The Eastern Question from Shanghai : Views of the Ottoman Empire in Shenbao, 1870s-1880s

Abstract

This thesis examines late-Qing Chinese perspectives of world order. Concentrating on the images of the Ottoman Empire in the Shanghai-based, Chinese-language commercial newspaper Shenbao (1872-1949), this study examines how the Chinese elite rethought China's position among expanding European empires based on their understanding of the contemporary world. During the 1870s and 1880s the Ottoman Empire emerged as a theatre of European politics in the newspaper owing primarily to the "Eastern Question," a series of British diplomatic concerns arising from the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. One of the earliest Chinese-language newspaper ventures in China, Shenbao provides a rare window on the lively discussions about a wide range of political and cultural issues among the little-known elite authors in and around Shanghai where the histories of Qing China and the British Empire intersected.Considering empire as a useful umbrella term to mean certain forms of large state, the chapters explore thematically the relationship between the notions of the world and the state (guo) as two primary fields of ordering in Shenbao. Chapter 1 situates Shenbao's writing at the intersection of Qing and British news networks that brought China the Eastern Question. Chapter 2 considers the implications of the Eastern Question in Chinese official writings, to argue that the East in question encompassed China between the 1840s and 1880s. Chapter 3 considers vocabularies used by Shenbao in imagining the Ottoman Empire in an unfamiliar scheme of the world spanning the entire surface of the globe. Chapter 4 moves on to the concept of state and its internal constitution consisting of human relationships extending beyond the state, as seen through the replacement of the Ottoman sovereigns in the palace coups d'etat in mid-1876, and concurrent armed uprisings within the Ottoman Empire. In turn Chapter 5 analyses reports on the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878, to chart the limits of the state and the sense of the temporal and spatial breakdown between a state and the world. Chapter 6 continues the enquiry on a different subject of foreign trade which was central to Shenbao's ancient imagination of a unified world-state. Show more