Why Shanghai's Concessions Still Matter: An Analytical Introduction

Why Shanghai's Concessions Still Matter: An Analytical Introduction

The Shanghai foreign concession looked like a place. It had a waterfront, an address system, a fire brigade, a cricket ground, and a row of stone-faced banks along a curving embankment. But to read it accurately you have to treat it as more than a place — as a machine, in the sense that every visible feature (every cornice, every ledger entry, every court ruling, every tram timetable) was the output of a small number of interlocking systems. Most visitors, including most of the people who write popular history about Shanghai, see only the output. They mistake the casing for the mechanism. This chapter is about the mechanism. It sets up the three analytical axes — juridical space, economic space, and morphological space — that every subsequent chapter in this book will return to. It also explains the legal vocabulary that beginners habitually mangle, sketches the 1843–1949 chronology, and runs through one cartographic exercise so that the reader can look at any old Shanghai map and find the concession.

The Surface and the Substance

A beginner's mental picture of Shanghai's foreign concessions is built from three ingredients: the Bund skyline, the Art Deco villas of the former French Concession, and a generic sense of colonial decadence inherited from novels, films, and travel writing. None of these is wrong. The Bund's granite-and-limestone frontage really did rise between the 1890s and the 1920s to become one of the most photographed streetscapes in Asia. The plane-tree-shaded lanes of the former French Concession really do shelter some of the densest concentrations of 1920s and 1930s residential architecture on the continent. And the concessions really did host the bars, ballrooms, and trading floors that supplied the rest of the world with images of Shanghai as the "Paris of the East" or the "Whore of the Orient," depending on the moral register of the speaker.

The problem is not that this picture is inaccurate. The problem is that it is static. It tells you what the concession looked like at a particular moment — usually the moment around 1930, just before everything collapsed — without telling you how it got there, what held it up, or why it fell. Worse, the picture treats the concession as an aesthetic object: something to be admired, photographed, or gentrified. It does not ask what the concession *was* in legal terms, what economic function it performed inside China and inside the world economy, or how its physical fabric was produced by specific decisions made by specific people under specific constraints.

Once you begin to ask those questions, the picture dissolves and a different object emerges. That object is harder to look at but far more interesting, because it actually explains the things the aesthetic picture could only register. For example:

• The reason the Bund's buildings look the way they do is not "European architects" but a sequence of building regulations enacted in 1869, modified in 1898, 1901, and 1926, and enforced by a municipal engineer's office that had the power to refuse occupancy permits. The skyline is a printed record of those regulations.
• The reason Shanghai became the banking center of East Asia by 1930 is not "British enterprise" but a treaty clause — the most-favored-nation article in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking — that forced China to extend to every signatory power any privilege it granted to one. Each new treaty multiplied the foreigners who could legally own land, set up banks, and sue in their own courts.
• The reason the foreign concessions eventually disappeared between 1937 and 1943 is not "Chinese nationalism" in some abstract sense but a chain of concrete events: the Japanese invasion of the Settlement's hinterland in November 1937, the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, the Japanese decision to abolish the foreign-administered areas in February 1943, and the parallel Chinese Nationalist government's attempt to recover them by treaty the same month. Each step is documentable.

None of this is visible from a photograph of the Bund. All of it is recoverable from documents, maps, and ledgers. The remainder of this chapter, and indeed the entire book, is an attempt to make those documents, maps, and ledgers legible to a reader who has never worked with them before.

Treaty Port, Settlement, Concession: A Legal Lexicon

Before any analytical framework can be useful, the reader needs to be able to use the vocabulary correctly. Three terms cause more confusion than anything else in the Shanghai literature: *treaty port*, *settlement*, and *concession*. They are sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes distinguished, and sometimes used in opposite senses by different authors. The distinctions are technical, and they matter.

Treaty port. A *treaty port* is a Chinese city whose opening to foreign trade and residence was imposed on the Qing government by an unequal treaty. The first five were opened by the 1842 Treaty of Nanking: Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo), and Shanghai. The number grew steadily through the nineteenth century and reached about fifty by 1914. A treaty port was not, by itself, a zone of foreign administration. It was a Chinese city in which foreigners were permitted to reside, trade, and (in most cases) be tried by their own consuls for serious crimes. The municipal government remained Chinese, except where special arrangements were made.

Concession. A *concession* was a tract of land within a treaty port that had been formally leased or assigned to a foreign government for administration. The word is a French term for a grant of land, and its application to Shanghai reflects the French administrative tradition. In Shanghai, the French Concession was the original "concession" in the strict sense: it was created by a Sino-French arrangement in 1849 and remained under French administration until 1943. The term is often loosely extended to cover all foreign-administered enclaves in China, but strictly speaking it refers to French holdings and a small number of other formally granted territories.

Settlement. The English word *settlement* carried a different meaning. It originally denoted a residential area established by foreigners without formal grant of administrative power. The British Settlement at Shanghai was established in 1843 on the basis of a notice issued by the British consul and the 1845 Land Regulations, which were negotiated between British merchants and the Chinese authorities but did not transfer sovereignty. The American Settlement was established in 1848 by the U.S. consul on similarly informal terms. Neither was a *concession* in the French sense; both were *settlements*. In 1863, the British and American settlements were merged into the International Settlement, but the word *settlement* persisted in the official name even after the merger.

The terminological situation is therefore as follows:

| Term | Strict meaning | Shanghai example | |------|----------------|------------------| | Treaty port | A Chinese city opened to foreign trade by treaty | Shanghai, Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo (and ~45 others) | | Concession | Land formally leased to a foreign government for administration | French Concession (1849–1943) | | Settlement | Foreign residential area with self-governing institutions but no formal grant of sovereignty | British Settlement (1843–1863), American Settlement (1848–1863) | | International Settlement | The merged British and American settlements | International Settlement (1863–1943) |

Three more pieces of vocabulary belong to the legal lexicon and should be mastered now:

Extraterritoriality. The right of a foreign national to be tried by his own consul or by his own courts rather than by Chinese courts. Extraterritoriality was granted to British subjects by Article XI of the 1843 Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue and