China-India Colonial Configurations and the Aesthetics of Imprisonment
Adhira Mangalagiri
University of Chicago
On May 30, 1925, Chinese workers and students famously took to the streets of Shanghai’s International Settlement in protest against imperialism. As protestors gathered outside the Louza (Laozha 老閘) police station, Indian policemen operating under British orders opened fire into the crowds, killing and wounding dozens. In the wake of this May Thirtieth Incident, the image of the Indian policeman exercising violence on the Chinese protestor soon emerged as a central symbol of the injustice and evils of foreign imperial presence in China. National and global outrage inhered within iterations of this provocative image.
While the May Thirtieth Incident and, more recently, the Indian branch of the Shanghai Municipal Police have received much historiographical attention, my paper contributes a resolutely literary approach. Focusing on the symbolic and aesthetic valence of the encounter between the Indian policeman and his Chinese victim, I first trace the development of this image in a collection of early-twentieth century Chinese short stories and novels. Chinese literary depictions of this Indian figure, I suggest, articulate a shared anti-colonial aesthetics anchored (unexpectedly) in moments of strident China-India enmity and hatred. Next, I read the reverberations of the May Thirtieth Incident (and resultant Movement) in the Hindi literary sphere through the poet-novelist Agyeya’s (1911-1987) writings during his imprisonment for anti-colonial activities in the 1930s. While Agyeya’s writings on China do not explicitly refer to May Thirtieth, I argue that the Movement animates the core of Agyeya’s emancipatory politics, crafted through his aesthetic engagements with China.
Ultimately, my paper demonstrates how literary approaches to the study of China-India colonial configurations reveal a field of vibrant affective intensities that have so far remained invisible under exclusively historiographical lenses. In reading Shanghai’s Indian policeman across transnational literary contexts, I chart new, comparative paths for the study of China-India relations during the late colonial period.
China in the Popular Imagination: Images of Chin in Hindi School Primers in Nineteenth Century North India
Anand Yang
University of Washington
How did people in India perceive and imagine China at the turn of the twentieth century? As the first extended eyewitness accounts of China written in Hindi in the initial years of the twentieth century reveal, notably Gadadhar Singh’s stunning travelogue recounting his experiences of serving in China over the course of thirteen months in 1900-1901 as a member of the British force in the International Expedition mobilized to suppress the Boxer Uprising, many Indian visitors responded to that country and its people with deep sympathy. Central to their sense of affiliation with China was the civilizational kinship and shared history that they discerned existing between India and China. My paper will highlight the early lessons that many of these early twentieth century writers on China learnt in the primary schools they attended in the emerging new colonial state system of education in the late nineteenth century. It will focus particularly on primary and secondary school textbooks in geography, the one subject in which school children were taught about the world around them, including their Asian neighbor, China.
The Politics of Culture: Cheena Bhavana, Converging Nationalisms and Wartime Diplomacy
Brian Tsui
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
The Cheena Bhavana was inaugurated in April 1937 with financial support from the Chinese Nationalist government. Mohandas Gandhi hailed the Visva Bharati department as a “symbol of living contact” between China and India and Jawaharlal Nehru congratulated it for reviving the two countries’ traditional, peaceful fraternity in a world battered by violent industrial warfare. Spearheaded by Rabindranath Tagore and particularly his Chinese protégé Tan Yunshan, Cheena Bhavana was a belated product of the Asianist interrogation of capitalist nation-state system that became popular among Asian intellectuals after the Great War. The institute’s self-identity emphasized aloofness from politics and devotion to culture, namely a broadly defined Buddhist civilization uniting East and South Asia. As organizations and ideals, however, Cheena Bhavana and its funder Sino-Indian Cultural Society were from their inception tied to the nationalist movements in China and India and regional anti-colonialism. This presentation investigates the dialectic between Tan’s insistence that culture transcended politics and Cheena Bhavana’s embroilment in wartime diplomacy. It focuses on the tension between Chiang Kai-shek’s appropriation of the idealism that underlay Cheena Bhavana and the institute’s association with core Indian freedom fighters while balancing his commitments to working under an embattled Anglo-American world order.
