‘Decolonisation’ on the Periphery: Liu Xiang and Shipping Rights Recovery at Chongqing, 1926–38

Abstract

Between 1929 and 1932, Sichuan militarist Liu Xiang pursued his own anti-imperialist agenda in Chongqing, a port city beyond the purview of China's ‘central’ Guomindang government. In both its autonomy and its defiant tactics, Liu's programme contradicted the Guomindang regime's official strategy of negotiated revision of the unequal treaties. In its concrete objectives, however, Liu's project was strikingly similar to the Guomindang's programme of shipping rights recovery, an effort to reduce the presence and power of foreign shipping in China's coastal waters and an integral part of its agenda for treaty revision. This essay examines Liu Xiang's efforts to eliminate the privileges of foreign shipping, bolster Chinese shipping and extend his regime's oversight over all shipping within his garrison area on the Upper Yangzi River. In examining Liu's local motives as well as his marginalisation of central government institutions like the Maritime Customs, the essay addresses his fraught relations with the centre, yet, in contrast to standard nationalist critique of China's early twentieth-century warlords, it also reveals how efforts like Liu's may have multiplied the sites of resistance to the unequal treaties and achieved a measure of ‘decolonisation’ on the periphery of central government control.