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helenawen
Newbie
Joined: Nov 06, 2005
Posts: 5
Status: Offline
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  Posted:
Apr 21, 2006 - 11:52 PM |
 
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| Post subject: I need your help |
I was writing my annual thesis these days.I want to find this article,could anyone help me to provide a link to me?
"SHANGHAILANDERS: THE FORMATION AND IDENTITY OF THE BRITISH SETTLER COMMUNITY IN Shanghai 1843--1937
Bickers Past and Present.1998; 159: 161-211"
The article is on
http://past.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/159/161.pdf
But I have to pay the pounds to see it.Since I don't have pounds(what I have is Rmb),I have no chance to see this article which is a very important and useful material to me.
I wonder whether anyone here have the payed link to Oxford Journals?Could you do me a favour to send me this article?
Thank you very much indeed! |
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frenchlover1999
Shanghai Royalty
Joined: Sep 18, 2004
Posts: 8730
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Apr 22, 2006 - 12:35 AM |
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Any chance you can find this at the Shanghai library? |
_________________
That was no shark. That was my personal submarine. But enough of this polite conversation. What is the purpose of your visit? |
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GC
The Ginger Prince
Joined: Dec 01, 2003
Posts: 21531
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Apr 22, 2006 - 02:04 AM |
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| frenchlover1999 wrote: |
| Any chance you can find this at the Shanghai library? |
Fidel has probably emptied the section. |
_________________
You turned on the lights, Fuelled U boats by night, That's how you repay us, It's time to go home. |
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man
FooJay
Joined: Mar 30, 2006
Posts: 1788
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Apr 22, 2006 - 02:23 AM |
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GC
The Ginger Prince
Joined: Dec 01, 2003
Posts: 21531
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Apr 22, 2006 - 02:30 AM |
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pm in its way |
_________________
You turned on the lights, Fuelled U boats by night, That's how you repay us, It's time to go home. |
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Super_Laowai
Raver
Joined: Apr 19, 2006
Posts: 398
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Apr 22, 2006 - 06:58 AM |
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GC
The Ginger Prince
Joined: Dec 01, 2003
Posts: 21531
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Apr 22, 2006 - 07:05 AM |
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yeah
you got a problem with that? |
_________________
You turned on the lights, Fuelled U boats by night, That's how you repay us, It's time to go home. |
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peasant
Reacher
Joined: July 24, 2004
Posts: 323
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Apr 22, 2006 - 07:16 AM |
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Are you sure you can't find this by yourself?
Shanghailanders: the formation and identity of the British settler community in Shanghai, 1843-1937
Past & Present, May, 1998 by Robert Bickers
British settlers in China were a sore problem for the British state as it attempted to re-negotiate its informal presence in that country in the face of the Nationalist Revolution of 1923-8. The most problematic group resided in Shanghai and called themselves Shanghailanders. These were the small treaty port people, whose fortunes were inextricably tied up with the existence of the British concessions and extraterritorial privileges in China. They worked in treaty port service occupations (administrative, service sector, police), or worked for, or ran, utility companies, land investment and real estate firms. Regardless of their social class or economic clout, their livelihoods were largely non-transferable, unlike the expatriate British businessmen who worked for the largest China companies (Jardine Mathesons, Butterfield and Swire), or for the multinationals (British American Tobacco, Imperial Chemicals Industries, Asiatic Petroleum Corporation), and whose interests and activities form the subject of most accounts of Sino-British relations.(1) Shanghai was all the Shanghailanders had.
They defended their position with bluster and with violence. In May 1925 they almost caused the complete collapse of the British position in China with their belligerent approval of the Shanghailander-run Shanghai Municipal Police after it mishandled a Chinese student demonstration, fired on the crowd and killed eleven Chinese. The May 30th Movement which grew out of this incident, a nation-wide anti-imperialist campaign, was a defining moment in the development of modern Chinese nationalism, and also in the growth of the Chinese Communist Party.(2) Through their belligerent conservatism, but mostly through the intractable fact of their very presence, Shanghailanders set back British responses to the development of the nationalist movement and its political victories by at least one decade, and arguably by two. It was only in January 1943 that a Sino-British friendship treaty was signed, in which the props of informal empire dating back to the end of the first Opium War in 1842 -- extraterritoriality, concessions, settlements -- were finally abandoned. But by then Britain had been militarily defeated by Japan in East and South-East Asia, and diplomatically vanquished in China by the United States.
Although prominent in Chinese historiography,(3) the history of the British communities on the China coast, and especially that which developed in the city of Shanghai between 1842 and 1949, has largely been ignored by historians of the British empire and the British diaspora. The settler communities in China have been difficult to define and their particularities and problems have been lost in wider accounts of the progress of Sino-British relations, which have examined the processes of diplomatic innovation and adaptation that became necessary in the face of the successive triumphs of the nationalist Guomindang in 1926-7, Japanese militarism in Manchuria in 1931 and in China proper after 1937, and finally the Chinese Communist Party in 1949.(4) Metropolitan-based interest group politics have dominated most works on this painful diplomatic process; Shanghailanders get short shrift. Aspects of Shanghai's history have dominated much recent Western research on republican-era Chinese history, but the foreign presence is still underexamined.(5) Rhoads Murphey's inclusion of the treaty ports in what he wildly identified as Britain's `grand colonial design' for China has been one exception to this pattern. But, in fact, much of what came to characterize the establishment of those that he labelled the `outsiders' evolved haphazardly in the interstices of a British China policy that was hardly grand, was certainly not colonial, and was arguably not at all designed.(6) It is important, then, that historians of empire, of China, and of Sino-British relations, properly understand the nature of this problematic British presence in the city. As William C. Kirby has recently noted, `Nothing mattered more' in republican China than issues of foreign relations -- `at home and abroad'.(7) We need to understand the varieties of the foreign presences in China if we are to understand the intractability of the problems they presented; and, in the case of Shanghai, we can only understand their politics if we accept that Shanghailanders actually formed the settler society that they `imagined' for themselves.
