Lord Macartney’s Duelling Fates: Writing, Reading and Revising the Macartney Embassy, 1792–1804

Reviewed by: Navigating Semi-Colonialism; Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860-1937 by Anne Reinhardt Chi Kong Lai (bio) Recently, maritime history has become an increasingly popular and prominent topic of inquiry in Chinese studies. The rise of the steamship is increasingly seen as a microcosm for the transformation of economic and trading environments in modern China, as the arrival of steamships certainly contributed positively to the economic and infrastructural development in modern China. The expansion of steam navigation in China since the 1860s has received renewed academic attention from researchers looking into Mercantile Capitalism,1 economic rivalry, and most recently semicolonialism and imperialism in China's modernization process. Anne Reinhardt's Navigating Semi-Colonialism, Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860-!937 provides a new perspective and historical context of this narrative of China's struggle to enter the modern world. Reinhardt, currently a chair and professor of history at Williams College, is an expert on modern Chinese economic and colonial history. She holds a BA in history from Harvard University (1990), an MA in Asian studies from the University of California (1994), and a PhD from Princeton University (2002) under Susan Naquin. She views steam navigation as a wider arena comprising intertwined political, economic, social, and cultural elements and steam navigation as a case study through which to understand semicolonial China. The scope of Reinhardt's historical inquiry includes foreign imperialism through the treaty port system, China's partial sovereignty, economic development, and the social space of the steamship. While her investigation covers the period between 1860 and 1937, the introduction and conclusion outline relevant developments before and after those dates. Reinhardt conducted research in [End Page 98] China, Taiwan, Japan, Britain, the United States, and India, and subsequently uses a diverse range of primary sources as well as draws from the work of various shipping history experts internationally. Semicolonialized nation-states such as China existed alongside India, the British Empire's crown jewel. Through detailing the development of steam shipping and enterprise, Reinhardt argues that China's experience is both unique and connected to other contexts and global processes. The book defines colonialism and semicolonialism by showing how international influences in modern China differed from those of countries under colonial rule. Reinhardt's book contains seven chapters following chronological order (1860-1937), an introduction, and a conclusion. Conclusions within each chapter contain a comparison with British India that strengthens her argument concerning the uniqueness of the Chinese experiences and the challenges that confronted China as part of a wider global trend. She begins by outlining the "semi-colonial conundrum" historians face in defining China's unique experience with colonialism. China's sovereignty was limited by unequal treaties imposed by foreign powers, particularly Britain, with a degree of collaboration by the Qing dynasty. She chooses the term "collaboration" as semicolonialism occasionally benefited both the Qing rulers and the foreign powers. Chapter 1 describes the existing shipping activity prior to the introduction of steam transport in the 1860s. As foreign vessels established their place in Chinese waters through the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the carriage of Chinese cargoes in foreign vessels along the coast became a profitable trade, which attracted the attention and commercial participation of Western steamship owners, such as Russell & Co., who brought vessels to China.2 As in India, however, in addition to import/export trade, foreign vessels became a substantial part of domestic trade. The coastal trade involved selling a vessel's service to Chinese merchants and trafficking cargoes between China's treaty ports. The coastal trade was formally recognized in the 1860 Treaty of Tianjin, which also saw the Qing government put Chinese ships of Western design under the same conditions as foreign powers', thus relinquishing some of their sovereign rights. After i860, there were treaty ports connected to one another. But at that time, the Chinese waters were not developed. For example, steamboats could not reach Chongqing. However, the best way to obtain a promising trade route to Chongqing was to open the Hubei port of Yichang.3 Then, foreign shipping began to expand into China's internal waters. The growth of steam-powered ships occurred as the Chinese...

