proper jurisdiction over foreigners all across China, nor was Britain prepared to cede its subjects’ special legal rights to this unstable regime. These unpromising realities explain why President Chiang Kai-shek was having a tough night in the Nanchang military headquarters for anti-communist operations on 1 August 1931, the exact day when he was debriefed on the Thorburn controversy and his Government’s inability to quiet down the crisis. Both the Chinese and British were expecting 11 Lee En-han claimed that this treaty was initialled, but Lampson’s diaries suggest that this was merely an exchange to record the progress of negotiations. Yet, Lee made a detailed summary of Sino-British extraterritoriality negotiations between 1929 and 1931. See Lee, The Nationalist China’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’, chapter 4. The full text of the Draft Treaty is in ‘Enclosure 3 in No. 458: Draft Extraterritoriality Treaty’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 546-559. 12 ‘Mr. Chiang Kai-shek in Year 20 of the Republic: 1 August’ [民國二十年之蔣中正先生，八月一日], ‘Academia Historica’ 002-060100-00039-001. The most comprehensive history of the Yangzi River disaster is Chris Courtney, The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 5 him to offer a satisfactory – not necessarily impartial – settlement. Chiang initially considered the case to be ‘unconcerning’ [不足為慮], but after consultations with advisors, he changed his mind and ordered another authoritative investigation with his authority.13 An account of Chiang’s daily activities recorded an expressive quote from the President, presumably made after his final decision: Alas, diplomatic bargains must be built upon our country’s strength and stability. Should we be flawless, why would we need to worry about foreigners? Strive, China, strive! 嗚呼，對外交涉，必以吾國自身之強固安定為基本。我苟無瑕，何患外人哉？勉之，勉之。14 The quote demonstrates Chiang and his Government’s problem-solution framework in their practical application of nationalist ‘revolutionary diplomacy’: before addressing the stressing concern over foreigners’ special rights, it was essential first to adopt ‘revolutionary’ cures for China’s own flaws. British accusations of the Chinese Government’s inability to find Thorburn and reinforce the ‘Rule of Law’ hit right at Chiang’s heart, reminding him of why he was compelled to stay in the Jiangxi Headquarters: to eliminate communism and bring central China to the GMD’s governance. For him, the suppression of communist activities was simultaneously a defence of China’s nationalist revolution. Little did Chiang know that, despite their firm attitude at the outset, British officials evaluated the Thorburn case from a similarly self-reflective perspective. Even though the incident perfectly marked the GMD Government’s dysfunction, Miles Lampson gloomily summarised the incident in a telegram to London: ‘The existence of Extraterritoriality did not 13 Telegram (Declassified) from Xu Mo (Nanchang) to Wang Zhengting, Sent 3 August 1931, 16:30, Received 5 August 1931, 7:03, Received No. 22641, IMH Archives (MFA), 11-06-16-13-01-003, 198. 14 ‘Mr. Chiang Kai-shek in Year 20 of the Republic: 1 August’ [民國二十年之蔣中正先生，八月一日], ‘Academia Historica’ 002-060100-00039-001. 6 save Thorburn’s life.’15 For Lampson, there was no need for the British communities to insist on the protection of extraterritoriality from nationalist China. He was prepared to lead the British Empire to gradually accept Chinese ambitions and adapt to the future of full-scale Chinese administration and jurisdiction over foreigners.16 The Thorburn controversy diminished in late October 1931, swept aside by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 18 September. During the negotiations between June and October, despite Chinese diplomats’ initiatives to prove their Government’s administrative competence and British efforts to quiet down public exasperation, as we will see in Chapters II and III, the incident ended with the Nanjing Government’s apology for Thorburn’s maltreatment by the Chinese military. The official note to the British Legation of 20 October reaffirmed China’s determination to ‘maintain the Rule of Law’ [維持近代法意], even though Thorburn’s right to trial was legitimised by extraterritoriality.17 Because of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and Shanghai in 1931 and 1932, respectively, the draft extraterritoriality treaty in June and the Thorburn case were the last hallmarks of Sino-British confrontations concerning foreigners’ treaty privileges in China. The GMD’s initiative for the abolition of extraterritoriality between 1929 and 1931 became an abortive – and, in fact, the last – struggle of its ‘revolutionary diplomacy’. Extraterritoriality survived until 1943 during the Second World War, but at that time, the Japanese occupation of Chinese treaty ports between 1938 and 1940 had already made it pointless for foreigners to keep this special right. 15 Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, No. 1171 (95/20), 13 August 1931, F 4820/3361/10, FO 371/15511. 16 Lee Shih-Der [李仕德], Anglo-Chinese Relations, 1927-1937《英國與中國的外交關係》, (Taipei: ‘Academia Sinica’, 1999), chapter 1. 17 MFA’s note to the British Legation, 20 October 1931, Sent No. 461 (努), IMH Archives (MFA), 11-06-16-13-01-004, 158-160. 7 Japanese and Anglo-Americans voluntarily offered the abolition of extraterritoriality to attract Chinese support for their war efforts.18 This study seeks to respond to two questions: Why do these inconclusive negotiations matter to our understanding of the ‘revolutionary’ climate in the early Nanjing decade (1928-1931)? What can they tell us about the diplomatic culture in Sino-foreign relations? Inspired by the ‘geologist probe’ concept described by the Chinese historian Lloyd Eastman, I regard Sino-British extraterritoriality negotiations between 1929 and 1931 as a core sample to examine the whole strata – the reconstitution of Sino-foreign relations from unequal treaty relations to ‘liberty, equality and reciprocity’ [自由平等].19 Sino-British encounters were important because Britain was the first Empire to enter China in the 1800s, the largest shareholder of imperial interests in China for decades, and a Power in decline that anxiously searched for the best way of imperial retreat. My inquiries start with this diplomatic incident, but I do not attempt to re-narrate the course of negotiations, as scholars Lee En-han [李恩涵] and Lee Shi-der [李仕德] did in the 1990s.20 Instead, since the abolition of extraterritoriality, an issue deeply embedded in foreigners’ daily lives, was a high diplomatic and rhetorical priority of the GMD, I delve into the political thinking of officials towards this complicated issue, that empowered or weakened their achievements in diplomacy. I contend that extraterritoriality negotiations were not a life-or-death struggle between antagonistic Chinese nationalists and British ‘imperialists’ – neither a holistic ‘revolutionary’ 18 Fung, ‘The Chinese Nationalists and the Unequal Treaties 1924-1931’, 819; Wesley R. Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 208-215. 19 Lloyd E. Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution 1937-1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 3-4. 20 Lee, The Nationalist China’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’, chapter 4; Lee, Anglo-Chinese Relations, chapter 2. 8 rejection of foreign privileges, nor an anxious defence of foreign rights from a demanding China. Rather, in a theoretically ‘revolutionary’ China, Chinese and British diplomats both pursued evolutionary, manageable means of diplomacy. Officials’ elitist pragmatism appeared in two trajectories. First, both sides maintained distance from an exasperated public and suppressed bottom-up friction demands from their citizens that conflicted with their own timelines for effecting foreign policy. Second, in working on Sino-British relations, officials on both sides preserved and expanded personal connections, both to foster discussions and to set personal examples of Sino-British amity, which they deemed imperative. The best explanation for the eventual abandonment of the GMD’s ‘revolutionary’ initiative was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 18 September 1931. This study concentrates on the significance of ideological constraints influencing Sino-British relations in the preceding years. Extraterritoriality negotiations between 1929 and 1931 highlight the oxymoronic nature of ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ – revolution is sudden, while diplomacy is incremental and prolonged. Chinese officials’ ambitious proclamations for an overnight ‘revolution’ contrasted with their real pursuit of gradual changes. This ideological inconsistency pointed to their concern for addressing China’s own flaws before seriously containing ‘foreign imperialists’, which compelled nationalist officials to half-heartedly execute their ambitious promises. Their British counterparts were also limited by what they recognised as the inevitability of conforming to the Chinese way – respecting Chinese ambitions and political reality in China – in normalising Sino-British relations. Fortunately for the British, the ‘inevitable’ future did not immediately become a concrete reality; the demise of the GMD initiative saved the British Empire in China from destruction. 9 Lingering Questions About Extraterritoriality Before the Manchurian Incident In his 1993 book, Lee En-Han theorises Wang Zhengting’s negotiation-centred approach to Chinese foreign policy between 1928 and 1931 as ‘mild revolutionary diplomacy’ [溫和的革命外交]. Evolving from the ‘radical’ [激進的] one of 1925-1928 that encouraged popular movements for the unilateral abrogation of unequal treaties, Wang’s ‘mild revolutionary diplomacy’ combined ‘revolutionary spirit’ and suitable respect for his foreign opponents on the negotiation table.21 Lee En-Han’s student Lee Shih-Der builds on the ‘mild revolutionary diplomacy’ and crystallises the story of Sino-British extraterritoriality negotiations from the British perspective. Lee Shih-Der introduces the ‘Lampson principle’ as the executive basis of British China policy between 1926 and 1933, which respected Chinese nationalist aspirations and simultaneously attempted to maximally protect British privileges in China.22 Edmund Fung, in revisiting the GMD’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ between 1925 and 1931, argues that the nationalist initiative failed because of China’s domestic instability – in other words, China’s own flaws.23 Tang Qihua’s [唐啟華] book on the foreign policy of the Beijing Government (1912-1928) argues that foreign diplomacy remained on the whole consistent in Chinese foreign diplomacy when the ruling regime of Republican China switched from the ‘warlordist’ Beijing to the ‘revolutionary’ Nanjing Government.24 21 Lee, The Nationalist China’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’. More specifically, see his introduction. 22 Lee, Anglo-Chinese Relations, chapter 1. 23 Fung, ‘The Chinese Nationalists and the Unequal Treaties 1924-1931’: 793-819. 24 Tang Qihua [唐啟華], Treaty Revision Campaign of the Beijing Government, 1912-1928: Out of the Shadow of the “Abrogation of Unequal Treaties”《被“廢除不平等條約”遮蔽的北洋修約史》, (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press [社會科學文獻出版社], 2019). 10 In all, these studies advocate understanding modern Chinese diplomacy from its political contexts. They carefully revisit the course of negotiations and inductively theorise the diplomatic tactics of both sides. As such, these works have predominantly centred on the descriptive side of diplomatic history, and the substance of negotiations. The ‘Chinese’ and the ‘foreign’ have been mainly regarded as rigid categories, and relatively less attention has been devoted to investigating the intricacies of policymaking within any state, especially the motivations and contestations behind any major policy decision. Lee’s ‘mild revolutionary theory’ and Fung’s focus on China’s domestic instability have succinctly caught the rhetorical and political realities in the early Nanjing decade, but they do not form a coherent picture of two coexisting issues: the mutual reinforcement of political rhetoric and politics in the Guomindang Nanjing Government’s foreign policy. Turan Kayauglu theorises the Western mentality behind the establishment and abolition of extraterritoriality in China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire as ‘legal imperialism’: Western Powers (especially Britain) arrogantly believed in their Westphalian legal positivism and made it a precondition that Eastern states should implant Western law in order to abrogate extraterritoriality.25 Kayauglu’s intellectual framework fails to present the intricacies of Chinese struggles against extraterritoriality except for the adoption of Western law. As Chapters II and III will demonstrate, China’s legal reforms according to the Western system were a premise for China’s abrogation of extraterritoriality, but not a precondition. The ‘legal imperialism’ theory understates China’s autonomy in the interpretation and adoption of foreign law. 25 Turan Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 11 In 1952, Wesley Fishel used his interviews with retired American diplomats to produce a comprehensive English-language survey on the history of extraterritoriality in China, arguing the cross-continental legal differences in motivating the establishment of extraterritoriality and the nationalist political ambition behind Chinese initiatives for its abolition.26 One historiographical focus after Fishel is the ideological foundation and gradual solidification of extraterritoriality. Case studies of criminal cases with foreign involvement in Guangdong Province have traced the roots of extraterritoriality before 1840. Foreigners’ mistrust of imperial China’s legal practices legitimised the making of extraterritoriality after the forced opening of Chinese ports.27 Looking at the Shanghai Mixed Court in the late Qing, Pär Cassel seeks to answer why the Chinese hated extraterritoriality. He demonstrates that extraterritoriality had started as a ‘legal pluralist’ Chinese jurisdictional practice to deal with foreigners, but, with the gradual expansion of foreign rights in China, became distorted to incorporate foreigners’ discrimination of their Chinese neighbours nearby.28 The other focus of the extraterritoriality literature investigates the initiatives to end these legal practices in the late Qing and the Republic, through legal reforms and diplomatic negotiations.29 Many articles also look into the political motives that led to the formal end of 26 Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China. 27 Li Chen, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Other writings include, for example, Joseph Benjamin Askew, ‘Re-Visiting New Territory: The Terranova Incident Re-Examined’, Asian Studies Review 28, no. 4 (December 2004): 351–371; S. P. Ong, ‘Jurisdictional Politics in Canton and the First English Translation of the Qing Penal Code (1810)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 20, no. 2 (April 2010): 141–165. There were efforts to create extraterritoriality in China before 1840. See, for example, Wu Yixiong [吳義雄], ‘The Development and Early Practice of Creating Extraterritoriality in China before the Opium War’ [鴉片戰爭前英國在華治外法權之醞釀與嘗試], Historical Research《歷史研究》, no. 4 (2006): 70-89. 28 Par Cassel, Grounds of Judgement: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). In this book, Cassel also investigates the case of Japan. 29 See, for example, Wang Licheng [王立誠], ‘Britain and the Establishment of “Rule of law” for Sino-Western Trade at the Treaty Ports between the Two Opium Wars’ [英國與近代中外貿易“法治”的建立], Historical Research《歷史研究》, no. 2 (2001): 69-82; Yang Tianhong [楊天宏], ‘The Beiyang Government’s Foreign 12 extraterritoriality in China in 1943. These studies agree on the lack of Chinese initiatives at this stage; instead, Anglo-Americans and Japanese offered the abolition of extraterritoriality to attract Chinese support for their war efforts.30 Scholars have further questioned the true end of extraterritoriality in China, noting its informal continued existence beyond 1943 for some groups, such as American soldiers who were stationed in China and Soviet nationals.31 Scholarship on unequal treaties in modern China has not yet included a coherent survey. Among them, much attention is devoted to foreign territorial entities or leased territories. To name a few examples, Ivan Lee demonstrates the consolidation of the concept of British sovereignty in Hong Kong between 1842 and 1844;32 Maria Carrai utilises the Chinese abrogation of the Belgian Concession in Tianjin in 1926 to suggest the Chinese Government’s capability of enforcing the special Chinese interpretation of international law.33 By examining the personal conflicts between British and Chinese judges in the Shanghai Mixed Court, Motono Eiichi [本野英一] investigates how personal disputes led to the reinforcement of extraterritoriality in China.34 Policy and the Abolition of Extraterritoriality: A Historical Exploration Based on the Extraterritoriality Conference’ Unequal treaties’ [北洋外交與“治外法權”的撤廢——基於法權會議所作的歷史考察], Modern Chinese History Studies《近代史研究》, no. 3 (2005): 83-116. 30 Japan surrendered its extraterritoriality to Chinese puppet states. See, for example, Zhaodong Wang, ‘Reviewing the 1943 Sino-British Treaty Negotiations: The United States’ Role in Ending British Imperialism in China’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 49, no. 5 (August 2021): 964-993; K.C. Chan, ‘The Abrogation of British Extraterritoriality in China 1942-43: A Study of Anglo-American-Chinese Relations’, Modern Asian Studies 11, no. 2 (1977): 257-291. 31 See, respectively, Yanqiu Zheng, ‘A Specter of Extraterritoriality: The Legal Status of U.S. Troops in China, 1943–1947’, Journal of American-East Asian Relations 22 (2015): 17–44; Bruce A Elleman, ‘The End of Extraterritoriality in China: The Case of the Soviet Union, 1917-1960’, Republican China 21, no. 2 (April 1996): 65–89. 32 Ivan Lee, ‘From Reciprocity to Territoriality: Extradition, the Opium War, and the Idea of British Sovereignty in Hong Kong, 1842–44’, Law and History Review 40, no. 3 (August 2022): 437–58. 33 Maria Adele Carrai, ‘China’s Unilateral Abrogation of the Sino–Belgian Treaty: Case Study of an Instance of Deviant Transplantation’, in Chinese Legal Reform and the Global Legal Order: Adoption and Adaptation, (eds.) Yun Zhao and Michael Ng (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 257-277. 34 Motono Eiichi [本野英一], ‘H. A. Giles versus Huang Chengyi: Sino-British Conflict over the Mixed Court, 1884-85’, East Asian History, no. 12 (December 1996): 135–57. 13 While the literature on extraterritoriality and unequal treaties has stressed the influences of Chinese domestic politics on Chinese foreign policy and Sino-foreign relations, another historiographical stream regards unequal treaties as rhetoric that political Parties manipulated to lead, administer, and regulate the Chinese population. In particular, John Fitzgerald’s Awakening China theorises the Chinese pedagogical state, a concept that illuminates the communist and nationalist urges to lead Chinese politics according to official blueprints.35 Dong Wang traces the development of the ‘unequal treaties’ discourse from the late Qing to the end of the Republic, showing the official manipulation of the fluid concept of ‘national humiliation’.36 My study seeks to bridge the two streams of historiography. In the nationalist atmosphere of Republican China, diplomacy and domestic politics mutually informed and reinforced each other; as Chapter III will reveal, this mutual reinforcement was prominent in both Chinese and foreign communities. From ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’ to Pragmatic Incremental Progress Chapter I starts by investigating the Chinese nationalist initiative, exploring the essence of the Nanjing Government’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ by situating the National Government’s two Mandates into the political contexts between 1929 and 1931. Both Mandates, made on 28 December 1929 (the 1929 Mandate) and 4 May 1931 (the 1931 Mandate) respectively, decreed the unilateral abolition of extraterritoriality, yet neither was executed. From the 1929 Mandate and telegrams to the National Government petitioning for the unilateral abolition of 35 John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 36 Dong Wang, China’s Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008). 14 extraterritoriality, currently stored in the ‘Academia Historica’ [國史館] in Taiwan, I will delve into the Nanjing Government’s regulation of nationalist opinions. Then, by examining documents on the National People’s Convention [國民會議] from the Second Historical Archives of China [中國第二歷史檔案館], I explore the Government’s use of political rhetoric, especially anti-communist propaganda, to defend its orthodoxy of revolution before and after the publication of the 1931 Mandate. I argue that both Mandates targeted China’s domestic audiences instead of foreigners, in order to enforce the Nanjing Government’s legitimacy in leading China’s anti-imperialist revolution. Chapter II focuses on China’s Foreign Minister Wang Zhengting, who led China’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ during extraterritoriality negotiations. I first offer a short overview of Wang’s professionalism during the Beiyang period (1912-1928) and China’s progression to an utmost nationalist atmosphere before 1929. Then, drawing on the booklet Wang Zhengting’s Recent Speeches《王正廷近言录》(1933), I explore Wang’s diplomatic worldview and his understanding of the unequal treaties, namely, his obsession with promoting Sino-foreign amity and continuing Chinese legal reforms. Lastly, I assess Wang’s evolutionary approaches to the GMD’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ in Sino-British extraterritoriality negotiations, by looking at Collection of Archival Documents on the History of the Republic of China《中華民國史檔案資料滙編》, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, Second Series, Volume VIII, and British Documents on Foreign Affairs, Part II Series E Vol. 39. These inquiries allow me to reveal the crucial paradox in the Foreign Minister, between his nationalist hatred of foreign privileges and the desire to maintain Sino-foreign relations. This ideological inconsistency pushed his foreign policy – regardless of his 15 professionalism – to reject any resort to the unilateral abolition of any unequal treaty privilege. In Chapter III, I move to the endurers of the Chinese initiative: the British, especially Minister to China Miles Lampson. In addition to the above document collections on Sino-British extraterritoriality negotiations, I rely on the 1931 volume of Diaries of Miles Lampson. Firstly, I revisit Ronald Hyam’s ‘interaction’ model on the decision-making matrix of the British Empire and situate it into the special context of the ‘revolutionary’ early Nanjing decade (1928-1931). Then, I reveal Lampson’s personal importance and his rather concessive policy decisions to the Chinese in governing the British informal Empire in China. Finally, I explain the rationales behind Lampson’s policy decisions, particularly by looking into his special diplomatic circles with Chinese officials and other foreign plenipotentiaries. In all, I seek to reappraise Lampson’s strategic role in the reorientation of Sino-British relations, and more importantly, how he had applied and reinforced his diplomatic mentality in closer alignment with professional diplomats, rather than his fellow nationals, to direct the internal reform of the ageing British Empire in China. Together, the three chapters reappraise Sino-British extraterritoriality negotiations between 1929 and 1931, by examining the different domains of political thinking and their implications. While more archival discoveries await, my findings help to deconstruct the image of monolithic states and introduce the autonomy of the different actors in officialdom. Let us start by exploring the Chinese interpretation of its diplomatic ‘revolution’, by looking at the last teaching of the GMD and Nationalist China’s deceased Premier, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. 16 Chapter I: ‘Long Live the Nanjing National Government!’ Purifying the Anti-Imperialist Revolution 第一章：“南京國民政府萬歲！”整肅反帝革命 At 8 a.m. on 8 May 1931, elected delegates from all professions across China crowded the auditorium of Central University [中央大學] in Nanjing, the capital of the Guomindang (GMD)’s National Government.37 The Chairman intoned the final testament of the Party’s Premier Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) to the delegates who stood in reverent silence: For forty years I have devoted myself to the national revolution for China’s liberty and equality. The forty-year experiences have firmly convinced me that, to attain this goal, we must struggle collaboratively by awakening the people and allying with other nations that treat China with equality. Now the revolution has not succeeded. Our comrades must follow my Plans for National Reconstruction, Fundamentals of National Reconstruction, The Three People’s Principles, and Manifesto of the First National Convention, and strive for their implementation. My recent declarations for convening the National People's Convention and abolishing unequal treaties should be achieved with the least possible delay. The above is my utmost will! 