As China becomes a pre-eminent world power again in the twenty-first century, this book uncovers Britain's long relationship with the country and its people.

This study points up the complex interplay of ethnic and national identities in the lives of Chinese in Britain, arguing that transnational studies reinforce essentialist conceptions of identity and cultural authenticity in diasporic communities, and thus frustrate the promotion of ethnic co-existence and social cohesion in multi-ethnic societies.

Originally published in 1962. This book is a study of relations between Britain and China. The first section surveys historical relations between the two nations and culminates with the Second World War. The second part examines British policy during the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the Geneva Conference. The third part discusses what contemporary issues in British-Chinese relations were at the time the book was written.

This book traces the intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century and argues for China's central impact on the British visual imagination. Chang brings together an unusual group of primary sources to investigate how nineteenth-century Britons looked at and represented Chinese people, places, and things, and how, in the process, ethnographic, geographic, and aesthetic representations of China shaped British writers' and artists' vision of their own lives and experiences. For many Britons, China was much more than a geographical location; it was also a way of seeing and being seen that could be either embraced as creative inspiration or rejected as contagious influence. In both cases, the idea of China's visual difference stood in negative contrast to Britain's evolving sense of the visual and literary real. To better grasp what Romantic and Victorian writers, artists, and architects were doing at home, we must also understand the foreign "objects" found in their midst and what they were looking at abroad.

This is the first text to address British Chinese culture. It explores British Chinese cultural politics in terms of national and international debates on the Chinese diaspora, race, multiculture, identity and belonging, and transnational ‘Chineseness’. Collectively, the essays look at how notions of ‘British Chinese culture’ have been constructed and challenged in the visual arts, theatre and performance, and film, since the mid-1980s. They contest British Chinese invisibility, showing how practice is not only heterogeneous, but is forged through shifting historical and political contexts; continued racialization, the currency of Orientalist stereotypes and the possibility of their subversion; the policies of institutions and their funding strategies; and dynamic relationships with transnationalisms. The book brings a fresh perspective that makes both an empirical and theoretical contribution to the study of race and cultural production, whilst critically interrogating the very notion of British Chineseness.

The focus of this book is on Chinese immigration in the past two decades and its spatial manifestations in Britain. A major argument in this study is that if the 1980s can be recorded as a turning point in the history of Chinese immigration to Britain because the decade marked a substantial increase in and a diversity of Chinese immigrants, it should also be considered a landmark in contemporary British urban history as it featured a major transformation in the Chinese urban landscape. This book examines how changes in the contexts of exit and reception have stimulated quantitative and qualitative changes in Chinese immigration, and how these changes in immigration facilitate the development of Chinatowns and Chinese settlements.

This book provides an overview of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, focussing especially on its later years and in particular on the experiences of the foreign administration.