Land, Law, and Economic Development in Semi-colonial Guangzhou and Shanghai: 1842-1937

Abstract

This dissertation explores the formation of what I call a treaty port property regime in Shanghai and Guangzhou from the 1840s to the 1940s. The treaty port property regime encompassed methods of land transfers, systems of land registration with the municipal council, ways to resolves conflicting claims over ownership, and a discourse of rights that empowered those who owned property in the foreign concessions of Shanghai and Guangzhou. Together, these institutional and legal arrangements allowed both Chinese and foreign subjects to own land, file lawsuits when their claimed rights were violated, and speculate on the value of the real estate market in these port cities. Landowners exploited aspects of the property regime to enrich themselves and to demand political representation in the political organs of the foreign settlements. I argued that both Chinese and foreign subjects sojourning in treaty ports participated in the founding, formation, and operation of the treaty port property regime. Jointly ensured by the Chinese and foreign powers, that property regime prompted the development of a full-fledged urban real estate market and turned Shanghai and Guangzhou into industrial and commercial centers in the early twentieth century. That treaty port property regime provides an ideal intellectual framework to reconsider the question of institutional divergence between China and modern Europe, because it represented moments of encounter between ways of organizing property rights from multiple legal traditions. These were instances when property rights practices in local society interacted with modern Western legal categories. Therefore, this dissertation goes beyond current debates over institutional divergence to delineate moments of institutional convergence when those legal orders coexisted and interacted to produce a property regime that all parties found useful and satisfactory in meeting their needs. People on the ground, officials, merchants, and ordinary people, worked out ways to secure their holdings in that same socio-political context. Such day-to-day interactions can tell us as much about the institutional similarities and differences as do theoretical frameworks. This dissertation contributes to the exploration of the relationships between property rights and imperial expansion by shedding light on how property rights were constructed in a semi-colonial setting. While there exists a myriad of studies on the ways property rights helped strengthen imperial control when Europeans established colonies in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the story of how property rights coincided with the establishments of foreign concessions in the semi-colonial setting of Shanghai and Guangzhou is yet to be told. The fact that these port cities were semi-colonies, where the local Chinese authorities co-existed with a fragmented Euro-American presence, complicates the binary of colonizer and the colonized. Based on multi-lingual and multi-archival sources, this dissertation reveals the complexities and nuances of how the relationship between property rights and the colonial process worked in Shanghai and Guangzhou. The similar incentives among Chinese and foreign subjects to make property rights work encouraged all sides to collaborate on numerous occasions and turned the port cities into China’s most prosperous urban centers by the mid-twentieth century.