Kill Buddha Singh: The Ghadar Party and its Enemies in Shanghai, 1914-1927
Cao Yin
NYU Shanghai
Abstract: On the morning of 6 April 1927, the Jemadar of the Sikh branch in the Shanghai Municipal Police, Buddha Singh, was shot dead by an Indian nationalist. This incident has not drawn much attention from scholars studying the modern Chinese history. This paper argues that the narrative framework of the Chinese national history fails to provide a space for subjects such as Sikh migrants and nationalists that can hardly be appropriated. By exploring how the Ghadar Party, the Comintern, and the Chinese communists cooperated with each other to shatter the British hegemony in Shanghai and how the British colonial authorities forged a coordinative network to check the ever flowing dissidents, this paper reconstructs the dramatic case of Buddha Singh not only in the milieu of the Chinese nationalist revolution but also in the context of the global anti-imperial and communist movements. In so doing, it challenges the established national narrative and champions an approach that incorporates the modern Chinese history into the global history.
An Unnecessary War: Misperceptions and the Origins of the Chinese-Indian Border Clash of 1962
Chen Jian
NYU Shanghai
Why and how did the Chinese-Indian border war of 1962 happen? What were the motivations for Beijing’s and New Delhi’s leaders to use military means to deal with the border disputes between the two countries, and what goals did they hope to achieve? Had there been any opportunity—especially given the friendly relationship that had existed between China and India in most of the 1950s—for the war to have been averted? And, if yes, why did the war occur? The main argument of this paper is that the Chinese-Indian border war was not inevitable. It was not so much about the two’s vital security interests. The war was even not so much about the territorial disputes per se—at least not so much as what the general public had been made to believe that they were. By carefully reading Chinese and Indian documents, one finds that the border problems between China and India were by no means more complicated than, for example, Chinese-Burmese border disputes that had been settled in the early 1960s. The McMahon Line, which the Chinese contested as a product of the age of British colonialism, virtually was an issue of non-issue. The disputes could have been settled if the two sides, by putting themselves into the others’ shoes, had been able to agree on a general “package settlement” based on mutual concessions as proposed by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai during his April 1960 trip to New Delhi. In a sense, this was Nehru’s war, and this was also Mao’s war. Both Nehru and, especially, Mao were driven to misperceptions by profound domestic factors. This was a war about great power status, national pride, domestic representation and mobilization, and legitimacy of the specific nation-building projects that the two countries had undertaken. Touched upon here were the essence of China’s and India’s modern experiences and the meanings that Mao and Nehru had attached to them. In history’s practical development, Nehru mistakenly believed that the Chinese would not fight a war against him and India. It seemed inconceivable that Nehru adopted the “forward policy” when the Indian troops were least ready to bear the possible consequences of such a policy. Mao’s most serious miscalculation was that he believed by teaching Nehru and the Indians a bitter lesson, he and the Chinese would be able to eventually make the Indians accept China as a friend, rather than as an enemy! Indeed, Mao lacked an understanding or appreciation of the self-esteem and pride that Nehru had had and their relations to the Indian leaders’ own legitimacy claim to their own path toward modernity. This probably explains why the highly negative legacies of the war have persisted and lived with us for so long and, in prospect, are likely not to go away easily in the foreseeable future.
India-China Interaction: Native Source Materials and Subaltern Indian Perceptions
Kamal Sheel
Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India
Studies on India-China interaction suffer not only from the lack of materials but also from the absence of meaningful study of even scantly available materials. Often ignored are native language source materials which shed light on the nature of modern subaltern perception of India – China connectedness. In this context, the paper provides an overview of Hindi and Urdu language source materials and demonstrate significance of this literature in opening up new vista in our comprehension of areas of India-China connectedness. It posits that a comprehensive and deeper study of contemporary writings by native intellectuals as published in books, journals and newspapers in native Indian languages would facilitate better comprehension of the nature of evolving interaction between the two countries. It would provide context to explore various vicissitudes of “connectedness” as well as sources to the frequent contemporary invocations of common ideas of “pan-Asianism”, “Asian values” or “Asian wisdom” demonstrating yearnings for unity and harmony. Finally, such forays into comparative studies would also further enrich our knowledge of their tryst with modernity.
