Lane J. Harris
I am a historian of late imperial and Republican China specializing in the study of the modern Chinese postal service.
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2012, my M.A. in East Asian Studies from Washington University in Saint Louis in 2002, and my B.A. in History from Drake University in 1998.
Address: History Department
Furman University
3300 Poinsett Highway
Greenville, SC 29613
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2012, my M.A. in East Asian Studies from Washington University in Saint Louis in 2002, and my B.A. in History from Drake University in 1998.
Address: History Department
Furman University
3300 Poinsett Highway
Greenville, SC 29613
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As an institutional history of the virtually unknown Local Post Office, this article is a study of the decades-long process by which the foreign settler community of Shanghai slowly built up the administrative capacity, trading networks, and communications infrastructure of informal empire and the semi-colonial order in the nineteenth-century treaty ports. The history of the Local Post Office is largely unknown not because of its insignificance, but because we have not paid enough attention to the institutions that facilitated the emergence of transnational expatriate and settler communities throughout the world of British informal empire and the global and local influences that shaped them.
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The Peking Gazette is a unique collection of primary sources designed to help readers explore and understand the policies and attitudes of the Manchu emperors, the ideas and perspectives of Han officials, and the mentality and worldviews of several hundred million Han, Mongol, Manchu, Muslim, and Tibetan subjects of the Great Qing Empire as they discussed and debated the most important political, social, and cultural events of the long nineteenth century.
Book Reviews
As an institutional history of the virtually unknown Local Post Office, this article is a study of the decades-long process by which the foreign settler community of Shanghai slowly built up the administrative capacity, trading networks, and communications infrastructure of informal empire and the semi-colonial order in the nineteenth-century treaty ports. The history of the Local Post Office is largely unknown not because of its insignificance, but because we have not paid enough attention to the institutions that facilitated the emergence of transnational expatriate and settler communities throughout the world of British informal empire and the global and local influences that shaped them.
The Peking Gazette is a unique collection of primary sources designed to help readers explore and understand the policies and attitudes of the Manchu emperors, the ideas and perspectives of Han officials, and the mentality and worldviews of several hundred million Han, Mongol, Manchu, Muslim, and Tibetan subjects of the Great Qing Empire as they discussed and debated the most important political, social, and cultural events of the long nineteenth century.
In this presentation, I will provide a historical overview of the Peking Gazette, efforts by nineteenth century missionaries and British officials to translate it, and then discuss the types of material available in the Peking Gazette in English translation from the Macartney mission in 1793 to the abdication of the last Qing emperor in February 1912. In the second part of the presentation, I will discuss my experiences using the translations in my undergraduate classes, provide sample chapters from an on-going book project, and talk about an electronic database of gazette translations that I am currently editing.
As the overseas Chinese remittance industry struggled during the early years of the war, the Post Office began a multi-front strategy to replace the transnational networks of the Qiaopiju. After carefully investigating the overseas Chinese remittance industry, the Chinese Post Office developed its own domestic distribution centers for overseas remittances across the southeast, trained a special staff of remittance workers, and signed agency contracts with international banks to collect the remittances. International law, Chinese Post Office regulations, and conventions of the Universal Postal Union prohibited the existence of a state-run transnational remittance network, but the Post Office skirted those restrictions by mimicking the Qiaopiju’s flexible, decentralized, rhizomatically-organized network. In so doing, the Nationalist state deterritorialized itself to capture overseas Chinese remittances.
The wartime transnational practices of the Chinese state require our attention for what they reveal about the limitations of the territorially-bound state, the relationship between the Chinese state and overseas Chinese communities, and the future of our understanding of overseas Chinese history.
In the initial months after the outbreak of the war, the government actively encouraged the Qiaopiju industry to continue importing much need foreign currency through remittances. The Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia, followed by the occupation of the southeastern ports in China in 1938 and 1939, however, temporarily crippled the industry and provided the National Government and Chinese Post Office with their opportunity. While the overseas Chinese remittance firms fought to sustain their businesses by moving inland, developing overland smuggling routes from Southeast Asia, and cooperating with provincial banks, the Post Office began a multifront strategy of its own. In public comments and government reports, the Post Office derided the Qiaopiju firms for exploiting their fellow countrymen by making capitalist profits on remittances during a time of national emergency while suggesting the state-run Post Office wanted the profits to financially strengthen the state. At the same time, the Post Office began to copy many of the features of the Qiaopi industry by developing its own network of domestic distribution centers (分發局) across the southeast, hired and trained a special staff of remittance workers (僑匯業務員), and signed agency contracts with international banks around the world to collect the remittances. Although international law, Chinese Post Office regulations, and conventions of the Universal Postal Union all prohibited the existence of a state-run transnational remittance network, the Chinese Post Office carefully skirted these legal issues and began operating outside its national borders in the late 1930s. In attempting to serve the national interest, the Post Office had done something quite original, it had partially transnationalized the Chinese state in its efforts to attract overseas remittances.
