About the Project

The most pressing geopolitical issue of our time is clear: how can China fit into a global ‘rules-based order’? This question is not new. What is new is that this time China will play the decisive role in answering it, from a position of strength. But how it does so will be heavily influenced by the baggage of history it set on its shoulders – because the last time the question arose, China found itself in a position of weakness.

From 1839 to 1949, China was the object of efforts by foreign Great Powers to answer that question. Foreign hard power penetrated deeply into first Qing and then Republican China, globalizing it by coercion. Notably, however, this rarely involved using much military power to do so, or even investing a significant share of overall resources. And quite often, China did not even rate highly as a priority in their own grander scheme of things. But they kept going, such that by 1919 China was deeply entangled within larger projects to build both a regional and global order. By the 1930s its connections to these projects came to be seen as a crucial problem to solve in reordering the world.

What the Great Powers always saw as a possible problem had now become a pressing one: they might get into a major war with each other over how to globalize China. That focuses the principal question this research project will address: why were Great Power efforts to globalize imperial and republican China so volatile – and to what ends?

To address that question, this project aims to make it necessary for the existing silos of research to engage each other. Studies in Great Power global foreign and defence policies, international relations, and global ordering need deeper grounding in how their metropolitan governments engaged with the Sinic region – including with their own agents located therein – and to what ends. The purpose of this project is to drive those conversations, especially to reconceptualize our global understanding of the role Great Powers, and their agents, played in the Chinese ‘century of humiliation’.

China is not the subject of this project. Art imitates life: it is, once, again, the object. Our subject is how the Great Powers tried to build the global order that the PRC now seeks to redesign, and to fit China into it. Our contribution will be to clarify, and reposition, our understanding of their efforts, agency, and impact.