'Of such local significance': Culture, diplomacy and the Tientsin Incident of 1919.

摘要

This thesis focuses on three days of rioting between American Army troops and Japanese civilians, police and military personnel in the foreign concessions of Tientsin, China in March 1919. The description of this incident and the diplomatic attempts to resolve it, based primarily on published and unpublished U.S. State Department records, is framed in a discussion of cultural differences between the United States and Japan regarding strategies of conflict resolution.;The thesis concludes that the diplomatic debate concerning the Tientsin Incident was fundamentally an epistemological struggle between American and Japanese diplomats to control truth and thus establish symbolic power over the opposing side of the discussion. By emphasizing further the culturally defined strategies in this struggle, the thesis offers a rarely considered insight into the nature of American-Japanese diplomacy between the end of the First World War and the Washington Naval Conference of 1921. The cultural dynamics of diplomacy were just as significant as the political and economic forces which have most often been the foci of the traditional diplomatic historiography of the period.