Consumption of “Creative” Urban Space: A Comparative Study on Middle Class Identity in Shanghai and New Delhi
Lei Ping
New School University
Scholarly research of the making of the middle class in the emerging economies plays a crucial role in unraveling the complexities of global urbanism. More and more “creative” urban spaces mushroomed from Chinese and Indian metropolises such as Shanghai and New Delhi in the past two decades. Both cities have experienced new waves of intensified state-sponsored consumerism and urbanism. Production and consumption of such socio-cultural urban enclaves not only constitutes a key component of the non-Western modernity discourse, but also provides material and symbolic spaces for urban middle-class identity making. Meanwhile, it further legitimizes radical urbanization and economic liberalization in both urban contexts. In attempt to understand the meaning and impact of this historical phenomenon, this paper draws comparative studies on spatialized identity politics by examining how “creative” urban spaces cultivate and distinguish middle-class sensibility and lifestyles in Shanghai and New Delhi in the age of globalization. It investigates the relations between the middle class and the state, and identifies the limitations of the state-propagated creative industry initiatives and image-conscious urban restructuring projects in these two cities. It studies the problematic practice of what Joseph Schumpeter calls “creative destruction” by critiquing the interdependent dynamic between creative economy development and middle-class construction manifested in remade artificial spaces such as Xintiandi and Tianzifang in Shanghai as well as Khan Market and Hauz Khas in New Delhi. In this context, the following questions will be highlighted: How does the state’s developmentalist sense of anxiety become the driving force behind spatializing classes in Shanghai and New Delhi? How to understand the revival of bourgeois sensibility and consumer-citizenship that solidifies the states’ ideologies in these two urban contexts? By catering to an imagined “creative class,” is the new mode of economy in fact creative or speculative? In short, this paper intends to critically rethink the underlying problems and dilemmas that derive from the politics of the making of Chinese and Indian middle classes through the making of urban “creative” spaces.
A Chinese Muslim Intellectual in Istanbul: Celaleddin Zin Shan Wang (1903-1961) and the China-Turkey Contacts
Liu Yi
Shanghai University
Celaleddin Zin Shan Wang (1903-1961), a prominent Muslim in modern China, has a large influence both in the intellectual and political sphere. Born in a Hui family originally from Linqing of Shandong Province, he had an ideal and desire to save the fate of Chinese Islam. After graduating from Yen-ching University, he decided to go to Turkey, as one of the first two Chinese students at Istanbul University. During his study period, he helped a Chinese delegation led by Hu Hanmin, a senior leader of the Nationalist government, which later developed into the formal diplomatic relationship between China and Turkey. After coming back, Wang became an elite figure, firstly among his fellow Muslims, and then in the political system. Among all his achievements, from 1938 to 1939, he took a Muslim delegation to visit 10 Islamic countries, including Turkey, to propagate China’s struggle for independence against Japan, a pioneering act of public diplomacy then. With the regime change after 1949, Wang firstly moved to Pakistan together with his big family, and later settled in Istanbul, as the first Chinese professor at Istanbul University. To compensate the family expenditure, he also opened the first Chinese restaurant there. Wang’s story becomes a precious memory of the early contacts between China and Turkey, as well as the broader Islamic world.
Materials related to Republican-era China in the National Archives of India
Madhavi Thampi
Institute of Chinese Studies, India
The paper will give an overview of the relatively unexplored holdings related to Republican-era China (1911-1949) in the National Archives of India (NAI), New Delhi. These holdings contain the voluminous official documents, reports and correspondence of the Government of India as well as the private papers of Indian individuals and organisations who had a connection with China. The thousands of files related to modern China in the NAI reflect the expanding relationship between British India and China over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After outlining the main developments in this relationship, that form the context for understanding the nature of the holdings in the NAI related to modern China, the paper goes on to introduce the kinds of documentation that can be found there related to Republican China. It will focus on three subjects in particular – that is, Tibet and Xinjiang; the political activity of Indians in China; and Sino-Indian relations during World War II – to illustrate why the holdings on modern China can contribute to producing a richer, more nuanced understanding of modern China and particularly of its relations with India.