In a city with rapid urbanization and profound history and culture like Guangzhou, conservation for urban village is facing grim challenges. Taking Guangzhou Huangbu Village as a typical case, the paper is based on site investigation on periods before and after conservation of Guangzhou Huangbu Village by research means of literature collection, onsite investigation, induction and deduction etc. The paper proposes conservation planning under current situations and typical issues after implementation of construction, and analyzes the reasons for the issues in an objective fashion. The study offers good reference to urban village construction in China in the current stage. Huangbu Village is located in the east of Xinyao Town, Haizhu District, Guangzhou. As recorded by literature, ancient Huangbu Village was first built no later than Song Dynasty. With Bazhou Island on the west and Zhujiang Waters on the east, the Village was a natural harbor back in Song Dynasty, and an important port for foreign trade in Ming Dynasty. During the reign of Emperor Kangxi in Qing Dynasty, Guangdong Customs set up nine landing ports, and Huangbu Village is one of them. In the 22nd year of Emperor Qianlong's reign in Qing Dynasty (1757), only one port of Guangdong Customs was retained for trade, Huangbu Port flourished as the most important port for foreign trade at that time, bringing fast economic development for Huangbu Village as well. However after Treaty of Nanjing was signed, five ports were opened for trade, and with the relocation of Huangbu Registration Port, Huangbu Village also experienced a recession, changing from commercial trade based to natural agriculture based economy, and the once-flourishing town has descended to a common village. Today ancient port, fairly complete streets, ancestral temples, former residence of celebrity and other traditional Huangbu residences have been preserved, which are of high historical, art and scientific values. In July 2002, Guangzhou People's Government announced it to be the sixth batch of listed cultural relic site under conservation [1].

ABSTRACTThis article investigates British attitudes towards Qing China as a consequence of their early encounters from the Macartney embassy to the opium crisis. Examining this medium-term time span, to which previous scholarship has paid inadequate attention, shows the continuity and change in these attitudes through different historical contexts. With its focus on war-related discussions, this article reveals how the idea of war against the Chinese empire was developed and debated on the basis of these changing ideas. The First Anglo-Chinese War, to a great extent, could not have developed into the form and scale it did without these developments.

This draft is divided into the following three sections: the Emperor Jiaqing's image, the degradation of social customs, and the tremendous crisis in social reality, all of which contribute to explore the image of China presented in Yeonhaenglok' (Books of Travel to Ch'ing) written by the Korean ambassador Lee Gi-hoen in the early nineteenth century. The positive image of Emperor Jiaqing portrayed in Yeonhaenglok' (Books of Travel to Ch'ing) is characterized with attributes such as diligence in tackling political affairs, impartiality in making judicial judgments, assigning positions per competence, concerning himself with national destiny, and treating Korea with courteous reception, with a single exception of negative image being the biased perspective he adopted in determining certain judicial cases. This image of Emperor Jiaqing is generally correspondent with his prototype described in the Qingshigao (Draft History of Qing). The author does not deliberately smear the image of Emperor Jiaqing due to ethnical differentiations, but depicts his image from a relatively objective and rational angle, which, judging from another viewpoint, suggests their acceptance of this emperor of different ethnical origin. The reason why Lee Gi-hoen is capable of depicting such a positive image of Emperor Jiaqing is closely related to the social background of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in which the author was born. The author's contemporary social trend in Korea was to cultivate and populate Qing China. From the realistic perspective, despite Lee Gi-hoen's recognition of Emperor Jiaqing, he still files intense censures against Chinese customs; for instance, he impugns that Confucius' memorial tablet is misplaced in terms of order within the County College, and the ancestor's spirits tablet in the Hsu family temple is covered in dust and placed in a deserted house. The above depiction gives the overall impression of social decadence during Emperor Jiaqing's reign. This censure for Qing people's ignorance of social decorum originated from Korea's miniature-China complex. The sense of superiority of this consciousness is apparently manifested from their pride in preserving the ancient Chinese code in traditional Korean costumes. The preservation of ancient Chinese conventions in Korean dressing codes and literary systems is attested to by the Chinese scholar Qi Pei-lian. Additionally, the author reveals the crises hidden behind the prosperity of Emperor Jiaqing's reign, such as frequent flooding. In other words, the image of Chinese social reality perceived by Lee Gi-hoen is imbued with immense crises.

