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School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Rd, Shanghai, China [email protected]
On 14 April 1896, the Russian empire took control of a piece of land outside the Chinese city of Hankou.1 While Russia's role in north-eastern China in the decade before the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) is well documented, this outpost in central China remains little studied.2 It was not typical of Russian imperial possessions. The rest of the empire formed a single mass, accumulated by conquest and colonization of contiguous territory. The new acquisition in Hankou, by contrast, was an urban commercial enclave 1,400 miles beyond the Russian frontier. Though it would be bound by Russian law and patrolled by Russian troops, the land was only leased, not annexed. Chinese residents did not become Russian subjects but remained answerable to their own government. Such territories were known as concessions, and Russia's move into Hankou marked the start of its quarter-century-long experiment with this distinctive form of colonialism.
Hankou was a treaty port, one of the cities in which the Qing empire, under duress, allowed foreign trade and residence. The first treaty ports were created after Britain defeated the Qing in the First Opium War (1839–42) and demanded access to five coastal cities. Other countries soon concluded similar agreements, with most-favoured-nation clauses extending any new privilege won to every ‘treaty power’. The introduction of extraterritoriality made treaty-power nationals immune to Qing justice and provided legal justification for self-governing foreign concessions in Chinese cities.3 Propelled by a series of wars, the foreign presence expanded. When the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, seventeen countries had access to dozens of treaty ports and sixteen ports contained one or more concessions; Hankou eventually had five. Colonialism in China became a multi-national phenomenon.
Located 430 miles inland on the Yangzi River, Hankou became a treaty port after the Second Opium War (1856–60). A British concession (established 1861)4 was later followed by German (1895), Russian (1896), French (1896), and Japanese (1898) concessions. This influx of concessions in the 1890s has received little attention from historians since H. B. Morse succinctly explained it a century ago: after the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), ‘advantage was…taken of China's condition of abasement to establish new foreign “concessions” at several of...