Understanding Media Perception: Selected Indian National Dailies on China (2012-14)
Rakhahari Chatterji, Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury and Swagata Saha
Observer Research Foundation, Kolkata
India and China individually as well as collectively have become powers to reckon with in the Asian century. These two countries are undergoing many transitions. Against the backdrop of decadal regime change in China in 2012 and the installation of a majority government in India in 2014, it is worthwhile to analyze how the Indian print media portray the changes in India-China relations. Importance of media lies in the fact that media reproduce, interpret and disseminate information in the realm of the society and politics. Thereby, the media become a vital link in the democratic process through which people acquire information, form perceptions and opinions, and respond to issues and events in the public sphere. Therefore, how the media behave becomes an important aspect of present India-China relations. The presentation at hand is an attempt to understand select Indian media behaviour in the arena of recent India-China relations. In this context of rational discourse on the importance of media, the present article intends to evaluate how the mainstream media in India is viewing/projecting China.
For the sake of analysis the presentation intends to concentrate on editorials from five national Indian dailies, namely, The Indian Express, The Times of India, The Hindu, The Financial Times and The Economic Times during the period 2012 to 2014. The main objective of the study is to evaluate how the selected editorials view or perceive China and how they project China to its readers. The paper will focus on editorials only because a news paper’s position on any issue or its broad policy is authoritatively reflected through its editorials. The newspapers have been selected on the basis of circulation. Additionally, two business dailies from the most circulated news houses have been included as economic issues constitute an increasingly important dimension of India-China relations. How frequently do these select newspapers editorialize China? What are the dominant themes in these editorials? Do the editorials project China favourably or unfavourably? What sort of perception of China lies behind the editorial projections? These are some of the questions that the present study intends to take into account.
Methodologically, the paper will be divided into two broad sections for analysis: quantitative and qualitative. Several descriptive and interpretative tools will be used to aggregate as well as dissect the data sets using many variables in quantitative analyses. At the qualitative level, key words, positioning of news, headlines, between the lines and overall tone of editorials are to be considered to understand the perception and position of these newspapers on China. Professor Chatterji is the Advisor, Dr. Basu Ray Chaudhury is Fellow and Ms. Saha is Research Assistant in Observer Research Foundation, Kolkata
'Co-Producing China in India: the ‘China Bazaars’ in Indian Cities'
Solomon Benjamin
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Thinking about everyday practices of spaces of production in Indian cities, very quickly reveals how many of these goods are co-produced across borders and particularly as what’s locally called ‘china products’. At one level, there are networks including for electronics focused in Shenzhen interlinked with places within Indian cities and town known locally as ‘china Bazzars’. These China Bazaars' are quite varied (as specialised products and ethnic groups). It becomes very evident that trading are also sites of re-engineering and customization — as witnessed most vividly in electronics and the focus in this paper, cell phones: In Delhi, Gaffar Market, Nehru Place, and East Delhi -- the site of e-recycling; Chennai's Richie street for electronics; and Bombay's Lamington Road and Manish Market.
This presentation is a review of the first phase of a three year long project to trace out these constructed artifacts and their movement between spaces of commodities, property and craft. The space of Property, deeply troubling for admirers of ideas of copyright and patents for the basis of innovation, and also layered over another troublesome set of assumptions of neat and clean urban planning to be globally competitive, just as both of these ideas fit into another troubled ideology that poses the binary of the Indian elephant competing the Chinese dragon. Working beyond such nationalistic jingoism, a material analysis shows competing narratives of co-production that is deeply political despite it’s messy everydayness. ‘China Bazzars’ are a truly urban political spaces constituted out of a layered history of being spaces of production that move distinctive property forms into complex land tenures, and where the re-engineering makes this socially constituted in complex ways due to the network of people involved that is increasingly trans-national. These are shaped in very important ways by the ethnicity -- Punjabi, Marwari, Karur Muslims, Mapallas, and in the realm of a rapidly evolving electronics trade, require one member to visit Shenzhen once in three months.
What is at conceptual stake here, are our notions of property, territory, boundary, embedded histories, and the construction of a very dynamic ‘urban’ that is co-constituted beyond nationalistic dream such as ‘Make in India’.
