| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Dong Wang. China's Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History. (Asia World.) Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2005. Pp. x, 179. $60.00.
It is not news, of course, that themes of past humiliation have been central to the making of modern Chinese nationalism, or that the unequal treaties lie at the heart of the story. But when and how did the treaties assume that position? These are the questions Dong Wang sets out to answer in her valuable analysis, not of the treaties themselves, but of the rhetorical uses to which they have been put in shaping China's national and international discourse since the late Qing.	1
Rather surprisingly (to me, at any rate), she finds that the term bupingdeng tiaoyue (unequal treaties) probably did not appear until the Guomindang's First National Congress in January 1924, almost eighty years after the treaty of Nanjing set the pattern in 1842. Criticisms of their inequality were abroad earlier, of course, both among late Qing statesmen and the new diplomats of the early republic after 1912. Qing objections to the treaties, Wang argues, were couched largely in moral terms, the language of fairness and unfairness being drawn from classical Chinese, and hence without much popular resonance. By the early republic, however, international law was increasingly coming to be perceived as a useful weapon in the struggle for treaty revision or abolition. Still, in the eyes of the new cadre of foreign affairs specialists emerging in the 1910s and 1920s—men like Alfred Sze, Wellington Koo, and Wang Zhengting—foreign policy remained a matter for government officials rather than popular debate. Hence the emergence of the term bupingdeng tiaoyue in Guomindang and Communist rhetoric marked a striking departure, for it now served as an engine of popular mobilization.	. . .

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