余致力國民革命，凡四十年，其目的在求中國之自由平等。積四十年之經驗，深知欲達到此目的，必須喚起民眾及聯合世界上以平等待我之民族，共同奮鬥。現在革命尚未成功，凡我同志，務須依照余所著《建國方略》、《建國大綱》、《三民主義》及《第一次全國代表大會宣言》，繼續努力，以求貫徹。最近主張開國民會議及廢除不平等條約，尤須於最短期間，促其實現。是所至囑！38 37 Regardless of political turbulences, 436 delegates came to Nanjing for the Convention, including those from Xinjiang, Tibet, and Mongolia. See ‘Report of the first meeting of the Council on Reviewing Delegates’ Qualifications’ [代表資格審查委員會第一次會議審查報告], SHAC 711-1-88. 38 ‘Agenda of the first meeting on the first day of the National People's Convention’ [國民會議第一日第一次議事日程], SHAC 711-1-88. For the news report on Sun Yat-sen’s death with his testament, see, for example, ‘Sun Yat-sen passed away in Beijing’ [孫中山在北京逝世], Shenbao《申報》, 13 March 1925, 5-6. Sun’s testament was dated 25 February 1925, and he died on 12 March 1925. 17 By opening the first and all meetings of the National People’s Convention [國民會議] with a reading of Sun’s testament, the organisers reminded everyone that the Convention was designed in strict accordance with Sun’s revolutionary imagination and the GMD’s blueprint for its execution. A few days later, Convention delegates would motion and pass a declaration to claim China’s nationwide embracement of Sun’s doctrines and the GMD’s leadership.39 Yet, the Convention was not merely a Party assembly; the GMD’s claim for its pedagogical leadership in Chinese politics converged with a concrete political agenda for achieving China’s ‘liberty and equality’ [自由平等]. Since China had remained a unified nation – however nominally, Sun’s successors desired to use the 1931 Convention to reach the second stage of Sun’s vision for the progressive political construction of China: from military tutelage [軍政] to political tutelage [訓政], in preparation for constitutional tutelage [憲政] and electoral democracy.40 39 Interestingly, delegates claimed that they made this motion because the Chinese people were unable to fully understand and sponsor the GMD ideals. See ‘(Motion No. 303) Motion on requesting the Convention to vote to accept all the Premier’s testament and publish a declaration to demonstrate all Chinese people’s voluntarily to accept and humbly execute the Premier’s teachings’ [（提 303）擬請 大會議決接受 總理全部遺教並發表宣言昭告全國民眾一致誠信接受努力實行案], SHAC 711-1-90. 40 The first meeting deliberated the Constitution of the Republic under the period of political tutelage [訓政] and a schedule for developing Chinese industry. ‘Agenda of the first meeting on the first day of the National People's Convention’ [國民會議第一日第一次議事日程], SHAC 711-1-88. The Constitution was then passed in the fourth meeting on 12 May. It dictated that the constitutional tutelage would start once over half of Chinese provinces have achieved mature regional autonomy; ‘Constitution of the Republic of China during the Political Tutelage’ [中華民國訓政時期約法], SHAC 711-1-89. 18 Figure I: Auditorium of Central University (now Southeastern University [東南大學]) in Nanjing, photograph taken by the author on 7 January 2024. Unfortunately, few, even the most optimistic observers, were able to earnestly believe in Nanjing’s rhetoric without reservation. Unceasing political and military rivalries had failed to offer the important premise of stability before imagining the vision laid out by Sun Yat-sen, the ‘Father of the Nation’ [國父].41 The National People’s Convention in May was not truly ‘national’, and even the GMD – suspected of transforming the Convention into another Party assembly – was on the edge of another internal divide. After Chiang Kai-shek imprisoned Hu Hanmin (1879-1936) – a potential successor to Sun Yat-sen – on 28 February, all the anti-Chiang factions united in Guangzhou to publicly criticise Chiang’s dictatorial ambition and boycott the Convention for its sponsorship by the Nanjing Government.42 A minor episode that was overshadowed by the political controversies was the publication of a Mandate on 4 May (the 1931 Mandate), decreeing the unilateral abolition of 41 For Sun’s vision and his struggles, see Fitzgerald, Awakening China, chapter 2. 42 Jin Yilin [金以林], Factional Politics in the High Ranks of the Guomindang: The Establishment of Jiang Jieshi’s Position as the “Most Superior Leader” 《國民黨高層的派系政治：蔣介石“最高領袖"地位的確立》, (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2016), 149-168. 19 extraterritoriality on 1 January 1932.43 At the outset, this move indicates that Nanjing was determined to achieve both of Sun’s goals – holding the National People’s Convention and the abolition of unequal treaties – on a symbolically important date in China’s nationalist politics. On the same day in 1919, driven by their resentment against the continued foreign enjoyment of treaty rights after China’s victory in the First World War, furious students demonstrated against the Beijing Foreign Ministry, which they claimed to be controlled by the ‘traitorous Beiyang warlords’. However, the 1931 Mandate did not much bother Nanjing’s British counterparts. As the British Minister has judged, it was a ‘smart’ political move, targeting more of China’s domestic audiences instead of foreigners.44 Lampson’s diagnosis was probably correct, but it did not comprehensively respond to some other questions: Why was Nanjing focusing on domestic audiences? How did the 1931 Mandate tell us about the GMD Government’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ throughout the course of extraterritoriality negotiations? I argue that the Nanjing Government’s foremost obsession was to pursue a purist ‘anti-imperialist revolution’ [反帝革命], which converged its desire for achieving Party hegemony with China’s revolutionary dream for abolishing the unequal treaties. Before the relinquishment of these treaty rights, it was essential to address China’s own flaws, which the GMD implemented as expanding Party dictatorship through the excuse of diplomacy, and suppressing ongoing domestic insurgencies that contested Nanjing’s orthodoxy in leading China’s nationalist revolution. The two means for the ‘revolution’ proved the manipulation of 43 ‘Order of the National Government [國民政府令], 4 May 1931’, Gazette of the National Government《國民政府公報》, no. 764, 1-2, 13. 44 ‘No. 419: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 6 May 1931’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 515-516. 20 the diplomatic rhetoric by Nanjing officials, who even forgave foreigners’ continued resistance against the Chinese drives against extraterritoriality. To approach Chinese foreign policy from the perspective of domestic politics, this chapter situates itself within the rich scholarship on the GMD’s administration. In his The Abortive Revolution, Lloyd Eastman uses an ‘autonomy model’ to argue the GMD regime’s self-centrism and its eventual failure to achieve China’s ‘revolution’ with coercion.45 While Eastman makes little reference to autonomous interest groups who also impacted the GMD leadership, his observations are repeatedly echoed by scholarly inquiries into the GMD’s multi-dimensional tutelage of Chinese civil and political lives.46 Wang Qisheng [王奇生] investigates the GMD’s flaws with organisational and ideological design, and why these two issues led to the Party’s quick corruption during the Nanjing decade.47 Building on Wang, Jin Yilin [金以林] elaborates on the unceasing factional struggles within the Guomindang, 45 Lloyd Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927-1937 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). 46 Some challenges to Eastman’s theory are Joseph Fewsmith, ‘Response to Eastman’, Republican China 9, no. 2 (February 1984): pp. 19-27; Joseph Fewsmith, Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China: Merchant Organisations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890-1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 1-16; Bradley Geisert, ‘Probing KMT Rule: Reflections on Eastman’s “New Insights”, Republican China 9, no. 2 (February 1984): 28-39. Parkes Coble seconded Eastman’s argument by evaluating the Government’s desire to control Chinese finances. Parkes M. Coble Jr. The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927-1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Debates surrounding Eastman’s theory were also relevant to the civil society debate in modern Chinese historiography. See Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, ‘The Ambiguous Challenge of Civil Society’, in Civil Society in China, (eds.) Timothy Brook and B. Michael Frolic, (London: Routledge, 1997), 3-18. The following notes point to some influential scholarships that have contributed to the discussion. See Frederic Wakeman Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labour (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Janet Y. Chen, Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900–1953 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Also, refer to the book on Sino-Japanese relations and the GMD’s anti-Japanese boycotts in Donald A. Jordan, Chinese Boycotts versus Japanese Bombs: The Failure of China’s “Revolutionary Diplomacy,” 1931-32 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991); yet the book’s arguments are refrained by source unavailability. 47 Wang Qisheng [王奇生], Party Members, Party Power, and Party Struggle: Organisational Pattens of the Guomindang between 1924 and 1949《黨員、黨權與黨爭：1924-1949年國民黨的組織形態》, (Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House [上海書店出版社], 2003). 21 among Chiang Kai-shek, Hu Hanmin, and Wang Jingwei, for the legitimacy to inherit Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary legacies as the succeeding charismatic leader of the entire China. His research carefully navigates Nanjing’s factional struggles and political chaos between 1929 and 1931, especially surrounding the National Conference in May 1931.48 This chapter evaluates the 1931 Mandate and its predecessor, the 1929 Mandate made on 28 December 1929; both decreed China’s unilateral abolition of extraterritoriality, yet neither was executed. From the 1929 Mandate, I examine telegram protests from officials and civil society groups to the National Government that urged the unilateral relinquishment of extraterritoriality. I then situate the 1931 Mandate in the context of the National People's Convention, especially the Nanjing Government’s defamation of its political rivals. A holistic reading of the Mandates and their political contexts helps show the Nanjing Government’s attempts to expand its hegemony and defend its legitimacy to represent the entirety of a revolutionary China. The 1929 Mandate and Nationalist Discourse in China On 28 December 1929, the National Government announced its 1929 Mandate, instructing local governments to enforce the unilateral abolition of extraterritoriality from the first day of 1930 (Appendix I), while ‘responsible departments’ should begin drafting ‘relevant regulations for foreigners’.49 This move hardly convinced anyone of the GMD’s determination. Political turbulence and communication delays aside, three days were far too short a notice for any local government to be prepared to execute such an important legal edict; nor did Chinese courts possess any adequate regulation to be cited when enforcing 48 Jin, Factional Politics in the High Ranks of the Guomindang. 49 Full text of this 1929 Mandate is in ‘Order of the National Government [國民政府令], 28 December 1929’, ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00001-029. 22 Chinese law over foreigners. The Mandate became another example of Nanjing making a promise it could not achieve. In the Second Historical Archives of China [中國第二歷史檔案館] and the ‘Academia Historica’ [國史館] in Taiwan, few documents have survived (or have been declassified) to convincingly explain the Government’s puzzling move. I would speculate that the short-term goal was reputational. The Party had not meant to seriously enforce Chinese jurisdiction over foreigners starting just a few days after the announced policy change. Instead, the 1929 Mandate was part of a grand scheme of Party propaganda to publicise the Party-state’s ‘anti-imperialist’ commitment to the Chinese public. Two days before the formal announcement of the Mandate, on 26 December, the GMD Central Executive Committee passed a resolution proposed by the Propaganda Department [宣傳部], instructing all local Party branches to organise popular movements [民眾運動] against extraterritoriality on 1 January 1930.50 It expected that these actions might ‘call on all people across the nation to be the backers of the Government’s diplomatic actions [喚起全國民眾為政府交涉之後盾]’.51 Paralleling the proclaimed spirits in the ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ rhetoric, the 1929 Mandate and relevant propaganda plans sought to incite and coordinate a mass national response to foreign extraterritoriality, presumably through the contrast between 50 In China’s Leninist states, namely, the Guomindang and Communist Governments, ‘propaganda’ does not carry the negative connotation as in the English context. The ‘Propaganda Department’ serves for conveying the most recent messages from the central Government to the Chinese people. 51 CEC to National Government, No. 692 (Chang 常), 28 December 1929, ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00001-027. 23 the Party’s promised ‘revolutionary’ futures and ongoing ‘imperialist violations [帝國主義侵略]’ of China’s sovereignty. That is why the extraterritoriality issue should matter to a patriotic Chinese revolutionary. The more striking feature across these official correspondences was the Government’s Party-centric obsession, stressing the necessity of directing GMD’s top-down, hierarchical leadership in directing diplomatic or popular movements to foster the abolition of extraterritoriality. As the resolution outlined, across China’s localities, Party branches were responsible for convening all the political, military, and civil organisations for popular movements and publicising the poison of extraterritoriality with propaganda teams [宣傳隊], proceeding within the frames outlined by Nanjing’s Central Propaganda Department. The same instruction to reinforce Party leadership was also transmitted along the civil wing of the Nanjing Government.52 Notwithstanding officially condoned depictions of ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ as a violent duel between the Chinese people and foreign imperialists, foreign policy was determined through negotiated compromises between the GMD and foreign Governments. Since 1928, Nanjing had already promised foreign Powers that China would continue to enforce existing treaties, regardless of the aspiration for their eventual abolition.53 Even so, to defend the proclaimed official sympathy for anti-imperialism, Nanjing maintained a communicative bridge with popular revolutionary demands. Between 1929 and 1931, the National Government received telegrams that criticised foreigners’ arrogance and advocated an immediate, ‘revolutionary’ abolition of extraterritoriality. The table below 52 Minister of Interior Yang Zhaotai to National Government (Secret), Unnumbered, 30 December 1929, ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00001-030. 53 ‘No. 7: The National Government’s declaration to abolish past treaties [國民政府廢除舊約宣言]’, CADHROC Vol. 5 Issue 1: Diplomacy, 33-34. 24 (Figure II) summarises the backgrounds of these telegrams’ senders, based on the surviving and declassified files stored under the ‘National Government’ fond at the ‘Academia Historica’ in Taiwan: Figure II: Table of the Identities of Telegram Petitioners who Advocated the Abolition of Extraterritoriality 1929 (total: 9)1 1930 (total: 3)2 1931 (total: 35)3 Chambers of Commerce 2 0 55 Societies for Abolishing Unequal Treaties 1 1 3 Party Branches4 3 0 18 Provincial Governments 0 1 1 Other Societies 3 1 8 1. From the volume ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00001. 2. From the volume ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00001. 3. From the volumes ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00002, 001-064410-00003, 001-064410-00004. 4. This category includes overseas branches and GMD branches in localities and military headquarters. 5. Two were from overseas chambers formed by Chinese migrants. These telegram protests do not represent a national Chinese ‘public opinion’. First, they over-represented the metropolitan areas. In contrast to the numerous telegrams from bourgeois cities and their prosperous civil societies, such as the Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, few came from agrarian suburbs. Even the only one from a Peasants’ Association did not appear to fully represent farmers’ view; compiled with a similarly-worded telegram from a union at the same prefecture, that petition of ‘peasants’ might have been heavily informed by the local Party branch.54 Second, around half of these petitions came from Party branches and Government officials, which meant they were essentially an extension of communications within officialdom. Third, the unequally distributed proportions of telegrams over the three 54 The peasant association was from Tongshan Prefecture in Jiangsu (nowadays in Xuzhou city). See Union of Coolies [杠運職業工會] and Peasant Association of Tongshan Prefecture to National Government, 6 May 1931, ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00004-031, 001-064410-00004-030. 25 years suggest the limited autonomy of their senders, as they paralleled Nanjing’s diplomatic moves over the extraterritoriality question: the first mention of the relinquishment in 1929, a relatively quiet 1930, and a more dramatic 1931.55 Most of the telegrams from 1931 came before and after the National People’s Convention in May, probably to meet the Convention’s propaganda goals. Regardless, these telegrams suggest the penetration of radical nationalist sentiments, at least those among local elites, of the Party’s propaganda. Around early April 1931, petitions (eleven of all) homed in on France for its unwillingness to open negotiations on the abolition of extraterritoriality.56 From Party Headquarters to the Commercial Chambers and from Chaha’er Province in the North to Guangxi in the South, senders’ divergent identities imply that the French resistance to the abolition of extraterritoriality was understood and detested throughout China.57 Even though petitioners cautiously framed their protests according to formulaic languages that centred the leadership of the GMD, such as a vague proclamation of the people’s determination to ‘act as powerful backers of the Government’ [作政府有力後盾], the existence of these telegrams points out to another mindset of Chinese revolutionaries under GMD reign: the GMD was the most effective – indeed, the only – instrument in executing national revolution and containing resistant foreign Powers.58 In other words, in their reminders for the Government to ‘boldly execute revolutionary 55 Lee, The Nationalist China’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’, 85-146. 56 See, for example, the first of these telegrams in registry in No. 51: Special Commissioner on Party Affairs of Chaha’er Province to National Government, Received in Registry 25 March 1931, ‘Academia Historica’, 001-064410-00002-007. 57 See, for example, No. 62: President Lin Kanghou et. al of National Association of Chambers of Commerce to National Government, Received in Registry 4 April 1931, ‘Academia Historica’, 001-064410-00002-029; No. 63: Party Reorganisation Committee of Guangxi Province to National Government, Received in Registry 4 April 1931, ‘Academia Historica’, 001-064410-00002-026. 58 No. 100: The GMD Directive Committee of Party Affairs in Xinfan Prefecture, Sichuan Province to National Government, Received in Registry 1 May 1931, ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00004-020. 26 diplomacy’ [厲行革命外交], petitioners assert to importance of the Government over and over again.59 Stories surrounding the 1929 Mandate and China’s nationalist opinions between then and the 1931 Mandate, therefore, were coherent to the longer story of Nanjing’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’. The Party was hardly hesitant in its top-down leadership of foreign policy, and the penetration of diplomatic rhetoric into earning the means and legitimacy of ruling the entirety of China. Telegrams to the National Government were not close to an authentic ‘national’ opinion, yet they reaffirm the influence of the GMD’s abolition of extraterritoriality rhetoric in shaping China’s nationalist discourses. As we will see in the 1931 Mandate and the National People’s Convention, the Nanjing Government anxiously fought to contain some tougher political rivals – intra-Party rebels in Guangzhou and communist guerrillas in Jiangxi, neither of which were willing to accept Nanjing’s (or even GMD) authority in leading China’s revolution. Handling Domestic Rivals The GMD published its 1931 Mandate on 4 May (Appendix II), one day before the opening ceremony of the National People’s Convention.60 Again, it decreed the unilateral abolition of extraterritoriality on the first day of 1932, but this time Nanjing appeared to be more prepared for its enforcement. The new Mandate comprised twelve regulations that specified the Chinese jurisdiction over foreigners (Appendix III), claiming that the Legislative Yuan [立法 59 No. 20: The Capital’s Society for Fostering the Abolition of Unequal Treaties to National Government, 6 November 1929, ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00001-019. 60 For the opening ceremonies, especially the delegates’ visit to the Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum in Nanjing’s Purple Mountain, see ‘May 5 and May 6’, IMHROC: Year 1931. 27 院] outlined these clauses according to the spirit of the 1929 Mandate.61 In other words, via the phrasing of the 1931 Mandate, Nanjing wanted to show that the 1931 Mandate was a supplementary amendment to the 1929 one that incorporated suitable provisions for Chinese courts to rule over foreigners. Theoretically, it would make up for the legal gap in China’s determination to bring about the relinquishment of extraterritoriality after months of drafting legal articles. Yet, Britain refused to follow Nanjing’s legal rationale. Lampson attached so little importance to it that he did not even circulate its text back to the Foreign Office.62 As an insider to negotiations with the National Government, Lampson diagnosed that the twelve regulations enclosed in the Mandate did not go beyond any of the tentative agreements between him and China’s Foreign Minister.63 The British Minister kept warning London of China’s possible resorting to the unilateral abolition of extraterritoriality, but his claims rested more on the fear of the explosion of Chinese nationalist anger, rather than the faith in China’s preparedness in executing ‘Rule of Law’.64 Was Lampson imposing an unjust judgement on the Nanjing Government? The long gap between December 1929 and May 1931 – the respective dates of the two Mandates’ publication – demanded justification from Nanjing, not to mention that the twelve regulations hardly departed from previously agreed provisions in Sino-British negotiations. The 1929 Mandate was ambiguous; it even failed to identify which were the ‘responsible departments’ 61 ‘Order of the National Government [國民政府令], 4 May 1931’, Gazette of the National Government《國民政府公報》, no. 764, 1-2, 13. 62 This is probably why the Mandate had no English translation in relevant FO volumes. The FO thus diagnosed the Chinese intent to reach ‘amicable arrangements’ with foreign Powers. Enclosure: Memorandum for the Prime Minister, in Lampson (on tour) to FO, No. 72 Immediate, 6 May 1931, F 2524/34/10, FO 371/15459. 63 See paragraphs 43-45 in ‘No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931’, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 580-581. 64 See, for example, No. 414: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 1 May 1931, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 511-512. 28 in drafting the regulations (Appendix I). In contrast, before the publication of the 1931 Mandate, relevant deliberation and legislative processes moved quickly and were completed within ten days. In late April 1931, the GMD Central Executive Committee reviewed and revised the twelve regulations submitted by the MFA. The former then distributed these articles to the Legislative Yuan for final review and publication.65 All these inconsistencies – between the ambition and practices and between the making of the 1929 and 1931 Mandates – make it hard to let go of the suspicion of the National Government’s sincerity in truly pursuing a unilateral abolition of extraterritoriality. It seems that they were compelled to resort to another Mandate in 1931 during the period of political distress with the dissenting Guangzhou faction, in order to prove its ability to turn the deceased Premier’s testament into concrete practices. The National People’s Convention, held right after the publication of the Mandate, was a tough forum to reclaim the GMD’s nationalist revolution. Meeting minutes suggest that the Convention carried the Government’s vision for directing China’s necessary reforms, such as those in infrastructure and taxation, to ameliorate the Chinese people’s well-being.66 Yet, public reception of the Convention was the most positive in Chinese localities where the Government’s control was the strongest. In Nanjing’s neighbourhood provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui, pre-Convention elections were smooth and suggested local optimism 65 See the enclosed drafts and communications in GMD CEC Political Meeting to the National Government, 6 May 1931, ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00004-007. In fact, more specific revisions of the Mandate’s contents were achieved by the MFA’s Treaty Revision Council (to be briefly discussed in Chapter II). See ‘The sixtieth meeting of the Treaty Revision Council, on 23 April 1931’ [條約委員會第六十次會議，於二十年四月廿三日], IMH Archives (MFA), 11-10-01-07-004, 74-77; ‘The sixty-first meeting of the Treaty Revision Council, on 30 April 1931 [條約委員會第六十一次會議，於二十年四月卅日]’, IMH Archives (MFA), 11-10-01-07-005, 5-8. 