To Change in China

Abstract This article brings together sources from China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to explore the rare and fraught cases of Americans and Europeans who attempted to become naturalized subjects in late-nineteenth-century Qing China. Decades before China established its first formal law on citizenship, foreigners, especially foreign military experts, were trying and occasionally succeeding in naturalizing as Chinese. I see naturalization as one of many ad hoc collaborations within the period’s Self-Strengthening movement. Yet the place of China in the nineteenth century’s global debates on naturalization remains little known. More than just a product of silences, I argue that this is the result of a deliberate erasure, primarily achieved through historic efforts by Euro-American powers to deny the legitimacy of white naturalization in China. Despite small numbers of applicants, these powers quickly came to perceive the possibility as a threat to broader racial hierarchies they were constructing in Asia. Reconstructing and contextualizing these cases serves to expand the story of modern nationality in China, and to reinsert China into a global history with present-day implications. Ultimately, I argue, it was the lines drawn around China here that most shaped the boundaries of modern naturalization.