As this article shows, the British community in Shanghai actually provides a clear model of what a settler community looks like and how it develops. The nature of its multilayered identities and their interaction are also clearly identifiable. Shanghailander identity was always British and imperial, but Shanghailanders' local `imagined' identity, so easily and readily dismissed by contemporaries and by historians, was of crucial importance to them, and to the Sino-British imbroglio. At different times their British, imperial or local identity was more prominent than the others, but all three were ever-present. Historiographically, the recent profusion of studies on the culture of colonialism and the society of the settler has greatly enriched our understanding of the processes of colonial expansion, consolidation, retrenchment and, in particular, the resistance of settler or, at the very least, settled, interests to decolonization. Missionaries have long been known to have had a different agenda and to have clashed with colonial thinking; but now beginning to be strongly delineated are the conflicts and competitions between and among other groups in colonial societies.( C. A. Bayly's call to put Britain, and British social and intellectual history, back into studies of South Asia identifies some of the further insights, firmly rooted in British studies, to be gained from an examination of the colonizer. Domestic class, nationality and gender tensions were exported with settlers, administrators and missionaries; and these tensions found new modes of expression, especially as they interacted with issues of race, as they underpinned the improvised communities of empire.(9) This was particularly true in the outposts of Britain's informal empire in China.
This article first outlines the structure of the Shanghai polity from 1843 onwards. It then describes the evolution of the specific Shanghailander community, its identity and ambitions, and analyses the key areas in which Shanghailanders articulated and maintained this identity (through social, sexual and racial taboos, for example, and through demonstrations of communal purpose and military power). The intractable and concrete nature of the Shanghailander identity is then examined during the period when the mature character and form of the community provided most problems for the British state: the period of its slow dissolution between 1925 and 1943. In so doing, it demonstrates how different, indeed competing, interests operated in Shanghai under the Union Jack; most importantly, it outlines the economic, social and political gulf between the expatriate trader and the settler, and then after 1925, between the diplomat and the settler.
I
This article first outlines the structure of the Shanghai polity from 1843 onwards. It then describes the evolution of the specific Shanghailander community, its identity and ambitions, and analyses the key areas in which Shanghailanders articulated and maintained this identity (through social, sexual and racial taboos, for example, and through demonstrations of communal purpose and military power). The intractable and concrete nature of the Shanghailander identity is then examined during the period when the mature character and form of the community provided most problems for the British state: the period of its slow dissolution between 1925 and 1943. In so doing, it demonstrates how different, indeed competing, interests operated in Shanghai under the Union Jack; most importantly, it outlines the economic, social and political gulf between the expatriate trader and the settler, and then after 1925, between the diplomat and the settler.
Shanghai became China's biggest, most industrialized and modernized city. The cauldron of Chinese cultural, intellectual, industrial and political innovation before the establishment of the communist regime in 1949, it was the most important focus of trade for Britain.(14) It served as an entrepot, and as the headquarters for most British China interests. Shanghailanders formed the largest single British community in China and had political and military control of the heart of the city until the late 1930s. Despite being largely ignored by posterity, they had developed a complex and distinctive identity by the 1920s and actively attempted to follow policies of their own and influence the policies of the British and other foreign governments. There never was a grand `Yangtsze Protectorate' based on the city, which some agitated for in the late 1890s, but Shanghai thrived and was soundly protected.(15) British naval and military reinforcements were sent at times of acute crisis, but on the whole the International Settlement was left to defend itself, unless this was patently impossible, and to order its own affairs. As the Chairman of the SMC remarked at the settlement's Jubilee celebration in 1893, `We are allowed a pretty free hand'.(16) There was no equivalent of the viceregal establishment which kept the unofficial British in India in their place, nor was there a colonial administration to lord it over the men of business. The China consular service were small fry; Shanghailanders governed themselves.
The government of the International Settlement was a complicated affair, an accretion of precedent over thin legal foundations. The SMC was annually elected on a property-based franchise that excluded most Britons from voting, and even more from standing for election, while others held multiple votes depending on the number of properties they represented.(17) In 1854, when the Council was formed, there were some 30-40 Land Renters out of a foreign (mostly British) population of about 250.(1 Only in the late 1930s did more than one-sixth of the British community get the vote, and then only to assist the gerrymandering necessary to hamper Japanese activism. Despite the limited franchise, Shanghailanders much preferred this restrictive arrangement. They did not need to vote for the SMC or serve on it to feel that it was their body: as will be shown, they worked for it and paid for it, and they lobbied for policy implementation in the press. They also voted with their feet, by joining the SVC, the volunteer fire brigade, or the Police Specials during the First World War. These were communal institutions and the sense of community transcended the restrictions placed on Shanghailanders' representative involvement. The Land Renters (and ratepayers) met once a year in full session to vote on the budget and on substantive issues put forward by the Council, or by other ratepayers. The nine members of the Council (five British, two American, and two Japanese after the First World War) met regularly in full session, but delegated much of their work to committees of elected councillors and co-optees. All of these men were usually drawn from the ranks of the managers of the bigger expatriate and Shanghailander companies. The very first Council appointed a Secretary to oversee the embryonic administration. By 1922, some 600, mostly British employees, were employed in the Secretariat, and in the Revenue, Public Health, Public Works and Police departments, supervising a far larger number of Chinese. The SMC had become by far the biggest employer of British personnel in the settlement.(19)
Individual Britons in Shanghai were subject, like all Britons in China, to the jurisdiction of their consuls. The SMC, however, was constitutionally responsible only to its electorate, and not to any direct consular or diplomatic authority (unlike its French neighbour). Shanghailanders were fond of reminding themselves, and the world, of this fact. Exactly who the SMC was answerable to always remained unclear. The British Minister in Peking could not formally order the Council, as a body, to do anything, although the Land Regulations themselves were subject to diplomatic agreement and the SMC was subject, as a body, to claims made against it in a Court of the Consuls, convened when necessary, of those foreign powers with interests in the settlement.(20)
Unshackled then by formal consular or diplomatic control, the SMC consistently arrogated to itself greater and greater degrees of autonomy as it grew in size and influence over the century of the settlement's formal existence. It acquired a sizeable Chinese population during and after the calamitous Taiping rebellion which devastated the provinces of the Yangzi valley, and it was soon representing the interests of, as it was termed in 1872, the `real estate oligarchy': those Britons who made their fortunes, or even just a comfortable living, out of land and property deals as a result of this influx.(21) The Chinese, who formed the majority of the settlement's population throughout its history, were denied representation on the Council until 1928, when three new seats were allotted them.(22) The Chinese-ness of the foreign settlement, which often surprised Europeans arriving there for the first time, must always be borne in mind. Shanghailanders constructed their community in the midst of China's most populous metropolis.