66 See, for example, ‘Programme for Constructing National Infrastructure’ [實業建設程序案] in ‘Minutes of the First Meeting of the National People’s Convention’ [國民會議第一次會議議事紀錄], SHAC 711-1-88. 29 for China’s eventual achievement of electoral democracy. But for those provinces and municipalities on the margins of Nanjing’s tutelage, such as the newly-conquered Beijing, Tianjin and the rebelling Guangdong, bribery, local sanction, and Party manipulation of the electorate reigned.67 Throughout the Convention between 5 and 17 May, aggregating political instability within the Party resulted in more explicit crossfire between Nanjing and Guangzhou factions. Convention sessions passed official-inspired resolutions to denounce Southern rebels, and then helplessly witnessed the resignations of Cantonese statesmen from the Nanjing Government.68 The People’s Convention ended with the Government’s increasing inability to protect its name for being ‘popular’. Nanjing thus set about propagandising the Government’s capability of leading the ‘national revolution’ and defaming political dissidents. Right in the first meeting of the National People’s Convention, delegates praised China’s soldiers and reiterated the country’s three national armies: warlords, imperialists, and communist ‘red bandits’ [赤匪]. Interestingly, even though extraterritoriality negotiations and other Party propaganda had repeatedly reaffirmed the ongoing imperialist intrusion of Chinese sovereignty, the telegram downplayed the threat of warlords and imperialism and focused on communist rebellions, on 67 The British Consulate-General in Nanjing has produced and circulated a report on the Convention’s public receptions (mainly on pre-Convention elections), agenda, interesting motions, and effects; ‘Enclosure 2 in No. 1: Report on the People’s Convention, 5 to 17 May 1931’, in Lampson to Henderson, No. 789 (29/2U), 4 June 1931, F 3837/69/10, FO 371/15473. 68 The most noted Government members who resigned were Sun Ke (son of Sun Yat-sen) and Wang Chonghui. British reports said that, during the fourth session, all delegates from Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces returned home, yet there is no remarkable difference in head counts of meeting minutes of the Convention; see in ‘Enclosure 3 in No. 1: Summary of the Sessions of the Convention’, in Lampson to Henderson, No. 789 (29/2U), 4 June 1931, F 3837/69/10, FO 371/15473. In the sixth meeting of the Convention, delegates incidentally motioned and passed to draft two declarations in the name of the Convention for the Guangzhou faction: one declaring the national promotion of unification and peaceful construction; the other directly denouncing General Chen Jitang (in Guangzhou) and requesting him to defend national unification with repentance. See ‘Minutes of the Sixth Meeting of the National People’s Convention’ [國民會議第六次會議議事紀錄], SHAC 711-1-90. 30 the rationale that the other two issues had already been mitigated by the Northern Expedition in 1927 to 1928.69 In other words, among the three national armies, only anti-communism was the Nanjing Government’s life-or-death struggle. Communist phobia was a defining characteristic of the paranoid Nanjing decade; even the missing Briton John Thorburn died because the Chinese military wrongly identified him as a Soviet-Russian bandit attempting to sabotage China’s railroad.70 On 12 April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek executed a bloody ‘purification’ [清黨] campaign from Shanghai, in which he purged numerous communists who had joined the GMD for Sun Yat-sen’s inter-Party cooperation, and even left-wing Party members. Yet, the purge had never eliminated communism from China, which pushed Nanjing to move further along its defamation of communists. In the Convention’s fourth meeting on 12 May, unsurprisingly, delegates passed a report on the Government’s extermination of ‘red bandits’. The report claimed that the communists had ‘committed countless crimes, including burning houses down, killing, raping, and robbing civilians’ [焚殺淫掠，罪惡卓著], so that the ‘red bandit problem’ was the most urgent affair for the National Government to rescue the ‘New China’ [新中國].71 69 In other words, warlordism and imperialism were China’s pressing concern before the Norther Expedition, but afterwards and specifically in 1931, the two issues were less compelling when compared to communis activities. See ‘Telegram Appreciating the Services of Nationwide Soldiers’ [慰勞全國將士電], in ‘Minutes of the First Meeting of the National People’s Convention’ [國民會議第一次會議議事紀錄], SHAC 711-1-88. 70 'Railway gendarmes courageously chased bandits: reason for the gunshot in the night’s Zhengyi Station’ [鐵路憲兵奮勇追匪⋯正儀車站黑夜槍聲之由來], Wuxian ribao《吳縣日報》, 3 June 1931, reproduced in IMH Archives (MFA), 11-06-16-13-01-004, 115. 71 Report on the National Government’s suppression of red bandits [國民政府剿滅赤匪報告], 12 May 1931, SHAC 711-1-89. Interestingly, in the Convention’s warning to Chen Jitang in Guangzhou, it advocated Chen and Guangzhou statesmen to drop the rebellion to together suppress the most urgent ‘red bandit’ issue. See ‘Telegram of warning for Chen Jitang’ [警告陳濟棠電], in ‘Minutes of the Seventh Meeting of the National People’s Convention’ [國民會議第七次會議議事紀錄], SHAC 711-1-91. 31 The unconventional part of the report was its linking of communism to Chinese nationalist anger against unequal treaties. ‘The reason for red bandits to take the responsibility of sabotaging the lives of the New China is the instigation of red imperialism’ [夫赤匪之所以自任毀壞新中國生命之責任，實受赤色帝國主義之唆使]. Through such language, Nanjing aimed to convey to the Chinese people why anti-communism mattered to anti-imperialism.72 With reference to the Sino-Soviet tension in 1929 over the Central-Eastern Railway in Manchuria, Convention reports argued that Chinese communism was a part of the broader scheme of ‘red imperialism’ [赤色帝國主義], to trigger domestic riots and thus offer opportunities for the Soviet ‘imperialist’ and ‘militarist’ expansion into China’s peripheral provinces.73 Reports continued to argue that, the subsequent chaos would lead to ‘economic panic in Euro-American countries and bankruptcy of industry and commerce’ [歐美各國之經濟恐慌與工商業之倒閉], resulting in ‘sacrifices of the Chinese nation for the Euro-American countries to vent their anger with that excuse’ [以中國民族作犧牲，以供彼時歐美各國逞憤泄怨之資].74 72 See, for example, the GMD-approved defectors’ declarations to openly criticise Chinese communism in Joseph W. Esherick, ‘The CCP in the 1930s: The View from Defectors’ Declarations [脫離共黨宣言]’, The PRC History Review 2, No. 2 (April 2017): 1-6. 73 These regions implied Xinjiang, Mongolia, and North-eastern provinces (Manchuria). As the reports have claimed, the riots almost destroyed inland provinces of Jiangxi and Hunan. See Report on the National Government’s suppression of red bandits [國民政府剿滅赤匪報告], 12 May 1931, SHAC 711-1-89; ‘Report of the Review Committee for the Report on the Extermination of Red Bandits [剿滅赤匪報告審查委員會審查報告]’, SHAC 711-1-90. 74 Report on the National Government’s suppression of red bandits [國民政府剿滅赤匪報告], 12 May 1931, SHAC 711-1-89. 32 As Chiang Kai-shek would himself establish in the theory of ‘defending against foreigners requires first suppressing domestic problems’ [攘外必先安內] in two months, Chinese communists, being manipulated by foreign ‘red imperialists’, were indeed producers of China’s own flaws and traitors to China’s ‘revolution’. Thus, in Party propaganda, communists impeded the Government’s efforts to abolish extraterritoriality and unequal treaties, destroyed local economies, and, more importantly, hindered China’s unification – a crucial step towards democracy and modernity.75 In this narrative, communists were deprived of their status as one portion of the ‘Chinese people’, who ought to be faithful proponents of Nanjing’s hegemonic utopia. Statements concerning the ‘Euro-American countries’ [歐美各國] in the GMD’s anti-communist propaganda divulged Nanjing’s ideological paradox in its uncertain definition of ‘foreign imperialism’. Ironically, the often denounced Euro-American Powers – major possessors of the extraterritorial privilege in China – seemed not to matter and even represented the morally right side. The Convention’s second anti-communist report offered a rationale for this preference: instead of learning communist thoughts, the Chinese people needed to ‘nurture faith in Chinese spiritual civility and modern scientific civilisation’ [建立（...）對中國固有精神文明與近代科學文明之信仰] and construct a mature capitalist 75 ‘Declaration to all Chinese nationals on suppressing domestic problems before defending foreigners [吿全國同胞一致安內攘外書]’, 23 July 1931, https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E5%91%8A%E5%85%A8%E5%9C%8B%E5%90%8C%E8%83%9E%E4%B8%80%E8%87%B4%E5%AE%89%E5%85%A7%E6%94%98%E5%A4%96%E6%9B%B8. Also, see the ways to ‘suppress domestic problems’ [安內] in ‘Report of the Review Committee for the Report on the Extermination of Red Bandits’ [剿滅赤匪報告審查委員會審查報告], SHAC 711-1-90. 33 system before tackling with ‘rich Western capitalism’ [西方雄厚資本主義], to achieve which China needed to actively follow and learn from the Euro-American countries.76 In that sense, Nanjing’s ‘anti-imperialist revolution’ had an internal hierarchy; the ‘Euro-American imperialists’ were less of a threat than the ‘red imperialists’. Contrary to its intolerance of domestic political rivals, Nanjing expected an impossible peaceful revolution for Western foreigners, where desires to abolish treaty privileges and to construct reciprocal relations coexisted with concerns about international perceptions [國際觀瞻] of China’s moves.77 With that premise, Nanjing presented the threat of the communists as coming from what it feared: the Euro-American countries’ anger. In the fifth meeting of the National People’s Convention, delegates discussed the declaration on the abolition of unequal treaties [廢除不平等條約宣言].78 This document reaffirmed the merging of domestic politics and diplomacy by the Nanjing Government. As one would expect, it depicted the backers of the ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ as ‘all Chinese nationals who bear in mind the Three People’s Principle’ [吾服膺三民主義之全國國民].79 76 ‘Report of the Review Committee for the Report on the Extermination of Red Bandits’ [剿滅赤匪報告審查委員會審查報告], SHAC 711-1-90. 77 In fact, Nanjing also expected to reach peaceful resolutions with the Soviets over the recent crisis, namely, by purchasing the railway concerned from Soviet occupation. See, for example, ‘Review Report of the Review Committee on Foreign Affairs: No 2 ‘[外交審查委員會審查報告：第二號], SHAC 711-1-91. 78 The Declaration was initialled based on an incidental motion of 102 delegates, requesting the National Government to bargain with the foreign Powers to cancel the unequal treaties in a fixed time limit and publish the declaration in the name of the National People’s Convention. See ‘Minutes of the Second Meeting of the National People’s Convention’ [國民會議第二次會議議事紀錄], SHAC 711-1-88. The Declaration was then passed in the final (eighth) session. See ‘Minutes of the Eighth Meeting of the National People’s Convention’ [國民會議第八次會議議事紀錄], SHAC 711-1-91. 79 Draft on the Declaration on the abolition of unequal treaties [廢除不平等條約宣言草案], 13 May 1931, SHAC 711-1-90. 34 In contrast to its slandering of domestic dissidents, the Government further expressed its utmost optimism in the declaration on the abolition of unequal treaties, relying on foreign Governments’ voluntary surrender of treaty rights. The declaration envisioned a friendly international atmosphere that would emerge after China’s nationalist revolution. It proclaimed that the people of the foreign Powers widely affirmed the legitimacy of Chinese hatred of the unequal treaties; only their stubborn foreign Governments stood in the way.80 This diagnosis paralleled Sun’s testament to ‘ally with other nations that treat China with equality’. But both the Thorburn case and Chapter III show that the declaration was wrong; at least on the British side, the more stubborn parties were the citizens, not the authorities.81 In claiming an imagined Sino-foreign harmony, Nanjing’s seemingly-anti-imperialist propaganda, in fact, revealed its commitment to following standards raised by ‘foreign imperialists’. It proposed three specific reasons to justify China’s antagonism against the ‘unequal treaties’. First, there was the rebus sic stantibus (fundamental change of circumstances) principle in the Chinese context: the circumstances in which the ‘unequal treaties’ were signed decades ago no longer applied to the ‘new China’. Second, the ‘unequal treaties’ did not match Article XIX of the Covenant of the League of Nations, of which China was a faithful member.82 Third, the ‘unequal treaties’ became an excuse for foreign Powers to interfere in Chinese domestic affairs, and the ‘new China’ was determined to ‘make improvements’ to construct China’s own system according to international legal standards.83 All three reasons suggested Nanjing’s modernist agenda, one that merged the subtle 80 Draft on the Declaration on the abolition of unequal treaties [廢除不平等條約宣言草案], 13 May 1931, SHAC 711-1-90. 81 Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders’: 161-211. 82 For Article XIX of the Convenant, see ‘The Covenant of the League of Nations’, The Avalon Project of Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp. 83 Draft on the Declaration on the abolition of unequal treaties [廢除不平等條約宣言草案], 13 May 1931, SHAC 711-1-90. 35 recognition of foreigners’ legitimacy in accusing China’s own flaws, the anxious expectation for foreign Powers to recognise China’s reconstitutions led by the new nationalist regime, and the resentment against foreigners’ constant denials of China’s progress. The Demise of the GMD’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’ The National Government’s declaration to all Chinese nationals on 23 September 1931, published five days after Japan invaded Manchuria, parallels the essential characteristics of Nanjing’s interpretation of ‘revolutionary diplomacy’. It was a wholesale rejection of the resort to force, even when confronting foreign violation of Chinese sovereignty – jurisdictional or territorial: ‘[The Government] has already instructed all Chinese military to avoid conflicts with the Japanese army; similarly, all nationals are to keep an unruffled attitude’ [已嚴格命令全國軍隊，對日軍避免衝突，對於國民亦一致告誡，務必維持嚴肅鎮靜之態度]. However trying the circumstances, China’s foremost commitment was to a modernist international morality, which, ironically, was just then being violated by foreign imperialists: ‘The Government has strictly instructed all localities to carefully protect Japanese nationals in China because it is an obligation of a civilised country’ [對於在華日僑，政府亦嚴令各地方管理妥慎保護，此為文明國家應有之責任]. Nanjing gambled on foreigners’ recognition of China’s righteousness, forbearance, and willingness to humbly promote Chinese interests, either the removal of extraterritoriality or the defence of Manchuria: ‘[The Government] deeply believes that, after a fair investigation of this incident, the League of Nations will fulfil its duties and offer us adequate justice and proper remedies’ [深信此次事件，苟經一公平之調查，國聯本其應有之職責，必能與我以充分之公道， 36 及合理之補救]. Meanwhile, the announcement reiterated the necessity of Nanjing’s hegemony in leading China’s defence: ‘All Chinese nationals should realise that the defence against foreign aggression is impossible without supporting national unity. It is forbidden to shake the Central Government’s decisions and measures with personal emotions, which would influence the full determination of national salvation’ [全國同胞，尤應確認非擁護國家之統一，無以對外；斷不容以任何意氣情感，搖動中央所確定之方策與步驟，以影響一致救國之決心].84 To Chinese militarists and would-be vigilantes, the message is clear: do not act rashly, and follow Nanjing’s lead. The National Government’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’, therefore, was a combination of inflexibility and flexibility: inflexible in the domestic domain because the deepest rationale in the 1929 and 1931 Mandates was the reinforcement of the Nanjing regime’s hegemonic interpretation of the Chinese revolution; flexible to foreigners because the Nanjing Government romanticised the foreign beneficiaries of the unequal treaties, and did not consider to seriously executing the proclaimed unilateral abolition of extraterritoriality. This ideological inconsistency came from an implicit rationale, namely, that all the insurgencies against Nanjing’s hegemony were indicative of China’s own flaws in confronting foreign Powers. The unceasing promotion of the diplomatic rhetoric, hence, was for convincing foreigners of China’s solidarity and, more importantly, informing the Chinese people of the Government’s ability to make the ‘revolution’ happen. 84 ‘National Government’s declaration to all Chinese nationals [國民政府吿全國國民書], 23 September 1931’, CDDROC Sixth Volume, 32. 37 On 29 December 1931, the National Government decreed to slow down their execution of the 1931 Mandate due to ‘natural disasters and sudden incidents’ [天災變故]. Nanjing promised to execute the Mandate on a future date, but the promised execution never happened.85 Evidently, for the ‘sudden incidents’ [變故], the Government meant the Manchurian crisis on 18 September. On 25 October, as the League Assembly failed to pass a unanimous resolution to condemn the aggression, China’s experienced diplomat Gu Weijun (Wellington Koo) expressed his utmost concern: ‘Result in the League was certainly a moral success but in fact turned out to be an impasse [國聯結果，道德上固屬勝利，實際成為僵局].’86 In subsequent months, fruitless debates in Geneva would further convince officials of the weakness of the League – and ‘Euro-American countries’ at its back – to contain Japan’s territorial ambition.87 GMD’s compromises did not bring about the outcomes China desired. Further research could lead to attributing specific policy decisions to the different factions within the GMD. We might well wonder: given that Chiang Kai-shek is notorious for his warlord-like dictatorial obsession, would the story be different if Hu Hanmin or Wang Jingwei and their Guangzhou faction, powerful representatives of the civil, or even ‘left’ factions in the high rank, had defeated Nanjing and became the formal Government of China? The answer is likely no. Intense factional struggles did reveal certain ideological rivalry among the three Chinese statesmen, but they shared the same obsession with hegemony and differed on the technical issue of who ought to inherit Sun Yat-sen’s legacies 85 ‘No. 28: Order of the National Government on slowing down the execution of the regulations over foreigners in China [國民政府為緩行在華外人實施條例的訓令], 29 December 1931’, CADHROC Vol. 5 Issue 1: Diplomacy, 68. 86 ‘Gu Weijun to Zhang Xueliang (two telegrams), 25 October 1931’, CDDROC Sixth Volume, 85. 87 ‘Gu Weijun and Liu Zhe to Zhang Xueliang, 18 November 1931’, CDDROC Sixth Volume, 88. 38 and rule the entire China.88 In 1931, the Guangzhou faction was no less dedicated than the Nanjing Government to the crossfire on who was legitimate to represent China. It took all opportunities, including the Thorburn case, to criticise Chiang’s administration.89 Yet even the ‘Foreign Minister’ of the Guangzhou faction, Chen Youren, visited Japan in mid-1931 and offered the Japanese special privileges in northern China in exchange for Japan’s support of his regime.90 On 10 October, after the outbreak of the Manchurian crisis, the Guangzhou authorities opened fire on anti-Japanese demonstrators.91 The Nanjing Government was even more tolerant of demonstrators; in the capital, as we will see in Chapter II, more intense student anti-Japanese demonstrations led to the resignation of Foreign Minister Wang Zhengting. In fact, the Guangzhou faction had a chance to seize power from Chiang. The postponement order of the 1931 Mandate was made during the transition of power, in which Chiang Kai-shek resigned and left Governmental positions to Guangzhou politicians. Sun Ke, son of Sun Yat-sen, formed a new Government, but his Government quickly collapsed due to financial difficulties.92 Rumours about this tough situation reached British ears as an urban myth: the new Chinese Government even devoted the Boxer Indemnity instalments, which were designed to fund the construction of the new MFA building, to paying arrears in salaries.93 Chen Youren succeeded as the new Foreign Minister in Sun’s Government, with no senior staff at his disposal and no knowledge of his predecessors’ efforts in 88 Jin, Factional Politics in the High Ranks of the Guomindang, 1-14. 89 That was recorded by the British Legation in ‘Enclosure: Extract from Central Press (Canton), 2 September 1931’, Received in registry 29 September 1931, F 5214/3361/10, FO 371/15511. 90 In January 1932, Lampson commented that Chen was then anxious to ‘white-wash himself of universal belief that his visit to Japan compromised him somehow but is floundering a bit as to what to do.’ ‘No. 68: Lampson (Peking) to Simon, 11 January 1932’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 9, 103. 91 ‘No. 613: Phillips (Canton) to Lampson (Peking), 11 October 1931’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 751. 92 ‘No. 27: Lampson to Simon, 25 December 1931’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 9, 40-41. 93 ‘Enclosure in No. 87: Letter from Ingram (Nanking) to Lampson (Peking), 13 January 1932’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 9, 131-133. 39 extraterritoriality negotiations. His proclaimed ignorance of the 1931 Mandate and Chiang’s Government’s earlier efforts to abolish extraterritoriality shocked the British Consul-General at Nanjing, who called their meaning ‘rambling and futile’.94 All these issues with Chiang’s intra-Party enemies indicated that, as long as China remained subject to the GMD’s reign, the latter’s promised ‘anti-imperialist’ revolution was destined to be manipulated amidst internal political struggles. Yet, the cynicism diminished the contribution of the functioning and able MFA bureaucracy, led by China’s experienced diplomat, Foreign Minister Wang Zhengting, during the latter’s struggles to professionally navigate the abolition of extraterritoriality in China’s rough diplomatic seas. 94 Nothing could explain why Chen claimed to have no knowledge of these significant affairs in Chinese diplomacy, or whether he pretended to have no knowledge. Neither interpretation made sense. See ‘Enclosure in No. 75: Letter from Ingram (Nanking) to Lampson (Peking), 4 January 1932’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 9, 106-108. 40 Chapter II: Elite Diplomacy: The Anti-Imperialist Revolution in Practice 第二章：精英外交：踐行反帝革命 Many months later, as he confronted furious anti-Japanese demonstrators in September 1931 and was prepared to resign from his post, Minister for Foreign Affairs Wang Zhengting was probably to remember that distant day on 15 November 1929, when his Ministry hosted an exceptionally lively banquet in Zhenjiang, the provincial capital of Jiangsu province.95 After enjoying the specially prepared Chinese delicacies, Chinese officials and British diplomats sat together and chatted happily with the accompaniment of majestic martial music. The ceremony ended when Wang Zhengting and British diplomat Frank Aveling, seen off by other guests, stepped on a decorated train to Shanghai.96 The feast was held to mark the relinquishment of the tiny British Concession in Zhenjiang. In Wang Zhengting’s view, the Concession itself was trivial, but its abolition was significant. It was the first foreign Concession surrendered to the new-born Nanjing Government, thus commencing a promising trend toward China’s gradual abolition of unequal treaties. Three days after the banquet, Wang’s excitement had not diminished; he expressed his optimism about Chinese diplomacy in the coming years: Our Government outlined that this year [1929] shall be devoted to the abolition of extraterritoriality, and next year we will take back foreign Concessions. Unexpectedly, Britain returned the Zhenjiang Concession to us before this time [1930]. China is impressed with the British commitment to its promises on foreign affairs. This spirit is tremendously different from those countries that are not creditable; those that only shout out loud but do nothing. 