This paper explores the changes in Qing territorial perceptions and frontier policies in nineteenth-century Taiwan. I trace the territorial question of aboriginal Taiwan to Qing quarantine doctrine in the eighteenth century and outline important historical contingencies and different local circumstances that shaped official debates on the aboriginal boundary policy in Gemalan and Shuishalian in early nineteenth century. Moreover, I point out the impacts of Sino-foreign negotiations and especially the territorial crisis of Japanese invasion in Langqiao that transformed Qing territorial discourse in the 1870s. The famous kaishan fufan campaign signifies the changing nature of Qing colonialism from passive quarantine to aggressive colonization. Despite the efforts of progressive officials, the late Qing colonial project was limited by its military, administrative and financial capacities in opening the mountains and pacifying the aborigines. Moreover, the territorialization of aboriginal Taiwan was continued by the Japanese colonial government after the cession of the island in 1895.

Celebrating the Yu Fan Shrine:Literati Networks and Local Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou Steven B. Miles, Assistant Professor of History Late in 1811 the Guangdong lieutenant-governor, Zeng Yu (1760-1831), and a group of local Cantonese and sojourning literati gathered at Guangxiao Monastery in Guangzhou to celebrate the construction of a shrine in honor of Yu Fan (164-233), a scholar and minor official who had been banished to the far south. While this 1811 gathering was a relatively minor affair, it coincided with a period in which Cantonese literati both turned with growing intensity toward writing about local culture and increasingly gained stature among the literary elite in the major cultural centers of the empire. The literary and scholarly ideals associated with the site and the celebrants would become mainstream in urban Cantonese literati circles with governor-general Ruan Yuan's (1764-1849) opening, a decade later, of the Xuehaitang academy. Moreover, subsequent portrayals of the Yu Fan Shrine, the cultural hero that it honored, and its creator persistently reappeared in local literature throughout the nineteenth century. An examination of the participants who attended the event and the cultural meanings attached to the site of the Yu Fan Shrine provides an opportunity to explore connections between two developments in early nineteenth-century China: localism and empire-wide literati activism. Regarding the first of these developments, recent studies have drawn attention to several periods in which the production of texts was increasingly focused on local themes. One instance of this occurred in the late-eleventh and twelfth centuries, another in the sixteenth.2 The early nineteenth century is another period for which this type of "localist turn" may be documented in many places across the Qing [End Page 33] empire. In Guangzhou this was certainly the case, as Cantonese literati produced an unprecedented number of anthologies and histories focused on local culture.3 Yet it is important to remember that the production of localist texts could also be stimulated and maintained through trans-local networks of literati.4 Furthermore, in addition to the increased attention devoted towards local cultures in the early nineteenth century, James Polachek and other scholars have identified this period as a time when literati activism was on the rise throughout the Qing empire.5 That is, Chinese literati sought to enhance their influence in the bureaucratic administration, often through factional politics formed in part through shared aesthetic ideals. While this paper is not primarily concerned with "national" politics, a consideration of the writers and writings associated with the Yu Fan Shrine relates to the issue of the "ascendant literati" in two ways. First, since Zeng Yu was tied to the literati groups that would begin to assert themselves only a few years later in the capital, an examination of the interactions between Zeng and the Cantonese poets who celebrated the Yu Fan Shrine provides a means of exploring the evolving relationship between Cantonese literati and their northern—from the Cantonese perspective designating every place "north of the range"—patrons and like-minded associates. Second, if Polachek is correct in asserting that "belletristic friendship" or "aesthetic fellowship" was a means of forming trans-local patronage relationships in the early nineteenth century, then it behooves historians to take seriously the literature through which such relationships were forged.6 While members of the same literati "group" may have shared cultural icons, the cultural meanings associated with those icons likely varied over time and place, and among individual members of the group. An examination of commemorative essays and poems associated with the shrine provides an opportunity to further our understanding of the role that "aesthetic fellowship" and the celebration of local sites played in constructing elite culture and building literati networks in late imperial China. This article begins with an examination of the backgrounds of the northern patron in this case, Zeng Yu, and of the Cantonese poets he mobilized to celebrate the Yu Fan Shrine. This is followed by an overview of the history of the site of the shrine in order to understand the range of symbols available to early nineteenth-century writers. We then turn our attention to the 1811 construction [End Page 34...