The `Shanghailander' identity was a British affair. Other national communities in Shanghai mostly remained communities of expatriate foreign nationals,(23) but the British became Shanghailanders. And Britons dominated the patterns of political and social life in the nominally International Settlement. The institutions established in Shanghai more closely resembled those in British towns such as Oldham or Birmingham than the `synarchy' with Chinese institutions which John K. Fairbank claimed to have identified, or the political institutions found in other countries represented in the International Settlement.(24) Under the Shanghai Municipal Council's motto, Omnia Functa in Uno (everyone together as one), overt British dominance was cloaked by rhetorical cosmopolitanism. This rhetoric was important because it provided the basis on which British settlers differentiated between their Shanghailander and their British identities; it also lent some credence to their periodic demands for a city-state. Such cosmopolitanism was, however, always limited in its scope; the Chinese, Japanese and White Russians were excluded. It was certainly the case, as has been observed, that foreign and Chinese families lived side by side, both in the French Concession and in the International Settlement, but actual, physical proximity meant very little.(25) This cosmopolitanism, in practice, meant that Europeans of different, competing, even warring, states, and Americans, lived side by side, and nominally ran the International Settlement jointly; but in truth there was little interaction at other than an elite level even between the different foreign communities.(26)
Politically, Shanghailanders were mostly directly excluded from local politics and local decision-making. To believe that the SMC and Shanghailanders were synonymous is to misperceive the tensions and conflicts within the British community, and within the Shanghailander community. The Council held its meetings in private and did not favour publicity. Even a proposal to distribute a questionnaire soliciting the opinions of ratepayers on orchestral policy was rejected in 1934 as it might `establish an undesirable precedent in respect to other municipal activities and it may be assumed that the section of the public which has advocated the disbandment of the orchestra would take advantage of the opportunity to renew its demands'.(27) Before 1924, contested elections were the exception rather than the rule. As part of the slow reassertion of diplomatic control after 1925, a bid was made to avoid contests by striking a balance between local elite and expatriate interests. That way ordinary Shanghailander voices could be kept out. The SMC was rightly seen, then, by ratepaying and nonratepaying residents alike, as a secretive, self-perpetuating oligarchy composed equally of the managers of the expatriate trading companies, who bowed willingly to diplomatic pressure, and the representatives of some of the big property-owning interests, who were less amenable to such influence. The subcommittees which oversaw most of the Council's affairs were packed with like-minded co-optees.
For most of its history, however, the Council represented the settlers and their ambitions because securing Shanghai for expatriate trade meant, ipso facto, securing the International Settlement for the Shanghailanders. The SMC usually managed to balance the interests of these groups. On the whole, the Council's expansionist policies and steady accumulation of powers inside the settlement suited the unenfranchised and the ratepayers very well. Occasionally, the Council accurately articulated the anger and feelings of Shanghailanders -- after the May 30th Incident, for example -- but they could not rely on it do so, nor could they predictably influence it. After 1928, in particular, the divorce between the Council and Shanghailanders, and often between the Council and the ratepayers, grew more manifest. The Council's drive for reform on such issues as the Parks (from which Chinese had been barred since at least the 1880s) and the admission of Chinese members to the Council was too quick even for most ratepayers. Many saw such reforms as craven surrender of all that they had built up. The SMC was reduced to haranguing its voters at annual meetings and, on one memorable occasion, when the ratepayers had misvoted on an important issue, it convened a special emergency meeting to `correct' their decision.(2 Business interest groups such as the China Association and the Shanghai British Chamber of Commerce also failed to represent the Shanghailanders: they took their cues from London. John Swire and Sons' director, Warren Swire, summed up the relationship accurately in 1933 with characteristic bluntness: `There is a difference in opinion between people like ourselves and the small treaty port people and ... we are not going to sacrifice what we consider to be bigger national interests to their desire to go backwards'.(29)
The small treaty port people had never had any intention of going backwards; in fact, they desired to go forward by making their identity more tangible and permanent. As early as 1862 there were demands for the creation of a self-governing city-state and, in various forms, this proposal was made again and again until the 1930s.(30) The SMC used its free hand over the century after 1843 to expand the boundaries of their settlement deep into Chinese administered territory, notably in the 1860s and in 1899 (Map 2).(31) Thereafter, as further appeals for extension were denied in 1909, it kept on probing and pushing, constructing roads outside the settlement when the psychological moment was right, or when the local Chinese authorities were preoccupied with war or revolution, and in a piecemeal fashion secured rights to police, tax and administer such areas. Sometimes opportunities were squandered; there are angry comments in the papers of former SMC Secretary J. O. P. Bland about the failure of the Council to retain its temporary control of the northern Chinese suburb of Zhabei during revolutionary disturbances in 1913.(32) Plans to extend the settlement still further were abandoned after 1925, but some 45.5 miles of roads built by the SMC remained outside the settlement and subject to festering jurisdictional dispute with Chinese regimes.(33) Accompanying geographical expansion, the SMC developed more and more autonomy over the years in the settlement itself. It excluded Chinese authority, reserving to itself the right to arrest Chinese in the settlement upon production of the necessary warrants, to tax the Chinese and to prohibit external Chinese tax collectors. Furthermore, it developed the machinery of an efficient, modern municipal government, which insinuated itself into all areas of settlement life, Chinese and foreign, despite opposition from both sectors of the community.(34)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The ambitions of the SMC and its leading Shanghailander citizens for even greater autonomy were underpinned, then, by the continued independent-mindedness that governed the Council's expansionist actions. These ambitions strike us now as absurd: an independent, foreign-controlled Shanghai would have been in a hugely insecure position; physically, it would have been a tiny, and indefensible, toe-hold on the Asian mainland. But such ambitions should be taken seriously. They were sustained by the not unreasonable Shanghailander belief that Shanghai, as it existed, was so valuable to China that Chinese governments would continue to acquiesce in the situation which had developed, and so valuable to British trade that the diplomats would continue to allow Shanghailanders free rein.(35) |
