EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 130 Airaksinen Tiina (University of Helsinki) Negotiating Legality in the Treaty Port: Peace and Order in China Key words: Legality, imperialism, treaty port system, territorial administration, International Settlement Chinese and Western concepts and understanding of processes of dispute resolution, territorial admin- istration and maintenance of order in society were constantly negotiated particularly during the treaty port period. This was evident when the International Settlement was established within the boundaries of Shanghai. Imperial authority and legality was executed in the Settlement by the Shanghai Municipal Council (1854–1943) with support of the Mixed Court (1869–1927). The Council was an imperial construction created by the British. The Council executed the authority creating legal rhetoric that sustained British order in the region. The Court was established to deal with people of Chinese nationality that were accused of crimes committed within the Settlement limits. It was also responsible for dispute resolution, criminal administration, and the enforcement of order generally for the Chinese component of the population. China was never completely reduced to the status of formal colony, thus this system of foreign control in the treaty ports was often referred as informal imperialism or semi-imperialism in where imperial practices were executed without formal territorial colonialism. Land was always leased from the Chinese government and Chinese residents were never colonial subjects and were subject to Chines national law. In reality, they were accorded a protection from the state by the foreign authorities, directly or indirectly. This paper hence focuses on the activity of ‘territorial administration’, which here refers to a formally-constituted, locally- based management structure operating with respect to a particular territorial unit or as a sub-state like unit or as nonstate territorial entity. Such an artificial definition is adopted in preference to that of ‘government’ or ‘governance’ when these terms are used to refer to, respectively, the sovereign authority in the territory concerned and the activity performed by that authority. Borokh Olga (Institute of Far Eastern Studies, RAS) FromWestern Knowledge to“Chinese Economics”: Views of Wang Yanan in the 1930s-1940s Key words: Republican China, Western economics, national specifics The paper analyses the ideas of Chinese economist Wang Yanan (1901–1969) in Republican period. He is famous for the first complete Chinese translation of Das Kapital (1938) in collaboration with Guo Dali. Wang’s assessments of Western economics and of economic situation in China outlined the path for “sini- fication” of foreign economic theories. Since the 1930s he claimed that economics as practical knowledge should correspond to basic economic realities of the nation. He warned that the popularity of “metaphysi- cal” ideas of the Austrian school of economics among the Chinese scholars hampered the development of national economic thought. In the early 1940s Wang Yanan proposed to “study political economy from the standpoint of the Chinese” and to define clearly the current stage of development of Chinese society. Wang Yanan noted that Chinese feudal system was different from the West and it continued to impact China’s development. In 1943 discussions with British scholar Joseph Needham on the unique features of the Chinese bureaucratic system led Wang Yanan to publish his well-known book Studies in Chinese Bureaucratic Politics (1948).