95 This line is inspired by the noted opening line in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Wang Zhengting was wounded by student demonstrators from the Central University in Nanjing, on 28 September 1931. See ‘28 September’, IMHROC: Year 1931. 96 The British Minister to China was then residing in Beijing. After the abolition of the Zhenjiang Concession, British properties there were effectively uninfluenced, as contracts for their possessions were transferred to be ‘deeds for perpetual lease’ [永租地契]. See Li Dijun [李迪俊], ‘Before and after receiving the British Concession in Zhenjiang [鎮江英租界接收之前後], 21 November 1929’, in CDDROC Fifth Volume, 770-778. 41 我國政府規定本年，努力於撤銷領判權，而以明年為收回租界時期。乃英國竟先期即行將鎮江租界交還，我國誠以其對外能守信用也，較之不守信義之國家，徒口惠，而實不至者，相差岂可以道里計耶。97 As the statement has indicated, whilst the Central Government was obsessed with the ‘awakening of the Chinese people’ [喚醒民眾], Wang centred more on the ‘alliance with other nations that treated China with equality’ [聯合世界上平等待我之民族]. His lines reveal that China’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ was not merely rhetoric that was manipulated by Nanjing statesmen, of the type we saw in Chapter I; instead, able professionals like Wang sought to convert these ambitions into political reality. Figure III: Building of the Zhenjiang Municipal Council [鎮江市英租界工部局], photograph taken by the author on 23 July 2022. Wang’s visions ultimately failed, but his approaches to directing extraterritoriality negotiations and Chinese foreign policy are worth examining. They showcase the great competence of the diplomatic bureaucracy; Wang pragmatically assessed China’s unequal 97 ‘Minister Wang’s report on the Memorial Week – impressions after recovering the British Concession in Zhenjiang’ [王部長紀念週報告–對於收回鎮江英租界之感想], in CDDROC Fifth Volume, 778-780. 42 treaty system and recommended diligent plans for its gradual abolition. More importantly, the retrospective review suggests his ideological inconsistency in hindering Nanjing’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’. Wang wavered between professionalist and nationalist motivations, namely, between his exasperation against foreign privileges and his desire to achieve Sino-foreign amity regardless of nationalist antagonism. Wang expressed his sorrow for China’s incomplete progress in adopting modern law, anxiously demonstrated Chinese goodwill for foreigners, and rejected resorting to the unilateral abrogation of any unequal treaty right – the core of ‘revolutionary diplomacy’. Due to his hesitant regard for reception in the ‘foreign imperialists’, Wang’s foreign policy did not subscribe to the friend-enemy dichotomy of a theoretically revolutionary China. Republican China’s role in international relations, especially its diplomats’ attempts to end foreigners’ special rights, illustrates the Chinese approaches to adopting the Westphalian system and pushing for the system’s fundamental change. In After Imperialism, Akira Iriye presents the ‘Chinese initiative’, i.e., the GMD’s treaty revision campaigns, in East Asian international relations after the collapse of the Empire system, focusing on the Japanese perspective and the Chinese initiative’s eventual failure.98 Other historians survey the search for equality and reciprocity among noted Republican diplomats, especially Gu Weijun.99 Alison Adcock Kaufman points to their ‘persistent tension’, which came from the Chinese faith in their ultimate leadership in the world: ‘between an aspiration for legal 98 Akira Iriye, After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921-1931, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), Part III and conclusion. 99 See, for example, Wang Lixin [王立新], ‘The Washington System and the Chinese National Revolution: A New Investigation of the Sino-American Relations during the 1920s‘ [華盛頓體系與中國國民革命：二十年代中美關係新探], Historical Research《歷史研究》, no. 2 (2002): 56-68. An unsurpassable issue in the Chinese vision of that promising future is anti-imperialism [反帝], see, for example, Jianwei Wang, ‘The Chinese Interpretation of the Concept of Imperialism in the Anti-Imperialist Context of the 1920s’, Journal of Modern Chinese History 6, no. 2 (December 2012): 164–81. 43 equality, on one hand, and on the other a belief in permanent inequality in the inherent worth of nations.’100 Historians have revealed the more technical efforts in the professionals’ construction of a modern Chinese state, such as legal reforms, the establishment of a professional diplomatic bureaucracy, and the grafting of imported ‘modern’ practices in China.101 This chapter’s case study of Wang Zhengting presents the ideological ambiguity that frustrated the achievements of Chinese diplomats’ professional approaches to diplomacy. I start by briefly introducing Wang Zhengting’s background and the decade of professional diplomacy in the Chinese Republic (1919-1928), when diplomats’ elitism contrasted with the GMD’s proclaimed mission for popular diplomacy. Then, I survey Wang and the MFA’s assessments of the extraterritoriality question and their vision for China’s future without this legal obstacle. Finally, I assess Wang’s highly-personalised execution of ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ in extraterritoriality negotiations based on his worldview and expertise. 100 Alison Adcock Kaufman, ‘In Pursuit of Equality and Respect: China’s Diplomacy and the League of Nations’, Modern China 40, no. 6 (November 2014): 605-638. 101 As per China’s legal reforms, see, for example, Anja Bihler, ‘The Legacy of Extraterritoriality and the Trial of Japanese War Criminals in the Republic of China’, in War Crimes Trials in the Wake of Decolonization and Cold War in Asia, 1945-1956, ed. Kerstin von Lingen (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 93–116; Chen Yaping [陳亞平], ‘Renewed Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between Britain and China and Legal Reform in the late Qing’ [《中英續議通商行船條約》與清末修律辨析 ], Studies in Qing History 《清史研究》, no. 1 (February 2004): 58-65. The creation of a professional bureaucracy is in, for example, Jenny Huangfu Day, ’Mediating Sovereignty: The Qing Legation in London and Its Diplomatic Representation of China, 1876–1901’, Modern Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (July 2021): 1151–1184. For the implantation of ‘modernity’, see, for example, Frank Dikotter, ‘Crime and Punishment in Early Republican China: Beijing’s First Model Prison, 1912-1922’, Late Imperial China 21, no. 2 (December 2000): 140–162; Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 225-254. 44 From Professional Diplomacy to ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’ A YMCA member and Yale alumnus, Wang Zhengting returned from the United States to China in 1911 to assist the Chinese revolution against the Qing Dynasty. In 1913, he became one of the GMD members in the first Parliament of the Beijing (Beiyang) Government.102 In 1919, when the Government selected him as one of China’s envoys to the Paris Peace Conferences, Wang formally entered the diplomatic realm.103 The Conference introduced to the world to China’s claims against unequal treaties – namely, the reciprocity and rebus sic stantibus (fundamental change of circumstances) arguments – and to the professional diplomats who made these arguments.104 As Tang Qihua has illustrated, in the same year, the Beijing Government started its ‘treaty revision campaign’, which focused on revising the unequal treaties with equal and reciprocal negotiations.105 During China’s unceasing civil wars and rushing changes of Governments between 1919 and 1928, Wang Zhengting, together with Lu Zhengxiang, Gu Weijun, Yan Huiqing, and Shi Zhaoji, served as Foreign Ministers and fought hard to deconstruct the unequal treaties system through diplomatic bargains.106 In Dong Wang’s words, the Beiyang period was the high mark of China’s legalist diagnosis of the unequal treaties, defined by those five diplomats’ day-to-day handling of foreign affairs.107 102 ‘Dr. Chengting T. Wang (Wang Cheng-ting), 王正廷字儒堂’, Who’s Who in China: Biographies of Chinese Leaders《中國名人錄》, Fifth Edition (Shanghai: The China Weekly Review, 1936), 241-242. 103 ‘21 January’, IMHROC: Year 1919. Wang was in the Conference as one representative of the Guangdong Military Government and thus semi-independent from the Beijing Government’s directives. 104 These arguments came from diplomat Gu Weijun (Wellington Koo)’s PhD dissertation for Columbia University dated 1912. See Maria Adele Carrai, ‘China’s Unilateral Abrogation of the Sino–Belgian Treaty: Case Study of an Instance of Deviant Transplantation’, in Chinese Legal Reform and the Global Legal Order: Adoption and Adaptation, (eds.) Yun Zhao and Michael Ng (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 267-269. 105 Tang, Treaty Revision Campaign of the Beijing Government, 1912-1928, 81-98. 106 Wang, China’s Unequal Treaties, 38-41. 107 Wang, China’s Unequal Treaties, 35-52. 45 The era of professional diplomacy started to fall apart with the GMD’s Northern Expedition and its revolutionary propaganda. Beginning in 1925, the GMD promoted popular participation in diplomacy with massive public memorialisation programmes of foreigners’ acts of violence in China.108 In early 1927, Chen Youren, then Foreign Minister of the leftist GMD Wuhan Government, directed negotiations for abolishing the last British presence in Hankou and Jiujiang Concessions, after angry Chinese demonstrators had occupied those territories in their anti-imperialist demonstrations.109 Even the abolition of the Zhenjiang Concession, which Wang Zhengting and his fellow officials took as a friendly gesture of the British Government, was not purely ‘friendly’. In 1927, after failing to invite Britain’s military protection of the Concession, the British Consulate had to give up its policing power in Zhenjiang to Chinese demonstrators sympathetic to the GMD’s Northern Expedition.110 Therefore, when Wang Zhengting became Foreign Minister in 1928, he was stuck between two extremes: the ‘foreign imperialists’ and the nationalist Chinese public; both were hard to placate. Back in 1922, Wang could openly rebut public criticisms: these ‘rumours [public criticisms]’, as he had argued, hindered the execution of Chinese foreign policy and defamed a Chinese nationalist’s anxiety for his motherland’s salvation.111 In 1929-1931 during extraterritoriality negotiations, skyrocketing nationalist discourse refrained him from making these direct rebuttals. He only had two alternatives: either fully endorsing 108 See, for example, ‘Methods for memorialising the three-day massacre in Guangzhou‘ [廣州三日焚殺哀念辦法], undated (probably 1929), SHAC 722-400-1. Those methods included the suspension of entertainment, delivering leaflets, and building monuments. 109 Li, The Nationalist China’s ‘Revolutionary Diplomacy’, 49-84. These negotiations demonstrated that Chen was also an experienced diplomat and a faithful proponent of the ‘radical revolutionary diplomacy’, which made his denials of Wang’s struggles between 1929 and 1931, mentioned in the first chapter, abrupt. 110 Li Dijun, ‘Before and after receiving the British Concession in Zhenjiang, 21 November 1929’, in CDDROC Fifth Volume, 770-778. 111 ‘Letter to all Chinese nationals after resolving the Shandong incident [魯案善後吿國人書]’, 23 July 1922 (at Commerce Press《商報》, Beijing), WZTRS, 109-114. 46 revolutionary radicalism, or discreetly following his old style under the name of ‘revolution’. Wang chose the latter option, the choice that did not impress Chinese nationalists – as one could tell from student demonstrators’ calling of ‘Down with Wang Zhengting [打倒王正廷]’ in September 1931.112 The Foreign Minister’s justification for this decision derived from his interpretation of China’s diplomatic ambitions. Unequal Treaties and Chinese Diplomacy in Wang Zhengting’s Worldview For Wang Zhengting, the unequal treaties were a structural problem, in which all treaty provisions informed and reinforced each other. He paid particular attention to two treaty stipulations: foreign control of Chinese Customs (later abolished in 1928) and extraterritoriality.113 The Minister’s rationale was primarily economic: the dual protection of extraterritoriality and foreign-controlled Chinese tariff strengthened foreign invasion of Chinese commerce, as foreigners could easily outcompete Chinese industries in domestic and international markets.114 Hence, extraterritoriality was a prominent obstacle to China’s ‘right to live’ [生存權] as a ‘free, independent nation’ [自由獨立之國家].115 The dream of a ‘free, independent’ nation was the premise of the Chinese initiative for revolutionising international relations. In Wang’s eyes, the ‘old world’ was dominated by 112 ‘28 September’, IMHROC: Year 1931. 113 ‘Recovering taxation and jurisdictional rights and appropriate diplomacy’ [收回稅法兩權與適度外交], 12 January 1929 (speech at Chamber of Commerce, Shanghai), WZTRS, 37-43. 114 ‘Industry, commerce, and diplomacy’ [工商與外交], November 1930 (at closing ceremony of the Industry and Commerce Conference), WZTRS, 85-93. 115 ‘China’s right to live’ [中國生存權利], 20 January 1926 (speech before the MFA building, Beijing), WZTRS, 5-7. 47 Euro-centrism and Powers’ struggles in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.116 The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) was slow in its reactions to these changes in international relations, which passively contributed to the foreigners’ fortification of their multi-dimensional special privileges across China. He bitterly concluded: ‘In fact, the demise of the Manchurian Qing Dynasty was due to its diplomacy [滿清之亡，實亡於外交].’117 Wang’s self-pity came from his resentment of foreigners, but even more so from his disappointment at China’s initial inwardness, which both cut the throat of the Sino-centric East Asian tributary system and subjected China to imperialist aggression.118 In particular, he grieved the year 1898, when foreign Powers struggled for Chinese territories and utilised newly-acquired concessions to defend their ‘spheres of influence’, thus practically reducing the Chinese Empire from a regional rule-maker to a battlefield for European Empires.119 Nevertheless, Wang was confident that the imminent end of the unequal treaties would restore China to the club of global leadership. In 1929, before China’s formal recovery of tariff autonomy, Wang imagined that future with excitement and optimism in a public 116 ‘Trend of today’s diplomacy’ [今日外交之趨勢], 2 July 1929 (speech at the tenth division of the tenth district’s GMD branch), WZTRS, 63-67. Note that Wang might have agreed to make a speech in this specific Party branch because its number paralleled the Republic’s National Day (10 October). 117 Wang discussed the progression of foreign policy from the late Qing to 1927 in ‘China’s diplomacy in around the past twenty-five years’ [近二十五年中國之外交], July 1927 (written for Guowen Zhoubao《國聞週報》) WZTRS, 127-155. 118 The Sino-centric tributary system, especially in Ming and early Qing Dynasties, had to go through drastic changes when European Westphalian sovereignty principles arrived in East Asia. See, for example, Seo-Hyum Park, ‘Changing Definitions of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: Japan and Korea Between China and the West’, Journal of East Asian Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 281–307. 119 In particular, Wang claimed that Britain had to lease Weihaiwei to defend the newly established Russian and German influences in Shandong and Liaoning. See ‘Impressions of recovering Weihaiwei’ [對收回威海衛之感想], 22 April 1930 (report at the Memorial Week), WZTRS, 81-83. Wang’s claim was testified by late scholars. See, for example, Liu Bensen [劉本森], The Empire’s Corner: A Study on the British Concession of Weihaiwei 《帝國的角落：英國租占威海衛研究(1898-1930)》(Beijing: Social Sciences Academy Press, 2018), chapter 2. 48 speech: ‘Thereafter, given the talents of our merchants and the abundance of our resources, China will be well positioned to give foreigners a run for their money in the international arena [此後以我國商才的優良，資源的豐富，大可以與外人在國際上爭一爭雌雄了]’.120 Given China’s poverty in the late 1920s, his statement revealed the merging of embryonic idealist and realist thinking in international relations in a patriotic Chinese diplomat: idealist in his pride in Chinese historical traditions; realist because Wang backed that future with China’s great potential as a large country with a huge population.121 To achieve that future, Wang always framed global cooperation and friendship as his Ministry’s essential objective. Whilst reiterating the ‘reciprocity’ and ‘rebus sic stantibus’ principles in the pursuit of recovering China’s full sovereignty, the Minister reaffirmed China’s commitment to international law and denied any intent for unequal treatment of foreign residents in China.122 These promises were not mere rhetoric to deceive foreigners; Wang himself did believe in them. In a speech to his ministerial staff, he said that one of the MFA’s most striking accomplishments was China’s return to international politics, by humbly participating in numerous international treaties and preparing to sign others.123 Wang also envisaged more personal friendships between Chinese and foreigners, such as the ones 120 ‘Recovering taxation and jurisdictional rights and appropriate diplomacy’ [收回稅法兩權與適度外交], 12 January 1929 (speech at Chamber of Commerce, Shanghai), WZTRS, 37-43. 121 For a basic theorisation of international relations and the realist (bureaucrat)-idealist (intellectual) modes of thinking, see Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: MacMillan, 1946), 11-21. For Wang’s realist rationale, see ‘Trend of today’s diplomacy’ [今日外交之趨勢], 2 July 1929 (speech at the tenth division of the tenth district’s GMD branch), WZTRS, 63-67. 122 See, for example, ‘Abolishing the (unequal) treaties’ [廢約], 6 August 1928, (speech at banquet in the Shanghai diplomatic bargaining building [交涉署外交大樓]), WZTRS, 9-10. 123 ‘Review of the MFA’s works of the preceding year’ [過去一年中外交部工作之回顧], 20 December 1930, (speech at the MFA’s memorial week), WZTRS, 95-102. 49 between him and British diplomats.124 His hopes of friendship were long-standing. Wang had served as the proprietor of Nanjing’s International Club [國際聯歡社] and sponsored its founding. In the club’s opening on 1 June 1929, with much excitement, Wang contended that this club and its entertainment had filled one crucial gap in his Government’s plan for China’s reconstruction: ameliorating China’s connections with foreigners. He then portrayed a promising future of the ‘new Nanjing’, when the city, similar to Shanghai, would become an important centre for international trade and communications.125 For Wang, the successful implementation of his foreign policy required a firm basis in domestic politics: China’s nationwide solidarity, the best armament to outcompete ‘foreign imperialists’ and take back China’s lost sovereignty. In one of Wang’s speeches, the crucial reason for China’s turbulent and fragmented reality was that the Chinese people were not united and thus did not possess ‘l’espirit de corps’.126 Yet, the same speech shows that the unifying movement he advocated was not to form a uniform force against the unequal treaties, but to ‘demonstrate China’s promising scenes to the world’ [將國內的佳象公諸世界] and ‘change the worldwide opinion on us’ [轉移世界對我的目光].127 In other words, regardless of the inequalities of the treaty port system and the Chinese antagonism against it, 124 See the introductions to this chapter and Chapter III, and also Robert Bickers, Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 123-124. 125 ‘Opening of the International Club’ [國際聯歡社開幕], 1 June 1929 (at the International Club, Sajiawan [薩家灣], Nanjing), WZTRS, 55-57. The International Club did host several banquets between Chinese, especially MFA officials, and foreigners. See, for example, ‘Thursday, 30 April, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 126 ‘Collaborative internal forces and success or failure in diplomacy’ [團結內力與外交成敗], 7 January 1929, (speech at the MFA’s memorial week), WZTRS, 33-35. The quote was original. 127 ‘Collaborative internal forces and success or failure in diplomacy’ [團結內力與外交成敗], 7 January 1929, (speech at the MFA’s memorial week), WZTRS, 33-35. 50 the more important premise was always ‘China’s own flaws’ that any Chinese Government ought to address in order to be admitted into the international community. But how could his foreign policy help China earn this status of a civilised state? Wang’s professionalism induced him to apply two approaches. Firstly, he structured the MFA bureaucracy to efficiently handle foreign affairs. Immediately after succeeding as the National Government’s Foreign Minister, he scheduled entrance tests for applicants and hosted many training sessions, aiming to nurture professional qualities in this new generation of diplomats.128 Furthermore, contrary to the black box of the Nanjing Government’s administration (Chapter I), he relied on and explicitly recognised the contribution of other senior officials in diplomacy.129 In extraterritoriality negotiations, he had the Treaty Revision Council [條約委員會] responsible for drafting and revising Chinese (counter-)proposals and regulations over foreigners, while the director of the Euro-American Bureau [歐美司], Xu Mo [徐謨, 1893-1956], was highly involved in the Sino-British negotiations as a legal technician to navigate the specifics.130 These senior members very likely shared Wang’s China’s own flaws logic and his insistence on pushing concrete legal reforms. Xu Mo, for example, contended that the most crucial issue with Chinese jurisdiction was its inability to 128 ‘Obligations of ambassadorial and consular personnel’ [使領館人員之操守職責], 25 November 1928, (speech at the MFA’s auditorium to incoming staff), WZTRS, 17-19. 129 ‘The MFA’s works and the abolition of unequal treaties’ [外部工作與廢除不平等條約], 31 December 1928, (speech at the MFA’s memorial week), WZTRS, 29-32. 130 For Xu Mo’s biography, see ‘Hsu Mo, 徐謨’, Who’s Who in China, Fifth Edition, 96. For his devotion in the negotiations, see, for example, No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 559-601. 51 administer rule of law [司法行政], instead of the commonly-criticised foreign intrusion of the Chinese legal sovereignty.131 Secondly, Wang asserted that his policy would be a fostering [促進] force in the abolition of unequal treaties, which, he proclaimed, echoed both the National Government’s interpretation of Sun Yat-sen’s testament and the will of all Chinese people.132 Chinese commerce and industry were ‘electric currents’, while politics, diplomacy and economics were the ‘copper wires’. Without ‘electric currents’, the ‘copper wires’ he represented would have nothing to conduct.133 He thus recognised his role as an intermediary between the Chinese people and foreigners, to transmit the opinions from one to the other and coordinate relations in-between. In particular, for the foreigners, Wang made sure that his struggles for the relinquishment would not disregard any respect for existing treaties and the ‘Rule of Law’.134 Continuing the ‘treaty revision campaign’ as in the Beijing Government, he promised to only relinquish the treaties that had expired and showed his willingness to negotiate for new treaties – rather than a full-scale abolition – over those still in force.135 For the Chinese people, Wang reiterated the GMD’s ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric and evaded references to the logic of China’s own flaws in public speeches. In 1929, Wang 131 Xu Mo, ‘Consular jurisdiction and administering justice’ [領事裁判權與司法行政], Xiandai Pinglun《現代評論》, in SMA D 2-0-1786-19, 19-23. 132 ‘Abolishing the (unequal) treaties’ [廢約], 6 August 1928, (speech at banquet in the Shanghai diplomatic bargaining building [交涉署外交大樓]), WZTRS, 9-10. 133 ‘Industry, commerce, and diplomacy’ [工商與外交], November 1930 (at closing ceremony of the Industry and Commerce Conference), WZTRS, 85-93. 134 ‘China’s right to live’ [中國生存權利], 20 January 1926 (speech before the MFA building, Beijing), WZTRS, 5-7. 135 ‘Abolishing the (unequal) treaties’ [廢約], 6 August 1928, (speech at banquet in the Shanghai diplomatic bargaining building [交涉署外交大樓]), WZTRS, 9-10. 52 claimed that he would never pursue secret policy, and that he had always been willing to let the people know his decisions throughout the past decade.136 More strikingly, he carefully affirmed his loyalty to the self-proclaimed, yet merciless representative of the Chinese people: the GMD and the National Government. For instance, in a 1930 speech, the Minister claimed that China’s progress was achieved by Chiang Kai-shek and his ‘army with model idealogy’ [主義之師], whose victories safeguarded Chinese solidarity and induced global respect for a new China.137 One might argue that Wang made these speeches because he was foremost a faithful Party member, who believed in GMD principles and the Party’s forthcoming victory in the revolutions. Even before serving as the Nanjing Government’s Foreign Minister, Wang wrote for an English-language press that he had been confident in the GMD’s political struggles, because of the Party’s ‘ideology’ [主義], ‘organised propaganda’ [有組織之宣傳], and devotion to ‘progressive reform’ [進步的改革].138 He was also a nationalist supporter of popular movements and donated a fortune to the Nanjing Anti-Japanese Society to help the society’s efforts in boycotting Japanese goods.139 Nevertheless, other traces, especially his assessment of Sino-Russian relations, suggest that he must have cautiously aligned his public claims on diplomacy with the Party’s most recent political preferences. In June 1927, before anti-communism formally became the entire GMD’s official policy, he could still argue that 136 ‘An overview of diplomacy in the preceding year and future policy’ [一年以來外交經過及以後方針], 12 July 1929, (speech at press conference in front of the old MFA building, Beijing), WZTRS, 73-79. 