This dissertation examines how multiple imperial powers in Chinese treaty port cities interacted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It centers on China’s two largest treaty port cities: Tianjin and Shanghai, two cities that were divided into several colonial concessions alongside the Chinese districts from the 1860s to 1940s. Historically, while Shanghai was characterized by its tripartite division of governance—the British-dominated International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese municipality, Tianjin was home to up to nine foreign-controlled concessions (British, American, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Belgian, Austro-Hungarian, and Italian). This dissertation inquires into how these multiple imperialisms shaped, and were shaped by, these two cities. Situated at the intersection of modern Chinese history, empire studies, and urban history, this dissertation investigates how the multi-pronged and multifarious interactions between various imperial powers shaped the urban politics of these two cities, as well as their urban development. While much scholarship on colonial history has focused on the bilateral relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, my research reveals the multiplicity, multilateralism, and multilayered trajectories at the heart of the colonial experiences of both imperial powers and the Chinese. Drawing on a wide range of multi-lingual historical materials located in different parts of the world, this dissertation underscores the density and concentration of crisscrossing imperial trajectories within cities while situating Chinese colonial history within a global comparative framework.

Until the late nineteenth century camphor, extracted from the camphor tree cinnamomum camphora native to southeast China, Taiwan, and Japan, was a luxury commodity used for religious and medicinal purposes. That changed with the invention of celluloid plastic, the world’s first man-made plastic. From around 1870 forward camphor was used as an important industrial input to make celluloid, first for a variety of household goods, and then later as a backing for photographic roll film.

Current literature on camphor only mentions its modern industrial uses in passing, while literature on celluloid often omit its Asian origins. This dissertation seeks to fill that gap by relying on Qing dynasty records, British Parliamentary papers, archival materials from the Celluloid Manufacturing Co. and Eastman Kodak, as well as Republican-era Chinese periodicals. I argue that camphor was an essential commodity for the development of the twentieth century modern world, and that the supply of camphor was dependent upon the political and economic conditions of imperialism in East Asia.

This dissertation, a history of the development of an institutional body at the Northeast Military Academy in the early twentieth century, sets out to show that focusing on regional military institutions such as this school can shed light on how, in addition to shaping the political landscape of early twentieth-century China through their actions, the military men of this time also influenced notions of what was progressive, masculine, and modern, and what kinds of visual, material, and institutional forms Chinese masculinity would take. By closely examining the fragmentary documents produced by the Northeast Military Academy, this dissertation explores the ways in which the men affiliated with the school affirmed their membership in an elite military cohort and their connection to the school and to each other. The school sought to train officers who would be physically fit, psychologically astute, technically skilled, but most importantly of all, act as leaders in battle and embody a source of pride and support for other soldiers, a task that was only partially realized. The textual and visual archive of the Northeast Military Academy chronicle the efforts of instructors and students to absorb, implement, and improve upon new military skills and an effort not simply building strong bodies in the form of its graduates, but also creating bodies that could properly digest specific kinds of knowledge and make it their own. The dissertation attempts to reconstruct their fragmentary experiences by taking the reader on a journey through the rapidly shifting political terrain of Northeast China in the early twentieth century.

The present dissertation deals with how a specific kind of modern political discourse and practice, which was associated with an American style approach to public administration, was introduced, experienced, and then adapted during the 1930s and 1940s in China. The research focuses on local officials who graduated from the Central Politics School, an institution established by the Nationalist Party to train professional public administrators. These individuals were supposed to modernize the entire system of Chinese local governance, making it more rational by bringing it inline with the precepts of scientific knowledge and the scientific method. The actions of the school’s graduates in various counties expose the failure of orthodox public administration methods to deal effectively with Chinese political reality, due to a tendency to underestimate the importance of variable human factors. It was, ironically, only when some of the school’s best former students broke with the precepts of their training and use innovative strategies, which took local realities into account and made use of ideas derived from China’s own statecraft traditions, that they achieved success. This dissertation thus suggests that researchers need to pay more attention in future to Chinese statecraft and its assumptions regarding the importance of sensitivity to human nature and variability, as well as imported ideas concerning rationality and scientific methods, when trying to understand trends in Chinese politics and governance. Moreover, the historical meaning of the rise and deviation of public administration is by no means a story only of frustrated modernization or periodic revivals of “tradition.” Rather, it represents an important case study of how non-scientific indigenous resources are deployed in the face of drives in settings outside the West to impose a form of political modernity, which has the potential to overcome the problems insurmountable in the current political conceptual framework.

