"Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century" includes chapters Crowe authored, including one that was co-written by an Elon alumna who recently completed graduate work at Columbia University.
Elon University Professor David Crowe, a faculty member at the Elon University School of Law and in the Department of History and Geography, co-edited a book, “Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century,” recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Crowe, who edited the book with Joanne Cho, wrote or co-authored two of the chapters in the book as well as the lengthy historical introduction to this diverse collection of essays. The book deals with not only traditional German-Chinese ties, but also German views and writing on China in fields as diverse as philosophy, medicine, history, literature, religion and politics.
Crowe’s two chapters, “Sino-German Relations, 1871-1917” and “Sino-German Relations, 1918-1941,” deal with different facets of this relations from German unification until the early years of World War II. The first chapter on this relationship deals with the development of German relations with China from the mid-19th century until the last year of World War I. It focuses on German efforts to gain a foothold in China in the years before and after German unification in 1871.
Unlike other European countries, which forced their way into China in the 1840s and 1850s, the new German state initially followed a different course, though after the murder of two German missionaries in 1891, Berlin used the episode to force the Qing court to grant it concessions in Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong province. Fortunately, at least for the Chinese, the Germans would never be able to develop this concession into anything more than a distant German naval base.
And in the years after the Boxer Rebellion, Jiaozhou became a haven for Chinese businessmen and others seeking new financial markets for China.
Crowe co-authored his second chapter, “Sino-German Relations, 1918-1941,” with Christine Swanson, a former Elon student who recently completed her master’s degree in Chinese studies at Columbia University.
Like the 1871-1917 article, Crowe and Swanson tried to use both Chinese and German sources to insure that the German perspective did not dominate their discussion. The principal thrust of this chapter was the special relationship established between the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek and both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany from the late 1920s until the outbreak of war with Japan and China in 1937.
In his efforts to militarily unite China, Chiang Kai-shek relied heavily on German weapons and advisers to help him in his reunification efforts. This relationship began to change once Japan started pressuring Hitler’s government to honor the spirit of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern pact (1936) and sever ties with Chiang’s government.
Resistance from the German foreign office and the military resisted such efforts, though by 1938 all members of the German Advisory Group were ordered home and all military shipments to China halted.