Shanghai-Hangchow-Ningpo Railway Loan A Case Study of the Rights Recovery Movement

Abstract

During the first decade of the twentieth century, foreign residents in China observed a noticeable change in the temper of the Chinese people. It was more than a change in mood, but a wave of activities, a dynamic force aimed at the recovery of China's sovereign rights. The movement was so intense that Japanese diplomats in Peking called it the ‘rights recovery fever’. Sir Ernest Satow, British minister in China, remarked that the movement was a manifestation of ‘the consciousness of national solidarity, which is entirely a new phenomenon in China’.