Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900-1949 (review)

Many years ago, when I was serving my country before the mast during the first offshore islands crisis (1954-1955), my ship put into Hong Kong for a few days of R and R. There, at dinner one evening in the Foreign Correspondents' Club (hospitably open to such as I) halfway up the Peak, I overheard a gentleman at a neighboring table who, gazing down at the lights of the city below, referred to it—completely without ironic intent—as "Chinatown." This was probably my introduction to what I later learned to call the "treaty port mind," or the "Shanghai mind," although, of course, the term reflects a kind of discourse common in all sorts of descriptions by foreigners of China and the Chinese.

For a great many years the British were the most important of these foreigners. Not that they had the largest representation in China, for, by the early twentieth century, the Japanese outnumbered them. But it was the British who set the tone, particularly for Western residents of China, and their ways were followed, to one degree or another, by the Americans, the French, and by others less important in numbers or influence. As the journalist Peter Fleming wrote in the 1930s, many of them might be "people from whom [a traveler] would run a mile at home." In China, however, they were different. "Men who would be intolerable in their native suburb become, by virtue of their very limitations, fascinating subjects for study in the compounds of Cathay."¹ It is such men and women, among others, whom Robert Bickers sets out to examine in his new book.

Of course, by no means all foreigners in China—even all British in China—were the same. Bickers divides them into four broad groups: officials, missionaries, settlers, and expatriates, who together made up what he calls "Britain in China." That there were conflicts and contradictions between them is something that others have pointed out—between businessmen and missionaries, for instance, between officials and non-officials, and between the social classes who imported their prejudices from Home (and often found them deepened by the Chinese air). But no one has so clearly delineated the differences between the two groups that he calls "expatriates" and "settlers." The former were, by and large, those who went to China to work for the large multinational corporations, such as British-American Tobacco, the Asiatic Petroleum Company, and the larger China firms such as Butterfield and Swire, and Jardines. The latter were those we commonly think of as exemplary of the treaty-port mind: the men and women whose whole livelihood, indeed raison d'être, depended on the institutions of treaty-port life. They worked for the administrations of concessions and settlements or for organizations like the Chinese Maritime Customs; they served in the Western-led police forces; they ran the small businesses that met the needs of foreign residents; and a few—in a city like Shanghai—built up vast real-estate interests, becoming what Bickers calls "land oligarchs" (p. 147), men whose property holdings might well be endangered by any substantial treaty revision.

Such people were at once Britons and yet denizens of China, and these two roles could come into conflict. A few years ago James Huskey drew a roughly similar line between the "parochials" and the "cosmopolitans" of Shanghai ' s American population,² but the British settlers in that city, as well as in Hankou, Tianjin, and the smaller outports, were greater in number and in influence. Moreover, they largely set the tone of life. Fiercely loyal to the empire (at least when it suited them to be so), they nonetheless suffered from insecurity, since the treaty ports, unlike Hong Kong, were not part of the formal empire, and thus they enjoyed none of the certainties...