A Spatial Fix for the Economic Slowdown? New Urbanization in China and India
Vamsi Vakulabharanam
University of Massachusetts
After witnessing three decades of phenomenal growth, China and India have experienced a slowdown of their economies since 2010. One response to this slowdown is that ambitious urban development programs have been launched. China's National New Urbanization Plan (2014-2020) aims to invest $ 6.75 trillion (State Council in China, 2014). India's Smart City Mission (2015-2020) targets 100 cities with the federal government committed to invest $ 7.3 billion to further fuel private investment (Ministry of Urban Development, 2015). Critical geographers and urban sociologists have been critical about the top-down urbanization initiatives through the massive infusion of public and private investment (Wang et al, 2010; Veloso and Maia, 2015). Heterodox economists have argued that in the absence of rising global demand the slowdown has been caused by the sharp increase in inequality levels (depressing the domestic demand) after 1980 (Li, et al, 2013; Vakulabharanam, 2010). However, this is not being addressed by the new urban projects. However, these literatures have existed in their own respective silos. Heterodox economists do not deeply investigate the attempted spatial urban fix. Geographers do not analyze the deeper accumulation dynamics. We argue that a composite analysis of space, inequality and accumulation processes helps comprehend the slowdown better while paving the way for better models of equitable and sustainable growth.
Explore to the Migration of Central Asian Muslims to Yunnan in the 13th Century
Wang Jianping
Shanghai Normal University
The Thirteenth Century has the most dramatic events in the history of the Eurasian which greatly changed the political, social and economical context of this largest continent in the world. The Mongol nomadic troops led by Gingis Khan and his successors from the steppe in Inner Asia first made the westward expeditions which conquered a number of the kingdoms and empires in Central Asia and West Asia; followed that campaign the Mongols again launched the eastward expeditions which toppled several dynasties in East Asia and Southeast Asia. In the former military adventures the Mongols recruited many Central Muslims into their armies to wage the conquest of Yunnan from where as the springboard finally overthrew the South Song Dynasty of China. This paper tries to explore the historical materials such as History of the Yuan Dynasty, History of Rashid al-Din, and other local gazetteers to trace the historical migrations of the Muslims from Central Asia and West Asia to Yunnan, and to analyze the scope, the route, the size of such migrations which cover more than seven thousand kilometers in geographic distance in the Mongol era. Such a historical study certainly helps to understand the general feature, social structure and the characteristics of Islam and Muslims both in Yunnan and in China for their communal development afterward.
Recently Opened Archival Sources in Taiwan on China-India Relations, 1939-1949
Liao Wen-shuo
Academia Historica
This review of materials of the Kuomintang-led government dealing with major events and issues shaping the China-India relations during World War II and the immediate postwar era aims to draw the attention of historians and researchers to the barely used or still relatively unknown official and personal documents held in archives of government, academic and party institutes in Taiwan. The decade of 1939-1949 began with Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to war-tormented China where he secured support from Chiang Kai-shek and other Nationalist leaders, and ended with their split. On the one hand Nehru and Chiang shared a vision of partnership that readdressed Rabindranath Tagore and Tai Chi-tao’s interwar perceptions of the Eastern civilization as a reflection of the Asian self-consciousness and a reaction against the Western imperial colonization; on the other notwithstanding that the strategy of alliance-building played a vital role in Chiang’s wartime diplomacy, Chiang was primarily looking at the developments in India through the Allied prism firstly desiring the British, American and Russian aids and later stressing solely on the U.S. influence. In the wake of WWII the KMT government was urged to recognize the newly independent India as a rising power while struggling to counterbalance communist forces on the eve of its defeat in the Civil War. Three episodes will be discussed in terms of regional politics and confrontations for cultural dominance in Asia in the turbulent decade and their possible legacies: Nehru and Chiang’s mutual visits, the Sino-American military and intelligence cooperation in India, and the KMT’s participation in the Asian Relations Conference called by Nehru.