Although the Chinese Post Office’s transnational remittance network saw modest success in the early years of the war, my presentation will conclude by tracing its gradual decline and final demise as wartime and postwar inflation undermined its profitability, government restrictions on outward remittances in Southeast Asia depleted its source of remittances, and the Qiaopi industry’s shift to the black market destroyed what few remaining advantages the Post Office enjoyed.
At almost the precise moment the post office was opened to the public—putting the state in an unmediated relationship with its subjects—the state also declared a monopoly on the carriage of mail. The monopolization of the post, creating what later came to be called “the postal power,” represented a shift in the nature and operations of the state itself, a remapping of the polity by a communications system. Over the next four centuries, the state gradually embedded itself deeper in society and spread itself wider in its territory by developing the post office until it became ubiquitous, a point at which reach of the modern state came to seem natural. This presentation, then, will address the global development of postal systems in world historical time to show how they came to play an essential role in the creation of the modern state between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.
This presentation will also touch on the intellectual incorporation of the borderlands into the mental empire of the Ming, and the ways passing through relay stations created a sense of time, of celebrating the slowness and luxury of travel in the Ming, by discussing related travel accounts, poems and records of prominent officials serving at peripheral stations, and popular stories in which the relay system plays a conspicuous part. The conclusion will touch on the Mongol capture of the Zhengtong Emperor (r. 1436-49, 1457-64) at Tumu Relay Station in 1449, a moment that represented the end of the expansionist phase of the early Ming.
During the period of Court-led reforms immediately after the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the Guangxu Emperor authorized Sir Robert Hart, Inspector General of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, to create a modern postal service open to the general public in 1896. The development and rapid spread of the Imperial Post Office gave the revolutionaries a communications infrastructure for disseminating their radical publications, but presented the government with the opportunity to forbid them postal transmission.
The conflict between the revolutionaries and government over the spread of anti-Manchu propaganda came to a head during the celebrated Mixed Court trial in Shanghai’s International Settlement against the revolutionary newspaper Subao in 1903. As will be discussed in this presentation, the trial raised a number of complicated issues related to the application of international law, the parameters of extraterritoriality, the status of the International Settlement, and the composition of the Mixed Court. The Subao trial, and Sir Robert Hart’s decision to forbid postal transmission to “seditious” mail matter, would quickly transform the Post Office into the institutional locus for state censorship against Chinese and foreign-language publications, a position it would hold for the next half century.
Although the Qing government was slow to realize the alien post offices infringed on Chinese state sovereignty, the Guangxu Emperor eventually authorized Sir Robert Hart, Inspector General of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, to establish a modern Imperial Post Office in 1896. The second half of my presentation explores the efforts by Hart and his successors, over a twenty-five year period, to defend Chinese sovereignty by using international law to negotiate the closure of the foreign postal services in China. The eventual victory of the Chinese Post Office over the alien posts in 1923 not only represents the recovery of an important element of Chinese state sovereignty, but the first significant step towards the end of informal empire in China.
While many Chinese scholars argue that the success of the Qiaopiju was based on their adoption of “traditional business practices,” a more nuanced understanding of the Qiaopiju firm, its network, and business behavior shows that they were not traditional, but pioneered a unique combination of culturalist strategies with capitalist business practices. At the precise moment that Southeast Asia became colonized, the Western nation-state system made inroads into Southeast and East Asia, and global communications and transportation systems like telegraph lines, steamer routes, and modern postal services increasingly linked the world, the Qiaopiju utilized their “traditional” culturalist practices in firm-customer and inter-firm relations and modern capitalist profit-making strategies like international currency speculation as part and parcel of an organizational process of transnationalization. The transnationalization of their business model allowed them to secure a reliable market segment and exploit the incomplete, negotiable, and porous boundaries of the global nation-state and colonial systems. Indeed, the fusion of these two elements – culturalist practices and capitalist strategies – allowed the Qiaopiju to thrive in the midst of restrictive nation-state, colonial, and capitalist world systems for almost a century.
