This article examines China’s first women’s prison in the context of diplomatic disputes, legal reforms, and gender order at the turn of the twentieth century. It shows that the custody of female offenders in the Shanghai International Settlement became a battleground in which the interests and perceptions of late imperial China and the Western authorities clashed. Under pressure from the Western authorities, the first Chinese women’s prison was established in 1907, even prior to the formal introduction of custodial sentences into China’s criminal code. Notably, the Chinese officials did not embrace prison as a more benevolent punitive institution; rather, they saw it more as a tool to consolidate its judicial sovereignty and preserve gender norms. For Chinese women, the prison, functioning as a re-cloistered feminine space, further entrenched the confinement of their bodies, thereby perpetuating rather than changing orthodox values of female chastity. This article questions the universal modernity of European penalties by pointing out that the introduction of imprisonment as a supposedly more civilized and humane form of punishment may have placed Chinese women at a greater disadvantage.

The financial burden of the Boxer Indemnity forced the Chinese government to change its behaviours since 1901. This article re-examines the position that the decision to honour indeminity obligations enabled the Chinese state to maintain peaceful relations with western powers during the first quarter of the twentiety century. The 1901 edict affirming that China would re-examine its capacity to satisfy its international commitments. Before this edict, China had selectively followed its Sino-foreign treaties, but thereafter, China completely assumed all of her financial obligations to foreign creditors. These changes in behaviour helped China restore its deteriorated foreign relations and were followed by Provisional Executive Duan Qirui until 1925. These changes can be illustrated by three cases, namely the depreciation of tael, the Austrian loans, and the gold franc. The cases were highly international as the first concerned eleven foreign creditors, the second concerned two, and the third concerned three. From 1901–1925, foreign powers also provided China with reciprocal favours in exchange for China's responsible behaviours. Eventually, China retrieved its tariff autonomy in 1930.

Following victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the Meiji government sought to expand its maritime influence in Northeast Asia by developing pelagic fisheries in the newly acquired Kwantung leased territory, but it encountered immediate resistance from the Qing court, which had just embarked upon ambitious reform to strengthen maritime defence through the building of a national fishing industry. The dispute first emerged as a clash between Japanese and Chinese fishery protection companies on the seas adjacent to the Chinese city of Xiongyue. It then gave rise to a protracted Sino-Japanese legal debate on the question of whether the Xiongyue fishing ground was in the free sea or part of Chinese territorial waters. However, the 1912 settlement agreement made no mention of the legal status of the fishing ground. By examining this oft-neglected dispute, this article not only provides a rare East Asian case that illustrates the tension between the requirements of national sea borders and the principle of navigational freedom, but also explores how the Meiji and Qing governments perceived and practised international maritime law at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that neither government viewed international maritime law as the only referential framework to solve the dispute, especially when it contributed little to the conflict settlement and contradicted their perceptions of the historical relations between East Asian countries.

In this paper, I will focus on the emergence and uses of political economy in late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century China. I will discuss how the concept of “economy” came to be conceived as an autonomous sphere of human life, with its own rules and its own order, and how the production of “wealth” was conceptually divorced from ethics, politics, and administration. For this purpose, I will focus on a group which played a key role in reshaping the social and political discourse of the empire: a group of nationalist reformers who wanted to transform the Qing empire into a constitutional monarchy. I will explore how these reformers brought together two different sets of traditions – the Chinese imperial traditions of literati statecraft on the one hand, and mostly British, French, and German traditions of political economy on the other – and how they used them to naturalize a particular idea of what the “Chinese nation” was and should be.

This article compares the ways in which two major textbook publishers in East Asia – namely Kinkōdō in Meiji Japan and the Commercial Press in early twentieth-century China – practised the Western model of corporations to build a new kind of publishing business in their respective societies, which were undergoing significant transformation. The study suggests that, although the use of the model could imply global business convergence, its transplantation process was largely shaped by entrepreneurs who negotiated the Western model as an alternative newly opened to them and brought to light variant forms of practice tailored to serve their own aspirations in corporate directions such as industrial integration and ownership structure. The two cases present two distinct patterns of developing a new textbook publishing business under the same corporation model.