Who could vote: the ratepayers' meeting, 1869–1941, and the jubilee of 1893

The short answer. The International Settlement was run by a council of nine, elected each year by the foreigners who owned land worth 500 taels or rented a house assessed at 500 taels a year. In 1906 that was 1,597 men out of 5,728 adult foreign males, in a Settlement of half a million people; by 1930 the whole roll was a few thousand votes in a city of a million. The ratepayers’ annual meeting was the Settlement’s parliament, and for much of the 1920s it could not raise a quorum. Yet the same small electorate could, when it chose, close the town for two days and light every street from the Bund to Hongkou, as it did on 17 and 18 November 1893 to celebrate fifty years of itself. The franchise and the party are the two faces of the same institution.

The rules

The constitution of the Settlement was the Land Regulations, agreed between the consuls and the daotai in 1854, revised in 1869 and last amended in 1880, with bye-laws added by the ratepayers and approved by the ministers in Beijing. The edition the Council printed in 1907 sets out the franchise in Article XIX of the Regulations themselves, not in the bye-laws that follow them; the Council’s own reports cite “Article XVIII” and “Article XX of the Land Regulations” when they describe elections and co-options. A foreigner could vote in the election of the Council and at public meetings if he was “an owner of land of not less than five hundred taels in value” paying at least ten taels a year in assessment, “or who shall be a householder paying on an assessed rental of not less than five hundred taels per annum”. Taxes had to be paid up. A firm, however large, had one vote; a man might vote for himself and as a partner. Proxies were admitted only for ratepayers “absent from the Consular District of Shanghai, or are prevented by illness from attending”. The voters’ list was revised every first of December by the Council’s secretary.

The bar to sit on the Council was higher: an annual assessment of fifty taels, licences excluded, or a house assessed at 1,200 taels. The Council had “not more than nine nor less than five” members. Any two voters could nominate a candidate with his written assent, at least seven days before the election; if more than nine were nominated there was a poll over two days from ten to three, each voter marking up to nine names on a card, and the nine with most votes were declared elected. If exactly nine or fewer stood, there was no poll at all. Three councillors made a quorum of the Council, which chose its own chairman each year. The consuls fixed the election day and called the annual public meeting, which received the accounts and the budget; the senior consul took the chair; twenty-five electors could requisition a special meeting; and a meeting bound the electors only “if not less than one-third of the electors are present or represented”. Anything the regulations did not cover needed consular approval, and the ministers in Beijing had the last word on the regulations themselves.

Pott, summarising for the general reader in 1928, ran the two voting tests together as land “and” householding; the text says “or”. The distinction mattered, because the rental test was what let a salaried manager living in a company house vote beside the land-owning merchants. It was the revision of 1880 that widened both tests; before it, Pott says, only 112 residents in the Settlement qualified to be councillors at all.

How few

The Council never printed a simple total of its voters, and the figures have to be assembled. The gazetteer gives the clearest snapshot: in 1906, of 5,728 adult foreign men in the Settlement, 1,597 qualified to vote, among them 885 British, 182 Germans, 147 Americans, 77 Japanese and 75 French. The Chinese population, then over 400,000, had no vote at all, and would not until 1928, though from the 1920s it paid the larger share of the Settlement’s taxes. Justice Feetham’s report of 1931, quoted by the American consul-general the following year, counted 971 British ratepayers holding 1,203 votes, 654 Japanese with 668, and 308 Americans with 328; the whole roll was perhaps 2,700 votes, which is what the quorum of 902 implies. A city of more than a million was governed, in law, by the equivalent of a large village.

Votes were not quite one a head. The Council insisted in 1925 that “plural voting does not exist in the Foreign Settlement” and that the principle was “one interest one vote”, refusing a Methodist mission that paid 309 taels in taxes any vote but one; but a man with land and a firm had two interests, and a proxy-holder carried several tickets. A division in 1893 shows the arithmetic. A resolution to negotiate the purchase of the Settlement’s failing electric company passed by two votes, “25 Ratepayers with 61 votes voting for it, and 14 with 59 votes against”: thirty-nine men holding a hundred and twenty votes decided that the Council should go into the electricity business.

