The Chinese Corpsmen in the Shanghai Volunteer Corps

Abstract

For more than 100 years since the emergence of Shanghai as the leading treaty port, the city’s international communities remained stable regardless of the rampant instability that plagued China. The Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC) played a decisive role in maintaining the social order of international communities. Approved by the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), the Chinese Physical Recreation Association joined the SVC in 1907. The Chinese Company of the SVC was initially composed of 83 members and continuously grew bigger. It even embraced an Interpreter Company. Finally, it perished in pace with the disbandment of the SVC due to Japan’s invasion of China. The present author, in a broadening and deepening research into the SVC’s history, has found that the conflicts between China and foreign powers were not always zero-sum games. Rather, in Shanghai, a city serving as a melting pot of varying interests of China and the West, the Sino–Western conflicts in many cases were subordinated to major matters such as war and peace. The vicissitude of the Chinese Company affiliated to the SVC was an embodiment of the complexity of modern Chinese history.