This article reexamines a pivotal yet understudied episode in Sino-British relations: the British East India Company's 1759 petition to the Qing Emperor. It highlights the critical role of intermediaries in the Company's eighteenth-century trade with China. Central to this exploration is James Flint, the Company's first Chinese interpreter, whose life and career, drawn from previously overlooked biographical sources, illustrate the complexities of cultural interactions in Qing China. Flint's experience underscores how diverse groups navigated the cultural contact zones, shaping both Sino-British relations and the Company's ties with the British state. By situating Flint's case within a broader context, the article also illuminates key themes, including the interaction between the metropole and the Company, the Canton system, the tributary system, and intellectual exchanges between Britain and China.

‘The Civilized World Versus China’ was how the Canton Register described growing animosity between the Western merchant community and the Canton authorities in 1835. The British opium trading firm Jardine Matheson owned this newspaper and its editorial line reflects the widely accepted decline of Western perceptions of China. The dominant historical narrative has been that a positive view of China, and by extension the Chinese, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had transformed to a negative and critical attitude by the early nineteenth century. The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were the height of Western fascination with Chinese institutions, society and culture. The praise of influential thinkers such as Gottfried Leibniz and Voltaire, as well as the fetish for Chinese architecture and Chinese consumer products, are all evidence of European reverence towards the civilised Celestial Empire. In the late eighteenth century a combination of commercial and diplomatic frustration led to a transformation of how people in Britain perceived China more broadly. The failure of the Macartney Embassy (1792–94) was the key moment at which British reverence began to morph into disdain. The formation and circulation of a Western perception of an archetypal Chinese character over the 1830s, in the build-up to the First Opium War (1839–42) between Britain and China, complicates this narrative. As seen in Singapore, colonial observers perceived Chinese migrants as economically valuable, rather than generally positively or negatively. The popularisation of the Singapore model of Chinese migration took place in the wider context of worsening Anglo-Chinese relations. This chapter will chart the spread and prominence of the idea of a distinctly Chinese racial character through the 1830s and 1840s. This marks a shift from examining the individual agents in the contact zone of Singapore to a broader discussion about the Chinese as a racial category across the British Empire and in Britain itself. Crucially, the wider discussion about China and Chinese migrants in the context of Anglo-Chinese conflict helped formulate images of a simultaneously industrious and duplicitous Chinese character that would prosper under British authority and instruction. British perceptions of a useful Chinese character and Chinese despotism could co-exist once the Chinese population was separated and distinguished from the Qing Empire.