137 ‘Review of the MFA’s works of the preceding year’ [過去一年中外交部工作之回顧], 20 December 1930, (speech at the MFA’s memorial week), WZTRS, 95-102. 138 ‘Hardship and accomplishments of the National Government’ [國民政府之艱辛與成就], 24 November 1928, (banquet at Richard Hotel, Shanghai), WZTRS, 11-15. 139 Report of Liu Jiashu of the CTD’s investigative section on the Nanjing AJS, 6 January 1929, SHAC 722-1795-1. 53 ‘connection with the Russians’ [聯俄] was a crucial success in the Party’s foreign relations.140 Two years later, as an official of the anti-communist Nanjing Government, he abandoned that statement and claimed that Sino-Russian relations would never normalise until Russia gave up its communist propaganda in China.141 In other words, just like other Party statesmen, Wang was half-hearted about the GMD’s ‘revolutionary’ agenda; he might have sincerely believed in the outcome of the ‘revolution’, but his approaches to achieving it did not have to be consistently ‘revolutionary’ – at least not in accordance with popular rhetoric on unilateral abolition. Wang Zhengting’s personal model was Zhuge Liang [諸葛亮], a noted Chinese statesman and strategist from circa. 200 AD, who served his masters until his death from exhaustion, leaving an ambitious mission of the Han Dynasty’s reunification incomplete. Living in another era of turbulence for China, Wang endorsed Zhuge’s ambition of ‘stabilising the world and rescuing the people [安世救民]’.142 Even with no doubt about China’s promising future, its leadership in worldwide affairs and its friendship with foreigners, Wang approached the unsatisfactory reality with the logic of China’s own flaws, referring to the important constructions of domestic law and nationwide solidarity. And he was conscious that he should not go beyond the frame of Zhuge’s loyalty; as a professional 140 ‘China’s diplomacy in around the past twenty-five years’ [近二十五年中國之外交], July 1927 (written for Guowen Zhoubao《國聞週報》) WZTRS, 127-155. On the shift to formal anti-Communism in the KMT in the second half of 1927, see Hans J. van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), last chapter. 141 ‘An overview of diplomacy in the preceding year and future policy’ [一年以來外交經過及以後方針], 12 July 1929, (speech at press conference in front of the old MFA building, Beijing), WZTRS, 73-79. 142 ‘Causerie made in the House of “never wait for aye”: the model statesman in history’ [莫等閒館隨筆：千古人臣模楷], WZTRS, 8. 54 diplomat, the duty was to booster his superior’s decisions in diplomacy and navigate the specifics. His diagnosis of China’s diplomacy and his positionality together disavowed the resort to the proclaimed ‘revolutionary diplomacy’. Extraterritoriality and Wang’s Worldview in Practice On 27 April 1929, Wang Zhengting delivered a note to six foreign Legations regarding China’s ambition to abolish extraterritoriality.143 As the Chinese Government had been loud about its hatred of extraterritoriality, this was not surprising, and British Minister Miles Lampson confessed that the note came with ‘moderate language’.144 The Chinese original of the note does not survive, but its English translation supports Lampson’s judgement: It goes without saying the extraterritoriality in China is a legacy of the old regime, which has not only ceased to be adaptable to the present day conditions, but has become so detrimental to the smooth working of the judicial and administrative machinery of China that her progress as a member of the family of Nations has been unnecessarily retarded.145 This quote matches some of the prominent themes in Wang Zhengting’s worldview: China’s necessary break with the old regime, its exasperation for modernising reforms, and its ambition to become a civilised state in the global family of nations. Wang argued for the same historical premise concerning this ‘humiliating’ [辱國] legal issue: the Qing court’s unwillingness to open the interior.146 Indeed, when the extraterritorial regime started, the 143 The six Powers were Britain, the United States, France, Brazil, Norway, and Holland. Wang’s report on the situation of extraterritoriality in China and the delivery of the note is in Wang Zhengting to National Government, 1 May 1929, ‘Academia Historica’, 001-064410-00001-001. 144 ‘No. 2: Lampson (Peking) to Chamberlain, 29 April 1929’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 27. For a survey of the Anglo-American reactions to this Mandate, see Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China, 168-173. 145 ‘No. 3: Note from the Chinese Chargé d’Affaires (London) to Chamberlain, 2 May 1929’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 27-29. 146 For Wang’s rationale, see ‘Recovering taxation and jurisdictional rights and appropriate diplomacy’ [收回稅法兩權與適度外交], 12 January 1929 (speech at Chamber of Commerce, Shanghai), WZTRS, 37-43; and ‘Wang Zhengting explained the past and future of extraterritoriality’ [王正廷述領事裁判權之過去與未來], SHAC 34-1455-1. 55 imperial court simply transplanted their political experiences with Han-Manchurian segregation by limiting foreigners to very restricted areas of legal and administrative autonomy. The dynasty failed to anticipate the expansion of foreigners’ special rights over the following decades, when China was compelled to enter the Westphalian world stage and adopt Western-defined sovereignty principles.147 Hence, we see Wang’s real-life application of the rebus sic stantibus principle in extraterritoriality negotiations. His note of April 1929 explicitly addressed the more evident circumstantial change: Chinese political development. The Nanjing regime was willing to execute legal reforms recommended in the report of the Commission on Extraterritoriality in 1926 (a foreign Commission that investigated the progress of Chinese legal reforms), regardless of the Government’s nationalist grievance against that report’s resistance to the immediate abolition of extraterritoriality.148 The more implicit argument on the ‘changes of circumstances’, however, was more aggressive. It homed in on the foreign distortion of the extraterritorial system, namely, the ‘mixed qualities’ [良莠不齊] of incoming foreign residents in the past decades. The ‘mixed qualities’ led to rising volumes of crime in and out of Settlements, while the consuls, whose foremost duty was to protect their nationals, could not hold fair trials on the skyrocketing number of crimes across China.149 147 In 1932-1933, the Academia Sinica argued the same argument after investigating the legality of the Shanghai International Settlement, See Xu Gongsu [徐公肅] and Qiu Jinzhang [丘瑾璋], Regulations of the Shanghai International Settlement《上海公共租界制度》 (Nanjing: Institute of Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, 1933), SMA Y7-1-5, 155-180. Also, see Par Cassel, Grounds of Judgement: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15-38. 148 For those foreign recommendations, see US Department of State, Report of the Commission on Extraterritoriality in China, Peking, September 16, 1926 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1926), 107-110; Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China, 112-122. 149 ‘Wang Zhengting explained the past and future regarding the abolition of extraterritoriality’ [王正廷述領事裁判權之過去與未來], SHAC 34-1455-1. Wang was not exaggerating. Shanghai, for example, was indeed a metropolis of crime. See Frederic Wakeman Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1-40. 56 Wang envisioned abolishing unequal treaties in stages. Like peeling an onion, he did not expect an immediate wholesale abolition, yet the removal of one layer brought about more determined and powerful drives to get rid of the next.150 As the Qing court had intended to achieve administrative and legal Sino-foreign segregation with residential segregation, territoriality (Concessions) legitimised and informed extraterritoriality (Sino-foreign legal segregation). The relinquishment, therefore, should take a reverse order: the demise of extraterritoriality would de-weaponise foreigners’ territoriality in China by expropriating the means of preserving foreign Concessions legally.151 Before he could move to the indefinite cancellation of extraterritoriality and foreign territoriality, Wang felt it necessary to peel thinner layers of the ‘onion’ of the treaty port system and gradually weaken the foreign voice in the Chinese legal system. For example, one of his projects was to enlarge the power of the Shanghai Provisional Court – the successor of the abolished Mixed Court – to expand Chinese jurisdiction over Chinese defendants in Shanghai.152 Wang also pushed forward China’s administrative reforms. Between 1929 and 1930, his Ministry worked on the compulsory documentation of foreign visitors and residents on Chinese territory. In December 1929, the MFA prepared a report for the Executive Yuan with eight regulations on examining foreigners’ passports. This was another example of Wang’s onion-peeling strategy: thanks to the National Government’s recent control of the Chinese 150 That metaphor is inspired by Gail Hershatter’s discussion on the knowing and remembering of history; Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3-33. 151 Note that foreign ‘territoriality’ in China was always achieved by ‘permanent lease’ [永遠租賃], an under-defined term in then law that led to divided legal opinions. See Xu and Qiu, Regulations of the Shanghai International Settlement, SMA Y7-1-5, 155-180. 152 The Legislative Yuan (headed by China’s international law scholar Wang Chonghui) recognised that the abolition of the Mixed Court did not translate to full power in the Provisional Court, and that the Chinese were also struggling for the abolition of the Mixed Court in the French Concession. See ‘No. 21: Report by Wang Chonghui et al. on the bargains regarding the Shanghai Provisional Court’ [王寵惠等關於上海公共租界法院交涉情形的報告], 12 February 1930, CADHROC Vol. 5 Issue 1: Diplomacy, 55-60. 57 Customs, Chinese civil and Custom officials could collaborate with each other and effectively enforce an immigration policy. The new documentation policy attempted to reinforce Chinese sovereignty by addressing the second layer of circumstantial changes: the potential entry of foreign criminals, namely, ‘wanderers’ [浮浪], ‘beggars’ [乞丐], and those carrying infectious diseases or intents to ‘violate the Party-state’s interests’ [違反黨國利益] and ‘damage public order’ [妨害公共秩序].153 Wang’s documentation policy helped the Republican Party-state to regulate the free movement of individuals, such as the refused entry of Soviet and Belarusian workers suspected of ‘communist connections’ in 1930.154 But for Wang Zhengting, it contributed to the making of an important basis for the modern Chinese legal system, which would possess standardised procedures and protocols when dealing with foreigners. In late July 1931, he argued during the management of the Thorburn case that standardised Chinese jurisdiction over foreigners would assign the duties of protecting aliens to local civil and legal authorities; in this process, foreigners’ proper identification would be the necessary premise. The Briton’s essential wrongdoing was his inability to offer his documents and prove his identity, which invalidated his right to official protection.155 153 ‘No. 15: MFA to Executive Yuan on provisions of examining foreigners’ passports upon their entry to China [外交部為查驗外人入境護照規則至行政院呈文], 9 December 1929’, CADHROC Vol. 5 Issue 1: Diplomacy, 50-52. 154 The provisions were passed and delivered to foreign Legations in September 1930. See ‘No. 23: MFA to the Secretariat of the Executive Yuan on examining foreigners’ passports [外交部為查驗外人入境護照事致行政院秘書處公函], 15 September 1930’, CADHROC Vol. 5 Issue 1: Diplomacy, 61. The special ban of Belurisan and Soviet workers was deliberated in December 1930. See ‘No. 24: GMD CEC’s note on banning the entry of Belursian workers according to the provisions on foreigners’ entry with passports [國民黨中執會為禁阻白俄工人入境按外人入境護照規則辦理的公函], December 1930’, CADHROC Vol. 5 Issue 1: Diplomacy, 62-63. 155 ‘The Thorburn Disappearance Case: Foreign Minister Wang replied to British Minister; Local officials could not bear the duty’ [韜朋失蹤案：外王答覆英使；地方官不能負責], Shenbao《申報》, 31 July 1931, 4. 58 These examples reveal some concrete efforts towards China’s gradual unpeeling of the treaty port system, but Wang’s careful framing of his struggles with legalist lines revealed his foremost obsession: evading any possibility of large-scale foreign anger – as had last occurred in the British bombardment of Nanjing in 1927.156 In April 1931, when Lampson questioned Wang for the latter’s claim that he might deal with foreign Concessions ‘vigorously’ if extraterritoriality negotiations did not go through, Lampson said Wang ‘prevaricated’ and anxiously suggested that he did not mean to apply the ‘vigorous’ way to the British.157 To avoid these awkward circumstances, Wang made sure he would be the first to make a move, in a rather aggressive gesture. He used all opportunities to convey China’s determination to end extraterritoriality to foreign plenipotentiaries, intimidating them with his Government’s potential resort to unilateral action.158 Wang’s policy was essentially carrot and stick. Apart from these threatening gestures, he and his Ministry purposefully left much leeway for the extraterritoriality regime. On 30 December 1929, two days after the issue of the 1929 Mandate, Wang delivered an explanatory note to foreign Powers, assuring them that the most recent Mandate was ‘in fact a step [實係一種步驟] [to reach the final abolition]’; negotiations would continue regardless.159 Similar promises were issued before and after the issue of the 1931 Mandate. Wang guaranteed that foreign Powers would have enough time to conclude a treaty before the Mandate’s enactment on the first day of 1932, which made the Mandate more like a 156 Li, Anglo-Chinese Relations, 1. 157 Lampson proudly declared in his diaries that he had ‘belaboured’ Wang. The British Minister also expressed that he felt the Chinese insistence on the little textual points of the draft extraterritoriality treaty was merely a pointless defence of amour propre. He argued that ‘these people [Chinese officials] are children in many respects’. See ‘Monday, 27 April, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 158 Li, Anglo-Chinese Relations, 87-88. 159 ‘Declaration of the MFA (on 30 December 1929, Chinese plenipotentiaries were instructed to publish it overseas)’ [外交部之宣言（十八年十二月三十日訓令駐外各使在各國發表）], SHAC 34-1455-1. 59 diplomatic move to break the ongoing impasse in Sino-British negotiations, instead of a determined declaration of the unilateral action.160 The British were aware of Wang’s caution. Immediately after the publication of the 1931 Mandate, Lampson wrote to the FO that its twelve regulations (Appendix III) did not go beyond the tentative agreements between him and the Foreign Minister.161 On 10 May, Wang privately explained to Lampson that he had made the regulations applicable since 1 January 1932, to allow time for the draft treaty to be signed and ratified in-between.162 These clues reaffirm Chapter I’s observation of the two Mandates’ limited pressure on foreigners. Furthermore, Wang’s cautious regard for foreign concurrence helps us grasp the MFA’s interpretation of the ‘equality and reciprocity’ principle in Nanjing’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’, which, in both rhetorical and practical terms, indicated that China would not resort to retaliation in its foreign policy. When the Treaty Revision Council was drafting and revising regulations for the 1931 Mandate, it pursued the execution of international ‘equity’ [公道]. Even though Council members were fully aware of incoming foreigners’ ‘mixed qualities’ and foreign Powers’ restrictive policies on Chinese migrants overseas, they argued that it would contradict the ‘equity’ morality if China were to adopt similarly restrictive policies on foreigners’ entry to Chinese territories.163 In other words, they knew the desired 160 ‘No. 415: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 4 May 1931’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 513. For that impasse and relevant progress in Sino-British negotiations, see paragraph 41-43 in ‘No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931’, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 578-580. 161 See paragraphs 43-45 in ‘No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931’, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 580-581. 162 Wording in the diaries of the same day further suggested Wang’s certain influence in his Government. He seemed to have persuaded his colleagues to not act on Wang Chonghui for the latter’s resignation during the People’s Convention, because Wang Chonghui was ‘a purely technical man and not a politician’. As for extraterritoriality negotiations, Lampson noticed that Wang seemed anxious to have things fixed before the next January. ‘Sunday, 10 May, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 163 ‘The sixty-first meeting of the Treaty Revision Council, on 30 April 1931’ [條約委員會第六十一次會議，於二十年四月卅日], IMH Archives (MFA), 11-10-01-07-005, 5-8; An example of Nanjing’s awareness of restrictive policies on Chinese migrants overseas can be seen in the National People’s Convention’s Seventh 60 ‘alliance with other nations that treated China with equality’ was not a concrete reality, but the solution to it was to enlarge China’s utopian commitment to moral universality. That principle limited the MFA’s means for achieving its dreamed, utopian end and pointed out the logical paradox underneath the practices of Nanjing’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’. The policy sought to ‘revolutionarily’ remove the constraints on Chinese sovereignty and therefore achieve full ‘equality and reciprocity’, but refrained from confronting the policy’s necessary consequence: an intrusion of foreigners’ special privileges in China. A truly revolutionary approach, however, had winners and losers. For Chinese nationalists to win out, they needed to non-reciprocally break their restrictive chains, just like the non-reciprocal signatures of unequal treaties in foreigners’ favour. In terms of extraterritoriality and other treaty questions, where foreign rights flourished based on the loss of Chinese sovereignty, Wang invited foreign Powers to negotiations, expecting the latter to comply voluntarily, or at least offer a nominal promise. In Sino-British extraterritoriality negotiations, for instance, he invited Lampson to cruises on the Yangzi River for private discussions, where he made compromises on the extraterritoriality treaty’s excluded areas and durations (Article XVI and XXI), in exchange for the British agreement with other articles.164 But how could Wang ensure that foreign Powers would willingly enter and go through negotiations with the Chinese to abolish their special privileges? He resorted to the divide-and-conquer strategy. The MFA purposefully negotiated treaty clauses bilaterally, rather than multi-laterally, which increased the difficulty for foreign Powers to coordinate their grounds and make uniform reactions. In fact, the difficulty in communication permitted Meeting. See ‘(Motion No. 408) Urgent case on negotiating with worldwide Governments for the cancellation of restrictive policies on Chinese migrants’ [（提 408）急速向各國政府交涉取消待遇華僑苛刻案], SHAC 711-1-91. 164 See, for example, ‘Doc 144: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 26 May 1931’, BDFA Part II Series E Vol. 39, 174-175; also, Bickers, Out of China, 123-124. 61 the Chinese to spread rumours to arouse foreigners’ anxiety about falling behind the other Powers in the negotiations. In mid-May 1931, for example, the Chinese frightened the French Minister by suggesting that the British and Americans were prepared to sign extraterritoriality treaties with China.165 Sino-British and Sino-American negotiations were even conducted in different places – the former in China and the latter in Washington. Although the British and American Ministers to China had extensively exchanged their positions and draft treaties after respective discussions with Wang (Chapter III), the Chinese still managed to advance the Sino-British negotiations with America’s retracted insistence on several major points, such as the evocation of Consular court decisions in post-extraterritoriality Chinese trials.166 Besides, Wang might have impressed foreign circles that he represented the more moderate and professional voice among Chinese Government members and the nationalist Chinese population. Before the National People’s Convention, the British Consulate-General in Nanjing noticed widespread rumours about the danger of Wang’s position and his potential succession by the left-wing Chen Youren, whom they claimed to be ‘less easy for the Powers to deal with’.167 Similarly, Lampson argued that the Nanjing-Guangzhou political divide would imply the ‘transfer of its [Chinese extraterritoriality negotiations’] direction to other and possibly less skilled and experienced hands’.168 In other words, although foreign Powers were aware that the MFA was not a key influencer in Chinese politics, no one desired to surpass Wang Zhengting and directly encounter China’s skyrocketing nationalist sentiments. 165 When the French Minister, then away from Nanjing in Shanghai, confirmed whether this was correct from Lampson, the latter asked the French Consul to ‘[politely] suggest to Wilden [the French Minister] not to be an ass’. See ‘Tuesday, 19 May, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 166 Lampson’s discussion with the American Minister on the American draft treaty of 27 April is in ‘Tuesday, 19 May, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. In terms of evocation, Lampson realised that insisting on this right was pointless after the American abandonment of it. See paragraph 7 in ‘No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931’, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 563. 167 ‘Enclosure 2 in No. 1: Report on the People’s Convention, 5 to 17 May 1931’, in Lampson to Henderson, No. 789 (29/2U), 4 June 1931, F 3837/69/10, FO 371/15473. 168 See paragraph 41 in ‘No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931’, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 578-579. 62 Deliberate or not, Wang took advantage of this point and sometimes adopted rather stubborn attitudes in negotiations. In Lampson’s words, whenever he turned down Wang Zhengting’s proposal, the opposite always ‘employed usual threats about public exasperation’.169 The black box of Chinese politics might have also permitted Wang to apply the good cop-bad cop strategy, jumping back and forth between being a stubborn nationalist radical and a sympathiser for foreigners. On 26 May 1931, the Foreign Minister vividly depicted the story of his Government colleagues’ stubbornness to his compromising offer to the British, even after ‘his [Wang’s] most endeavours’, on the excluded areas (Article 16) of the extraterritoriality treaty. But after noticing Lampson’s dissatisfaction, he went back to his original proposals, and on the next day, contended that he received approval from his Government.170 No source survives to confirm whether Wang told the truth, or, as Lampson had suspected, utilised the ‘usual Chinese “try-on”’, but such an ambiguity – and foreigners’ recurring fear of China’s potential resort to unilateral action – certainly strengthened Wang’s position in the negotiations.171 The Demise of Wang Zhengting’s ‘Appropriate Diplomacy’ [適度外交] Despite his achievements, Wang’s foreign policy pointed to a significant danger. With the presence of unequal treaties, the more he attempted to demonstrate his amity and rationality for foreigners, the less confidence he received from the Chinese public or even the Nanjing 169 See, for example, ‘Doc 125: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 19 April 1931’, BDFA Part II Series E Vol. 39, 161-162. 170 Wang initially offered five years for Tianjin and ten years at most for Greater Shanghai. In his words, the President decided to revise the offer to five years duration for each place, and Chiang Kai-shek’s final agreement to Wang’s initial offer rested on the worry for Guangzhou’s manipulation of this compromise to attack Nanjing. See ‘Doc 144: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 26 May 1931’, BDFA Part II Series E Vol. 39, 174-175; Paragraphs 57-60, ‘No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931’, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 588-591; ‘Doc 146: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 27 May 1931’, BDFA Part II Series E Vol. 39, 176-177. 