From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. But that information was secret, not destined for wide circulation.
Gregory Afinogenov distinguishes between the kinds of knowledge Russia sought over the years and argues that they changed with the shifting aims of the state and its perceived place in the world. In the seventeenth century, Russian bureaucrats were focused on China and the forbidding Siberian frontier. They relied more on spies, including Jesuit scholars stationed in China. In the early nineteenth century, the geopolitical challenge shifted to Europe: rivalry with Britain drove the Russians to stake their prestige on public-facing intellectual work, and knowledge of the East was embedded in the academy. None of these institutional configurations was especially effective in delivering strategic or commercial advantages. But various knowledge regimes did have their consequences. Knowledge filtered through Russian espionage and publication found its way to Europe, informing the encounter between China and Western empires.
Based on extensive archival research in Russia and beyond, Spies and Scholars breaks down long-accepted assumptions about the connection between knowledge regimes and imperial power and excavates an intellectual legacy largely neglected by historians.
Came across this interesting photo the other day of Jewish refugees with various torah scrolls from Shanghai arriving in Israel around 1949 to the newly independent State of Israel…
WHAT: RASBJ Zoom talk followed by QA WHEN: July 29, 19:00-20:00 Beijing Standard Time MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: Robert Hart became Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service in 1863 and led it until shortly before his death in 1911. Under his leadership, the Service grew into an efficient and admired customs collection agency critical to Qing finances. But he did much else, including lighting the China coast, training the Qing’s diplomats, and purchasing a navy. Hart figures in China’s history textbooks today, but he is forgotten in the UK and Ireland. His greatest achievement was building a space where all could trade and interact regardless of national, ethnic, or religious background at a time that the UK and the Qing were often at war and when diplomatic relations were always difficult. In this talk, Prof. Hans van de Ven will discuss what we can learn from the life and experience of this legendary figure.
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Professor Hans van de Ven is a Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was educated first at Leiden University and received his PhD from Harvard University. Professor van de Ven has written extensively on the early history of the Chinese Communist Party, the history of the military and warfare in China, the Maritime Customs Service, and globalisation and modern China. His books include From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927; War and Nationalism in China: 1925–1945; Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China; and the most recent China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China 1937-1952.
HOW TO JOIN THIS EVENT: This event is free and exclusively for members of RASBJ and of other RAS branches. If you’d like to join RASBJ in order to attend this event, please add MembershipRASBJ on Wechat or email membership.ras.bj@gmail.com and arrange payment no later than July 27.
My thanks to Katya Knyazeva for finding a photograph of the entrance to the Argentina Club, one of 1940s Shanghai’s most notorious joints on the Avenue Haig (Jiangsu Lu).
The Argentina was the biggest of several openly fascist sympathetic nightclubs in Shanghai. The place was managed by Leo Fleischer, a White Russian who believed the Nazis would smash Stalin and return the country to the Tsar. With strong Japanese contacts, Fleischer came to Shanghai via Harbin in 1940 to open the Argentina Nightclub in the Badlands (which you can take a tour of here), where Gestapo officers from the German Consulate wore their uniforms openly.
The joint was staffed by Fleischer’s White Russian cronies from Harbin and Dalian, and attracted a mixed crowd of Japanese, Italians and Germans, along with their sympathizers. The club had a large-scale Spanish-themed illegal roulette operation, in keeping with the clientele’s passion for Generalissimo Franco in Madrid. The roulette wheels were rigged, and the Argentina also had a floor of Macanese-imported slot machines (courtesy of Jose Bothelo).
They paid huge bribes to the Japanese, and when the Japanese cracked down on the Badlands casinos, the Argentina never closed its doors, while Fleischer secured a neutral Portuguese passport to prevent himself from being busted.