Loyal Souls Come HomeManifest Loyalty Shrines and the Decentering of War Commemoration in the Qing Empire (1724–1803)* James Bonk (bio) The Manifest Loyalty shrine (Zhaozhongci), a large complex holding spirit tablets of all Qing war dead (zhenwang guanbing), was established by the Yongzheng emperor in 1724 on a property north of Chongwen gate in Beijing (Figure 1). With the military campaigns of the Qianlong reign (1736–95), the number of tablets in the shrine grew steadily. By the mid-1790s, the shrine held more than fifty thousand tablets. The White Lotus War (1796–1804), a conflict involving tens of thousands of troops in central China, led to a surge in the number of tablets. In the first five years of the war, nearly sixty thousand more tablets crowded the shrine's already overburdened tables and shelves.1 In 1802, the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820) responded to the overcrowding with an order to build Manifest Loyalty shrines in all prefectural seats (fucheng) of the empire. The new shrines, he directed, were to hold tablets of the war dead in their native places (yuanji). [End Page 61] The Beijing shrine would be restricted to the tablets of bannermen and high-ranking Han civil and military officials.2 By enshrining the dead in their native places, the emperor proclaimed, "not only would loyal souls return to their native lands (gu tu), fellow villagers and kinsmen [of the dead] would join together as an audience, gaining a greater understanding of the excellence of the dynasty's principles and clarity of its favor, and would therefore be even more inspired [to act with loyalty]."3 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Manifest Loyalty shrine, Huacheng si, and Tangzi. From Qianlong Jingcheng quan tu vol. 10 (1750, rept. 1940). The Chongwen gate, not pictured on the map, is south on the main thoroughfare east of the temple and shrine. The Jiaqing emperor's decision raises a question—were these new shrines simply the product of a pragmatic decision to avoid overcrowding at the shrine in Beijing, or did they signal a broader change in the nature of war commemoration in the early nineteenth century? In her book The Culture of War in China, Joanna Waley-Cohen characterized the eighteenth century as a time of cultural "militarization."4 According [End Page 62] to Waley-Cohen, the Qianlong emperor oversaw the development of a spectacular, "multi-layered" culture of war that both celebrated the empire's westward expansion and promoted Manchu martial values.5 Unfortunately, Waley-Cohen's thorough survey of war-related ritual and cultural production under the Qianlong emperor left unanswered the question of how this culture of war evolved in the nineteenth century. The present study argues that the building of prefectural Manifest Loyalty shrines was part of a shift in the Qing culture of war in the early nineteenth century. As a conquest dynasty that staked its authority on military superiority, the Qing crafted war commemoration in the eighteenth century to enhance the martial image of the Eight Banners while downplaying the military role of the largely Han Green Standards (lüying). The most ostentatious honors for accomplishments on the battlefield, such as the portraits of eminent generals hung in the Pavilion of Purple Light (Ziguang ge), were rarely given to Green Standard officers.6 State efforts to promote an image of banner military power were accompanied by a suppression of Chinese writing on military topics. Matthew Mosca has noted that Qianlong's ban on "virtually all recent Chinese works on military strategy" had the effect of "warning the literati off the topic."7 The Manifest Loyalty shrine in Beijing was, as I discuss below, unusual in its mission to enshrine the dead of both the Green Standards and banners. However, in many ways it resembled other elements of the eighteenth-century culture of war. It was controlled by the central government and intentionally banner-centered. Though tablets of the Green Standard dead far outnumbered those of bannermen overall, the tablets of banner generals dominated the main halls of the shrine.8 [End Page 63] In the early nineteenth century central government control over the commemoration of war...

The University of London was the first institution in the United Kingdom to establish a professorship in Chinese. Within a decade of the first half of the nineteenth century, two professorships in Chinese were created at its two colleges: the first at University College in 1837 and the second at King's College in 1847. Previous studies of British sinology have devoted sufficient attention to the establishment of the programme and the first Chinese professorship. However, despite the latter professorship being established by the same patron (Sir George Thomas Staunton; 1781–1859) during the same era as the former, the institutionalisation of the Chinese programme at King's College London seems to have been completely overlooked. If we consider British colonial policy and the mission of the Empire in the early nineteenth century, we are able to understand the strategic purpose served by the Chinese studies programme at King's and the special reason for its establishment at a crucial moment in the history of Sino-British relations. Examining it from this perspective, we reveal unresolved doubts concerning the selection and appointment of King's first Chinese professor. Unlike other inaugural Chinese professors appointed during the nineteenth century at other universities in the United Kingdom, the first Chinese professor at King’s, Samuel Turner Fearon (1819–1854), was not a sinophile. He did not translate any Chinese classics or other works. His inaugural lecture has not even survived. This is why sinologists have failed to conduct an in-depth study on Fearon and the genealogy of the Chinese programme at King’s. Nevertheless, Samuel Fearon did indeed play a very significant role in Sino-British relations due to his ability as an interpreter and his knowledge of China. He was not only an interpreter in the first Opium War (1839–1842) but was also a colonial civil servant and senior government official in British Hong Kong when the colonial government started to take shape after the war. This paper both re-examines his contribution during this “period of conflict and difficulty” in Sino-British relations and demonstrates the very nature of British sinology.