Return of the Barbarian: Female Storytellers and Tansregional Folklore in the Works of Xu Dishan
Gal Gvili
Columbia University
Through a voyage in the South Sea spanning China and India, a merchant’s wife offers a new perspective on folklore, storytelling and survival. This paper will follow her route, as portrayed in the short story The Merchant’s Wife (商人婦1921) by the author and folklorist Xu Dishan (1894–1941). A key figure in Republican China’s literary world, Xu Dishan introduced the study of modern Indian literature in China, and translated three volumes of Indian folktales. These endeavors had led Xu to phrase a transregional view of folklore study, which departed from the legacies of Western colonialism as well as from May Fourth nationalism. The development of modern literature in China has been understood as a process of adaptation of European enlightenment ideals, which arrived to China via Japan. Working through the story of one merchant’s wife, we will reveal an alternative trajectory—a Sino-Indian horizon envisioned through the figure of the female storyteller.
Progress or Perish: Two images of India in Late Qing China
Zhang Ke
Fudan University
China and India has long been culturally connected. However, the Chinese understanding of the British Raj was something rebuilt in the nineteenth century. There were two different discourses of Indias in late Qing China. One was created by the progressive British and American Protestant missionaries. They tried to convince the Chinese that the dissemination of Christianity and the British governance had brought positive changes into India, namely the improvements of social customs and political institutions, as well as economic development. The other one emerged at the end of the late nineteenth century when the Chinese nation was in peril. By narrating the “perish” of India, the Chinese intellectuals intended to learn the lesson of nations such as India and thought about their way out of failure. This presentation will argue that these two different discourses saw the nineteenth century India respectively from the perspectives of colonialism and nationalism; hence two very different Indias were made.
Borderland Environments of Yunnan and Burma ca. 1917
Mark Swislocki
NYU Abu Dhabi
Is Yunnan the southwestern most region of northeast Asia or the northwestern most region of southeast Asia? Generally speaking, within scholarship from China, Yunnan appears to be securely located in “the southwest” (Xi’nan), a term that defines Yunnan externally by political boundaries and internally by (to me at least) less clear-cut criteria. In contrast, much current English-language scholarship on Yunnan’s history answers this question internally with regard to studies of cultural transformation within Yunnan or externally though economic linkages between Yunnan and neighboring polities or jurisdictions, including Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Tibet, Sichuan, and Guizhou. All of these studies provide opportunities to re-assess G. William Skinner’s location of Yunnan within the Yun-Gui macroregion. But what does the question look like from the perspective of environmental history? And can the question be raised without relying on “internal” and “external” frameworks. This paper starts at the Yunnan-Burma border and draws on evidence from the history of forest conservation and natural history in an attempt to ask and answer these questions.
Between Shanghai and Singapore: Chinese Islamic Missions to the South Seas and the Indian Ocean during the WWII
Janice Hyeju Jeong
Duke University
The onset of the World War II in the Pacific front prompted leading Chinese Muslim writers and militarists of the time to expediently organize several “Chinese Islamic Missions” with the support of the Nationalist Party. The delegations set out from the port city of Shanghai to different parts of the Islamic world across the South Seas and the Indian Ocean, with the solemn agenda of mustering the support of overseas coreligionists and compatriots for China’s fight against Japan. From the perspective of China’s international status during the World War II, the Islamic missions abroad represented medium through which the war-torn regime sought to uphold its sovereignty by allying with transnational religious communities within its domestic sphere to promote cultural diplomacy in Asia. At the same time, to the scholars and politicians who headed the missions, the peregrinations at sites such as the coasts of Borneo, Singapore, Mumbai, Cairo and Mecca were a continuation of the religious, commercial and interpersonal networks that they had constructed in the preceding decades. Through these sojourns they once again mobilized Muslim and Chinese diasporas, but at a speed and volume unmatched by what had preceded the War. By centering on the socio-religious backgrounds of the cohort who led the missions, and their itineraries, rhetoric and encounters, this paper probes on the impact of the World War II in expanding existing conduits of Sino-Islamic networks as the Nationalist state reached outwards, from the viewpoint of the religious leaders who positioned themselves at the juncture between China and the Islamic world.
