Abstract
The foreign settlements in China’s treaty ports made Chinese urban development unique. Their delineated boundaries created an artificial pressure on space that made the settlements less habitable, even as they sought to be the most habitable urban environments in China, claiming the status of ‘model settlements’. By contrasting the British Concession at Tianjin with Shanghai’s International Settlement, this chapter shows how class and race intersected to exclude certain groups from the habitable environment in treaty ports. The settlements expanded to provide more space for their wealthy inhabitants, attempted to regulate the urban environment, and shaped preferences for quiet and green spaces. The greater pressure on space in Shanghai contributed to more racial exclusion from the habitable environment than in Tianjin, as reflected in the growth in Chinese nationalism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Bickers, R. (1998). Shanghailanders: The formation and identity of the British settler community in Shanghai, 1843–1937. Past and Present, 159, 161–211.
Bickers, R. (2011). The scramble for China: Foreign devils in the Qing empire, 1832–1914. London: Allen Lane.
Bickers, R., & Wasserstrom, J. (1995). Shanghai’s ‘dogs and Chinese not admitted’ sign: Legend, history and contemporary symbol. China Quarterly, 142, 444–466.
British Municipal Council, Tientsin, ‘Minutes of the 19th Annual General Meeting of Electors, held 7 April 1937’, 2, http://tianjin.virtualcities.fr/Asset/Source/bnBook_ID-1266_No-1.pdf. Accessed 2 Dec 2015.
Carr, S. (1992). Public space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chen, J. (2012a). Guilty of indigence: The urban poor in China, 1900–1953. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chen, S. (2012b). Shame on you!: Competing narratives of the nation in the Laoxikai incident and the Tianjin anti-French campaign, 1916–1917. Twentieth-Century China, 37(2), 121–138.
Crow, C. (1938). My friends, the Chinese. London: H. Hamilton.
Darwent, C. (1904). Shanghai: A handbook for travellers and residents. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh.
Dong Xiujia 董修甲. (1924) Shizheng xinlun 市政新論 [A new treatise on urban planning]. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan).
Esherick, J. W. (Ed.) (1999). Remaking the Chinese city: Modernity and national identity, 1900–1950. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Feetham, R. (1931). Report of the Hon. Mr Justice Feetham, CMG, to the Shanghai municipal council. Shanghai: North-China Daily News and Herald.
Henriot, C. (1991). Shanghai, 1927–1937: Municipal power, locality, and modernization (trans: Castelino, N.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Henriot, C. (2012). Slums, squats or hutments? Constructing and deconstructing an in-between space in modern Shanghai (1926–1965). Frontiers of History, 7(2), 499–528.
Henriot, C., & Durand, I. (2012). The impact of war on Shanghai’s industrial structure: A GIS_based analysis of the Shanghai industrial surveys (1935–1940). Annals of GIS, 18(1), 45–55.
Hess, C. A. (2011). From colonial port to socialist metropolis: Imperialist legacies and the making of “New Dalian”. Urban History, 38(3), 373–390.
Hitch, M. A. (1935). The port of Tientsin and its problems. Geographical Review, 25(3), 370–375.
Honig, E. (1992). Creating Chinese ethnicity: Subei people in Shanghai, 1850–1980. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Liu Haiyan (2011). Water supply and the reconstruction of urban space in early twentieth-century Tianjin. Urban History, 38, 391–412.
Lu Hanchao (1999). Beyond the neon lights: Everyday Shanghai in the early twentieth-century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ma, C., et al. (2011). Shanghai gonggong zujie chengshi guanli yanjiu 上海剬共租界城市管理研究 [Research on the urban management of the Shanghai International Settlement]. Shanghai: Zhong xi shuju.
MacPherson, K. L. (1990). Designing China’s urban future: The Greater Shanghai Plan, 1927–1937. Planning Perspectives, 5(1), 39–62.
Marinelli, M. (2013). Projecting Italianità on the Chinese space: The construction of the ‘aristocratic’ concession in Tianjin (1901–1947). In M. Marinelli & G. Andornino (Eds.), Italy’s encounters with modern China: Imperial dreams, strategic ambitions (pp. 1–29). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nightingale, C. (2012). Segregation: A global history of divided cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
North China Herald and Supreme Court and Consular Gazette. 2020.
Rihal, D. (2009) Foreign-administered Parks in Shanghai: Visual and spatial representations of new forms of public open spaces. http://www.virtualshanghai.net/Texts/Articles?ID=59. Accessed 2 Dec 2015.
Ristaino, M. R. (2001). Port of last resort: The diaspora communities of Shanghai. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rogaski, R. (2004). Hygienic modernity: Meanings of health and disease in treaty-port China. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Shanghai Municipal Archives. 2020.
Shanghai Municipal Council, annual reports. 2020.
Sheehan, B. (2003). Trust in troubled times: Money, banks and state-society relations in republican Tianjin. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
Taeuber, I. B. (1974). Migrants and cities in Japan, Taiwan, and Northeast China. In M. Elvin & G. W. Skinner (Eds.), The Chinese city between two worlds (pp. 359–384). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
The China Press. 2020
The Chinese Recorder. 2020
Tientsin’s foreign concessions: Historical notes. (1938). Oriental Affairs, 10(4), 194–197.
Wright, A. (Ed.) (1908). Twentieth-century impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and other treaty ports of China. London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing Company.
Xu, X. (2000). Chinese professionals and the republican state: The rise of professional associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Xu, G. (2011). Strangers on the Western front: Chinese workers in the great war. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
Yang Daxing. (1992) Tianjin jiuguo zujie gaixu 天津九國租界概述 [The general history of nine concessions in Tianjin]. In: Qiang zai Zhongguo de zujie 強在中國的租界 [Foreign Concessions in China] (pp. 113–140). Beijing: Wenshi.
Yeh, C. (2006). Shanghai love: Courtesans, intellectuals, and entertainment culture, 1850–1910. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Young, E. P. (2013). Ecclesiastical colony: China’s Catholic church and the French religious protectorate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zhang Wenzhong 张文忠. (Ed.). (2006). Zhongugo yiju chengshi yanjiu baogao (Beijing) 中国宜居城市研究报告 [北京] [Report on research into China’s livable cities (Beijing)]. (Beijing: Shihui kexue wenxian chubanshe).
Zhang Yingjin (1996). The city in modern Chinese literature and film: Configurations of space, time, and gender. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Toby Lincoln for organizing the workshop and conference at which this chapter developed; participants at those events and at the British Association for Chinese Studies conference at Newcastle University in 2014 for their questions and comments on various versions of the paper, especially Sarah Dauncey; Denise Ho for her valuable comments on an earlier draft; and the British Academy for funding the necessary visits to China for this research.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jackson, I. (2017). Habitability in the Treaty Ports: Shanghai and Tianjin. In: Lincoln, T., Tao, X. (eds) The Habitable City in China. Politics and Development of Contemporary China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55471-0_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55471-0_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55470-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-55471-0
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)