The British maritime assault on the China coast in 1840 came as a shock to the Qing Empire despite many prior signs indicating a possible attack. And the reasons the Qing so underestimated the British Empire before the first Opium War involved stove-piping and a failure to connect dots. In this impressive book, Matthew W. Mosca demonstrates that the reasons for the massive Qing intelligence failure about the world at large and strategic vulnerability along its coast lay not only in its bureaucratic structure, but also in the nature of Chinese geographic epistemology and the modes of geographic writing practiced in late imperial times. He also shows how a relaxation of imperial monopoly over discourse on external affairs in the early nineteenth century, combined with the shock of the first Opium War itself, allowed networks of scholars to consider world geography and geopolitics in new ways outside official channels. These innovations among private scholars helped change what had been a segmented “frontier policy” into an integrated “foreign policy” that would eventually comprehend and begin to deal with the British Empire and other aspects of the new international scene in which the Qing found itself.

Introduction The development of music and music education in modern China through the entire twentieth century was predominantly governed by the development of the nation in that same period. The political, social, and psychological changes that occurred in Chinese society at large within that particular period deeply influenced the development of music and music education. The Chinese musical heritage, a profound human cultural legacy, encompasses a variety of genres, a wealth of repertoire, and a style that is all its own. For thousands of years Chinese folk songs, operas, narrative music, and instrumental music--with their pentatonic tonal expressions--revealed and expressed the suffering, joy, and human nature of a people. This musical expression includes, among other things, tales about the Kunlun Mountain, the Yellow River, spectacular ancient wars, and the peaceful and quiet farming lives of the people. It tells stories or describes nameless sentiments through its own tone, its own mood, and its own attitude. It provides an aesthetic experience that is different from that of the music of other cultures in the world. Chinese music is unique because of its particular way of putting together musical sound patterns in compositions. Its musical foundations, elements, idioms, structural processes, and stylistic devices together form the compositional common practices that have been consistently recognized and understood by Chinese listeners throughout history. The knowledge of and ability to comprehendthese compositional common practices in traditional Chinese music is the Chinese music literacy. This music literacy is based upon a type of pentatonicism that is unique to Chinese music. The advent of the twentieth century brought not only the threat of European colonialism to China, but also saw an influx of Western culture that led to the development of a Westernized system of music education in China. The diatonic music of Europe has permeated and dominated the classrooms of modern China since that time. For the past one hundred years, music and music education in China have, in other words, been colonized by Western music. The Westernization of Music and Music Education in Twentieth-Century China The mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century was a critical and difficult time for China, as the Qing dynasty tried to protect its heritage from the growing influence of Western missionaries, stave off European and Japanese colonization, and put down increasingly violent citizen revolts. Growing internal economic pressure, the Opium War (1839-1842), and the Boxer Rebellion (1900) all contributed to the downfall of the Qing Empire and establishment of the new Republic of China in 1911. It was a time of change between two centuries, two societal systems, and two cultures with very different values and tremendous misunderstandings. (1) When the Opium War ended in 1842, the British with their modern weapons had not only won the war, but also had blown open the closed doors of the Qing Empire. China now had to face the reality of dealing with the scientifically advanced cultures of Japan and the West. The Treaty of Nanjing (1842), in which China ceded the island of Hong Kong and granted unprecedented trade advantages to the British, was the first of a series of inequitable treaties the Qing government signed with Western nations. (2) The Boxer Rebellion, an officially sanctioned peasant uprising that attempted to drive out all foreigners, ended in 1900 with imperial leaders agreeing to more trade concessions and granting more control to Western powers who sought to carve up China into many colonies. (3) The Movement of Westernization and Educational Reform (1860-1911) The fear of being colonized led Chinese intellectuals and government officials to pursue self-strengthening through a movement of political and cultural reformation. These leaders agreed that China should learn from the West in order to fight against the West. …

