Abstract
‘China is the greatest potential market in the world, and always has been’, proclaimed a British Board of Trade memorandum in late 1944.1 This somewhat anguished declaration accentuates the fact that the story of British commercial and business experience in China neither begins with the conclusion of the Opium War in 1842, nor does it end abruptly during the Second World War or even with the rise to power of the Communists in 1949. A systematic and intense British effort to penetrate the Chinese market may be traced back at least to the late eighteenth century, with the Chinese mission of Lord Macartney in 1793, and it has continued well into the present, albeit under conditions strikingly different from those which prevailed before.
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Notes
Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary 1945–1951 (London, 1983), p. 49.
A. Shai, Britain and China, 1941–1947: Imperial Momentum (London, 1984), p. 141.
D.C. Wolf, ‘To Secure a Convenience: Britain Recognizes China — 1950’, Journal of Contemporary History 8 (1983) and E. Luard, Britain and China (London, 1962), pp. 81–2. It took quite some time, however, before full diplomatic relations were actually established between Britain and China. The Chinese retained a few grievances relating to the British government’s relations with the Guomindang and, until these were eventually solved, they were unwilling to accept full diplomatic exchanges. See FO 371, 92189 FC 1011/1, 1950, annual report from J.C. Hutchison. In mid-1951 the British Cabinet authorized the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to instruct the UK representative in the UN Security Council that he should support a procedure motion proposing that consideration of the question of Chinese representation should be postponed for the time being, but that he should make it clear that this did not mean that the British government had modified their view that the Beijing government was entitled to represent China in the Security Council. Cab. 128/19 39 (51) 2, 31 May 1951. Even M. Lindsay (Lord Lindsay of Birker), who was one of Communist China’s great supporters, felt by 1953 that ‘conditions for foreign business [were] made impossible by exorbitant, officially backed wage demands’. See China and the Cold War: A Study in International Politics (Melbourne, 1955), p. 19, also pp. 10, 18.
As for the significance of India in this context, see, for example, B. Porter, Britain and the Rise of Communist China (Oxford, 1967), pp. 37–8.
H. Felling, The Labour Governments 1945–51 (London, 1984), p. 143 and Bullock, op. cit., p. 744.
L. Taire, Shanghai Episode (Hong Kong, 1956), pp. 57–8.
E. Luard, Britain and China (London, 1962), p. 196.
Yoko Yasuhara, ‘Japan, Communist China, and Export Controls in Asia, 1948–1952’, Diplomatic History, 10, No. 1 (1986), pp. 75–89.
Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London, 1982), p. 454.
G.N. Ecklund, ‘Protracted Expropriation of Private Business in Communist China’, Pacific Affairs (Fall, 1963).
R. Boardman, Britain and the People’s Republic of China 1949–1974 (London, 1976), p. 79 and Cheng Chu-yuan, p. 62.
H. Trevelyan, Worlds Apart: China 1953–1955, Soviet Union 1962–5 (London, 1971), p. 54.
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© 1996 Aron Shai
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Shai, A. (1996). The British Perception. In: The Fate of British and French Firms in China, 1949–54. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375628_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375628_3
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