Over the last fifteen years, historians of China have paid considerable attention to the development of the newspaper and publishing industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the predominant themes of these studies is the government’s adversarial relationship with the press over the issue of censorship, but those same scholars have overlooked state subsidies of the publishing industry through preferential postage rates.
This presentation will discuss the history of state subsidies of the newspaper, magazine, and book industries from the late Qing through the Republic. Postal administrators in the late Qing began subsidizing the dissemination of “information in the public interest” through cheap postage to use rate-making policy and the postal network as conduits for nation-building. Although all Republican central and warlord governments used censorship, they also re-asserted the value postal subsidies to the press in 1912, 1922, and 1932 during postal rate-making controversies. In each of those instances, the governments forced the Post Office to abandon rate increases thereby allowing newspapers, books, and magazines to circulate throughout the country at the lowest postage rates in the world.
This presentation will explore the myriad issues and debates surrounding the creation or adoption of specific transliteration systems by foreigners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The key variables conditioning the choice of a transliteration system by foreigners included their mother tongue, their perception of Chinese cultural traditions, and their occupational-cum-social standing. In terms of mother tongue, a distinction can be seen between Continentals and English-speaking groups. Gradually, by dint of superior numbers and commanding colonialist position, English-based romanization systems generally predominated. Perceptions of elite Chinese cultural traditions, especially among early Sinologists, seem to have determined which regional Mandarin pronunication system they favored as representing the “highest” form of the Chinese language. Finally, the occupational pursuits of specific groups of foreigners – missionaries, scholars, and government bureaucrats – implicitly and explicitly shaped their choice of transliteration systems based upon the implied language register of their audiences. For example, missionaries favored transliterations of spoken dialects as the language of “average” people while foreign bureaucrats felt learning Beijing-based Mandarin pronunciation was instrumental for dealing with the government. An additional factor impacting the romanization systems adopted were significant language reforms made by respective Chinese governments, particularly the efforts by the Ministry of Education in 1913 and 1919 to create a “national pronunciation standard,” and its accompanying National Phonetic Alphabet (注音字母), for use in schools. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of how amalgamated Wade-Giles transcription, an orthographically English-based system representing the sounds of Beijing Mandarin as interpreted through British pronunication, became the prestige transliteration system adopted by most foreigners starting in the mid-1930s.
A study of postal censorship on foreign-language media is particularly important because it involved a whole host of legal issues surrounding extraterritoriality. Since foreign media published within China and abroad relied on the Chinese Post Office for distribution, Chinese governments throughout the period refused postal transmission to objectionable publications in an attempt to economically force them into submission.
This paper, then, will explore the myriad issues and debates surrounding the censorship of foreign media through the Chinese Post Office. Following a broad description and analysis of the history of postal censorship in China, the project will be organized around examinations of the legal issues involved, the government rationale for postally banning certain foreign-language publications, and the discourses of Western publishers in China on postal censorship.
From a legal perspective postal censorship was a complicated web of extraterritorial rights, Chinese postal regulations, the stipulations of the 1922 Washington Conference resolution on the withdrawal of foreign post offices from China, and the regulations of the Universal Postal Union Conventions. Chinese governments, especially the National Government after 1927, used the legal system to create a particularistic censorship system without clearly defined prohibitions effectively forcing publishers to self-censor or face the whims of the censor; however, certain categories of censored content can discerned – “defamatory” or “reactionary” criticisms of the Nationalist Party or Government, “wanton” or “malicious” portrayals of China or its people, “propagandizing” the spread of Chinese Communism, and “inciting” or “absurd” discussions of Manzhouguo. Finally, the vitriolic discourses by Western publishers living in China attacked the Post Office and Government through a number of tropes – the “inscrutable” and feminized Chinese government that lacked “manliness” by using obscurity and secrecy to censor a “free” Western press, a vindictive and personalist Chinese government undermining Western treaty rights, and the forfeiture of public confidence in the Post Office through its politicization.
In sum, this study argues that the Post Office was the Chinese Government’s most effective institutional locus for post-publication censorship through its control over circulation; second, that the Chinese government’s legal use of postal censorship demonstrates important limitations on the system of extraterritorial treaty rights; third, that although Chinese censorship was shrouded in secrecy, we can determine certain categories of material that engendered censorship; and fourth; that even when operating under a system of law, prejudicial discourses of Western publishers aimed to characterize the Chinese government as corrupt, personalist, and feminized.