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peasant
Reacher
Joined: July 24, 2004
Posts: 323
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Apr 22, 2006 - 07:32 AM |
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II
SHANGHAILANDERS
After 1843, a complex community of Britons developed in this legal grey area -- less than formal colonialism but more than mere informal influence -- assisted by what can only be termed the benign neglect of the British state. Identifiable groups with British passports or under British protection were excluded in varying degrees from this community: from its formal and informal gatherings; from its self-ascription; from its public discourse; and especially from its memoirs and commentaries. The Sephardic Jews, who came from Baghdad via Bombay and Hong Kong certainly saw themselves as British but, the odd millionaire apart, were not regarded as such on a social level.(36) For that part of the Eurasian community which had British protection, the same applied. There was also a large Indian community, mostly policemen or night-watchmen; they totalled 1,842 in 1930, but were counted as a separate group in the SMC's census.(37) Hong Kong Chinese, who were also British proteges, were excluded. This racially defined barrier was stronger in Shanghai than, for example, in Sumatra, and, as will be shown, was reinforced by social and sexual taboos.(3 Shanghailanders, moreover, were British in origin, not merely English. As in many settler societies there was a strong Scottish and Irish presence, expressed, for example, in the theatre of communal life (there was a kilted Scottish Company of the SVC and a busy St Andrew's Society); similarly, as in other settler communities, there is evidence of conflict among the British national groups. There was, for instance, resentment at the Scottish presence in the SMP.(39)
The growth of the community is indicated in Table 1. By 1935, at least 10,000 Britons lived in the various parts of the city, sharing the International Settlement along with some 20,000 Japanese, 3,000 White Russians (technically stateless refugees and often in the direst poverty),(40) 2,000 Americans, 1,000 Germans and 1,100,000 Chinese. Forming just over half of one per cent of the population of the International Settlement, the stridency of the Shanghailander articulation of their specific identity is not unexpected. Unless they made themselves heard, they would have been swamped. The Shanghailander identity was not exactly geographically coterminous with the International Settlement and the Shanghai Municipal Council: Shanghai's business district grew to be located along the Bund in the International Settlement and the French Concession became a popular residential district for Shanghailanders. But the legally semi-autonomous International Settlement and its institutions remained the foundation of that identity.
TABLE 1 NUMBERS OF BRITISH RESIDENTS IN SHANGHAI(*)
As % of total
population of
International International French Chinese
Settlement Settlement Concession Jurisdiction
1851 256 - - -
1871 894 1.16 - -
1876 872 0.90 - -
1880 1,057 0.96 - -
1885 1,453 1.12 - -
1890 1,574 0.92 - -
1895 1,936 0.79 - -
1900 2,691 0.76 - -
1905 3,713 0.80 314 -
1910 4,465 0.89 681 -
1915 4,822 0.71 1,044 -
1920 5,341 0.68 2,312 -
1925 5,879 0.70 2,219 -
1930 6,221 0.62 2,630 891
1934 - - - 1,153
1935 6,595 0.57 - -
1936 - - 2,648 -
(*) Sources: North China Herald, 3 May 1851, 159; Shanghai Municipal Council, Annual Reports, 1871-1935; H. G. W. Woodhead (ed.), The China Year Book: 1931 (London, 1931), 694; Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqian de yanjiu [Research on Population Change in Old Shanghai] (Shanghai, 1980), 145-7.
By the early 1930s some families, such as the descendants of G. L. Skinner, had been in Shanghai for three generations. Skinner, who arrived in Shanghai around 1860 as a seaman, joined the SMP in 1866, summoned his betrothed from Somerset, and spawned descendants who remained in the city until 1949. Such continuities in the community's fabric grew stronger yearly. An impressionistic idea of the increase in the number of families can be gauged from ratios of men to women recorded by the censuses. If we assume, crudely, that all adult British women in the settlement were married (and, nurses and teachers apart, female employment -- from which married women were conventionally barred -- was the dramatic exception rather than the norm until the 1930s), and if we remain aware that a significant proportion of the men were forbidden from marrying during their first term's contract, then the decreasing percentage of excess men gives an indication of the shift towards more settled family life in the community in the twentieth century. This pattern was also typically the case in the European empires.(41) Entries in surviving Shanghai marriage registers also show that, whereas up to and around 1930, most men married women who had come out especially from Britain, in the 1930s many more married the daughters of local Shanghailander families.(42)
As in the Federated Malay States, the significant decrease in men living singly around the turn of the century probably arose from a variety of factors which made life for foreigners in Asia easier, more comfortable, and safer. Improvements in steamship transportation and other communications, including the telegraph; sanitation, disease prevention and medical treatment; the introduction of electricity, refrigeration, and so on; all made it easier and less risky for men to bring their wives out with them, to bring out women to marry, and to raise young children.(43) It became easier to reproduce British life in Shanghai. The 1900 Boxer Rising and its suppression, far from frightening off would-be migrants as might be expected, actually advertised to the world the opportunities for foreign employment offered in China, and the security of life there, devastatingly protected as it was by foreign armies.