Meetings without a quorum

The annual meeting, held in April after the February election, was the only occasion on which the ratepayers acted as a body, and the special meetings called for particular measures were the only way to change a bye-law or a rate. The one-third rule turned out to be the Settlement’s weak point. In the 1920s the foreign population was larger, busier and more transient than ever, and the meetings failed. The special meeting of 15 April 1921 lacked a quorum. The annual meeting of 15 April 1925 “was attended by 399 ratepayers representing 622 votes”, 302 short of the number needed, according to a letter of protest from 76 ratepayers; the special meeting of 2 June 1925, called to pass a child-labour bye-law, wharfage dues and a printing bye-law, “failed by 177 votes to form the necessary quorum of 902” and was declared void at a quarter past five, three days after the shooting on Nanking Road. The two figures do not quite agree with each other, and the Council’s report prints both. The consequences were real: the Council recorded that its efforts to put wharfage dues on a sound footing had “been frustrated by the lack of a quorum”, and the child-labour bye-law, drafted after a commission’s report on children in the mills, lapsed with the meeting.

The polls of the 1920s

The election itself was usually no contest; in many years exactly nine stood and no poll was held. When there was one, the Gazette printed it, and the two polls of 1925 and 1926 are the best measure of how many of the Settlement’s voters actually voted. In 1925 “eleven ratepayers were nominated” and the poll of 2 and 3 March returned nine: A. E. Baker with 718 votes, the Japanese member S. Sakuragi 690, V. G. Lyman 534, Stirling Fessenden 512, A. D. Bell 501, P. W. Massey 490, Humphrys 447, Paterson 445 and Teesdale 337, from 875 ballots and eight irregular. Each voter marked up to nine names, so the 875 is the number of men, or proxies, who came to the poll: in a Settlement of some 30,000 foreigners and a roll of perhaps 2,700 votes, fewer than nine hundred chose the government. In 1926 the poll of 1 and 2 March drew 966 ballots and eleven irregular, and Sakuragi topped it with 765, ahead of Fessenden’s 665, H. B. Roe’s 552 and Lyman’s 508. The annual meeting that followed on 14 April 1926 was attended by 377 ratepayers holding 605 votes, fewer than the 399 and 622 of the year before.

That 1926 meeting is the one that passed Resolution VI, the first step towards Chinese seats, and its mover introduced it as “a resolution of greater moment in the history of this Settlement” than any before. He reminded the ratepayers that the idea was old: “as far back as 1863” a scheme for Chinese members had been approved by the diplomatic body in Peking and had fallen through for other reasons, and “in 1905 an attempt to secure Chinese representation failed”. An amendment by L. K. Kentwell, a lawyer and ratepayer who was a persistent critic of the Council, to hasten the election of Chinese members with regard to the taxes Chinese ratepayers paid, was seconded by a Chinese ratepayer, Russell B. S. Chen, and lost; the resolution for three Chinese members carried with one vote against. The story of what followed is told in the article on May Thirtieth. The Council was, in Pott’s words quoting one of its own chairmen, elected annually by “foreign land-renters and ratepayers”, and for seventy years the question of who those were was settled by the two tests of 1880.

1932: a council of fourteen

By 1932 the Council had changed shape without the franchise changing at all. At the start of that year it had fourteen members under Brigadier-General E. B. Macnaghten: nine elected by the foreign ratepayers, among them two Japanese, K. Fukushima and O. Okamoto, and five Chinese members, S. L. Hsu, O. S. Lieu, T. D. Woo, L. T. Yuan and Yu Ya-ching, “returned as the Chinese members of the Council” by the Chinese ratepayers’ own body. “Fifteen ratepayers were nominated” for the foreign seats and a poll on 21 and 22 March elected nine; when Fukushima left for Japan in May, H. Terai “was co-opted as a member under Article XX of the Land Regulations”, and when Terai resigned at the year’s end T. Funatsu was invited to the seat. The Japanese seats, in other words, had become a convention the Council kept by co-option when the poll did not supply them.

The same report records the Council giving up on the special meeting. It wanted two Chinese members added to the Land Commission, which needed an amendment to the Land Regulations, and explained that “it is usual to convene a Special Meeting of Ratepayers to vote upon proposed amendments of the Land Regulations, but as a Special Meeting requires a quorum of one-third of the ratepayers it has been almost impossible in the past to secure the requisite quorum except when matters of great public interest or importance were to be discussed.” It would move the amendment at the annual meeting instead, which had no quorum rule, and Resolution VI of 1932 did so. The one-third rule of 1869 had not been repealed; it had been walked around.

