The Chinese student protest in Brussels (1926): A Global History
On October 27, 1926, young Chinese took to the streets of Brussels to protest. This local event was the last call after months of mobilization efforts against an document formally signed in the previous century — the Sino-Belgian Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation of November 2, 1865.
This document was made in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and symbolically marked the beginning of the relations between Belgium and the Qing empire. Similar to other Sino-foreign treaties that had come before, the treaty granted Belgium, among other things, extraterritorial rights and consular jurisdiction on Chinese soil and was stipulated to be revisable every ten years.
Sixty years elapsed after the conclusion of the treaty and on April 26, 1926, the Beijing government — China's representative regime at the time — approached the Belgian legation to request a new treaty, summoning the Treaty's Article 46 that detailed possible revision. The very next day, the Belgian delegate responded that Article 46 only gave the Belgian state the exclusive right to revise the treaty and it was therefore only Belgium to decide on the treaty.(1) The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs then instructed their envoy in Brussels to insist that October 27 —the anniversary of the ratification — would mark the treaty's termination while the Belgian side instructed theirs in Beijing to hold their stance.
In response to the situation, grassroots mobilization emerged among the Chinese students in Belgium. Among the most prominent drivers behind the movement were Wu Baoyi and Deng Jufang.
Wu Baoyi, born in 1900, had come to Belgium at the age of fourteen, at the start of the first World War. Details of his whereabouts during the war are lacking but in 1920 he received a Civic Decoration for his brave resistance against the Germans.(2) In the early twenties he continued his education of mathematics in Brussels, though later he stayed some time at the Chinese home in Marchienne-au-pont, a student residence tied to the Université du Travail in Charleroi.
Deng Jufang, born in 1902, had followed a different trajectory than Wu. After arriving in France during the Work-study movement in early 1920s, he found his way through interpersonal contacts to the Université du Travail in Charleroi where he commenced his engineering studies. He later became president of the Association Générale des étudiants Chinois en Belgique.
Following the general convention of overseas Chinese in Brussels in July 1926, Wu Baoyi set up the comité d'études des traités sino-belges (Study Committee of Sino-Belgian Treaties), which was tasked to communicate the Chinese critique of the treaty, and, together with the Association Générale, he published pamphlets and brochures to mobilize compatriots and to persuade the public in Belgium to abolish the unequal treaty. Among the documents that were disseminated at the time was the leaflet titled aux hommes d’affaires (To the Businessmen). Apart from containing a public letter to Belgian minister of Foreign Affairs, Emile Vandervelde (1866-1938), this leaflet lined out the consequences of the Anti-British boycott that had unfolded in China since the May 30th shooting, implying that a similar thing could happen in the context of Sino-Belgian relations if political indifference persisted.
At the same time, Wu Baoyi also reached out to Chinese in Germany, Austria, UK, and France to join hands, as well as the Peranakan Chinese Chung Hwa Hui in the Netherlands.(3) Some of them joined the congrès des colonies chinoises en Europe on October 25.(4)
As the response from the Belgian state still remained unsatisfactory — Vandervelde decided to turn to The Hague to bow over the case if no conclusion was reached, the Chinese students in Belgium marked October 27 as the day to bring the matter more into the open — to the streets of Brussels!
The exact number of the demonstrators that day is not clear. Some newspaper said fifty people showed up, another claimed eighty-three.(5)
The protest, which mostly consisted Chinese student delegates in Europe, took place in the afternoon and was said to take more than a hour.(6)
Although the march was peaceful, chaos broke out on the way to the final destination when police showed up and hit demonstrators with truncheons, resulting in arrests and injuries.
The news of this incident provoked reactions in China. Anti-Belgian boycott was called by the Chinese press and Chambers of commerce in Shanghai. The Guandong Government protested the Belgian action against Chinese students.(7)
In the end, the Belgian minister le baron de Warzée (1877-1931) met Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs the Chinese minister Gu Weijun (Wellington Koo, 1888 – 1985) in Beijing and reached a modus vivendi, which paved the way for further negotiations.
However, the new (provisional) treaty only arrived in August 1928, after the Kuomintang regime had eclipsed the power in Beijing. Some of the old terms, such as custom tariffs, were changed in KMT's favor, but the extraterritoriality was only to be removed on the condition that other countries distanced themselves from similar privileges before 1930, which did not happen.(8) For the complete abolishment of Belgium's extraterritoriality, one had to wait until 1943, when Belgium made several concessions to China to strengthen allyship during the second World War.
Although it is hard to determine the specific impact of a short-lived event on the diplomatic negotiations, the unfolding of the Chinese student protest in 1926 is still interesting to write about. Far from being some local event, the protest is tied to the broader story of anti-imperialist activism in 1920s Europe. For a very brief moment, the saga of the Sino-Belgian Treaty made the local and the global contexts collapse into one and opened up a space of solidarity that connected overseas Chinese across Europe in ways that would not have been conceived before. Taking the 1926 protest as a timely writing exercise also made me think about my research. It makes me wonder what space and time meant in the life of overseas students, a population defined by mobility.
I hope you enjoyed this post and see you next time
References
(1) "Statement of the Chinese Government and other Official Document relating to the Negotiation." Leaflet, November, 1926.
(2) "Une décoration," Indépendance Belge, October 6, 1920.
(3) Stutje, Klaas. “The Complex World of the Chung Hwa Hui: International Engagements of Chinese Indonesian Peranakan Students in the Netherlands, 1918-1931.” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 171, no. 4 (2015): 531
(4) "La question Sino-Belge," Dernière Heure, October 26, 1926.
(5) "Bagarre entre chinois et policiers," La Meuse, October 28, 1926; "Les incidents de la manifestations des Chinois à Bruxelles," Le Peuple, October 30, 1926.
(6) "Les incidents de la manifestations des Chinois à Bruxelles," Le Peuple, October 30, 1926.
(7) "Le Litige Belgo-chinois," Libre Belgique, November 2, 1926; "Le Litige Belgo-chinois," Libre Belgique, November 8, 1926.
(8) Vermeersch, Jens. “Het Buitenlands Beleid van België Tegenover China, 1919-1941.” Belgisch Tijdschrift Voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis (BTNG) 20, nos. 03–04 (1989): 337–38.
(9) See Accord Sino-Belge du 20 Octobre 1943.