Safe Havens for Rebels

“We’re too damn liberal,” exclaims a British colonial administrator in India in an iconic scene from the eight-time Oscar-winning film “Gandhi” (1982). This ironic outburst comes to mind when reading Jenny Huangfu Day’s “Transborder Fugitives, Extradition, and Political Crimes in Modern China.” This time, however, one imagines the thought crossing the mind of a Qing official. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese authorities tasked with extraditing fugitives who had fled from Guangdong Province (Canton) into British-controlled Hong Kong faced an awkward and peculiar dilemma. Treaty obligations compelled them to crack down on anti-foreign activity. Yet the very foreign power that had forced them into these treaties—and in doing so stoked unrest within China—shielded the rebels from Qing authority. And it did so in the name of liberalism.

Britain had treated political crimes with similar severity as China. That is, until 1870, when it passed the Extradition Act. The new measure established the “political offense exception,” which barred extradition for crimes deemed political rather than ordinary criminal acts. What the Qing saw as rebellion or treason, British authorities came to treat as political offenses and dismissed. This effectively turned territories under British jurisdiction into safe havens for rebels.

What explains the shift in Britain’s stance? What new insights does the ensuing legal conflict provide into the strategies of rebellion? What does it reveal about the workings of imperialism? Day’s book brings these questions into focus and offers a compelling set of answers, outlined below. While grounded in historical analysis, it provides empirically rich material for social scientists seeking to build theories that integrate legal regimes and practices into models of rebellion and colonial rule. It also sheds light on a little-known dimension of modern China’s relations with the West.

How Britain Embraced Political Crimes

Day’s story begins with the astounding development of Britain embracing political crimes as lawful. Britain and China were similar in their treatment of political offenses until the French Revolution introduced Europe to new political values, and new technologies of punishment made it possible to put those values into practice. After the revolution, legal concepts of political crime changed profoundly. New social contract theories promoted the idea that sovereignty resided with the people rather than the monarch. Governments were to be limited to exercising powers with the consent and in the interests of the populace. If a government abused its power, people were now seen as having the right to overthrow it.

The 1791 French Criminal Code incorporated these liberal ideas. It distinguished between threats to the external security of the state, such as attacks on its laws or existence, and threats to internal security, such as attacks on government institutions. Only the former came to be viewed as genuine threats. Acts against internal security were now seen as actions by honorable citizens rather than crimes against the state.

At the same time, punishment changed. Brutal methods were replaced with organized systems, such as prisons and asylums, designed to guide and reform behavior, as Michel Foucault famously described in “Discipline and Punish” (1977).

Prior to the French Revolution, the term “political crimes” was largely unknown in England. The 1793 Jacobin Constitution introduced to Europe the idea that individuals could seek political asylum and that states should bar the extradition of those accused of political offenses. By the early 19th century, extradition increasingly fell under legislative and judicial oversight rather than being controlled solely by the executive. As the principle of excluding political offenders from extradition spread across Europe, it created an international framework in which liberal states protected individuals from older, repressive political systems. These changes made European countries, especially Great Britain, destinations for political refugees. Growing public sympathy for fugitives reinforced expectations and moral obligations to provide asylum.

How Rebels Recast Their Image

Many revolts in 1890s China were both anti-foreign and anti-Qing, Day observes. Secret societies presented their actions as defending China from foreign encroachment while simultaneously challenging Qing rule. Ironically, it was Britain’s demand for reparations for attacks on its forces in Kowloon—a British-controlled peninsula in southern China—that initially compelled the Qing to pay attention to these uprisings.

Britain’s liberal embrace of the “political offense exception” not only allowed fugitives to evade Chinese authority, effectively accomplishing the opposite of what Britain had demanded of China. It also incentivized the rebels to recast themselves as modern revolutionaries using the language of rights, as Day demonstrates in her book.

A case in point is Sun Yat-sen. Born in China and raised partly in Hawaii, he trained as a medical doctor in Hong Kong. Inspired by the Taiping Rebellion and a mix of Western political ideas, he led an uprising in Canton after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. When the revolt failed, he fled to Hong Kong, Japan, the United States, and England, facing possible extradition back to China. During his exile, Sun carefully crafted his image as a liberal political offender to fit the “political offense exception,” portraying a revolution guided by Christianity and the British Empire. In reality, his uprising drew on traditional secret societies along the Canton-Hong Kong borders and carried strong anti-Manchu sentiment.

Sun was the first Chinese rebel to claim political-offender status to secure asylum abroad, using it to gain international support. After him, claiming “political offense exception” protection became a strategic tool for rebels. Even mere affiliation with Sun’s groups could result in recognition as a political offender.

Britain’s embrace of political offenders had two other unexpected effects on rebellion. Liang Qichao, a leading reformer and intellectual in exile, observed in 1905 that the safe havens enjoyed by rebels in foreign settlements, colonies, and overseas were a hidden curse for the revolution. They kept rebels removed from the local populations they were meant to represent. Exiled individuals could attack traditional culture with impunity without considering how new ideas might be practically implemented. Second, the protection of extraterritoriality prevented direct confrontation between the regime and its opponents. This, in Liang’s view, limited the intellectual and civic development of Chinese citizens who lost the chance to participate in and learn from a direct struggle.

Why Britain Changed Its Mind (Hint: Not for China)

In the early 20th century, political struggles shifted from liberalism to anarchist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist movements. The French Revolution-era extradition regime became a political liability, as what counted as “political” became redefined. Day contends that those whose ideas threatened liberal democracy or colonial authority were classified as “social criminals” or “terrorists.

Technology once again entered the equation. This time it was a technology of rebel, not state, punishment. The invention of dynamite transformed revolutionary tactics, beginning with Irish revolutionaries, German anarchists, and Russian nihilists. Asian revolutionaries soon adopted these methods in their anti-colonial, nationalist, and anarchist struggles.

The global proliferation of violent tactics triggered panic and major changes to the extradition of political offenders in the name of “transnational security.” Before the 1890s, political offenders were often seen as heroic figures rebelling against autocracy. By the turn of the century, European governments increasingly viewed them as threats to international stability.

This shift coincided with the fall of the Qing in 1911. During the 1910s and 1920s, Britain came to see differences between China and its legal norms as less important than the challenge posed by revolutionaries with radical anti-imperial visions. As nationalist, anarchist, socialist, and later communist networks crossed borders, Western powers revised extradition procedures to enable transnational cooperation. They abandoned the political offense exception.

It was not pressure from Chinese authorities that led Britain to turn its back on political offenses. Day’s book makes clear that Britain’s liberal stance was conditional. It did not extend to activities that threatened imperial interests. Britain was not too liberal, after all.