Sino-British Relations Research Articles

Translation and the British Colonial Mission: The Career of Samuel Turner Fearon and the Establishment of Chinese Studies at King's College, London

AbstractThe 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.

Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 by Shih-Wen Chen (review)

Reviewed by: Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 by Shih-Wen Chen Erica Hateley (bio) Shih-Wen Chen. Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911. Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013. 218 pp. Hardcover £55.00, isbn 978-1-4094-4735-1. During a recent conversation with my Anglo-Australian father, he recalled a story encountered in the 1950s and 1960s classrooms of his youth. A staple resource in those classrooms was the Victorian Readers, and if my father is anything to go by, it seems that the comic stories included in these state-authorized anthologies were enjoyed and remembered by students far more than any other genre.1 In the course of recounting Henry Lawson’s short story “The Loaded Dog” (1901), my father had suddenly remembered another story, the title of which he could not recall, but which he knew he and his friends had found hilarious. After some searching, I found the story my father remembered: Edward Dyson’s “A Golden Shanty” (1898), the racism of which is so overt as to beggar belief. Dyson’s story and its inclusion in state-mandated education of mid-twentieth century Australia may seem at some remove from the materials discussed in Shih-Wen Chen’s Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911, but this conversation with my father reminded me how close, in both space and time, my own Anglophone, British Commonwealth culture remains to those fictions of the nineteenth century that shaped and continue to shape cultural and cross-cultural meaning and understanding. It reminded me how pervasive and potent are the images and ideas consumed in childhood. Chen takes as her subject the ways in which China and Chinese characters were depicted in children’s books addressed to an implied British child readership a century ago. In addition to shedding light on a historical phase of transition in literary culture, Chen’s work has the capacity to speak to contemporary modes of cultural representation and analysis. The volume is organized by chapters discussing [End Page 64] travelogues by Anne Bowman and William Dalton, the emergence and development of the popular character Ching-Ching, representations of the Taiping Rebellion, and literary depictions of the Boxer Uprising. Chen addresses a range of genres for young readers and engages with children’s literature across her focus period. In so doing, she offers an important contribution both to children’s literature studies and to Anglophone China studies. To the degree that a national culture is defined as much by what it is not as what it may be—that is, to the degree that Said’s influential account of Orientalism (1978) retains utility as an account of defining the self through defining the other—attending to the representations of China and Chineseness in nineteenth-century British children’s literature offers insights into the popular practices of “the East made known, and therefore less fearsome, to the Western reading public” at a time when a newly literate population simultaneously proved the cultural ascendancy of the British Empire and posed a threat to its internal cohesion.2 It is in the management of a literate population that imperial politics retain and extend an imaginative potency. In Britain, the long nineteenth century witnessed two major cultural shifts that inform Representations of China. The first is the emergence of widespread literacy; the other is the development of children’s literature as a social and economic force for educating the newly literate population. These two narratives of mass literacy and children’s literature are well known to scholars of British cultural history, not least because literature for young people is widely recognized as a tool of social education as much as an object of pleasure. In the tensions between education and entertainment that characterize much popular culture, and children’s texts in particular, the fault lines of a nation’s culture—real and desired—can be traced. Chen identifies a range of contexts as relevant to her study, including political, economic, and martial histories and conflicts in Sino-British relations; an explosion of information and literacy in Britain...

THECHALLENGER: HUGH HAMILTON LINDSAY AND THE RISE OF BRITISH ASIA, 1832–1865

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the life and activities of Hugh Hamilton Lindsay (1802–81), an East India Company official who worked at Canton from 1820. Lindsay's is a key voice in the challenge to the Company's policies in China on the cusp of the abolition of its monopoly, and to British policy on the eve of the first ‘Opium War’ with the empire of the Qing. Lindsay first made his mark on Sino-British relations by leading a covert East India Company foray north along the Chinese coast in 1832 in the shipLord Amherst, and in widely disseminating his bullish conclusions and policy recommendations in publications and reports that followed. He is known as a bellicose pamphleteer, but a more complex picture emerges if we follow Lindsay and his commercial activities as the British fanned out from Canton into the Chinese ‘treaty ports’ opened after 1842, and across Britain's wider developing empire in Asia. His field of operations developed to include the British colony of Labuan and led him into a heated public conflict with Sir James Brooke in the early 1850s. Lindsay was never happy with thestatus quo: he lobbied and hectored, and in business he innovated, and pushed hard on the frontiers of British power and influence. Commercial opportunity drove him, but so did a specific vision of the ‘English character’, and notions of pride and national and personal honour.