The last decade

Justice Richard Feetham, the South African judge the Council brought in to review its constitution, reported in April 1931 and proposed the one reform that would have changed the franchise itself: in place of the single ratepayers’ meeting, two, one of foreign and one of Chinese ratepayers, whose joint resolutions would bind the Council and whose divided ones would advise it, with the Council enlarged to between twenty-two and thirty members. The American consul-general, summarising the report in 1932, quoted its count of the Japanese position: a Japanese population of 12,788, “while the number of Japanese ratepayers was only 654 and the number of votes 668”. Nothing came of the two meetings. The franchise of 1880 ran on to the end, and in the Settlement’s last years it was the thing that kept the Council out of Japanese hands. A British Embassy memorandum of 1941, in the American diplomatic record, explained that the Japanese could not outvote the British, American and other electors “because of the property qualifications for franchise laid down in the Land Regulations”: the Japanese community, though larger than any other foreign one, “consists mostly of the poorer residents without a vote”. A press report of April 1940 said the Japanese had “conceded defeat” in an attempt to control the Council, whose foreign seats would stay at five British, two American and two Japanese. The 500-tael test, written for the merchants of 1869, had become a line of defence.

1893: the Settlement celebrates itself

The port had been declared open to foreign trade in November 1843, and the ratepayers of 1893 decided that fifty years deserved a holiday. The annual meeting that spring was offered a scheme to spend 20,000 taels on a school building as a memorial; an amendment appointed instead a committee of 34 ratepayers to propose something. A special meeting on 7 June 1893 rejected a loan of 40,000 taels to buy the Shanghai Public School site “by a large majority” and carried an amendment by E. J. Hogg that fixed the shape of the thing: Friday 17 and Saturday 18 November to be general holidays, the principal streets decorated, householders invited to illuminate, a celebration for the children, a jubilee medal, and “a sum not exceeding Tls. 5,000” from municipal funds. A banquet was planned and then abandoned when the Council’s chairman, John Macgregor, died on 7 November. The chairman who spoke on the day was J. L. Scott.

The Council’s report prints the programme. At 9.30 on the Friday morning the Volunteers paraded on the racecourse with landing parties from the British and French warships: 323 British and 76 French sailors and 249 Volunteers, “648 in all on Parade, by far the largest number seen on the Race-course for many years”. They marched to the Bund, taking fifteen minutes to pass. At 11.20 the Rev. William Muirhead of the London Mission, forty-six years in Shanghai, gave a public address from a red-draped platform; he finished, the Mercury noted, “at exactly 11.50”. At noon the American gunboat Monocacy fired the first of fifty guns, the French Forfait, the British ships and four Volunteer guns on the Bund took up the salute, and a feu de joie followed. Scott, at the saluting flag, said the Settlement was “commemorating the conclusion of fifty years of amicable relations with the natives in whose midst we dwell”. A children’s fête filled the afternoon. At six the new jubilee fountain in the Public Garden was lit; at 8.30 the Bund, Nanking Road, the Maloo and Broadway in Hongkou were illuminated; at 9.30 a torchlight procession of the volunteer fire brigade and the Chinese guilds set off; at 10.30 the fireworks began from three points on the Bund foreshore.

The Mercury, whose editors collected their reports into a book before the year was out, supply the colour the Council left out. The chief feature on the Bund was a triumphal arch at the foot of Nanking Road, carrying the Council’s new arms and its motto, “Omnia juncta in uno”, and English mottoes of the kind a trading town writes for itself: “Look round and see what Fifty Years have done”. The Chinese mottoes, translated in the book, spoke of fifty years of treaty amity and of commerce uniting all. There were “tens of thousands of lanterns of every form and colour, of both Japanese and Chinese make”; the municipal offices on Kiangse Road were lit; electric lamps were fixed to the minarets of the cathedral; a flotilla of Japanese boats in the river sent up day rockets, and the fireworks were the work of two Japanese firms. The Friday procession was led by the Canton guild “with many a strange device in the shape of fiery dragons and fishes”, followed by the Ningbo guild, and took nearly half an hour to pass; it was, the paper judged, the most successful feature of the two days. Who paid for it is worth noticing. The Council contributed “something like Tls. 500” for the fire brigade’s part; the guilds’ procession, which “must have been several thousands of taels”, was “entirely borne by the Guilds”. The Chinese merchants of Shanghai put on the Settlement’s jubilee show, and watched it, the Mercury said, in “dense but orderly throngs”; a Chinese bank on the route entertained two or three hundred guests, including the daotai’s eldest son, to watch from its windows.

