Foreigners and Foreign Institutions in Republican China

Republican China attracted an uncommon diversity of foreign interests, groups, and individuals, which included missionaries, adventurers, diplomats, academics, humanitarians and refugees, as well as hedonists and tourists. By exploring the diverse nature of foreign activities in Republican China, this book complicates the dominant narratives of the imperialistic foreigner and Chinese victim, and moves beyond the depiction of foreigners as privileged and the Chinese as simply weak. The spaces and relationships examined in the essays in this volume reveal a complex series of interactions between foreigners and the people of China which go far beyond one-way transmission or exploitation. Indeed, this book examines how diverse and sometimes seemingly peripheral foreign individuals and communities influenced literature, education, trade, sexual morality, warfare, and architecture in China and in the process were themselves profoundly changed, in ways that are as remarkable as those experienced by the Chinese they had come to observe, meet, exploit, conquer, assist, or change.
Bringing together the work of a diverse group of scholars on Republican China, this edited volume adopts a uniquely multi-disciplinary approach to the study of foreigners in China, and utilises the perspectives of historiography, literary studies, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and political science. As such, this interesting and innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars from diverse fields including Chinese and global history, politics and international relations, Chinese studies, literary studies and gender studies.

Anne-Marie Brady is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Douglas Brown teaches in the English department of John Abbott College in Ste.-Anne-de-Bellevue, Canada.

Introduction. Foreign Bodies: Foreigners and Foreign Institutions in Republican China I. Heterotopic China 1. The Italian Production of Space in Tianjin: Heterotopia and Emotional Capital 2. Lending Words: Foreign Language Education and Teachers in Republican Peking 3. Redefining Institutional Identity: the YWCA Challenge to Extraterritoriality in China, 1925-30 4. Comintern Activists in China: Spies or Theorists? 5. Observations of the Political and Economic Situation in China by the British Mercantile Community during the Civil War, 1945-1949 II. Shanghaied: Morality Tales from the Paris of the East 6. Shanghai Three Ways: the 1930s view from Tokyo, Paris, and Shanghai 7. Adventurers, Aesthetes, and Tourists: Foreign Homosexuals in Republican China 8. Sissywood vs. Alleyman: Going Nose to Nose in Shanghai, Douglas Brown 9. Takeda Taijun in Shanghai: Recollections of Republican China and Imperial Japan III. With China at War 10. "What is it makes the stranger?": Robin Hyde in China 11. Italians in Nationalist China (1928-45): Some case studies 12. Struggling Through Times of Darkness and Despair: Korean Communists from the Anti-Japanese Resistance to the Chinese Civil War