III
SETTLERS
Shanghailanders were Britons, then, narrowly defined by race rather than passport; but not all Britons in Shanghai were Shanghailanders. First and foremost, the Shanghailander was a settler, not a temporary sojourner in a foreign land. It was in these terms that Shanghailanders saw themselves, and were seen by their compatriots at the time.(44) They were usually loyal: first, to their local community; secondly, to the wider British presence in China. The primary identity was local, but British and imperialist identities persisted and came to the foreground in emergencies of the Shanghailanders' own devising (30 May 1925) or of those facing the British state. Hundreds returned to Britain to join up in the First World War, for instance; among the dozens killed were thirty-seven members of the elite Shanghai Club alone.(45) Meanwhile, Shanghailanders strutted their stage in costumes borrowed from the Raj, used its vocabulary, mimicked many of its rituals, and even decorated their parades and balls with Sikh policemen to `add colour'.(46)
Still, their situation was hardly the same as that of the non-official British in India;(47) it might be argued that comparisons could be made with the 28,000-strong British community in Argentina in 1914. The British there were certainly a powerful economic and cultural force, but theirs was textbook informal empire. The Shanghailanders, by contrast, had political and military control of their polity; they had military force, policing and legal structures, and an elected governing body. A distinctive Anglo-Argentine identity certainly developed (exhibited in language, accent, social habits, and so on), but it lacked the sharp focus of hegemonic political control. The autonomous claims of the Shanghailander were born directly out of the logic of their situation.(4 The British presence in China generally constituted informal empire, but Shanghai was another matter. Shanghailanders arguably had much more in common with what has been termed the `colonial nationalism' of Australians, New Zealanders, Rhodesians, or other transplanted groups in the Edwardian British empire.(49) These settlers paid nominal allegiance to the empire and paraded their loyalty on ritual occasions, but the gulf between their ambitions and those of the empire for them grew wider year by year. This divergence occurred because those new societies grew confident with their own identities and histories -- as Australians, for example, rather than as Britons in Australia.(50) As Shanghailanders they also had, like Australians, regional and local priorities and problems of their own which conflicted sharply with those of the British state and British trading interests in China, although like most of the Dominions in the interwar period they ultimately relied on Britain for their defence.(51) Shanghailanders, as we have seen, had no real prospect of carving out an independent domain for themselves, but they thought they did, and often acted as if they had. The implications for British policy were tangible, so the belief needs to be taken seriously.
Approached from another angle, the settler comparison is strengthened through a contrast with the Japanese community in Shanghai.(52) The Japanese, the most aggressive of Shanghai's foreign communities in the 1930s, and the Shanghailanders' most direct competitor, were not autonomous settlers, but metropolitan-rooted colonialists. This Japanese community was by far the largest and by far the most comparable with the British presence in terms of social diversity and colonist ambition. As with other Japanese communities in China, it acted within limits established in specific legislation enacted by the metropolitan government. Although some of the Japanese Residents' Associations thus chartered were given `a large degree of autonomy',(53) they remained ultimately under the direction of their consulates. Japanese settlement in Shanghai only began in earnest after 1895, but there were some 26,500 residents by 1935. Part of the International Settlement's Northern District was known as Little Tokyo; foremen worked in the Japanese-owned mills, overseeing Chinese labour, while shopkeepers supplied provisions for the community. The close proximity of Japan encouraged the migration of larger numbers and broader social groups than was usual for European colonial societies in East and South-East Asia, but it also meant that far fewer ties were severed, if any. The community even had supplies of produce shipped in daily from Japan.
As a community the Japanese felt themselves to be particularly vulnerable to Chinese nationalist activism. They lived in much closer proximity to the Chinese than did the Westerners, and often worked at closer quarters. Donald Jordan has recently shown how this cocktail proved lethal in late 1931 and early 1932. Motivated by fears for their economic survival, and by popular ultra-nationalist groups in the community who co-operated closely with elements of the Japanese military, Japanese civilians played key roles in the escalation of the Shanghai crisis into armed conflict at the end of January 1932. But unlike the Shanghailanders, these elements did not act thus to protect or enhance their own autonomy as a settler community: they aimed instead to trip the Japanese government into full colonial occupation -- as was already the case in Taiwan and Korea.(54) Shanghailanders did not want London or its agents asserting authority over them in such manner. They wanted to maintain their autonomy.
IV
ECONOMICS
Shanghailanders were united economically in their common dependence upon the existence of a foreign-controlled society in the Chinese treaty ports. This dependence informed their responses to all issues involving reform of the fundamental treaties and served to foster a strong common identity out of their common predicament. They saw themselves, and were seen by observers, as a coherent group, sharing a coherent identity.
The three generations of the Skinner family active in Shanghai provide a good example of the range of Shanghailander occupations, which fell into three employment categories. First, Shanghailanders worked for the treaty port service industries and the SMC or the SMP. G. L. Skinner's daughter Evelyn, for example, worked for the SMC as a typist, while her brother-in-law's sister married the future Secretary of the British Council in Hankou. Foreign missionaries and mission workers in the city would also fit into this category, although missionaries are on the whole excluded from this analysis: Skinner's son-in-law's sister married the German missionary and sinologist, Paul Kranz. Some in this category worked for the expatriate China companies as locally recruited staff, or in non-managerial positions -- as seamen, for example, such as another Skinner son-in-law, W. E. Kent, who worked for Swire's China Navigation Company before becoming a Shanghai harbour pilot. The bulk of the people in the treaty port service trades were working class or lower middle class. The personnel files of demobbed soldier Maurice Tinkler and his companions who went out in 1919 to join the police force show them to have been farm hands, labourers, porters and soldiers. Two only seem to have come from middle-class backgrounds.(55)
