| Abstract | Local Chinese and foreigners jointly operated the International Mixed Court of Shanghai from 1864 to 1927 in the International Settlement of Shanghai. It was most famous for its political trials of Chinese revolutionaries. its trial in 1925 of Chinese students helped spark the May 30th Movement. Yet archival records left by the Chinese and foreigners who ran the Court and litigated there show that the Court performed other functions with far reaching effects. The Zongli Yamen founded the Court with British diplomats to give consuls in Shanghai the means to keep order among their subjects. It granted the Court a small jurisdiction and placed it inside the national Qing court system with the right of appeal up to the emperor. The Court developed procedures, however, that circumvented its jurisdictional limitations and strengthened its local autonomy, even as it maintained the cooperation of local Chinese officials. The Court became a means for directing the development of Shanghai according to a European model of urban growth. its judgments, enforced by the British Municipal Police, shifted and secured ownership of wealth and land. The Chinese whom the Court sentenced to prison worked on the chain gangs that build the streets of Shanghai still in use today. Recorded trial proceedings and Court administrative correspondence show that a Chinese magistrate and a foreign vice-consul together applied local laws according to a mixture of Anglo-American, continental European, and traditional Chinese procedure. The Municipal Police monopolized prosecutorial discretion at the Court and shut out Chiang Kaishek and his nationalist government from exercising jurisdiction over the hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens, vast financial reserves, and the revolutionaries who sought refuge in the Settlement. The library collections of Shanghai's pre-1949 law schools reveal that the Court gave birth to a profession of Chinese lawyers whose energy and creativity and receptivity to new legal forms created a new court system for Shanghai and contributed to a burgeoning new legal culture. Though the Court was an irritant to relations between national Chinese officials and foreigners, thousands of Chinese landlords, merchants, and bankers, even the Shanghai magistrate, used the Court to settle their disputes. Confidential correspondences show that local Chinese merchants and lawyers pressed for Chinese control of the Court, but they wished to retain its western-style procedure and its freedom to enforce local laws and customs. |
