Review of 'Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900-1931'

Abstract

, in the early hours of the morning, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, acting on behalf of a Consortium of five western powers, and representatives of the republican government of China signed what became known as the Reorganisation Loan. They did so in conditions of the utmost secrecy since there was concern that, if word got out, anti-imperialist forces would seek to prevent its completion.(1) It was the culmination of a process which had begun 15 years earlier, which saw China steadily mortgaging its revenues to fund the punitive indemnities imposed following the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) and the Boxer Uprising (1900), and to finance the building of the country's railways. To prop up Yuan Shikai's fledgling regime following the fall of the Qing in 1911, something more fundamental was required. With the Customs tariffs already used up, the salt gabelle was the only significant security left available. In return for a loan of £25 million, the Consortium assumed control over its collection and, effectively, over China's economy.(2) This was, as most acknowledge, the high point of financial imperialism in China.(3) However, whilst not challenging this view, Phoebe Chow contends that, as the title of her book implies, the seeds of 'imperial retreat' had already been sown in the Foreign Office mind: by 1901, there were, she says, 'subtle changes in how opinion-makers and policy-makers wrote about China' and, by 1906, Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary in the newly-elected liberal government, had become 'willing to embark on a new policy of gradual retreat from China'. It is a bold and novel thesis and one that allows for a powerful analysis of Sino-British relations in the early 20th century, and of the wider issue of how foreign policy was already being shaped by public opinion, whatever its exact form at that time.