Secondly, Shanghailanders were property owners and land speculators, such as those who controlled the Shanghai Land Investment Company, or Algar and Co., founded by Skinner's son-in-law, Albert Algar, and managed from 1928 to 1949 by Skinner's grandson, Noel Kent, a third generation Shanghailander.(56) Skinner's son Charles worked in shipbuilding and rose to become a director of the New Engineering and Shipbuilding Company.(57) Thirdly, Shanghailanders were small businessmen and women: shopkeepers, dairy owners, boardinghouse keepers, piano tuners. None of these jobs or opportunities -- or possibilities of access to them -- would have existed without the treaty port system. Although actual occupational statistics are hard to obtain, it can be fairly confidently stated that, following the definition presented above, by far the greater proportion of the British community in the city at any one time was composed of Shanghailanders.(5
Shanghailander society was in origin a British society. Not surprisingly, social differentiation and stratification was exported, if modified slightly to take into account such factors as the size of the population, the disparity between males and females (which made lower class G. L. Skinner's three daughters more socially acceptable), and the presence of the Chinese. The community's reputation for ruthless snobbery was perpetuated as much by those on the receiving end as by detached outsiders. Among the expatriate and Shanghailander elites, with no governing colonial administration to snub them, there was a degree of meritocracy, but there was also an observable and observed hierarchy. Policeman Maurice Tinkler's letters, for example, are replete with his bitterness at the rigidity of British class-consciousness, emphasized still further for him by his contrasting experiences with American society in Shanghai and, above all, by the fact that he felt he was being treated little better than the Chinese. Other accounts also make it clear that the British members of the police were often treated as the servants of the Shanghailander elites.(59) The police, the fire brigade, the outdoor Customs workers, the inspectors in the Public Works Department, these men and their families formed the bottom rung of Shanghailander society; they lived and socialized apart from the Shanghailander elites, although the patterns of sociability and socialization were very similar. The subtle gradations of domestic society functioned in Shanghai: Shanghailanders themselves formed a coherent socioeconomic group, but in turn evidenced the intricate layers and fractures of a society that was British in origin. Elite Shanghailanders had more in common with elite expatriates than with their fellow settlers, and this too was evidenced in patterns of sociability, and in club, society and of course Council membership.(60)
V
The Shanghailander identity emerges still more strongly in the course of a contrasting delineation of the expatriate `China hand'. The large trading companies extracted loyalty from their staffs using as incentives the chances of reasonably quick promotion and job security. These men were young, fresh from Britain, forbidden to marry for their first term's contract, and initially sent to the lonelier spots on the interior trading circuits; they therefore provided prime fodder for thorough socialization into the company spirit. They were moved around from post to post, which prevented geographical loyalty, were discouraged from overt political activity, and worked hard. These men believed in Swires or BAT. They considered themselves socially superior to the Shanghailanders of all classes, who were often described by expatriate businessmen and consuls as `low whites' or `lesser Europeans'.(61) They attended different clubs and different Masonic lodges, and often lived in different parts of town. Expatriates were more likely to enjoy (and more able to afford) the night-life that Shanghai was supposedly famous for, than was the 1930 letter-writer who signed himself: `Clerk and family: 25 years and no home leave'.(62) Even in death there were distinctions: Jardine Matheson's, for instance, had their own war memorial and Armistice Day ceremony.(63) Sometimes expatriates might `go native'; so too might British Consuls. Sir Sydney Barton, Consul General in Shanghai from 1922-9, was notoriously pro-settler, and was banished thereafter to Addis Ababa for his pains. 64)
The strongest delineation made, of course, was between Shanghailanders and the Chinese. Shanghailanders defined their identity against a range of others -- Britons at home, China hands, their neighbours the French, missionaries -- but in the broadest possible sense the Shanghailander position, like the British position in China generally, was underpinned by prevailing notions of `Orientals', and Chinese, as `racially' different, and `racially' unequal. These ideas were widely believed and propagated, and there was a large literature on such topics which sold well and was widely respected. In print, bar talk, letters and books, Britons exchanged their experiences and prejudices about the Chinese `mind', Chinese society, politics, culture and government. And when the Chinese were not different and inferior, they were different and exotic.(65) This discourse provided reassuring justification for Shanghailanders' very presence in China, and for the pattern of their interactions (or otherwise) with Chinese. Closer to home, contrasts were usually made between the administration of the International Settlement and the state of the Chinese municipality of Shanghai to provide further fuel for self-justification, and even for extending foreign control in the city.(66)
But first-generation Shanghailanders were also ill-equipped to engage with the Chinese world they found themselves in, and China was not a destination chosen by the most talented of Britons who chose to move overseas.(67) Shanghailanders had gone abroad to work, not to discover new cultures and peoples. The apparatus of theory and prejudice that characterized their attitudes towards the Chinese certainly helped Shanghailanders to justify their brusque insularity, but life abroad was also such a fundamentally normal and routine part of the British experience, that it should hardly surprise us that Shanghailanders made little effort to adopt any other attitude other than isolation and derision; there were always exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. The clear contradiction here lay in the fact that in all aspects of their lives and work Shanghailanders relied absolutely on Chinese labour, talent, know-how and understanding. As servants, workers, business partners, financial backers, middlemen or managers, Chinese were vital to the Shanghailander world.(6 The tenuousness of the social position of the lowest Shanghailanders, men such as Maurice Tinkler, quite possibly underlies the virulent and violent racism often evidenced by them. But the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Shanghailander identity, the absolute necessity of the Chinese, dictated the constructs of China, and the Chinese, with which all Shanghailanders worked.
VI
SOCIALIZATION AND THE MAINTENANCE OF `RACIAL' AND SEXUAL BOUNDARIES
As family life became more the norm, settler children took more and more jobs in Shanghai.(69) Concerned to reproduce, or refresh, the underlying Britishness of Shanghailander identity, at first parents often sent many of these children to schools in Britain, thereby removing them from the influence of Chinese servants, and of the non-British environment. There were also schools in the International Settlement with exclusionist policies. They faithfully reproduced British curricula and routines, and celebrated Empire Day and royal events, making no allowances for their geographical location (Chinese was rarely taught), or for Shanghai's international characteristics. So little was taught about China in Shanghai's foreign schools in 1930 that one contemporary critic saw the curriculum as a source of `race' antipathy.(70) Shanghailander children became British before they were allowed to become Shanghailanders again.
Shanghailanders were not only born so, like Noel Kent, they were also made so, rather quickly and comprehensively. The community reproduced itself by effectively socializing newly arrived Britons. Maurice Tinkler's correspondence shows, for example, that through his police training, through informal talks in bars and canteens, through his club, through his Masonic lodge, and through his desire to become one -- it was after all the location of the career he had chosen -- he quickly adopted the mores and beliefs of a Shanghailander. The evidence was exhibited even in his first letter home. Tinkler quickly became a firm believer in what he termed the `good old China'.(71) During the crisis years, 1925-7, with the zeal of the converted, he did his best to defend what little of the `good old China' was left in Shanghai. This pattern can be discerned in numerous memoirs, journals and letters. People learned because they wanted to, and because they needed to -- having committed themselves to long periods abroad in a new community they certainly had to settle in to it -- but also because they were prompted to by the expectations, and exhortations, of peer pressure at work and play.(72)
Socialization reinforced the `racial'/national boundaries of the Shanghailander identity. Maurice Tinkler, like all British members of the police, and indeed new recruits to Shanghailander society, was issued with a Chinese servant the day he arrived, and also, thereby, a set of ideas about Sino-British interaction. As was often the case, issues of race were also informed by issues of class, and often confused with them.(73) Frequently, the only Chinese met by Britons, as by most other foreigners in China, were rickshaw-pullers, servants, compradores and staff, and sometimes interpreters.(74) Mixing with social equals was kept to formal occasions arranged by compradores or Chinese managers, usually dinners for business contacts or seasonal celebrations providing a ritual acknowledgement of fraternal relations.(75) Social isolation from the Chinese was a key value. Shanghai was a `city in which a man is lost if he has not at least one club at his disposal',(76) and the Chinese were barred from most clubs, most sports clubs, most Masonic Lodges and treaty port schools. As clubs often formed the limits of the British community's social world, it was not surprising that `one lived amongst one's own kind'.(77) This contrasts with the Cercle sportif francais, to which access was much less restricted, or the American Club, which permitted Chinese to become members in 1929; and the German Club Concordia, which admitted Chinese members in 1917.(7 In fact, those national clubs which were more cosmopolitan and which placed fewer restrictions on race or nationality, such as the Cercle sportif francais, were widely disliked by Britons for their `mixed and dubious' company.(79) Mixing races and nationalities offended and threatened the integrity of the Shanghailander notion of their identity.
More intimate relations were seen as transgressions. Taboos against marriage with Chinese, indeed, against open sexual contact with Chinese women or men, were strong. Such relationships certainly occurred, as they did throughout European empires in the twentieth century -- in the nineteenth century elite men had very often established Chinese concubines, while at the other end of the social spectrum, Cantonese `salt water sisters' specialized in servicing foreign sailors.(80) But pressure was exerted by relatives, colleagues and superiors to make sure that young men did not get involved with Chinese, Eurasians or even with Russians.(81) The marriage registers of the Holy Trinity Cathedral contain no record of any mixed marriages between 1923 and 1941. It is to be assumed that weddings between British men and Chinese women were conducted instead in the privacy of the British Consulate-General (Plate 1).
This sensitivity was partly palliated by distinctions of class: some lower-class men can be found marrying Chinese, Japanese and Russian women. In 1934 the Shanghai Gong'anju (Public Security Bureau) gave licences to twenty-two Russian and six Chinese women who wanted to marry British men,(82) but the public taboos against marriages with non-British women remained strong. `Mixed marriages are not in the interest of the force', declared the Commissioner of Police in 1927 to the Council's Watch Committee, which broadly agreed with him.(83) Although the ban was formally lifted shortly thereafter, all con stables were then forbidden to marry during their first contract in the hope that they would `explore the marriage market at home' during their first long leave.(84) For his part, Maurice Tinkler saw keeping `clear of the Asiatic ones' as a question of `self-respect', but he had a string of Russian lovers.(85)
The taboo was also highly gendered. Taboos against women marrying Chinese men were much stronger than those against British men marrying Chinese women. `If you went out with an Asiatic [man] in Shanghai you would never live it down', wrote Tinkler to his sister.(86) In the mid-1930s, British women who intended to travel to China to marry Chinese men were interviewed by the Far East Department of the Foreign Office in an endeavour `to persuade [them] to give up the idea of such a marriage'. An official leaflet pointed out that the consequent loss of British nationality meant that British law could not `protect [them] in China from a treatment which does not conform with the rules applicable in Christian countries in regard to marriage'.(87) Those marriages that did take place seem to have done so outside China between overseas Chinese students and local women.(8
French journalist Henri Champly's salacious reportage, popular in the interwar years, was predicated on a sexual undermining of `white' racial superiority and purity through European prostitution in Shanghai; such themes had a strong presence in other popular writing and attitudes.(89) Chinese men were excluded from close physical proximity with foreign women for this reason: for example, in swimming clubs. The Shanghai Rowing Club refused to allow Chinese to join the club in 1930, as it provided `facilities for mixed bathing to which the Chinese would not be welcome'.(90) Chinese were kept out of European brothels, massage parlours and cabarets until the 1930s. The influx of Russian refugee women in the 1920s, very many of whom found employment in prostitution, largely brought about this shift in established patterns. The SMP fought to suppress the distribution of photographic images of white women and appearances by Russian women in Chinese `sing-song' houses.(91) For related reasons, missionaries and others decried the effect of the portrayal of European women in Western films as corrosive and dangerous; the dress and dancing of European women in China also came in for such criticism.(92) As Ann Stoler has shown, this taboo was characteristic of European colonial societies.(93)
The possible intimacy of language was also fraught with tension. Language stands out more as a self-conscious marker than a tool for communication: Shanghailanders spoke English, but they added to it a self-consciously imperial jargon compounded of Anglo-Indian terms spiced with pidgin-English argot. In this way they marked themselves off from other Britons and Westerners, and demonstrated their distance from Chinese. But the treaty port world was ever and at all levels Sino-foreign, and acting in that world required constant exchange and interaction between Britons and Chinese, exchange which required understanding of language and social custom. The need for distance and the linguistic limitations of the average Shanghailander forced direct communication with Chinese to be largely undertaken from the opening of Shanghai onwards in pidgin-English, at once a language of demand and command, but also quickly a vehicle for ridicule. For that reason, later guidebooks stressed that visitors should always try English first when they spoke with Chinese, so as not to offend.(94) In fact, English later grew so to dominate that even treaty port German was heavily affected in diction and vocabulary.(95) For the Chinese that Shanghailanders mostly interacted with there was pidgin, while the new Chinese political and business elites of the 1920s and 1930s often spoke English. Spoken Chinese still had to be learnt by many Shanghailanders, such as employees of the SMC and, in particular, the SMP, but this was more often honoured in the breach, and the written language was rarely studied. Learning and speaking Chinese was unpopular, partly because it was difficult, but most importantly because it was considered demeaning or deracinating. The need to communicate so intimately with Chinese labelled the speaker as either a `poor white' or else as the lowest in Shanghailander status (foremen or those in supervisory roles). Only missionaries, consuls and cranks learned Chinese willingly. As was common in colonial societies, pidgin, gesture, and a limited vocabulary of loud imperatives, summed up the communication skills of many, and distance was effectively maintained.(96)
This social, linguistic and sexual gerrymandering and ordering was vital. Relationships with Chinese, and with other proscribed groups, undermined and diluted Shanghailanders' self-ascribed identity. Moreover, acknowledging that those who married into the group were also part of the group (as was sometimes the case in Sumatra) would have meant dismantling the social barriers which maintained the Shanghailander identity.(97) More practically, losing that identity would have threatened the British military and diplomatic support which underpinned the Shanghailanders' presence in Shanghai. Given the strength of racist attitudes in metropolitan society, British diplomats in China were hardly likely to have bestirred themselves to support a community which had lost all trace of its British identity. Shanghailanders could not afford to mix if they wished to preserve themselves, especially given their numbers: there were over 300 Chinese Shanghai residents to each Shanghailander.