Soybean’s Journey from Manchuria to Egypt at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Shuang Wen
NYU Shanghai
Tea, silk, and porcelain were well known in Chinese-Arab trade over land and maritime silk roads in the ancient and early modern periods. Few people, however, would imagine that in the first half of the twentieth century, soybean was one of the major commodities that circulated along the global waterways from the East China Sea to the Mediterranean. By narrating the journey of soybeans from Manchuria to Egypt, this paper uncovers the global economic entanglements among China, Egypt, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States in the early twentieth century. Due to such exchanges, Egypt adopted the cultivation of soybeans. Nevertheless, it was not the Chinese who introduced this new practice to Egypt directly. It was the British agriculturalists and industrialists as well as the Japanese trading and shipping companies that mediated the process. Without the scaffolding imperial collaborations and competitions between the British and Japanese empires, Egyptian farmers probably would never have learnt how to grow soybeans. Imperial mediation, therefore, was the linchpin in forming China-Egypt connections in an age of global transformations.
Creolizing the Sinophone Pacific
Celina Hung
This presentation examines articulations of creolization by the multilingual Peranakan (or Baba/Straits Chinese) writers and educators based in Singapore and Malacca, of the former British Straits Settlements, around the turn of the twentieth century when the elites sought to fashion identities from a changing nexus of Anglicized, Chinese, and Malay cultural resources. Drawing examples from magazine publications, stories, and translation works, this study places the Peranakan voices in dialogue with the existing scholarship on creolization in the New World and with the emerging Sinophone studies in order to consider new grounds of theory and comparison.
Britain and China, and India, 1830s-1947
Robert Bickers
University of Bristol
This paper looks at the relationship between Britain and China, but does so in a way that highlights the difficulties that are faced in seeing it clearly. For, to borrow a turn of phrase, there were, in fact, always at least three countries in this bilateral relationship. In brief, the British relationship with, and presence in, China always operated in the shadow of British India, and this relationship remained strong until the Independence of India in 1947, although its character evolved significantly over time. There are two key sets of phenomena that contributed to this. First of all, the Sino-British relationship and the British presence in China were, like most of British Asia, originally a minor offshoot of British India’s family of eastern dependencies, and those antecedents continued to shape it in many ways after it formally broke free. Second, British India’s priorities, practices, and indeed its fears, also shaped and at times overshadowed the British China enterprise across the century of the treaty era after 1842. This paper, then, explores these constituent elements in a tangled set of relationships, and examines the ways in which British India shaped British China.
Global Fabric Bazaar: An Ethnographic Study of Indian Traders in a Chinese Fabric Market
Ka-Kin Cheuk
Leiden University
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Keqiao (2010-2012, 2016), a municipal district of eastern Zhejiang Province, China, this paper explores how a local economic dynamic counteracts the structural inequalities in the global economy. Accounting for its one-third annual turnover in China, Keqiao is the trading frontier for fabrics, the semi-finished textiles that are industrially weaved, knitted, dyed, and printed in bulk before being exported. Drawn by the enormous trade opportunities, around 5,000 Indian traders have flocked to Keqiao. The case studies of small-scale Indian traders shows that while such group of traders are marginalized in the volatile supply chain, most of their businesses manage to survive in Keqiao. A detailed examination of their survival strategies illustrates that Clifford Geertz’s concept ‘bazaar economy’ is useful in capturing the nuances of such business operation. Through this examination, which focuses on the Indian diasporic circulations within a local Chinese setting, the paper argues that the bazaar economy found in Keqiao provides a strong empirical example in advancing ‘Asia as Method’ in the studies of globalization.
The “Hindu-Yangtze-Saikai”: Stories of an Indian Globetrotter in the 1930s China
Tansen Sen
NYU Shanghai
Several new genres of literature pertaining to India-China interactions emerged in the early twentieth century. This included the writings of Indian travellers who visited China during the European and Japanese colonial phases of Asian history. This paper focuses on the travelogue of a Bengali globetrotter named Ramnath Biswas who visited a war-torn China in 1931-32. Biswas’s Maranbijayi Chin (China Defies Death) is not only a narrative of his travels through China, but also a commentary about China’s struggle against Japanese expansion and the conflict between the Guomindang and Communist factions. Maranbijayi Chin offers a unique and insightful perspective on Indian views on the unstable situation in China and the ways in which the issues of colonialism, global Marxism, and India-China affinity in the common struggle against imperialism concerned the subaltern members of the Indian society.