Saturday went less well. The guilds’ daylight parade was due at 10.30; a quarrel over precedence meant that “it was nearly noon before the first of the processionists arrived” and nearly two before it started, and the Council’s police report records that the procession “broke up at the Seward Road bridge” in a dispute between two factions of the Canton guild. The children had their performance by the Amateur Dramatic Club at the Lyceum at 3.30, with more than a thousand present. The police commissioner estimated “close upon 500,000 persons” in the Settlement over the two days, counting the ordinary population and visitors from Ningbo, Hangzhou and Suzhou, and reported “no casualty of any moment” at any of his three stations; shopfronts on the route were let for the occasion, “in some instances for as much as $30”.

The accounts give the cost. The celebration came to 5,591.89 taels, a little over the 5,000 voted; the 600 silver and 100 bronze medals ordered from England cost 1,724.40, and their engraving 735, and they arrived in December, too late to be given out that year. The Council’s post office issued a two-cent jubilee stamp, “the whole supply of 360,000” of which “was eagerly bought up in two or three days”, then surcharged its ordinary stamps “Jubilee 1843 to 1893” and sold those too, taking 8,040.13 taels, which is to say that the stamps paid for the party. The permanent memorial was the fountain basin in the Public Garden; Thomas Hanbury, the merchant who had left Shanghai for the Riviera, gave 5,000 taels on a visit for some permanent memorial, and the Governor of Hong Kong and Admiral Fremantle came as guests. Pott, writing thirty-five years later, says a banquet was held at one o’clock; the Council’s own report says it was cancelled, and the report was written the same winter.

What the jubilee was for

The Mercury’s book calls the Settlement “the model settlement”, and the jubilee was the moment the phrase was coined for public use. The Settlement of 1893 was 10,676 mu, governed by a few hundred voters, policed by a few hundred constables, and inhabited by some 170,000 Chinese residents who had no say in it and whose guilds paid for its procession. Scott’s “fifty years of amicable relations” was true as far as it went; the Chinese guilds marched because the Settlement was their market too, and the daotai’s son watched from a bank window because the two towns had grown together whether either liked it or not. What the franchise rules and the jubilee programme show together is the shape of the arrangement: a self-governing foreign town, small, prosperous and proud of its drains, sitting inside a Chinese city many times its size, which it did not represent and could not, in the end, do without.

What the sources disagree on

The 1907 text and the Council’s reports agree that the franchise is Article XIX of the Land Regulations; an earlier draft of this article, following the contents list’s numbering, called it a bye-law, and Pott’s summary runs the land and rental tests together with “and” where the text says “or”. The 1925 quorum is given in two ways in the same report, 302 short at the April meeting and 177 short of 902 at the June one, which imply rolls of about 2,770 and 2,710 votes. The poll totals of 1925 and 1926 count ballots, not voters, and the Council never printed a total of either; the figure of 1,597 voters in 1906 is the gazetteer’s, and Feetham’s by nationality are known only through an American despatch. For 1940 and 1941 the Council’s own reports are not on the Internet Archive, and the article relies on an embassy memorandum and a newspaper. Pott’s banquet of 1893 is contradicted by the Council’s report of the same winter.

What to look for

The racecourse where the parade formed up is People’s Square. The foot of Nanjing Road at the Bund, where the arch stood, is the pedestrian crossing to the river wall. The jubilee fountain’s basin in the Public Garden is gone; the park is Huangpu Park, and the Monument to the People’s Heroes stands at its river corner. The Council’s offices on Kiangse Road, lit for the occasion in 1893, were replaced by the municipal building of 1922 on the block bounded by Jiangxi, Hankou, Henan and Fuzhou Roads, which still stands.