171 Even after Nanjing disavowed the resort to unilateral abolition, Britain was still concerned about it executed by local officials; No. 488: Simon to Lindsay (Washington), DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 628-629. 63 Government.172 No one knew if the widespread rumour before the National People’s Convention on the danger of Wang’s position was officially-inspired, but the message certainly carried substantial public dissatisfaction against the Foreign Minister’s service in China’s revolution in foreign relations. Even so, during his service between 1928 and 1931 as China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Zhengting demonstrated competence and professionalism. Like his superiors, Wang recognised the unpromising gap between the dreamed future and the current reality due to China’s own flaws, and sought to direct the angry country from mere nationalist antagonism to the professional approaches of abolishing the unequal treaties. He wanted China empowered by concrete yet gradual legal and administrative reforms, such as the regulations on examining foreigners’ passports and a professional MFA bureaucracy. These steps, in his imagination, weakened the foreign criticisms of Chinese capability and gradually showed China the dreamed recovery of full sovereignty. More importantly, the above review of Wang’s execution of the ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ reveals the worldview of the first generation of foreign-educated Chinese elites, who possessed enough power to influence, or even rewrite China’s position in the international world. Wang’s solution to national salvation leaned more heavily on the Chinese self-correction of historical errors – inwardness, inadequate legal construction, and the political fragmentation hindering national solidarity – and the Chinese unilateral commitment to the ‘equality and reciprocity’ principle, in order to attract foreign support for a membership in the ‘family of nations’. Yet his foreign policy faced persistent tension, 172 To note, it is currently impossible to understand the Nanjing high-rank’s true assessment of Wang’s foreign policy. Whilst there was rumour around May 1931 that Wang was achieving too little and not ‘revolutionary’ enough, in March of the same year, rumours claimed that Nanjing thought Wang was going too far with his stubborn attitude. For the March rumour, see ‘Thursday, 26 March, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 64 between his promise for a ‘revolutionary’ recovery of China’s lost sovereignty and the hesitation about ex parte abrogation of foreign treaty rights. Indeed, fuelled by pragmatism, he could have abolished extraterritoriality for a longer period, but political instability in China did not permit him to sit down and deal with this striking issue with excessive patience. As the Foreign Minister, Wang once summarised his objective as the pursuit of ‘appropriate diplomacy’ [適度外交], because ‘a weak diplomacy [that exceeds national strength] could work out perfunctorily for a while, but would inevitably fail’ [（超出國家能力的）虛弱的外交，雖可敷衍一時，到後來仍是不免失敗的].173 Ironically, the September 1931 demonstration proved that his policy was still one of ‘weak diplomacy’ that failed to satisfy sentimental nationals, who saw explicit Japanese territorial thirst and the continuing survival of foreign privileges, regardless of all the official claims to ‘revolutionary diplomacy’. Both Wang and his model Zhuge Liang fought in impossible campaigns, but Zhuge Liang passed away as an iconic hero, while Wang’s diplomacy was challenged by his fellow nationals that he desired to represent. Contrary to the Chinese, British diplomats would not forget the negotiations in Nanjing in early 1931, where and when traces of Britain’s imperialist presence co-existed with GMD’s ambitions for reciprocity and Sino-foreign amity. Lampson, however, was well convinced that this peaceful coexistence could not last forever; he felt compelled to direct the British communities’ internal reforms to better prepare for Britain’s future presence in nationalist China. 173 ‘Recovering taxation and jurisdictional rights and appropriate diplomacy [收回稅法兩權與適度外交]’, 12 January 1929 (speech at Commercial Chamber, Shanghai), WZTRS, 37-43. 65 Chapter III: When in Rome: Reforming the British Informal Empire in China 第三章：入鄉隨俗：變革英人在華之非正式帝國 In Spring 1931, after nearly four years stationed in China, British Minister to China Miles Lampson still found himself disgusted by the weather there. The capital city Nanjing was humid, rainy, and depressingly cold, while Beijing, where foreign plenipotentiaries commonly resided, was under constant threat of dust storms.174 Yet, the terrible weather for Lampson appeared to be not diminishing the energy of GMD officials in cultivating amicable relations with foreigners, one of the crucial objectives in their undertaking of ‘revolutionary diplomacy’. On 3 March 1931, for instance, Lampson recollected his banquet with Chinese officials at Wang Zhengting’s place: ‘It was Chinese food, and a new departure was that we all sat at the same table instead of being divided into two tables of ten. Perhaps partly as a result of this arrangement the evening was distinctively hilarious. It always astonishes me how quickly their [Chinese officials’] wine mounts to their heads. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to have the same effect on the foreigner. Any way it was a very convivial evening; more so than any I have been to here since the uproarious evening of my first visit to Nanking in December 1928.’175 As he familiarised himself with China’s culture, politics, and special etiquette, the Minister witnessed a progression of his relations with Chinese officials that surpassed official courtesy. Yet, just as China’s weather continued to vex him, the customs of the country left 174 In his diaries, Lampson wrote that his daughter, Mary, was explicit with her ‘condemnation’ of Nanjing’s weather. See ‘Tuesday, 3 March, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. For the dust-storms in Beijing, see, for example, ‘Thursday, 9 April, Ta-Tao-Tze’ and ‘Sunday, 12 April, Peking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. In fact, these weather traits in the two cities last until today. 175 ‘Tuesday, 3 March, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. A proof of the ‘new departure’ in the guests’ sitting plan was the banquet in the ceremony on the rendition of the British Concession in Zhenjiang in 1929, mentioned in the introduction to Chapter II. The latter banquet was exactly divided into two tables. See Li Dijun, ‘Before and after receiving the British Concession in Zhenjiang [鎮江英租界接收之前後], 21 November 1929’, in CDDROC Fifth Volume, 770-778. 66 him perplexed. He persistently felt like an alien while attending to his duty as an external observer of nationalist China. Figure IV: Building of British Consulate-General, Nanjing (it became the British Embassy in 1935 and is now a dining room of Shuangmenlou Hotel [雙門樓賓館]), photograph taken by the author on 29 August 2022. This chapter examines the British response to China’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ by delving into the personal experiences and policies of Miles Lampson. Lampson played a significant role in Sino-British relations during extraterritoriality negotiations, both as a professional diplomat and an administrator of Britain’s imperial presence in China. Although he was pressured by his fellow nationals who opposed the relinquishment of treaty privileges, he formulated his policy according to his own ideas as to what was fair and in the long-term interests of Britain. His ideas emerged out of the interactions with other foreign Ministers to China and even with Chinese officials. Robert Bickers describes the British community in China as an amalgam of the ‘British’ (British nationalism), the ‘imperial’ (imperialist pride and arrogance), and the ‘colonial’ (the settler colonialist mentality) identities. These intertwined identities pushed 67 them to cautiously self-regulate to keep a distance from the perceived Chinese ‘pollution’.176 Many scholars of the foreign presence in China, like Bickers, study cosmopolitan Shanghai for its metropolitan prosperity and the coexisting cross-sectional identities, administrations, and jurisdictions in the city.177 Rudolf Wagner argues that the entry of Western ideas and technologies and unceasing Sino-foreign contestations over law and administration together increased the competitiveness of the Chinese public sphere in shaping China’s culture and politics.178 Looking beyond treaty ports, Emily Whewell proves that British official power existed in both treaty ports and inland frontiers, such as the Sino-Burmese border in Yunnan, where consuls served as legal mediators in cross-border disputes to reinforce British colonial and imperialist presence in Burma.179 Studies of British foreign policy during the Interwar years tend to depict British foreign policy as one of pragmatism and realism.180 Scholars who specialise in British policy 176 Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900-1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Also, see Bickers, ‘Death of a Young Shanghailander’; Robert Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community in Shanghai 1843-1937’, Past & Present, no. 159 (May 1998): 161-211. 177 See, for example, Robert Bickers, ‘Incubator City: Shanghai and the Crises of Empires’, Journal of Urban History 38, no. 5 (September 2012): 862–878. 178 Rudolf G. Wagner, ‘The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere’, The China Quarterly, no. 142 (June 1995): 423–443. Various communities incorporated various interpretations of Chinese claims against the unequal treaties. For the pro side, see, for example, Karen Garner, ‘Redefining Institutional Identity: The YWCA Challenge to Extraterritoriality in China, 1925–1930’, in Foreigners and Foreign Institutions in Republican China, ed. Anne-Marie Brady and Douglas Brown (London: Routledge, 2012), 72-92. For the con side, see, for example, Caroline Reeves, ‘Holding Hostages In China, Holding China Hostage: Sovereignty, Philanthropy, and the 1923 “Lincheng Outrage”’, Twentieth-Century China 27, no. 1 (2001): 39–69. The Chinese also attempted to memorialise the foreign contribution to China. See, for example, Jonathan Chappell, ‘Some Corner of a Chinese Field: The Politics of Remembering Foreign Veterans of the Taiping Civil War’, Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 4 (July 2018): 1134–1171. 179 Emily Whewell, ‘Legal Mediators: British Consuls in Tengyue (Western Yunnan) and the Burma-China Frontier Region, 1899–1931’, Modern Asian Studies 54, no. 1 (January 2020): 95–122. 180 The first monograph that identifies the ‘Foreign Office mind’ is T.G. Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865-1914, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Otte demonstrates that the ‘Foreign Office mind’ was not a fixed mindset, but one that was flexible and changed according to the Empire’s shift of focus and evolution of diplomatic elites. David Carlton identifies that the rivalry for controlling diplomatic power between the realist Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and the more idealist Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson weakened Britain’s policy overseas. See David Carlton, MacDonald versus Henderson: The Foreign Policy of the Second Labour Government, (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1970). Last but not least, Michael Hughes investigates how British foreign policy in the Interwar 68 in East Asian and Chinese contexts, more specifically, notice this policy’s eventual failure to contain Japanese territorial thirst and to promote British national interests.181 By looking at the British Minister to China and his efforts to achieve the difficult balance between his diplomatic and administrative duties, this chapter brings together foreign policy and the historiography of the British Empire. My discussion draws on theories about the internal structure of the British Empire, such as the theory that Britain’s Empire’s policy was one of cooperation and compromise between a restrained London and the ambitious individuals on colonial frontiers.182 The first section of this chapter evaluates the importance of British Minister Miles Lampson in Republican Sino-British relations, both to the administrative structure of the British imperialist presence in China in general, and to extraterritoriality negotiations in particular. The second section uses specific examples to reveal the influence of Lampson’s diplomatic authority on the real-life administration of the British Empire in China. These discussions help revisit the strategic position of Lampson as the British Minister to China, jointly-informed by his position and his personal discretion. Lastly, I delve into the rationale of Lampson’s decisions: his personal and professional connections in Nanjing, his appraisal of the GMD Government, and his insulation from outraged British opinions that urged the immediate protection of the Empire. years shifted according to the individual preferences of different Foreign Secretaries. See Michael Hughes, British Foreign Secretaries in an Uncertain World, 1919–1939, (London: Routledge, 2006). 181 Stephen Lyon Endicott, Diplomacy and Enterprise: British China Policy 1933–1937 (Vancouver: The UBC Press, 1975). A comprehensive survey of the Anglo-American (and the League of Nations’) unwillingness to aid the Chinese wish of containing Japanese aggression in Manchuria and Shanghai is Christopher Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy: The West, the League and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931-33, (London: MacMillan Press, 1972). 182 Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); also see his Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). Another comprehensive survey of the British Empire is John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 69 A Mediator in Sino-British Relations The British Minister to China’s foremost duty, as determined by the Foreign Office (FO), was to maintain the current British position in trade and to protect British subjects.183 In the Chinese Republic, the protection expanded to imply the safeguard of treaty privileges, which had flourished foreign communities and informed the shared identity of British residents in modern China.184 In other words, Lampson’s obligation was to use diplomacy to protect Britain’s imperial presence. To visualise the duality of his position, I bring in and complicate Ronald Hyam’s ‘interaction’ model on the metropole-periphery relations within the British Empire. In his general theory (Figure V), decisions from the Centre (London) and initiatives or pressure from the Periphery (colonial communities) met at the proconsuls ‘on the spot’ (colonial governors), who mediated both drives and turned them into concrete imperial policy.185 Figure V: The ‘interaction’ model, for a case-study.186 Hyam’s model indicates the strategic importance of proconsul mediators, yet, some specifics can better adapt his model to the semi-diplomatic, semi-imperialist context of the British 183 Another concern, according to the FO memorandum, was to preserve ‘Open Door’ and refrain China from political tutelage of any other Power. ‘No. 1: Foreign Office Memorandum of January 8, 1930, on British Policy in China’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 4. 184 Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders’: 161-211. 185 Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, chapter 1. An example of proconsul mediators in deciding the British Empire’s expansion in Qing China is J. Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapters 3 and 4. 186 Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, 80-81. 70 presence in Republican China, especially in the early Nanjing decade (Figure VI). First, Lampson came to China as a professional diplomat in an established diplomatic bureaucracy.187 His principal allegiance was to his hierarchical superiors – FO and British Governments in London, rather than to local pressure from anxious British communities. My second and most important modification of Hyam’s model takes into account Chinese initiatives and British reactions to them. Hyam’s model (Figure V), as he notes, is an extension of the historiography explaining the British Empire’s territorial acquisition.188 In the Nanjing decade, however, China was no longer a playing field for imperial adventures and expansion; instead, it actively pushed its own initiatives. Foreign expatriates constantly worried about the ongoing Chinese encroachments on foreign lifestyles, and there were concrete examples of the Chinese threat. For example, since 1929, rowing practices and the Shanghai Rowing Club’s biannual Regattas in Jiangsu had to study the question of Chinese participation, in the face of a threat by the Jiangsu Provincial Government to forbid the activity altogether on Chinese territory.189 Even hunting with legal licences could result in harassment by local soldiers; Chinese authorities declared that hunting in Shanghai’s neighbourhood area would be banned from 31 March 1931.190 In other words, instead of the motivation for expanding economic profits, local initiatives from British communities in China were driven by the fear of falling into Chinese administration and jurisdiction. As the 187 ‘LORD KILLEARN, 84, RETIRED DIPLOMAT; Ambassador to Egypt as Sir Miles Lampson is Dead’, The New York Times, 19 September 1964, 27. 188 Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, 79. 189 ‘Foreigners permitted to row in Qingyang Port: Chinese are allowed to join; the Provincial Government has approved the petition’ [外人准在靑暘港賽船：允許華人加入、呈奉省府批准], Shenbao《申報》, 24 September 1930, 15; also see N. M. W. Harris, “Sampan Pidgin” (Being a History of the Shanghai Rowing Club) (Shanghai: The Mercantile Printing Company, 1938), 93-5. 190 A Briton claimed that the guns of his friends were simply taken away by the soldiers, even though they possessed proper licences. See ‘Thursday, 26 March, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 71 FO recognised in its 27 April 1931 instruction to Lampson, the unwanted implication from the abolition of extraterritoriality was ‘a financial panic and a political agitation’.191 Moreover, the FO instruction indicates that the Chinese nationalist pressure more explicitly comes from diplomacy, namely, the drive against the unequal treaties. In Sino-British relations, the GMD initiative was primarily endured by the British Minister and his Legation. Unlike their American, French, and Japanese counterparts, Sino-British negotiations primarily took place in China. Between March and June 1931 – the primary focus of this chapter – Lampson even needed to leave the Legation in Beijing and come to Nanjing for in-person negotiations on the extraterritoriality issue.192 Figure VI: The revised ‘interaction’ model, in the context of the early Nanjing Decade, 1928-1931. Dashed lines suggest that the pressure in this relationship was weak and less prominent. The revised ‘interaction’ model (Figure VI) better reflects Lampson’s role in Sino-British relations. It shows the British Minister’s strategic position and great responsibilities in the decision-making matrix of Britain’s China policy. After the FO published its December Memorandum in 1926, the overarching theme of Sino-British relations was well-established; Britain declared its respect for China’s nationalist aspirations and disavowed the use of 191 ‘No. 403: Henderson to Lampson (Nanking), 27 April 1931’, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 503-504. 192 See Paragraphs 25 and 36 in ‘No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931’, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 571-572, 576-577. 72 coercive force – the notorious ‘gunboat diplomacy’.193 Lampson was thus working an impossible line – safeguarding various treaty rights with little power to back them up with force. Yet, great duties in the semi-imperialist, semi-diplomatic atmosphere tremendously empowered this single individual, which permitted him to regulate many facets of British expatriates’ lives in China. As we will see, Lampson was not hesitant to exploit his authority. Representative of the Empire in Retreat During his stay in Nanjing for extraterritoriality negotiations between March and June 1931, one of the Minister’s leisure-time activities was to cruise along the Yangzi River to shoot birds, on his Chinese counsellor of the Legation Eric Teichman’s ship S.S. Wanderer.194 These shooting voyages were bonding opportunities between the Minister and his personal friends. At the spur of the moment, the Minister and his fellows could get off their boat and shoot in the paddy fields, without earlier notice to local authorities or residents.195 The freedom to start the river trips was dependent on one of the unequal treaty privileges – foreigners’ free shipping in China’s inland waters. During Lampson’s river voyages on the Yangzi River, he sometimes met British gunboats on duty around China’s capital city and chatted with their captains.196 When the GMD took over Nanjing from the northern warlords in 1927, it was these wandering British gunboats that opened fire on the nationalist army to protect foreign interests, and until communists bombarded H.M.S Amethyst in 1949, this militaristic threat was not distant from the Yangzi River basin.197 193 H. M. Chargé d’Affaires at Peking, ‘British Memorandum on China, communicated on December 16, 1926’, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 6, no. 1 (January 1927): 62-68. 194 See, for example, the ship’s first mention in ‘Wednesday, 25 March, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. Shootings were not just limited to the Minister and Teichman. See, for example, shooting trip of three British men in ‘Saturday, 2 May, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 195 ‘Saturday, 2 May, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 196 See, for example, Lampson’s yarn with the crew of HMS ‘Bee’ in ‘Saturday, 25 April, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 197 Lee, Anglo-Chinese Relations, 1. 73 Interestingly though, Lampson’s freedom with shooting contrasted with the ban on the same activity of his fellow nationals in the neighbourhoods of Shanghai. Impacted Britons brought their protest to the British Minister, hoping that he could negotiate changes with the Chinese MFA.198 In such situations, the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) – a local administration with a significant British presence – appeared powerless. The SMC possessed no ability to supervise Chinese administrative affairs outside the boundaries of the International Settlement. In the preceding decades, the SMC had managed to extend its presence outside the International Settlement with foreign-built extra-Settlement roads and their nearby foreign properties, but negotiations between Lampson and the Chinese MFA determined the destiny of the administration of these entities.199 During extraterritoriality negotiations, Lampson was always ready to throw out this issue to the Chinese for a more satisfactory term in the draft treaty. In the Minister’s own words, ‘I would, so far as it lay in my power to do so, be disposed to meet him [Wang Zhengting] over, though I must emphasise that in this question [of extra-Settlement roads] it was the Municipal Council and not the British Government who were the principals interested.’200 Lampson’s words reveal tensions in the power dynamics within the British informal Empire in China. He recognised that his Legation and the SMC represented two authorities – the diplomatic over all Britons in China and the administrative of one region, but ultimately it was him and foreign policy that would determine the proper approaches to ending British administration in the city. This was because of the paramount significance of 198 Lampson promised to see what he could do. See ‘Thursday, 26 March, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 199 Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders’: 171-175. 200 Thursday, 21 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 74 extraterritoriality in enforcing the legal basis of foreign administration, especially taxation.201 The SMP sought to take its own initiative to determine its future. In 1929, it invited Judge Richard Feetham from South Africa to study the International Settlement and recommend a plan for its future administration.202 By 1931, Feetham’s recommendations reached the British Legation, and Lampson commented with explicit criticism: ‘Logics of Feetham’s arguments is doubtless sound, but his recommendations appear to me largely to ignore the political forces at work in China, and, failing a change of heart on the part of Chinese, I do not at present see the remotest chance of any Chinese Government giving these proposals a hearing.’203 Lampson’s distrust of the British community’s discretion in handling this tricky issue, even that of the legal professional Feetham, encouraged him to extend his power into the real administration of daily British activities in Shanghai, especially regarding public opinions. In one of his meetings with an editor of the North China Daily News, the common publisher of British consular reports and the widely recognised weathervane of the general opinion of British communities in Shanghai, on 16 May 1931, Lampson was explicit with his dissatisfaction with the latter’s ‘inaccurate’ report on the progress of Sino-British extraterritoriality negotiations: ‘I ended up by saying that the harm was done and could not be undone, but I hoped in future he would be able to be more circumspect before rushing in and emphasising what might be not only inaccurate but in effect mischievous reports.’204 When circulating official reports to the press, such as those on the Thorburn case, Lampson clearly 201 Joseph P. Chamberlain, ‘The Feetham Report on Shanghai’, Foreign Affairs 10, no. 1 (October 1931): 146-149. 