Shanghai and Hong Kong are very much like blood sisters. Shanghai is called the Lustrous Pearl of the Orient; Hong Kong, the Pearl of the East. Like two stars on the China coast, the two cities have a lot in common, in terms of geography, history, and challenges. Strategically placed at the mouth of the Yangtze River and Pearl River estuaries, both cities command the physical and social capital of rich hinterlands. They also bear witness to the turbulent history of China as their destiny is linked to western forays into Qing China on her knees. The momentous stroke that rewrote their history is of course the Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking (1842). Foremost among the humiliations were territorial concessions. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain as a colony, a status that was to last until 1997. The same treaty also turned Shanghai into a treaty port and semicolony, when the principle of extra-territoriality took the physical form of the international settlements. However infamous the past may be, the insulation from the most vicious wars and turmoil that besieged the China heartland was the key to Shanghai and Hong Kong's success. In the process, the twins evolved into the great hubs of trade and industry unmatched by any other Chinese city. Of equal importance has been the absorption of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, among them entrepreneurs, intellectuals, revolutionaries, artisans, and ordinary people. The mixing of the most adventurous and enterprising elements from within China and from all over the world underlaid the fantastic blending of cultures and practices. This not only turned them into great metropolises, but it also gave a big push to China's modernization. At the same time, unbridled growth in the context of cultural bastardy sired many social problems—drugs, crime, prostitution, poverty, and exploitation—that bestowed both with an aura of exotic decadence.

Over the past millennium, Shanghai transformed from a relatively insignificant market town and county capital into a major global metropolis. A combination of technical advances in agriculture, waterway management, and the natural changes in the course of some rivers and the silting of others led, in 1292, to the founding of the county capital Shanghai. The town went through alternate periods of growth and stagnation, but by the mid-19th century, it was an international trading hub with a population of a quarter of a million people. One of the turning points in its history came in 1842, the year that the Treaty of Nanking was signed by the Qing Empire and the United Kingdom and the Treaty Port of Shanghai opened up. Over the following century, Shanghai was divided into three main sections, each operating under its own laws and regulations: the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese city. In the 1930s, the fate of the city fell into the hands of yet another foreign power: Japan. After Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945, Chinese nationalists and communists continued their struggle for control of the city for another four years until the People’s Liberation Army “liberated” Shanghai on 25 May 1949.

The “unequal treaties” (known also by the terms “unjust,” “coercive,” “predatory,” “enslaving,” “leonine”) refers fundamentally, but not exclusively, to a historical category of bilateral treaties concluded in the late 19th and early 20th century between European states, the United States of America (USA) or Latin American countries (states that fulfilled the standards of “civilization”), and Asian or African states (perceived as “uncivilized”). Therefore, most of these treaties were signed after military defeat or as a consequence of such a threat and often provoked dissatisfaction, as they were establishing a system of benefits for the “civilized” powers, while restricting the sovereignty of the “uncivilized” and subordinate states. Hence, the “uncivilized” was being put in an unequal position while negotiating, as the “civilized” imposed—because of its economic and military superiority—harsh restrictions and inequitable terms and extorted for special privileges through concession of territorial and sovereign rights, division of spheres of influence, opening of ports, enforcement of extraterritorial jurisdiction, acquisition of railways, mining, etc. That said, the first unequal treaty is the peace treaty between the Qing Empire (China) and the United Kingdom signed in 1842, known as the Treaty of Nanking. It was followed by similar agreements between the United States and Japan (Convention of Kanagawa, 1854), or between Korea and Japan (Treaty of Kanghwa/Ganghwa, 1876). After World War II, all states suffering from unequal treaties tried to revoke the established system but met with varying success. Nevertheless and despite being seen as a historical category, the idea of unequal treaties is believed to have its prolongation to the present. Thus, the idea that lies behind the concept of “unequal treaties” is often related to imbalance between the parties, whether formal or substantive; nonreciprocal rights; and obligations and/or a coercive form of conclusion regardless of it being a military, political, or economic form of coercion. Accordingly, a question arises as to whether any of these forms of inequality affects a treaty qualified as unequal: whether it is valid or null, whether there are grounds for its revision or amendment or causes to declare its termination or suspension. However, applying the current international law—both its conventional (Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties) and customary sources—there are not enough foundations to affirm the existence of an autonomous category of “unequal treaties” and, above all, that they could possibly have some legal consequences.