Out of China

Robert Bickers traces the long dismantling of foreign privilege in China from the nineteenth-century treaty system to the recovery of sovereignty in the twentieth century. Concessions, leased territories, extraterritorial courts, foreign-controlled infrastructure and the enclaves of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macao reveal how domination could operate without the complete colonisation of the Chinese state.

The book places Chinese resistance and political change at the centre of the story. Nationalist campaigns, war, revolution and Communist victory gradually ended the old order, while memories of invasion and humiliation continued to shape state policy and public nationalism. Bickers also shows that decolonisation was uneven: mainland concessions disappeared while Hong Kong and Macao remained outside Chinese control for decades.