202 Chamberlain, ‘The Feetham Report on Shanghai’: 145-146. 203 Doc 152: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 5 June 1931, BDFA Part II Series E Vol. 39, 179. 204 Lampson’s rationale was that the British report on the point that Sino-British negotiations had broken off fell into the purposeful Chinese ‘game’. See ‘Saturday, 16 May, Shanghai’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. For the importance of the North China Daily News, see Bickers, Britain in China, 151. 75 instructed the Consulate-General to ensure the press’s moderation in its comments, in order to not ‘embarrass the conduct of these investigations [on the Thorburn case]’.205 Lampson’s authority included the supervision of the British military in China. On 4 May 1931, one day before the opening of the National People’s Convention, Lampson instructed the captain of HMS ‘Vindictive’ that the gunboat needed not to anchor in Nanjing as the British Commander-in-Chief in China had recommended, but instead should continue its routine duty up-river to change crews on other gunboats.206 The Minister acquired this authority because of the British Commander-in-Chief’s caution for the Legation’s opinions regarding military affairs. The Commander once reminded the Naval Mission to Nanjing’s Naval Ministry that its head should ‘regard himself as coming rather under my [Lampson’s] auspices than his, the C-in-C [Commander-in-Chief]’s’.207 The result was a harmonious relationship between Britain’s civil and military wings of administration in China. When Lampson later paid a visit to Shanghai, in contrast to others’ warning on the Commander’s personality, he found the latter ‘very pleasant to deal with’.208 Other examples, especially the status of British troops stationing around Shanghai, were more vexing and revealed the innate interconnectedness of the Minister’s diplomatic and administrative responsibilities; this complexity limited Lampson’s freehand. When Lampson deliberated on the extra-Settlement road issue, where he mentioned the possibility of abandoning the claim to policing and levy rates in these extra-Settlement areas for a quick, satisfactory settlement with the Chinese, someone pointed out that all British troops lived 205 ‘Enclosure 9: Brenan to Lampson, June 24’, in Lampson (Peking) to FO, No. 951 (37/20), 2 July 1931, F 4022/3361/10, FO 371/15510. 206 Lampson reconfirmed his decision the next day. See ‘Monday, 4 May, Nanking’ and ‘Tuesday, 5 May, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 207 ‘Monday, 20 April, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 208 The Commander also expressed his desire to welcome Lampson with compliments like firing guns. This Lampson turned down. ‘Wednesday, 13 May, Shanghai’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 76 outside the Settlement, which meant the surrender of policing may result in clashes between the Chinese police and British military.209 In other words, since the British Government had already turned down the possibility of forcing China into agreement over this affair, Lampson’s preferred diplomatic approach – voluntary offers of less desirable rights to preserve more crucial ones – could result in unwanted tensions that would interfere with the ongoing presence of British special rights in China.210 Lampson’s foreign policy further needed to tackle other interested parties, such as the ‘tiresome’ War Office. One of the War Office telegrams to Shanghai argued that ‘if the troops had to live inside the Settlement the British military could not be responsible for the safety of British life and property outside’. Lampson’s diaries indicated that neither he nor the telegram’s recipient would take the War Office comments seriously, but they certainly revealed the interesting contrasts between him and other influencers of Britain’s China policy, who stubbornly sought to protect British rights with few concessions.211 In the struggle for a balance between his cross-sectional duties, Lampson relied on his diplomatic discretion: a search for the maximised extension of Britain’s special privileges in China, before the eventual sunset of the imperial presence. With his weak hand, he needed to recommend which rights could be first given up. In the extraterritoriality negotiations, he had to determine the excluded areas and their durations for the forthcoming treaty. Lampson pushed for the exclusion of two cities: Shanghai and Tianjin. He explained his rationale in a telegram back home: ‘If we have Hong Kong in the South [of China], Shanghai in the centre, and Tientsin in the North it seems to me that our trade interests should be adequately secured 209 ‘Tuesday, 17 March, Shanghai’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 210 Lampson read a FO telegram that rejected the use of force. See ‘Tuesday, 17 March, Shanghai’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 211 Friday, 17 March, Shanghai, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 77 for some years to come during the inevitable process of readjustment which we cannot and do not wish to avoid.’212 The statement revealed many interesting aspects of Lampson’s pragmatism. He was not opposed to Britain’s presence in China, but he was pessimistic about its future. Lampson interpreted his recommended plan as a temporary solution before the Empire’s final retreat. The Minister’s push for Shanghai and Tianjin rested on an important premise: the giving-up of extraterritoriality in two other cities – Hankou and Guangzhou – to the Chinese. Lampson’s proposal to the FO referred to the surrender of these two places as part of ‘the usual bargaining process’.213 He first threw in Hankou, during which he negotiated with the French on the termination of the Anglo-French Shamian Concession in Guangzhou, and finally – and cautiously – offered Guangzhou to Wang Zhengting.214 Lampson did not achieve these surrenders without local friction. When he explained his policy in front of local councils representing British communities in Tianjin and Shanghai, they easily accepted and appreciated him for all his efforts in extraterritoriality negotiations.215 But the story was different for other circles, and he certainly encountered dissatisfaction from them. The FO was always anxious about British public opinion, which might very likely be irritated or terrified once they realised the substance of the forthcoming extraterritoriality treaty.216 In Hankou, after witnessing the gradual loss of special privileges 212 No. 417: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 5 May 1931, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 513-514. 213 Doc 136: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 6 May 1931, BDFA Part II Series E Vol. 39, 169. 214 See a confirmation of Lampson’s logic of giving up Hankou and Guangzhou (first Hankou and then Guangzhou) for preserving Shanghai and Tianjin, and the final FO approval in Paragraph 40 and 48 of No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 577-578, 583. In Lampson’s discussions with the French Minister to China, Henry Auguste Wilden, both attached little importance to the Shamian Concession. See, for example, Wednesday, 6 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 215 For Lampson’s talk in Tianjin, see Thursday, 16 April, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. For the Minister’s talk in Shanghai, see, for example, Thursday, 14 May, Shanghai, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 216 Doc 147: Henderson to Lampson (Nanking), 29 May 1931, BDFA Part II Series E Vol. 39, 176. 78 since the surrender of their Concession in 1927, British communities had bitterly cast themselves as the victims of British policy: ‘Everytime [sic] there’s a case of “trying it on the dog”, it was Hankow [Hankou] that played the part of the dog.’217 The divergent opinions between Hankou and Shanghai demonstrate that British communities in China primarily regarded Lampson’s principal role as an instrument – rather than a decision-maker – of British foreign policy. They appear unaware of the Minister’s personal preferences of and his influence in making the policy.218 After establishing the significance of Lampson’s cross-sectional role throughout the entirety of British presence in China, the next section will examine the ‘why’ question behind Lampson’s decisions. Impartial Policy Inspired by Informal Circles On 24 May 1931, Lampson farewelled the just retired Dutch Minister and Dean of the foreign Diplomacy Body in China, Willem Jacobus Oudendijk, who had served there for thirty-seven years. For the British Minister, ‘Uncle Ou’, a landmark of Sino-foreign relations, was of very good qualities, yet anachronistic about the ‘modern China’. Oudendijk’s nostalgia for foreigners’ good old days, when the Diplomacy Body possessed tremendous influence in Chinese foreign policy and politics, no longer aligned with nationalist China’s nationwide intolerance for foreign privileges.219 Lampson’s comments on Oudendijk point out two striking themes that defined Sino-foreign relations and his diagnosis of the China affair. First, regardless of the GMD’s desire for amity with foreigners (see Chapter I), Chinese nationalist antagonism against the unequal treaties was everywhere and could not be neglected. Second and more importantly, foreign 217 Thursday, 21 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 218 There were instances of direct criticism of the Minister. See, for example, Bickers, ‘Death of a Young Shanghailander’: 292. 219 Sunday, 24 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 79 Ministers to China collaborated with each other for a more efficient handling of Chinese claims in diplomacy. Even though the Diplomatic Body for all Ministers, the formal structure of this inter-Power cooperation, was essentially paralysed since the 1920s, informal cooperation among major Powers – a de facto Ministerial circle – continued to preside over major China policy decisions.220 Lampson was a faithful proponent of this circle. He maintained the strongest connection with the American Minister, Nelson Johnson, with whom he had ‘work[ed] whole-heartedly together’.221 During their stays in Nanjing for extraterritoriality negotiations, the Anglo-American Ministers deliberated over the substances of Sino-British or Sino-American negotiations and ensured to move along the same line.222 Thanks to these close ties, Ministers’ relationships transcended national identities and progressed toward personal amity. In private conversations among the Ministers, foreign policy instructions from home were not regarded as national secrets; instead, they were shared and even openly criticised. Lampson and Johnson were explicit with their critique of the State Department’s insistence on preserving the negotiations in Washington.223 Henri Wilden, the French Minister, frequently called on Lampson and vented his anger about the uncooperative French Ambassador in Tokyo and his stubborn Government in Paris.224 As Lampson had recorded in his diaries, Wilden complained that ‘if only he [Wilden] was a rich man he would undoubtedly send in his resignation owing to the way in which he was being 220 The arrival of the Soviet Ambassador paralysed the Diplomatic Body. According to the Body’s protocol, since all the other foreign plenipotentiaries were Ministers, the Soviet Ambassador immediately became the Dean of the Diplomatic Body for his highest diplomatic rank, regardless of his communist background. This dissatisfied other plenipotentiaries, who were thus passive to the new Dean’s decisions. See Tang, Treaty Revision Campaign of the Beijing Government, 332-363. 221 Monday, 1 June, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 222 Lampson always informed Johnson of the substance of his discussion right after he finished the discussions with Wang. See, for example, Wednesday, 27 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 223 See, for example, Tuesday, 31 March, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 224 See, for example, Tuesday, 24 March, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 80 treated’.225 Outside work, the Ministers mainly entertained in the same circle. They had dinner parties, played bridge, and sympathetically expressed sincere apologies for the illness of their colleagues.226 However, as the informal Ministerial circle gradually succeeded the position of the paralysed Diplomatic Body, it projected as a secretive and exclusive bloc, restricted to the Great Powers in China – Britain, America, France, and Japan, who shared similar urges to resist China’s claims against extraterritoriality. Social events with the other Ministers proceeded as normal alongside the frames of official courtesy, yet rarely followed the more friendly vein like that in the small circle. In other words, the real distinguisher between the small circle and the entire Diplomatic Body was the deliberation of national policies. Lampson was suspicious of the smaller Powers’ policies, which did not ‘really have a stake in the matter [of extraterritoriality]’.227 ‘Uncle Ou’ was a rare case. Thanks to his seniority and personal kindness, Oudendijk could be exceptionally regarded as a personal friend for closer social events, such as Lampson’s river cruises, but not as close as a political ally to help formulate new diplomatic reactions towards China’s demands.228 Lampson and his French and American colleagues would not regard their resort to the informal Ministerial circle in extraterritoriality negotiations as Great Power politics. Instead, they understood it as a matter of diplomatic pragmatism, where foreigners, especially the Great Powers with the most interests at stake, needed to quickly accommodate to new political realities in nationalist China. As one could tell from his ‘anachronistic’ comment of 225 Wednesday, 27 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 226 See, for example, Lampson’s bridge with the American and French Ministers and Wang Zhengting in Wednesday, 29 April, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. His concern for the French Minister’s health is in Thursday, 21 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 227 Sunday, 29 March, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 228 Lampson once pretended to be just arriving at the American Consulate, so that he would not let Oudendijk realise that he and Johnson had been talking about texts for the draft treaty. See Friday, 27 March, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 81 Oudendijk, Lampson understood the retired Dutch Minister and the Diplomatic Body as symbols of the courteous yet powerless old way of doing China policy, which, similar to British Shanghailanders, recognised China’s gradual encroachment on foreigners’ special rights yet regarded the Chinese initiatives as a mere threat that needed to be contained. 229 This ‘anachronism’ needed to be revolutionised with Oudendijk’s retirement and his more efficient smaller circle, where Ministers removed courtesy and deliberated the professional approaches to dealing with the Chinese closely. Since Chinese initiatives should not be simply considered threats, Lampson found the necessity of befriending Chinese officials and understanding the rationales behind their ambitions. This logic explained Lampson’s close ties with many Chinese Ministers, especially Wang Zhengting and the Naval Minister, Admiral Chen Shaokuan. Lampson’s friendship with Wang was juxtaposed with both Ministers’ ambition to maximise their gains from extraterritoriality negotiations. The Chinese Foreign Minister was invited to onboard Lampson’s river cruises, but, rather than mere leisure, these trips were also for escaping the formal atmosphere in Nanjing and navigating diplomacy with direct personal conversations.230 Frankness was thus diluted by divergent national interests and relevant diplomatic tactics to defend those of each side. It was in these discussions that Wang raised objections from his Government to turn down his initial offers (Chapter II) and Lampson accused him of short-sightedness.231 Lampson’s relations with Admiral Chen were more personal. The Admiral eagerly showed the British Minister to the new Chinese Naval 229 Lampson agreed with Wang Zhengting’s reference to the Diplomatic Body’s powerlessness in the reception for farewelling Oudendijk. See Sunday, 24 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 230 See, for example, Thursday, 21 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 231 Sunday, 24 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 82 Academy and the firing of his patent automatic rifles.232 Right before Lampson departed Nanjing in early June of 1931, he made a point of calling the Admiral to say goodbye.233 In such processes, Lampson familiarised and even adopted, as he would put it, the particular Chinese approach to high diplomacy.234 Deep inside the radical diplomatic rhetoric, many other factors in the unstable country added to the flexibility of the real policy. The British Minister noticed two issues at stake through his observations of Chinese politics. First, the Nanjing Government was willing to make some compromises to the foreign Powers in the negotiations, as long as they were temporary and did not directly undermine Nanjing’s position in domestic political struggles or the eventual abolition of the unequal treaties.235 Second, connections with Chinese statesmen might play a significant role in the construction of foreign policy in China; at least it helped surpass the Foreign Minister and transmit Britain’s demands to the highest authority, President Chiang Kai-shek. For Lampson, Admiral Chen was his strongest connection in Government, who was a close friend and happened to be a close source of the President. The British Minister was not hesitant to use his tie for more gains, such as requesting the Admiral to directly bring the British objection of Wang’s points to Chiang, in extraterritoriality negotiations.236 He also maintained close relationships with other Chinese or foreign social and political elites, from whom he sought to investigate the black box of political development in China.237 232 Friday, 20 March, Putuo and Friday, 1 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 233 Saturday, 6 June, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 234 Monday, 25 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 235 In mid-1931, President Chiang worried that the compromises in the extraterritoriality treaty might be manipulated by the Guangzhou faction to challenge his Government. Wednesday, 27 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 236 Wednesday, 1 April, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 237 See, for example, his gathering with the Yen couples in Shanghai in Thursday, 14 May, Shanghai, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 83 Lampson’s comments on Chinese diplomacy revealed his personal views that Chinese politics were corrupted and highly dependent on connections with Government officials of high rank. With reference to his earlier telegrams, where he worried about the ‘Asiatic’ overvote of the ‘Euro-American’ elements in the Shanghai Municipal Council, these special Chinese ways of doing politics were not what he favoured.238 Yet, personal dislike did not play a determinant role in Lampson’s policy. On the contrary, his diagnosis incorporated a fundamental respect for Chinese autonomy in their struggles for modern law and administration. As the Minister had tried to explain to an official, Chinese politics was and should only be dependent on their own efforts, and their outcomes would inevitably be fruitful. When confronting the current ‘anomalies’ in China, such as the prominent North-South factional divide in the Chinese Navy, ‘it was no good any outsider trying to force that [eventual amalgamation] – indeed, highly undesirable that he should attempt to’.239 Over the past three years between 1928 and 1931, Lampson praised the GMD’s gradual steps in merging China’s regional fragments into a unified polity. Even though Nanjing was still much less energetic than the international, bourgeois Shanghai, the GMD’s reign had introduced to this city new infrastructure and, more importantly, a patient way of handling Sino-foreign conflicts that contrasted the extreme antagonism in its ‘revolutionary’ Northern Expeditions.240 On 26 May 1931, when some British soldiers from a gunboat accidentally trespassed at the Chinese military’s forts, they were treated gently and immediately returned to the British Consulate upon request.241 In a few days, Thorburn’s 238 Lampson’s original fear was over all the ‘Asiatic’ races in international Shanghai, who might ‘outvote the European-American element’. He simply expressed his utmost concern over the Chinese because he was the British Minister to China. See, for example, paragraphs 7-9 in Lampson (Nanking) to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 7 June 1929, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 71-72. 239 Monday, 20 April, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 240 For the new infrastructure, see, for example, Saturday, 6 June, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 241 Tuesday, 26 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 84 disappearance and the aggregating split between Nanjing and Guangzhou would challenge Lampson’s optimism and bring him to the memories of a disorganised China in 1928, but, for the Minister, they were minor interludes before the inevitable future of China’s full-scale unity.242 From September 1930 to June 1931, he kept advising the FO to continue negotiations with Nanjing regardless of raging political turbulence.243 Lampson’s insistence on seeing Chinese unity and stability resembled those of his fellow Consuls and colleagues in London. A March instruction from the FO to the Minister had already established the core of Britain’s assessment of the extraterritoriality negotiations: ‘[T]he true criterion is not whether the Chinese are fit to assume jurisdiction over foreigners, but whether they are politically sufficiently stabilised to give effect to their determination to put an end to the extra-territorial system.’244 Reports from Shanghai, furthermore, confirmed the dilemma in British circles: although GMD’s nationalist activities often involved encroachment on foreign interests in the city, the Nanjing Government was the best bet for achieving stable administration – the more important premise for proper trade and commerce in China.245 In conformity with British policymakers specialising in East Asia, British policy was not about British residents’ willingness; it was essentially a mandatory cooperation with the Chinese. Under this influence, the prominent representative organs of British communities – British Joint Committees in Tianjin and Shanghai – expressed their earnest support and appreciation for Lampson’s achievements in the extraterritoriality negotiations, even though the draft treaty recommended a firm end date for extraterritoriality in China.246 242 For the Minister’s recollections of the bad memories from 1928, see Friday, 5 June, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 243 No. 419: Lampson (Nanking) to Henderson, 6 May 1931, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 515-516. 244 No. 366: Henderson to Lindley (Washington), 7 March 1931, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 476-478. 245 Doc 12 (Inclosure in Doc 11): Consul-General Brenan to Lampson, November 10, 1930: Activities of Kuomintang at Shanghai, BDFA Part II Series E Vol. 39, 23. 246 See Lampson’s reports on the British opinions of Tianjin and Shanghai, respectively in Paragraphs 27 and 66 of ‘No. 460: Lampson (Peking) to Henderson, 8 June 1931’, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 572, 596-597. 