Western powers in China between 1920 and 1930: Focus on the Minutes of Meetings of the Shanghai Municipal Council

The 1920s were a pivotal decade in the modern history of China and particularly of Shanghai, which steadily increased its power on the international arena, from politics through finance to communication. Shanghai gradually became the focal point of many activities that would eventually shape modern China. Such privileged role was also due to the fact that the city held a special status since, unlike other Chinese territories, its Municipality witnessed the presence of foreigners as rulers but not as owners of the land. This led to a situation where foreigners and locals coexisted with their own cultures and styles. It is against this socio-historical background that we need to view the Municipality of Shanghai between 1920 and 1930, whose Council’s Minutes of Meetings (henceforth MoMs) are analyzed in the present paper. MoMs are a text type which has long been ignored by scholarly research, at least from the linguistic point of view, possibly due to its ‘hybrid’ status that places it halfway between legal documents and (press) reports. Bearing this in mind, the present study has a twofold aim; in the first place, by focussing on Shanghai MoMs from the early 20th century, we delve into the evolution of the Western (largely British) management of municipal affairs on Chinese territory, paying special attention to the relations between such Western powers and local Chinese citizens at the time. Secondly, we shed more light on MoMs as a textual type, with special reference to their structural and linguistic distinctiveness. Specifically, first we overview the Shanghai International Settlement and its Municipal Council at the time under scrutiny; then, we illustrate the corpus exploited for this study; finally, we focus on the linguistic analysis of the corpus, to detect possible structural changes that may have occurred over the last century to MoMs as a textual type. The present study intends to place itself at the crossroads between linguistic analysis, on the one hand, and socio-historical research on the other, viewing both as two sides of the same coin, under the conviction that historical-linguistic research cannot do without an adequate socio-historical contextualization, especially when intercultural aspects come into place, and that the study of historical documents for linguistic purposes can—and needs to—be of help to other disciplines like History and Sociology, but also International Relations and Public Diplomacy, in a fruitful interdisciplinary way.