Volume XXII – Number 2
Clifton K. Yearley and Kernie L. MacPherson
Abstract: The story of China, at least as it is often read to us, is one of perpetual victimhood. China’s history is predicated on the notion that outside influences have utilized coercive economic, diplomatic, and military tactics in the pursuit of achieving political and economic gains. But as British traders discovered, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, China was not as backward and shut off from the world as was normally assumed in the international community. In fact, China had developed political and economic means of self-reliance that had gone relatively unnoticed by the outside world until European ventures in Shanghai called into question many of these prior misconceptions. The experience of British traders in Shanghai gives light to a greater global theme: the denial and universal mischaracterization of Chinese independence. This article serves to highlight how British trade ventures with China shifted the European powers’ mode of thinking from shallowly critical of Chinese capability to reluctantly accepting of China’s independent ability to cultivate its own political and economic future.
Keywords: China, Britain, economy, trade, Shanghai, dependence, self-reliance, strategy
Return to issue
