Old Habits Die Hard: The Return of British Warships to Chinese Waters after the Second World War

Abstract

British gunboat diplomacy in China, so redolent of the Palmer-stonian era, survived well into the twentieth century before being apparently laid to rest with the signing of the Sino-British agreement in January 1943. This symbolic act scrapped the remaining vestiges of those extraterritorial rights enjoyed by the British in China for more than a hundred years and brought the whole controversial system of the unequal treaties to what was thought by many to be a very timely end. When bolstered by the Moscow Declaration of December 1945, in which the great powers pledged themselves to a policy of non-interventionism in China and neutrality in the civil war between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the prospects for a revival of British gunboat activity in China appeared to be all but non-existent. Yet within three years of this historic foreign ministers meeting in the Russian capital, the British had decided to renege on their undertaking and revert to an admittedly limited use of their former extraterritorial privileges in Chinese waters.