85 Interestingly, Lampson insisted on this line much more insistently than his colleagues at home. Throughout the course of Sino-British negotiations in early 1931, FO instructions to Lampson appeared inconsistent. Concerning the areas excluded from the extraterritoriality treaty, in February, the FO seconded Lampson’s recommendation that only the Shanghai International Settlement was the bare minimum among the four areas at stake and communicated this policy to various British Dominions.247 In mid-May, however, another FO telegram worried about the surrender of Hankou and Guangzhou and re-inserted the demand for the exclusion of Tianjin.248 Lampson found the most recent instruction ‘peculiar’. He certainly desired to preserve as much privilege for his country as possible, but the FO’s insistence, which expected the Chinese to make another compromise after two earlier offers, obstructed the common steps in diplomacy; the new FO decision thus weakened Lampson’s hands in achieving his objective.249 The minor metropole-proconsul tension reveals the intricacies in the British defence for extraterritoriality and, more importantly, stresses the differential focuses between the metropole and the proconsul en frontier. The FO and the Foreign Secretary were cautious of not antagonising British public opinion when they designed foreign policy. To avoid a full-scale public challenge to its policy, once questions in the press and Parliament reached a non-neglectable limit, London found itself compelled to express a stubborn attitude in the negotiations.250 Lampson, on the contrary, was more insensible to public pressure and paid more attention to the enforcement of professional diplomacy. In fact, his 16 May critique of 247 No. 358: Henderson to Ingram (Peking), 18 February 1931, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 469-471. Also, see a FO explanation of this instruction in No. 375: Henderson to Lindsay (Washington), 20 March 1931, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 484. 248 No. 426: Henderson to Lampson (Nanking), 13 May 1931 and No. 427: Henderson to Lampson (Nanking), 13 May 1931, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 520. 249 No. 429: Lampson (Shanghai) to Henderson, 15 May 1931, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 521-522. 250 No. 426: Henderson to Lampson (Nanking), 13 May 1931, DBFP ser. 2, vol. 8, 520. 86 the editor of the North China Daily News happened the day after he received the revised FO instructions. The ‘harm’ of the ‘mischievous reports’ was the unwanted opinions agitated by the Shanghai press on the London public, and consequentially, the unwanted interferences on elite execution of British China policy.251 Lampson expected everyone to be addressing this important diplomatic encounter of extraterritoriality in a similar manner to his pragmatism. On 26 May, when Wang Zhengting, looking perplexed, raised the possible withdrawal of his offer due to frictions in Government (Chapter II), the British Minister accused Wang of destroying ‘mutual confidence’ – ‘the basis of all diplomatic discussion and business’.252 He was even willing to protect this principle at the expense of rebelling against some of the FO orders. On 5 June, the day before the formal exchange of the draft treaty, he had to experience the perplexity similar to Wang’s several days ago by submitting a re-drafted duration article (Article 21) from the FO, which disavowed the definite time limit for the end of extraterritoriality. As Wang went on to one-on-one rebut the form and substance of this new text, Lampson felt that ‘my sympathies were entirely with him, though I couldn’t say so’. He thus took the responsibility to disregard the FO order and stand with the original one.253 Why did Lampson decide to resort to his autonomy and to disregard the FO order? He had faith in modern diplomacy, and he believed that the exchange of the draft treaty did not suggest a practical treaty ratification; instead, it was the proper gesture to end the months of tough negotiations.254 The two rationales show Lampson’s self-confidence. As the proconsul in China who engaged with the Chinese officials on a daily basis, FO’s frictions on the 251 ‘Saturday, 16 May, Shanghai’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 252 Tuesday, 26 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 253 Friday, 5 June, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 254 Friday, 5 June, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 87 excluded areas and duration, in his view, contradicted the way of diplomacy in China and would eventually drag Britain to an undesirable outcome: the unnecessary provocation of China’s nationalist anger.255 Lampson might have viewed his Chinese counterparts with many prejudices, but he was against the common anachronism in foreign circles and respected the Chinese autonomy when they worked on their politics. Thanks to the close ties with other foreign plenipotentiaries and Chinese Ministers, he developed informal Ministerial circles in Nanjing, from which he deliberated and executed Britain’s China policy according to his own rationalist discretion, in relative insulation from British local and official pressure. It was how high diplomacy was conducted in China, and what foreigners should do in China in approaching high diplomacy. The Unexpected Continuance of the British Empire in China On 7 June 1931, Lampson’s air travel back to Beijing marked the temporary quiet-down of the most intensive phase of Sino-British extraterritoriality negotiations. For Lampson, it was the golden opportunity to catch a breath from Wang’s nationalist pressure and leave this business behind for a while, until the GMD could manage to mitigate the ongoing Nanjing-Guangzhou political divide and bring China back from the edge of political chaos.256 At that point, the British Minister recognised the necessity of having to pick up the entire affair again in the imminent future; he could not have anticipated the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, nor would he dare to imagine the hiatus lasting for over a decade. Between 1928 and 1931, especially in early 1931, Lampson’s policy recommendations were indispensable to the duality of his proconsul position: explicitly as a diplomat to coordinate with Chinese nationalists, and implicitly as an administrator to 255 Saturday, 30 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 256 Friday, 5 June, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 88 supervise activities of British communities. As he directed the compelled transition of British presence in China to co-exist with the Chinese jurisdictional and administrative systems, he relied on the diplomatic mindset to form decisions and utilised his governing power for these policy decisions’ successful execution. Lampson deliberated his policy in close association with like-minded official circles – one of the other foreign plenipotentiaries and the other of Chinese officials – and preserved much distance with outraged British communities impacted by these diplomatic negotiations. Unlike the regional governing organs, the British Minister prioritised Britain’s national strategy – even though it might involve the unwanted obedience of the alien Chinese system – over concerns for individual or regional well-offs. Lampson’s actions, therefore, were consistently informed by his diagnosis of the new nationalist regime. Whereas his recommendations had appeared more cautious than the FO in the early phases of extraterritoriality negotiations in 1929, as he was better familiarised with the Chinese way in 1931, policy recommendations in his telegrams became more and more flexible for his Chinese counterparts.257 Since the Japanese invasion of China on 18 September 1931, Lampson’s rather empathetic voice for the Chinese and concerns over Japanese territorial thirst contradicted the FO’s intention to marginalise the diplomatic implications of the affair.258 In 1933, Alexander Cadogan succeeded in his position with deeper suspicion of Chinese nationalism, but, as time went by, he gradually began to concur with Lampson’s judgements of Sino-Japanese disputes and nationalist China.259 257 Lee, Anglo-Chinese Relations, 81-98. 258 Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy, 392-393. 259 Lee suspected that Cadogan came with these judgements because of the opinions of British communities in China. Lee, Anglo-Chinese Relations, 240-241. 89 Conclusion: Revolution by ‘Dinner Parties’: Reappraising Sino-British Extraterritoriality Negotiations 終章：“請客吃飯”的革命：回望中英治外法權談判 Looking back now at 1929-1931, how do we evaluate the diplomatic culture, between the GMD Nanjing Government’s ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ and its foreign responders? In fighting for legitimacy in ruling the entirety of China, the Communist Party would probably argue for the inevitable failure of the GMD’s national revolution, ‘revolutionary diplomacy’ included. After his in-person investigations into the rural areas in Hunan Province, Mao Zedong offered the best rationale for the communist claim, namely, that ‘revolution is not a dinner party’ [革命不是請客吃飯].260 Mao was unaware of the specifics of GMD-British negotiations, but his maxim was surprisingly pointing to the essence behind the Nanjing Government’s ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric. Consider this scene from the British Minister’s diaries, written in recollection of one of the river cruises with Wang Zhengting in late May 1931: ‘Here [at a clump of willows] we landed and proceeded to have tea on shore, before which I took C.T.W. [Wang Zhengting] for a little walk and we again resumed our discussions, this time in rather a bantering vein; [...] And so we all sat down to tea surrounded by the entire village population who had gathered round watching the strange phenomenon. It was really a most amusing show. Between the intervals of chivvying off the urchins we threshed the thing out from every angle and gradually he began to budge from his non possumus attitude. By the time we got back on board ship he had evidently decided that it was up to him to make a move.’261 260 ‘Report on movements of Hunan peasants’ [湖南農民運動報告], in Mao Zedong, Selected Writings of Mao Zedong《毛澤東選集》First Volume (Beijing: People’s Press [人民出版社], 1967), 17. 261 ‘Monday, 25 May, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 90 When the group went back on the ship S.S. Wanderer, Wang made an offer to the British by excluding ten years for Shanghai and five years for Tianjin from the applicational range of the extraterritoriality treaty.262 The minor episode – looking exactly like a ‘dinner party’ in Mao’s epigram – suggests many prominent themes in Sino-British diplomacy of that time: personal friendship between the two Ministers regardless of national interests, switches of attitudes in negotiations between firmness and flexibility, and most strikingly, the ‘amusing’ contrast between energetic professional elites and ordinary residents. None of these characteristics were ‘revolutionary’. When local villagers, especially the ‘urchins’, curiously speculated the tea between two white foreigners (Lampson’s assistant was also present) and a Chinese official in an unfamiliar language, they were probably unaware of the extraordinary importance of the group’s conversation to the end of ‘national humiliation’ in China. This anecdote further opens a window into the constraints in the Chinese and British officials’ political thinking. Living under the influence of antithetical claims for the unequal treaty regime – between Chinese nationalist urges for its unilateral abolition and British residents’ insistence on its indefinite preservation, Chinese and British officials preserved divergent interpretations of the political realities in China. Nationalist Chinese officials were preoccupied with resolving ‘China’s own flaws’ and enhancing Sino-foreign amity before the wholistic cancellation of these special rights. To address these ‘flaws’, the Nanjing Government (Chapter I) prioritised its suppression of domestic dissidents, while Foreign Minister Wang Zhengting (Chapter II) worked on China’s modernising legal reforms for its admission to the family of nations. The British bitterly confronted China’s gradual encroachments on foreigners’ treaty regime, but Minister to China Miles Lampson (Chapter 262 ‘Monday, 25 May, Nanking’, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 91 III) was convinced of accepting the ‘Chinese way’ – getting used to the special circumstances in China and abandoning the ‘anachronistic’ claims against Chinese initiatives – in directing the normalisation of Sino-British relations. I have argued that Sino-British officials prioritised a pragmatic, evolutionary, and gradual approach when handling the fates of extraterritoriality and other unequal treaties in a rhetorically revolutionary China. Restrained by the ideological constraints that hindered their political freehand, the diplomatic officialdom anxiously searched for manageable changes that did not erode the relations between the two states. The first trajectory of these searches was personal friendships between Sino-British officials. By ensuring the ground for private discussions, these personal ties were indeed inseparable from diplomats’ loyalty to their national interests, but they were still examples of the desired Sino-foreign amity regardless of nationalist antagonism. The second trajectory was officials’ administration of domestic politics under the name and for the sake of diplomacy. To maximise the accomplishment of their policy blueprints, both the Nanjing Government and the British Legation sought to insulate their negotiations from hot-headed nationals, and regulated those who trespassed this domain reserved for officials’ pragmatism and discretion. Why did diplomats’ competence fail to bring any concrete result from the tough years of extraterritoriality negotiations? The best explanation for the retarded progress was the GMD’s approach to foreign policy. Nanjing statesmen and Foreign Minister Wang Zhengting were dealing with this diplomatic obstacle in different ways, but they shared the same ideological paradox; throughout the course of negotiations, their ambitious claims to revolution and unilateral action always contrasted the true evolutionary way of foreign policy. This was a theory-practice divide when the Party progressed from a revolutionary force to a ruling party; the call for revolutionised international relations was an antithesis to 92 the commitment to the Western-defined norms. In contrast to their British counterparts, who seldomly argued beyond their faith in diplomatic pragmatism, these inconsistencies undermined domestic and foreign receptions of the GMD Government’s credibility. Sino-British amity – at least coexistence – thus remained an untenable product of official fantasy, rather than a consolidating political reality. Indeed, even before the Japanese invaded and called a final end to extraterritoriality negotiations, the Sino-British exchange of the draft extraterritoriality treaty on 6 June 1931 was a direct product of the Nanjing Government’s dilemma, between the urge to meet British demands and the fear of the Guangzhou fraction’s critique on the Government’s ‘unrevolutionary’ concessions made to foreign Powers.263 Mao might have been too critical in his holistic rejection of the ‘dinner party’ style of revolution, but his maxim correctly noticed the incoherence among self-proclaimed revolutionaries. On the analogical dinner table that the GMD hosted, even the foreign guests at the ‘dinner party’, such as Lampson, judged those Chinese officials for their wine’s ‘quick mount on their heads’. Too much wine came with hasty grandiloquence – to name a few, the 1929 and 1931 Mandates and other claims on the unilateral abolition of unequal treaties. It was this unrealistic rhetoric that frustrated the conversion of diplomats’ competence into concrete political progress, thus sowing the ‘seeds of destruction’.264 263 Wednesday, 27 May, Nanking, Diaries of Miles Lampson 1/4 (1931), GB 165-0176. 264 The rhetorical reference comes from Eastman, Seeds of Destruction. To note, Eastman’s book seeks to explain the collapse of the GMD Government in 1949, while my thesis concentrates more on the ideological inconsistencies that retarded the success of Chinese diplomacy, rather than destroying it. 93 Appendix I: The Chinese Mandate of 28 December 1929265 ‘In every full sovereign State foreigners as well as its nationals are equally amenable to its laws and to the jurisdiction of its tribunals. This is an essential attribute to State sovereignty and a well established principle of international law. For more than eighty years China has been bound by systematic extraterritoriality [consular jurisdiction] which has prevented the Chinese Government from exercising its judicial power over foreigners within its territory. It is unnecessary to state here the defects and disadvantages of such a system. As long as extraterritoriality is not abolished so long will China be unable to exercise her full sovereignty. For the purpose of restoring her inherent jurisdictional sovereignty it is hereby decided and declared that on and after the first day of the first month of the nineteenth year of the Republic (January 1, 1930) all foreign nationals in the territory of China who are now enjoying extra territorial privileges shall abide by the laws, ordinances and regulations duly promulgated by the Central and local governments of China. The Executive Yuan and Juridical Yuan are hereby ordered to instruct the ministries concerned to prepare as soon as possible a plan for the execution of this mandate and to submit it to the Legislative Yuan for examination and deliberation with a view to its promulgation and enforcement.’ 查凡屬統治權完整之國家，其僑居該國之外國人民，應與本國人民同樣受該國法律之支配，及司法機關之管轄，此係國家固有之要素，亦為國際公法確定不易之原則，中國自受領事裁判權束縛以來，已屈八十餘年，國家法權不能及於外人，其弊害之深無 265 ‘Order of the National Government [國民政府令], 28 December 1929’, ‘Academia Historica’ 001-064410-00001-029. The English translation is from ‘No. 183: Lampson to Henderson, 30 December 1929’, DBFP ser. 2 vol. 8, 252-253. 94 庸贅述，領事裁判權一日不能廢除，即中國統治權一日不能完整，茲為恢復吾固有之法權起見，定自民國十九年一月一日起，凡僑居中國之外國人民，現時享有領事裁判權者，應一律遵守中國中央政府及地方政府依法頒布之法令規章，着行政院司法院轉令主管機關從速擬具實施辦法，送交立法院審議以便公布施行，此令。 95 Appendix II: The Chinese Mandate of 4 May 1931266 The relinquishment of foreign extraterritoriality [consular jurisdiction] in China is the National Government’s immutable policy and the collaborative expectation of all Chinese nationals that it will be realised immently. As stipulated in the Mandate of 28 December 1929, all foreign residents in China ought to obey Mandates and regulations published by the Chinese Central Government or local Governments in accordance with the law. Now, according to the reports from the Executive Yuan and Jurisdictional Yuan, responsible ministries have drafted twelve regulations over foreigners in China, and these clauses have been reviewed and passed by the Legislative Yuan. [The National Government] hereupon announces that these provisions shall come into effect on 1 January 1932. End of Mandate. 查廢除外人在華領事裁判權一事。為政府堅定不移之政策。亦為全國人民一致之企望。凡僑居中國之外國人。應一律遵守中國中央政府及地方政府依法頒布之法令規章。業於民國十八年十二月二十八日命令公布在案。現據行政院司法院呈稱。所有實施辦法。業經主管機關擬具管轄在華外國人實施條例十二條。並由立法院審議完竣等語。茲將該條例公布之。並定自民國二十一年一月一日起施行。此令。 266 ‘Order of the National Government [國民政府令], 4 May 1931’, Gazette of the National Government《國民政府公報》, no. 764, 13. Translation by author. 96 Appendix III: Twelve Regulations over Foreigners in China 《管轄在華外國人實施條例十二條》267 Article I. ‘Foreigners’ in this regulation specifically refers to foreign citizens enjoying consular jurisdiction (extraterritoriality) in China as of 31 December 1929. Article II. Foreigners should be subject to Chinese jurisdiction across all levels of courts. Article III. Special courts should be respectively installed in Special Regional Courts of the Northeastern Provinces, Shenyang, Tianjin, Qingdao, Shanghai, Hankou, Baxian, Minhou, Guangzhou, and Kunming, and all high courts that belonged to these Special Regional Courts, to judge civil or criminal cases with foreign defendants. Article IV. The head of the Special Court should be served by the head of the high court the former belonged to, as a concurrent post. Article V. In civil or criminal cases with foreign defendants that took place beyond the jurisdiction of the courts mentioned in Article III, the defendant can issue a written request to be tried by the specific court unmentioned in Article III. Article VI. The Special Court can recruit several legal advisors. The Ministry of Jurisdictional Administration is obliged to choose and recommend legal specialists with good conduct and qualifications as judges to fill these posts. Legal advisors are not restricted to Chinese nationals. Legal advisors can raise their opinions via written requests to the court, but they cannot influence court decisions. 267 ‘Order of the National Government [國民政府令], 4 May 1931’, Gazette of the National Government 《國民政府公報》, no. 764, 1-2. Translation by author. 97 Article VII. The arrest or detainment of foreigners, or search in the foreigner’s residence and other relevant places, should be completed according to the Law of Criminal Proceedings. Arrested foreigners with suspect of violating the Criminal Code or other criminal regulations should be sent to court for interrogation within twenty-four hours. Article VIII. Arbitration signed between foreigners and foreigners or other peoples should be considered valid by the court, and the latter should decide based on that arbitration, unless the arbitration meets one of the circumstances below: I. Violation of public order; II. Violation of good customs; III. The arbitration shall be considered invalid according to the general principles of law. Article IX. The affected foreign litigant in civil or criminal cases can hire Chinese or foreign lawyers as attorney or defence counsel. The lawyer provisions and other regulations over lawyers apply to foreign lawyers mentioned above. Article X. Foreigners who violate policing regulations should be interrogated by the court or the police. The police can issue fines for below fifteen yuan on such foreigners, except for those who have committed the issue again. Unpaid fines after five days of their issue result in detainment. Each yuan is converted to one day of detainment; any amount below one yuan is counted as one day. Article XI. The Ministry for Jurisdictional Administration uses its Mandates to decide where to imprison and detain foreigners. Article XII. The National Government uses its Mandates to decide this regulation’s enforcement date and its period in force. 98 第一條：本條例所稱外國人專指民國十八年十二月三十一日在華享有領事裁判權之外國人民。 第二條：外國人應受中國各級司法法院之管轄。 第三條：在東省特區地方法院、瀋陽地方法院、天津地方法院、青島地方法院、上海地方法院、漢口地方法院、巴縣地方法院、閩侯地方法院、廣州地方法院及昆明地方法院及其繫屬之各該高等法院內，各設專庭，受理屬於外國人為被告之民刑訴訟案件。 第四條：專庭庭長由其所繫屬之法院院長兼充之。 第五條：外國人為被告之民刑訴訟案件，發生在第三條以外之各法院管轄者，被告得用書面聲請，受第三條以外之該管法院審理。 第六條：專庭得設法律諮議若干人，由司法行政部遴選品行端方，具有法官資格之法律專家，呈請派充之。 法律諮議不限於中國人。 法律諮議得用書面向法庭陳述意見，但不得干預審判。 第七條：外國人之拘提或羈押及其住宅或其他處所之搜索，應依刑事訴訟法行之。 99 外國人犯有刑法或其他刑事法規上之嫌疑，已經逮捕者，即移送法院訊問，最遲不得逾二十四小時。 第八條：外國人與外國人或其他人民所訂仲裁契約，經當事人之一方或雙方聲請時，法院應認為有效，並執行依據該項契約所為之決定書，但有左列情形之一者不在此限。 一、違背公共秩序者 二、違背善良風俗者。 三、依普通法律原則應認為無效者。 第九條：外國人為民刑訴訟案件當事人，得依法律委任中國或外國律師為訴訟代理人或辯護人，律師章程及其他關於律師之法令，對於前項外國律師適用之。 第十條：外國人犯違警罰者，由法院或警察機關審訊之。 警察機關處罰外國人限於十五圓以下之罰金，但再犯者不在此限。 前項罰金於判定後五日以內不完納者，每一圓易拘留一日，不滿一圓者以一日計算。 第十一條：關於外國人之監禁羈押及拘留處所，由司法行政部以命令指定之。 第十二條：本條例施行日期及其期間由國民政府以命令定之。 100 Abbreviations BDFA – British Documents on Foreign Affairs CDDROC – Collection of Diplomatic Documents during the Republic of China, 1911-1949《中華民國時期外交文獻滙編，1911-1949》 CADHROC – Collection of Archival Documents on the History of the Republic of China《中華民國史檔案資料滙編》 DBFP – Documents on British Foreign Policy FO – (British) Foreign Office GMD – (Chinese) Guomindang [Nationalist Party/(中國)國民黨] IMH (MFA) – Ministry for Foreign Affairs Archives, catalogued at the Institute of Modern History Archives, ‘Academia Sinica’ [外交部檔案，中研院近史所檔案館藏] IMHROC – Important Matters in the History of the Republic of China《中華民國史大事記》 MFA – (Chinese) Ministry for Foreign Affairs [外交部] SHAC – Second Historical Archives of China [中國第二歷史檔案館] SMA – Shanghai Municipal Archives [上海市檔案館] SMC – Shanghai Municipal Council WZTRS – Wang Zhengting’s Recent Speeches《王正廷近言录》 101 Glossaries Geographies Beijing (Peking) – 北京 (北平, Beiping/Peking, 1928-1949) Guangzhou (Canton) – 廣州 (Guangdong Province) Jiujiang – 九江 (Jiangxi Province) Hankou (Hankow) – 漢口 (one of the Wuhan three towns [武漢三鎮]) Nanjing (Nanking) – 南京 Shamian (Shameen) – 沙面 (in Guangzhou) Shanghai – 上海 Zhenjiang (Chinkiang) – 鎮江 (Jiangsu Province) People Chen Shaokuan – 陳紹寬, 1889-1969 Chen Youren (Youren Eugene Chen) – 陳友仁, 1878-1944 Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) – 蔣介石, 1887-1975 Gu Weijun (V.K. Wellington Koo) – 顧維鈞, 1888-1985 Hu Hanmin (Hu Han-min) – 胡漢民, 1879-1936 Lu Zhengxiang – 陆徵祥, 1871-1949 Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) – 毛澤東, 1893-1976 Shi Zhaoji (Alfred Sao-ke Sze) – 施肇基, 1877-1958 Sun Fo (Sun Ke) – 孫科, 1891-1973 Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) – 孫中山（孫逸仙）, 1866-1925 102 Wang Jingwei (Wang Ching-wei) – 汪精衛, 1883-1944 Wang Zhengting (Chengting Thomas Wang) – 王正廷, 1882-1961 Xu Mo (Hsu Mo) – 徐謨, 1893-1956 Yan Huiqing – 顏惠慶, 1877-1950 103 Bibliography Primary Sources 「領事裁判權撤廢 [Abolition of Consular Jurisdiction]」. ‘Academia Historica’ [國史館]. Documents of the National Government [國民政府檔案]. 001-064410-00001, 00002, 00003, 00004. British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, Part II Series E (Asia, 1914-1939) Volume 39 (China, October 1930—December 1931). Eds. Ann Trotter et al. Lanham: University Publications of America, 1996. 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Evolutionary Revolution : Sino-British Extraterritoriality Negotiations and the Reconstitution of Chinese Foreign Relations, 1929-1931
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