Uncovering a series of landmark but often overlooked extradition cases between China and foreign powers from the 1860s to the 1920s, this study challenges the prevailing conception that political crimes in China were solely a domestic phenomenon. Extradition and extraterritoriality played an important role in shaping laws and regulations related to political crimes in modern China. China's inability to secure reciprocal extradition treaties was historically rooted in the legacy of extraterritoriality and semi-colonialism. Jenny Huangfu Day illustrates how the fugitive rendition clauses in the Opium War treaties evolved into informal extradition procedures and describes how the practice of fugitive rendition changed from the late Qing to Republican China. Readers will gain an understanding of the interaction between international law, diplomacy, and municipal laws in the jurisdiction of political crimes in modern China, allowing Chinese legal history to be brought into conversation with transnational legal scholarship.

'This book offers a highly compelling account of how struggles over fugitives, political crimes, and extradition shaped China’s contested path to legal and political modernity from the 1860s through the 1930s. Drawing on rich archival research and incisive case studies, it reframes modern Chinese history through the lens of international law, jurisdictional conflict, and cross-border diplomacy. An exemplary work of interdisciplinary legal and political history, it makes an original and significant contribution to the histories of law, empire, and modern China.'

Li Chen - author of Chinese Law in Imperia Eyes: Justice, Sovereignty, and Transcultural Politics

'Jenny Huangfu Day brings clarity to a crucial yet hitherto neglected aspect of China’s diplomatic relations. Drawing on extensive research, this impressive work makes a convincing argument for the central role of extradition in the development of laws on political crimes in late Qing and early Republican China.'

Christopher Munn - author of Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong

'Essential reading for those interested in the interaction of imperial and legal histories regarding the multiple ways in which the loss of sovereignty that extraterritoriality brought about in China was directly connected to the trajectory of revolution, to the development of new legal regimes, and to China’s ability to negotiate with the foreign powers.'

Joanna Waley-Cohen - author of The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History