In the aftermath of the tumultuous Taiping Civil War (1851-1864), Qing officials began imagining a reconstruction of Chinese post-war society through broad programs that resettled refugees, demobilized the army, and rebuilt temples, roads, and academies. This was an ambitious program and unprecedented in the annals of Chinese history, seeking to radically restore Chinese society through government intervention. At the center of their plans, was an administration, the Reconstruction Bureau, that blurred the boundaries between state and elite circles to achieve their common goals of reconstructing order in the war-torn landscape. At the center of this project are a few important questions: how did they understand what they were doing? Why was it necessary to do this? What were their priorities? And above all else, what did reconstruction mean to them?

The large-scale migration that resulted in the rapid growth of Shanghai during the early twentieth century brought wealth and international recognition to the city, but also created a number of social problems that reformers and philanthropists struggled to address. These social problems included several issues related to child welfare, and both foreign and Chinese residents of the city attempted to save children from kidnapping, abuse, poor living conditions, and poverty. Working together and in parallel, expatriate and Chinese advocates created a child welfare system that was private, fragmented, and voluntary.

After the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, child welfare work focused on addressing the needs of young refugees and homeless children; resolving these social problems stood as the primary goal of private charities and the local government throughout the civil war (1945-1949) and into the early years of the People's Republic of China. Although private charity institutions, both foreign and Chinese, continued to operate in the city after the communist government took over, by 1953, they had been consolidated under the auspices of the Shanghai Municipal Government.

This dissertation traces the history of child welfare work in Shanghai from the beginning of the twentieth century until 1953. It presents child aid efforts in the city as a site of Chinese-foreign cooperation, and examines the attitudes that foreigners and Chinese displayed toward Chinese children, their lives, and their futures. Through this research, we can gain a better understanding of the history of children and childhood in China during decades of great change, as well as see the ways that Shanghai's Chinese and foreign communities worked together to improve the welfare of the city's smallest and most vulnerable residents. The examination of popular culture materials produced for children offers insight into how social ills like child homelessness and poverty were explained to a juvenile audience, and how that message changed after the implementation of communist rule in 1949. Child welfare work in Shanghai reflected discourses about children and society's obligations toward them that circulated far beyond China in the first decades of the twentieth century.

This dissertation examines the early history of the meter, the liter, and the kilogram in modern China. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, foreign and Chinese elites began to condemn the profusion of different metrological practices and systems across China as chaotic and backward. The growing consensus that China needed to have one measure produced different proposals for standardizing weights and measures in late Qing (1644-1911) and Republican China (1911-49). In the Nanjing decade (1927-37), the Guomindang (GMD) government ratified one of these possibilities, setting out a two-track plan for China to embrace the metric system within a few years. This study analyzes records produced by the different groups which lobbied for, led, conducted, and responded to the Nanjing government’s metrological reform to specify the objectives, priorities and values which animated it. Officials from the National Bureau of Weights and Measures insisted that they were enforcing an orderly, scientific system of measurement which would inculcate modern habits of mind and practice in Chinese society; facilitate economic planning and China’s industrialization; and, the development of science in China. In practice, the comprehensive, exacting regulatory regime they established to keep every instrument and act of measurement in line worked to assert the Nanjing government’s absolute and ultimate authority over all metrological matters in China. In the 1930s, the state-building project to ensure compliance with the legal system of measurement produced mixed results among diverse metrological communities which found that they had to contend with an intrusive, demanding state in addition to choosing metrological practices which served their own needs for order, convenience, and legibility. Metrological reformers had to respond to merchants who refused to give up their old tape measures and steelyards, and scientists who asserted their right to design China’s system of measurement. When they did so, they clarified that metrological reform sought, above all, to centralize metrological authority in the Nanjing government, and consolidated the considerable progress towards national metrological standardization achieved by a national network of inspectors of weights and measures.