Vietnam War tourists: US Naval visits to Hong Kong and British-American-Chinese relations, 1965–1968

At the height of the Vietnam War, Communist China repeatedly lodged diplomatic protests with the British government about US naval visits to Hong Kong. Believing that the Chinese protests were nothing but propaganda and were as much about the Sino-Soviet split as about Sino-American and Sino-British relations per se, British officials decided that the visits of US servicemen for rest and recreation should continue, albeit within the framework of new Anglo-American guidelines. By examining the British handling of the question of US naval visits, this article reveals the interactions of the four Cold War powers concerned as well as a broader global phenomenon in the mid-1960s – the growth of anti-Americanism. The case of Hong Kong suggests that the ‘Vietnam War tourists’, who were well disciplined and economically valuable, were not ‘ugly Americans’ but ‘beautiful imperialists’.

Selling China: Class, Gender and Orientalism at the Department Store

This article explores how luxury Chinese items were sold in London department stores between 1890 and 1940, and is the result of a comprehensive survey of the catalogues of Liberty, Whiteley’s, and Debenham and Freebody held at Westminster City Archives and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Previous studies of the department store have looked at issues of gender and class, but where representations of the Orient have been addressed, there has been a tendency to reinscribe a masculinist Orientalist discourse that aligns the Orient with negative tropes of femininity and shopping (Rappaport 2000). My article re-examines this area, taking into account the historical specificity of Sino-British relations, and the socially exclusive nature of some of the Chinese goods being marketed. The article uniquely centres upon the goods that were being sold, rather than focussing on social comment, in order to generate a discussion of shopping and social identities. This work also adds to a growing body of literature that reads London’s West End shopping space as imperial space (Rappaport 2002), where the notion of colonial nostalgia is shown to be especially significant. Abstract In the late nineteenth century, while China was being subjected to various forms of Western imperial expansion, luxury Chinese items such as embroidered robes and carved wood furniture were widely available to British shoppers through the Oriental section of department stores. This article explores how such Chinese things were sold in London department stores between 1890 and 1940, in a survey of the catalogues of Liberty, Whiteley's and Debenham and Freebody. In a re-examination of the way in which theories of Orientalism have been applied to department store histories, the specificity of Sino-British relations during the early twentieth century, and the socially exclusive nature of some of the Chinese goods being marketed, reveals the multivalent role of Chinese products in the generation of a range of British identities. The femininity of the department store context is mapped against notions of the Orient, and notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ design, where London's West End shopping space was also imperial space. In particular, the notion of a colonial nostalgia for ‘old China’ becomes especially relevant in the articulation of a dynamic set of British class identities, constructed through the ownership of culturally elite Chinese products.

My Experiences of the Region during the Last Century – with Particular Reference to Sino-British Relations

The author describes his early diplomatic experiences as a Chinese language student during the Cultural Revolution, followed by his first posting to Peking. Hong Kong was then a major issue between China and Britain. He examines the tensions and difficulties of those years and the first signs of better days ahead. He details his involvement in the upgrading of diplomatic relations, and the first ministerial exchanges. His final overseas posting was to Hong Kong, first to head the Trade Commission, and then, importantly, to manage the final four years of detailed negotiations with China over the handover.