The Integration of Republican China into the League of Nations’ labour regime in the 1920s under the leadership of the International Labour Office (ILO) was a profound challenge that Western modernity posed to modernizing China. From its very beginning in 1919 and 1920, the ILO put the Chinese labour question on the agenda, yet without directly engaging with the Chinese conditions. This rather ambivalent and tense relations of imperial aspirations to order a global labour regime from Geneva and Chinese national resistance to everything that came from the “imperialists” in Geneva under the League of Nations’ banner lasted until the mid-1920s. The seminal field trip by the director of the ILO, Albert Thomas, in 1929 changed this deadlock of competing worldviews by engaging with the problems of labour on both global and local scales. This talk exposes the general relations between China and the ILO from 1919 to the mid-1930s by placing the China visit of Albert Thomas in 1928/29, its exchanges and its outcomes and transnational formations at the centre of understanding transnational co-operation and exchange beyond international structures of competing imperial and anti-imperial claims. It argues that Thomas, as one key actor in the ILO, was very much interested in understanding the situation of workers in China and the development of political parties and labour associations that could be integrated into the ILO tripartite system of representation of labour interests and of correspondents to the notoriously understaffed ILO secretariat. The talk also illuminates the fragile political framework of the Republic under which new standard of labour law were established in China. It raises the question whether China was integrated into a global labour regime under the Eurocentric globalizing auspices of industrial modernization imposed by the West, or whether China explored its own agency in shaping labour laws and mechanisms of industrial labour following a transnational exchange of knowledge and expertise on equal footing. It will also explore the ILO efforts to integrate China with its specific problems of labour legislation and political parties into the international system of the ILO while assessing how far China was interested in actively promoting their inclusion into a global labour regime in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Christian Müller is Associate Professor in History at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He holds an M.Stud. from University College, University of Oxford and an M.A. and a DPhil from the University of Heidelberg. Dr. Müller is a social, political and cultural historian who focuses on the intersections of British and European Imperialism and Internationalism and their local manifestations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in November 2018 and has held several Visiting Fellowships, among them at the Rothermere American Institute, University College and St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and the University of Ghent as well as a Mellon Prize Post-Doctoral Fellowship at King’s College Cambridge. He is currently also a Visiting Fellow of the University of Oxford. His essay to conceptualize the transnational relations between the ILO and China under the League of Nations and the role of Albert Thomas was published in the 2018 RAS Journal. Christian’s latest projects focuses on identifying key actors and personal networks that help transform structures and mechanisms of international, transnational and global interactions in and between nation-states and Empires, mainly between North America, Europe and Asia. In his projects on Humanitarianism and Empire and on Inter-Imperial Knowledge Exchange, Slavery and Labour under the League of Nations, Christian focuses on the European use of civilisation and development as normative tools for global alignment and their contestations from regional actors. In following these dialogic contestations, Christian aims to show how imperial aspirations are transformed into mutual efforts of exchange, complex co-operation and transnational alignment.
WHAT: Mahjong in Maida Vale -the Chinese intellectual community in UK in 1930s and 1940s, by Frances Wood, an RASBJ Zoom talk followed by Q&A WHEN: July 22, 19:00-20:00 Beijing Standard Time. NOTE: THIS EVENT BEGINS AT 7 PM BEIJING TIME
MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: “Mahjong in Maida Vale” was inspired by a study day in Oxford celebrating the writer and artist Chiang Yee, recalls Frances Wood who considers it a work in progress. She started to think about the Chinese intellectuals who came to the UK in the 1930s and 1940s, many of whom stayed on. A friend remembered sitting in a north London drawing room, eating sunflower seeds to the sound of clacking tiles as her mother played mahjong with three older ladies- the painters Fang Zhaoling and Zhang Qianying and the writer and artist Ling Shuhua. Why were they in UK? How did they live? What did they eat? What happened to them?
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: After studying Chinese at the universities of Cambridge and Peking, Frances Wood worked as Curator of the Chinese collections in the British Library for nearly 30 years. She has written , amongst others, Blue Guide to China, Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking, Did Marco Polo Go To China?, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China 1843-1943, The Silk Road, and The Diamond Sutra: the Story of the World’s Earliest Dated Printed Book.
HOW MUCH: This event is free and exclusively for members of the RASBJ and of other RAS branches. If you know someone who wants to join RASBJ, please ask them to contact MembershipRASBJ on Wechat or email membership.ras.bj@gmail.com
HOW TO JOIN RASBJ: to become a member (or, for PRC passport-holders, to become an Associate) email membership.ras.bj@gmail.com or on Wechat add MembershipRASBJ, giving your full name, nationality, mobile number and email address plus the annual subscription amount (or, for Associates, the suggested donation) of RMB 300 for those resident in China, RMB 200 for those living overseas and RMB 100 for students. To learn more about the RASBJ, please go to www.rasbj.org
HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT: If you wish to become an RASBJ member in order to attend this talk, please join RASBJ at least two days before the talk so that you can be sure to receive the event notice with the advance registration link.
I was having a discussion somewhere else about the rise of piano shops, tuners, musical instrument dealers and so on in Shanghai (yes, I do have that sort of discussion with people sometimes!). Naturally thoughts turned to the pioneer of the piano in Shanghai, the English musical instruments dealer (and later gramophones and so on) Sydenham Moutrie. Moutrie headed east around the 1870s setting up stores in Shanghai, Peking (as i’ve blogged before here), and Yokohama. All well and good – but what interested me in this advert (c.1913/1914) for Victrola gramophones was the use of the word ‘porch’ in Shanghai….
Now usually when people discuss the phenomenon of semi-colonial architecture in Shanghai – ‘compradore architecture’ as it’s sometimes called – they talk of verandas (or verandahs). But here Mr Moutrie, a good Englishman uses the very English word ‘porch’. Now whether technically porch is English for the Portuguese word veranda or Veranda is Portuguese for the English word porch is debateable. However, it is interesting that the term porch (rarely heard now in any discussions of Shanghai architecture – and often nowadays meaning a small addition to the front door or entry hallway rather than a grander covered shelter at the front and sides of the property) was used indicating perhaps the more prevalent use of English English in early twentieth century Shanghai.
