Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860-1937.

摘要

In a widely-read essay entitled Beloved China, its author recounted in 1935 an episode aboard a steamship on the Yangtze River belonging to a "T-com-pany" when several ticketless Chinese passengers were physically and sexually assaulted under the order of ship's management. The author used it as an allegory of Mother China being bullied and dismembered by greedy imperialist powers. As Anne Reinhardt confirms in her book Navigating Semi-Colonialism, steamship journeys were for provincial Chinese often the moment of awakening to their country's compromised sovereignty.