Sino-British Relations over Hong Kong during the Final Phase of Political Transition

Sino-British Relations over Hong Kong during the Final Phase of Political Transition

Tance Xianggang Guodu qianhou (Exploring Hong Kong's return to China), and: Jiuqiu hou Zhonggang di xin mianmao (The new face of China: Hong Kong after 1997) (review)

Reviews 195 In modern Chinese history, the line between soldier and civilian has rarely been a sharp one. McCord's warlords were drawn into politics by die legitimacy crisis and divided autiiority of the early Republic. Levich's Kwangsi soldier-politicians sought to create an island ofmodernization in a province that even today remains a backwater. Many ofLi's student nationalists wound up as cadres or officers in the Communist and Nationalist armies. Wou's rural Henan communists pursued an agenda that embraced both military security and social transformation . After 1949, on Taiwan and the mainland of China, Nationalists and Communists continued to wresde with the problem ofhow to incorporate soldiers into the rival party-states that were the legacy ofthe first half of the twentieth century in China. Steven I. Levine Boulder Run Research Steven I. Levine is Senior Research Associate at Boulder Run Research specializing in Chineseforeign policy. mi Frankie Fook-lun Leung. Tance Xianggang Guodu qianhou (Exploring Hong Kong's return to China). Hong Kong: Guangjiaojing Press, 1994. 287 pp. Paperback $15. 00, isbn 962-226-384-4. Frankie Fook-lun Leung. Jiuqiu hou Zhonggang di xin mianmao (The new face of China: Hong Kong after 1997). Hong Kong: Guangjiaojing Press, 1995. 211 pp. Paperback $18.00, isbn 962-226-396-8. With the countdown under way toward July 1, 1997, when China will regain sovereignty over Hong Kong, publications on the future of Hong Kong have become a fast-growth industry. Among the myriad tides on the subject, few deal with the important topic of the post-1997 legal system in Hong Kong, and even fewer are written by a trained legal scholar. The two volumes under review, both by Frankie F. L. Leung and both written in Chinese, are thus welcome contributions. The first monograph is a collection of essays written by the autiior over the© 1996 by University years and published in Shinbao (Hong Kong economicjournal) and Shinbao ofHawai'i Pressyuekan (Hong Kong economic journal monthly), two leading financial publications in Hong Kong, and arranged in five topical categories. The first, "Citizenship and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region," illuminates legal issues 196 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 relating to citizenship on the Hong Kong passport and rights of abode in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. The second section on "Sino-British Relations" analyzes the respective bargaining strategies of China and the United Kingdom, evaluates die performance ofleading British and Hong Kong Chinese civil servants , and takes a retrospective glance at the poignant experiences of British diplomats during the Cultural Revolution in Beijing. The third section on "Equality before the Law" offers an insider's critique ofthe legal system, the legal profession , and legal education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. Though not focused on Hong Kong, two companion sections on "The Economies and Investment Strategies of China and the U.S." and "Chinese and Western Education" compare the laws on international trade and investment in China, die United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; introduce the financial wizardry of Templeton and Buffet, as well as Soros; and discourse on the policy choices and pedagogical similarities and differences between the American and Chinese educational systems. In his sequel The New Face ofChina: Hong Kong after 1997, the focus shifts to a discussion ofthe Chinese legal system, which takes up more than a third of the book. The twenty-five essays in this selection examine the quality ofjudges, lawyers , and law students in China; the Criminal Code and the Basic Law of Hong Kong; and the Hong Kong judicial system during the transition. Returning to two major themes in fhe 1994 book, the second section probes the problems of dealing with Chinese companies, resolving trade disputes, and managing cross-national and international investments, while a third section comments on the ambivalent political psychology of Hong Kong citizens, the uncertain status of Hong Kong civil servants during and after 1997, and the degree of media-friendliness of Chinese versus British officials. A last section on Hong Kong high school and college education completes the circle begun in the first book. While written largely for and at the level of...

Sino-British Relations over Hong Kong: Memorandum Submitted by the Right Honorable Sir Percy Cradock, GCMG, House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee

1. Britain's need to cooperate with China over Hong Kong is imposed by the fact of the lease, which covers 92 percent of the territory and has less than four years to run, by the great disparity of power between Britain and China over this issue, and by our duty to establish the best possible conditions for Hong Kong's future.

