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Michael Schaller, Bargaining with the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China, 1844–1942, Journal of American History, Volume 89, Issue 3, December 2002, Pages 1059–1060, https://doi.org/10.2307/3092403
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For decades, polemicists and scholars (sometimes one and the same) have lambasted the principle and practice of “extraterritoriality” (extrality, in common parlance) that Western powers and Japan imposed on China through notorious “unequal treaties.” Under this provision, foreign nationals resident in Chinese treaty ports involved in legal disputes were to be tried by tribunals staffed by diplomats or judges from their own countries. Foreign, not Chinese, law applied. Eileen P. Scully has reexamined both the theory and the practice of extrality and in so doing confounds nearly every assumption—including this reviewer's— about how the system operated.
Applying both theoretical analysis about the nature of citizenship and rigorous research in diplomatic and legal archives, Scully explores the fluid nature of the relationship between American “sojourners” in China and the United States government. For most of the century under review, it was not a happy union. Although extrality effectively exempted U.S. nationals from Chinese law, it also made them subject to supervision by American officials and laws they did not always approve of. Officials in Washington and diplomats in China seldom gloated about the special privilege conferred on their countrymen living in the Middle Kingdom. More often than not, those officials resented the costs, burdens, and complications of looking after their nationals. For their part, American sojourners resented and resisted what they perceived as unwarranted interference by meddlesome diplomats.
