Alcock Convention

Chinese history

Alcock Convention, agreement regarding trade and diplomatic contact negotiated in 1869 between Great Britain and China. The implementation of the Alcock Convention would have put relations between the two countries on a more equitable basis than they had been in the past. Its rejection by the British government weakened the power of progressive forces in China that had advocated a conciliatory policy toward the West.

Negotiated for the British by Rutherford Alcock, the convention was intended to revise the Treaty of Tianjin (Tientsin, 1858), which had been forced on China after the trading conflict known as the second Opium War. The convention would have granted China the right to open a consulate in British-occupied Hong Kong and to increase the very low duties previously set on silk and opium. The British would have gained tax concessions, the right to nonsteam navigation of all Chinese inland waterways, and temporary residence privileges within China, but they would have had to forgo their most-favoured-nation treatment by which they gained any privilege China granted to other powers. British traders strongly objected to the agreement, protesting that the Chinese consul in Hong Kong would act as a spy on British merchants and that the traders’ sagging profits in China were a result of unnecessary hindrances put in their way by the Chinese government. They felt that the Chinese government should be made to grant more concessions. News of the Tianjin Massacre, in which several foreign nationals (including 10 French nuns) were killed by Chinese nationals, helped convince the British to oppose the agreement, and the Home Office refused to ratify it. As a result, Chinese-Western relations continued to be governed by “unequal treaties” like the Tianjin agreement.

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