Anglo-Chinese Encounters Since 1800: War, Trade, Science and Governance (review)

Anglo-Chinese history has often been dominated by studies of warfare that took place during the late nineteenth century. The rise of cultural history in recent years has encouraged scholars to engage with new approaches that focus on the cultural contacts of these two empires beyond the battlefield.¹ In Anglo-Chinese Encounters Since 1800, however, Wang adopts a third approach that goes beyond the study of high politics but does not attempt to provide a close reading of the details of the encounters. Based on the Commonwealth lectures he delivered at Cambridge University in 2000, Wang outlines four core issues of Anglo-Chinese contact - convert, trade, rule, and fight – in this monograph. His purpose is to examine the extent to which different groups of Chinese people and China, as a nation, were shaped by their encounters with the British and the British Empire in Asia in these four areas up to the present time.² He is aware of the colossal scope of his subject matter and never claims to be comprehensive in his writings. Positioning himself at “the Chinese and British periphery,” Wang argues that despite the frequent and close encounters between the Chinese and the British, they were deeply divided “on the most serious matters pertaining to their deeply felt values.”³ Such a claim no doubt encapsulates the general character of Anglo-Chinese relationship, especially with respect to British Malaya and Hong Kong, two examples he frequently refers to in this monograph. Yet his focus on a particular class of Chinese and his ambiguous and causal usage of the category of “the British” generalizes the relationship between the actors at times. His tendency to treat Chinese communities in mainland China and Southeast Asia as isolated and independent enclaves also ignores the close ties between these communities.

Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800 is structured into four chapters, based on Arthur Waley’s 1942 characterization of the British mission in China – to convert, trade, rule, and fight. Wang rearranges this characterization in a hierarchical order according to his own perception of their importance with respect to the British presence in China. Chapter 1, “To fight,” covers the Opium War and the warfare that followed, up to the makeup and strategy of the People’s Liberation Army of modern China. In Chapter 2, “To trade,” Wang begins with the eastward advance of the East Indian Company to the British imperial influence on the rise of Chinese merchants in the former British colonies of Malaya and Hong Kong. In addition to religious conversation, Chapter 3 — “To convert” — discusses the linguistic and ideological transformations brought on by the arrival of foreign missionaries in China. In the last chapter, “To rule,” Wang’s site of interrogation shifts from mainland China to the British colonies in Southeast Asia and examines what he calls the “indirect” British lesson for China, the art of governance. The scope of this monograph is vast and sometimes Wang touches on Chinese encounters with the other Anglophonic group, namely the Americans. Such vastness and diversity is one of the strengths of this book as it reminds readers that Anglo-Chinese encounters and their impacts were not and are still not confined by national boundaries. Apart from discussing a series of Anglo-Chinese historical encounters, Wang also historicizes a number of contemporary affairs, such as the handover of Hong Kong and China ‘s entry into the World Trade Organization, as the legacy of such encounters. Rather than tacking events to the rise of Communist China, his approach allows readers to comprehend the longer historical contexts of major incidents in Chinese history.

As an authority on the history of overseas Chinese, Wang is aware that “the Chinese” are not a homogenous group, and such awareness is constantly reflected in his writings. Native-place origins is an important identification among Chinese, so much so that the Cantonese, the Fujian, and the Hokkien formed their own cohorts in British Southeast Asia. In British Malaya, those...