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Chapter 1 provides an overview of the treaty-port media environment in China. It sketches the background of the key British and American-owned English-language papers in China’s treaty ports, particularly the North China Daily News, the China Press, and the China Weekly Review, and reveals the transnational feature of the treaty-port newspapers. By exploring China’s efforts to complete with Japan in establishing international news networks during the 1910s and the 1920s, it explores the intricate rivalries among various interest groups in the English-language press, and tensions between the treaty-port press and metropolitan papers.

This chapter provides a close reading of China's first translations that presented Western ways of hygiene under the rubric weisheng. “Fu Lanya” (John Fryer's Chinese moniker) had become almost synonymous with translations of “Western knowledge” in China. The books through which Fryer presented Western techniques of weisheng were fundamentally chemistry texts. Huaxue weisheng lun celebrates chemistry's ability to improve China's health by recategorizing the building blocks of nature, defining the health-giving properties of food, and eliminating the poisons of the atmosphere. The Weisheng bian series begins with advice on healthful nutrition. Juzhai weisheng lun places the ultimate responsibility for human health squarely on the shoulders of government. Zheng Guanying concludes that Western approaches to guarding life are occasionally helpful, but in no way superior to Chinese technology and knowledge.

Chapter 3 highlights the Nationalist government’s attempts to build an international propaganda system and to control the extraterritoriality-protected treaty-port papers from 1928 to 1932.The top-down information control exercised by the party-led propaganda system conflicted with the liberal journalism practiced in the treaty ports. Unable to achieve diplomatic progress in abolishing extraterritoriality, the Nanjing government made inroads into the extraterritorial system in specific fronts. Press control was one of them. By issuing postal bans, deporting journalists, and reviewing treaties with foreign cable companies, the government sought to strengthen its censorship power. It also adapted to the treaty-port press environment by camouflaging the party’s involvement through transnational covers.

This chapter considers the kinds of legal and medicolegal disputes that arose when foreign residents sustained injuries on the tracks of the Bangkok Tramway Company. It looks at the kinds of expertise and institutions responsible for adjudicating claims for compensation and considers the rights of the Bangkok Tramway Company, its employees, managers, and shareholders. In answering these questions, the chapter analyzes “jurisdictional politics,” “conflicts over the preservation, creation, nature, and extent of different legal forums and authorities,” in the plural legal arena of treaty port Bangkok. It deconstructs historical metanarratives about the “Westernization” or “modernization” of Thai law by revealing the fractious nature of Western law, including evidence of internecine squabbles between the representatives of legal and medical expertise—barristers and physicians—but also among the laypeople who advocated for particular brands of European legal tradition. It therefore complicates celebratory narratives of legal liberalism by demonstrating how nationalist sentiments and professional self-interest were the true impetus for legal change, not any grand imperial ambitions for bestowing law as a civilizing force.

This chapter analyses the multifaceted identities of returned emigrants in Xiamen during its treaty port era through the lens of different power regimes — the Qing, Great Britain, Japan, and the Republic of China. It examines how they manipulated their identities for their own benefits. For those emigrants who had acquired foreign nationality, they had literally returned home to China as a “foreign” country. But for returned overseas Chinese in general, Xiamen was “foreign” also, because it was not entirely Chinese. In a sense, the chapter explains how Xiamen was situated “in-between” China and the world beyond after various contending political powers created a fluid environment in Xiamen. While the various states tried to identify, win over, and discipline the emigrants, the chapter reveals the chameleonic nature of the overseas Chinese and their conspicuous lack of deep ideological commitment to any one particular state.

In Yingkou, the city where Tanxu began his serious study of Buddhism and decided to become a monk, Tanxu was persuaded to found a temple, eventually becoming the Surangama Temple. The project illustrates many of the themes present throughout Tanxu’s career: he enlists local government, military, and private sources to support the temple. The temple also plays an important symbolic, political role: in a city dominated by European-style colonial architecture, the temple is the first significant building with traditional Chinese architectural features, and is used to promote a Chinese national identity in the treaty port.

This chapter addresses the history and development of Xiamen. It presents a general overview of trade and migration through the port of Xiamen from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, culminating with its opening as a treaty port after the Opium War. The chapter then shifts to examine the interplay between trade and migration in South Fujian and the migration routes of the Fujianese before the mid-1800s. As the chapter shows, Xiamen and the Fujianese were well positioned to take advantage of the conditions and mechanisms that the treaty port era offered. The chapter then unveils how the continuation and expansion of migration through Xiamen deeply affected the port city's commercial activities and determined its development in ways that were unforeseen by the British.

This chapter discusses how Hong Kong became cosmopolitan. It can be noted that by 1865 the country no longer occupied the premier position on the China Coast, because there were other treaty ports that were growing in importance. It discusses the variety of nationalities that lived in Hong Kong, such as Germans, Jews, and Armenians, who slowly took some of the economic power long held by the British.

Not until the nineteenth century were the Japanese forced to confront and engage with the European conception of international law. In East Asia a Sinocentric regional order had governed their worldview for over a thousand years, and during the early modern period the Tokugawa dynasty then modified this outlook to place Japan in the centre of its own framework of international relations. Under the Tokugawa judicial system, moreover, the concept of a lawyer, international or otherwise, was practically unknown. It was the reluctant opening of treaty ports in 1859 that paved the way for Japan’s reception of international law. This chapter charts the shift from the early Japanese exploration of the outside world after centuries of self-imposed isolation, to the training of Japan’s first generation of international lawyers as the Meiji state embarked on reclaiming sovereign rights lost through the imposition of the treaty port regime.

Chapter 4 analyses how English-language newspapers controlled by China and Japan defended their cases during the Mukden and Shanghai incidents. Drawing on the experiences of the Jinan Incident, Chinese-operated papers formed a united anti-Japanese line during the two incidents and endeavored to convince the Western public that the two events were successive steps of Japan’s imperial expansion. Having witnessed the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in Shanghai, Western journalists in the treaty ports gradually withdrew their support for Japan’s case, and warned the international public against Japan’s military expansion in China. Yet the concern was not entirely shared by metropolitan editors who were more eager to downplay the conflict.

Chapter 2 examines China and Japan’s confrontation in the English-language press during the Jinan Incident in May 1928. Japan’s swift, consistent and intensive reporting about the event drowned out China’s voice in both the treaty-port and metropolitan papers. But what contributed to Japan’s victory of the propaganda battle was not only its sophisticated news network, but also the favorable context of international public opinion. Japanese-controlled media portrayed Chinese troops as looters, and established Japan as a defender of imperial interests in China. The Nationalist government’s propaganda efforts, in contrast, were hindered by factional struggles among the top leaders, and the anti-foreign tradition of the Nationalist Party.

Chapter 6 employs discourse analysis of the response to the statement of the Amō Doctrine (1934) in the English-language press as a case study to reflect a highly contentious and disunited media environment during the appeasement period. Periodicals operated by different political groups in China expressed diverse views about Japan’s plan of domination in Asia. The multiple voices reflected the struggles among the Nationalist leaders in devising an effective policy to deal with Japan’s coercion. Equally disturbed by the rivalry between the state and the military, however, Japanese-controlled papers also failed to provide a definite interpretation of the statement. Japan’s ambiguous position further estranged the treaty-port audience whose suspicion of its imperial plan in China grew stronger. The metropolitan papers, again, reacted differently from the treaty-port press by evincing little interest in reading into the Doctrine.

Chapter 2 then covers the period following the disbanding of the Co-hong and the opening of trade from 1771 to 1781. The resulting debt crisis that emerged in the late 1770s had an impact on the owners of the factories as well.