For similar reasons, expatriates and Shanghailanders of all classes shared an interest in keeping the city free of the poorest Britons, who were felt to undermine the `prestige' of the `white race' in the city in the eyes of the Chinese, and the character of the community in the eyes of the diplomats. The accommodations poor foreigners had to make to tailor their poverty to Shanghai's high costs meant transgressing the norms of the community: marrying or cohabiting with Asian, Eurasian or Russian women; living in Chinese housing; and working with or for Chinese. In contrast to British India, for example, Shanghailanders and the SMC were unable to deal with all such foreigners. `Distressed British Subjects' could be shipped home, criminals could be deported to Hong Kong after serving their time and dismissed policemen could be refused their superannuation unless they took it back to Britain, but Russian poverty and destitution could not be hidden.(9
Reality, for Shanghailanders, was thus far removed from the images of a rapacious and hedonistic colonial elite that inform many accounts of the Shanghai foreign community. They were ordinary people, who -- like Tinkler -- had found employment in the `Situations Vacant' columns of national newspapers in Britain. Expatriate managers may well have joked that the advice `traditionally given in London to new recruits departing for China' was `to keep the Sabbath and anything you can lay your hands on', but this attitude had not, as one historian put it, `characterised much of the century-long Western economic presence in China'.(99) Shanghailanders earned a living and mostly had a better lifestyle than was possible for them in Britain, but while Shanghai was and is the subject of a great deal of retrospective exoticism, it was actually a pedestrian community, with pedestrian lifestyles and values. Shanghailanders lived in a grimy, polluted, congested city, which was for many Britons about as exotic and mysterious as Slough. Maintaining their identities also meant that Shanghailanders had imported their far from exotic British lifestyles, cuisine and domestic habits. Few concessions were made to either China or cosmopolitanism: the heightened and insular Britishness of Shanghailander society was a rejection of the Chinese world which otherwise swamped them, physically as much as metaphorically. But if their culture was British, their self-image was intentionally sui generis. |
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frenchlover1999
Shanghai Royalty
Joined: Sep 18, 2004
Posts: 8730
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Apr 22, 2006 - 08:02 AM |
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Ah ah. And I have to deal with that everyday in office. "Boss, our printer is broken" --> GM gets paper. "Boss sorry our fax machine printed in the already printed side of the recycled paper we used to save money" --> GM turns the paper in the rack. "Boss we cannot contact this company you told us about, I think they are not in Shanghai" --> GM googles, find their website, contact details and name of the GM. Living and working in Shanghai. |
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That was no shark. That was my personal submarine. But enough of this polite conversation. What is the purpose of your visit? |
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lemongrass
StreetBeater
Joined: Jan 15, 2005
Posts: 2324
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Apr 22, 2006 - 10:21 PM |
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You just need a new printer en a new fax machine, maybe a new copier. |
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Missing home! |
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Andreas
Board Royalty
Joined: Feb 27, 2004
Posts: 6332
Location: 31 N 121 E
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| Posted:
Apr 23, 2006 - 12:18 AM |
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So the basic line was 'the British more or less founded Shanghai'. Well, we all know that. What's new ? |
_________________
If it has tits, tires, or a transom, there's gonna be issues! |
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Super_Laowai
Raver
Joined: Apr 19, 2006
Posts: 398
Status: Offline
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Apr 23, 2006 - 12:30 AM |
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And Hong Kong, please don't forget.
But you Germans did a nice job with Qingdao.
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Andreas
Board Royalty
Joined: Feb 27, 2004
Posts: 6332
Location: 31 N 121 E
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Apr 23, 2006 - 12:38 AM |
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Without Hong Kong, there would not be a China as we see it know. They should change their national anthem here. God save the Queen ! |
_________________
If it has tits, tires, or a transom, there's gonna be issues! |
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Henry_Chinaski
Board Lord
Joined: Aug 16, 2003
Posts: 5025
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Apr 23, 2006 - 01:47 AM |
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True, but the Portuguese in Macau were the pioneers. Without them teaching everybody else how to do it, there would be no Hong Kong |
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man
FooJay
Joined: Mar 30, 2006
Posts: 1788
Status: Offline
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Apr 23, 2006 - 02:10 AM |
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^ im so interesated in this. the portguguese, lacking any other intution, took chinese as slaves.
the pork-chops aleays get away blame free, they were the same as the english |
_________________
http://uk.gay.com/ |
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CoffeeHawk_0
Board Buddha
Joined: July 14, 2005
Posts: 14380
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Apr 23, 2006 - 08:42 PM |
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i thought Marco Polo invented China? |
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