“Coolie work”: Sir Reginald Johnston at the School of Oriental Studies, 1931–1937

Surprisingly, the history of Chinese studies in Britain has received little academic attention. In fact, its development in the twentieth century, and its problems and lack of world standing actually tell us much about the background to Sino-British relations, and especially about the resources available to enable those interested, for professional, business, evangelical or plainly academic reasons, to understand China and the Chinese. British sinology in the interwar period, if discussed at all, is routinely condemned by historians. After 1949 China was closed off to outside contacts; not surprisingly, commentators thereafter look back jealously to the opportunities for close and frequent contact that were available before the revolution but which they saw as being apparently wasted. This common judgement does not, however, do full justice to the scale of the underlying problems, especially financial ones, faced by academic institutions that taught Chinese.

Thirty Years of Sino-British Relations: A Foreign Office View

There can be few senior British civil servants who have devoted the early years of their retirement to systematically and publicly attacking the declared policies of the British Government. Indeed, Sir Percy Cradock's activities have been so prominent that debate about his opinions and account of events became a central issue in the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee hearings during 1993-94. That it has been possible for Sir Percy to do all this will no doubt be remarked upon by future historians as indicating both the changing mores of British bureaucracy and the tolerant nature of today's political culture. Comparison may also be drawn with the story of Xu Jia Tun, in some senses one of Sir Percy's opposite numbers, who after little more than symbolic disapproval of his government's policies was forced to seek monastic exile in California.

Horatio Nelson Lay and Sino-British Relations 1854-1864. by Jack J. Gerson

<i>Horatio Nelson Lay and Sino-British Relations 1854-1864</i>. by Jack J. Gerson

Studies in the Social History of China and South-East Asia: Essays in Memory of Victor Purcell.

Foreword Portrait of Victor Purcell V. W. W. S. Purcell: a memoir Sybille van der Sprenkel Part I. China: 1. Anti-imperialism in the Kuomintang 1923-1928 P. Cavendish 2. The origin of the Boxers Jerome Ch'en 3. The high tide of socialism in the Chinese countryside Jack Gray 4. The Sino-Indian and Sino-Russian borders: some comparisons and contrasts Alastair Lamb 5. Unpublished report from Yenan, 1937 Owen Lattimore 6. The use of slogans and 'uninterrupted revolution' in China in the early part of 1964 James Macdonald 7. The Optick Artists of Chiangsu Joseph Needham Part II. South-east Asia: 8. Canton and Manila in the eighteenth century W. E. Cheong 9. Sino-British mercantile relations in Singapore's entrepot trade 1870-1915 Chiang Hai Ding 10. The Dutch and the tin trade of Malaya in the seventeenth century Graham W. Irwin 11. Early Chinese migration into North Sumatra Anthony Reid 12. Revolution in education Kenneth Robinson 13. Sikh immigration into Malaya during the period of British rule Kernial Singh Sandhu 14. The entrepot at Labuan and the Chinese Nicholas Tarling 15. China and South-east Asia 1402-1424 Wang Gungwu 16. Bibliography of the writings of Victor Purcell The Editors Index.

The Kotow in the Macartney Embassy to China in 1793

On September 26, 1792, George Lord Viscount Macartney, the first British envoy ever to reach China, sailed from Portsmouth with a commission as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China. The aims of the mission were to put Sino-British relations upon a treaty basis, redress various grievances in the existing commercial arrangements at Canton, open new ports to trade in north and central China, and, if possible, establish a permanent legation in China. As the objectives of the embassy were important and as it would establish precedents for future British missions to China, the government had planned it with care, and had placed at its head an especially competent diplomat and colonial administrator. The British were well aware that the Chinese considered foreign embassies as tribute-bearing missions and generally, if not always, demanded that the ambassador perform the kotow before the Emperor.