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Mining, Bridges, Opium, and Guns: Chinese Investment and State Power in a Late Qing Frontier
Joseph Lawson
Front. Hist. China. 2015, 10 (3): 372-394.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-004-015-0019-6
In the last three decades of its rule, the Qing government attempted to establish Chinese-style administration in many of the empire’s non-Han territories, and, in conjunction with non-government actors, foster land cultivation, Han migration, Chinese education, and industries such as mining. This paper investigates these processes in Liangshan, in upland Southwest China. Here, attempts to establish Chinese administration came only in 1907, after a period of substantial private and state investment in mining, transport infrastructure, and, to a lesser extent, land cultivation. Government officials often assumed that such things would aid the political integration in China, but as this paper argues, the consequences were more complicated than that. Although better transport simplified the logistics of government military campaigns, increased commercial activity in the region also allowed its indigenes to acquire firearms for the first time.
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The Wire: Progress, Paradox, and Disaster in the Strategic Networking of China, 1881–1901
Roger R. Thompson
Front. Hist. China. 2015, 10 (3): 395-427.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-004-015-0020-0
This study of the introduction of telegraphy to China in the late-nineteenth century tells three interrelated stories: China’s pursuit of telegraphic sovereignty with its strategic networking of the empire in the period 1881–99; the functioning of China’s hybrid express courier-telegraphic communications infrastructure; and the international communications crisis during the Boxer Uprising and the “Siege of the Legations” in 1900. The material reality of two inter-connected networks—the privately owned Imperial Telegraph Administration network and the government-run telegraph network—allowed Qing-era Beijing and its provincial governors to communicate with much greater speed. The materiality of these networks—how this new communications technology affected the practical realities of government communications, including the ease of lateral communications between provincial governors—is explored in the context of the communications crisis of 1900. In May and June of 1900 all telegraph lines to Beijing, and throughout much of North China, were cut or otherwise destroyed. While these blinded Western governments are no longer able to exchange telegrams with their Beijing-based envoys, the Qing express courier system continued to operate. Moreover, both the court and provincial officials quickly improvised ad hoc telegraphic communication protocols through the use of “transfer telegrams” (zhuandian) that relied on mounted express couriers between Beijing and those North China telegraph stations with working network connections. This assessment of real-time secret imperial communications between the Qing court and the provinces is based on the documentary register Suishou dengji (Records of [documents] at hand) maintained by communications managers in the Grand Council. China lost its telegraphic sovereignty in the capital region when Allied troops occupied the Beijing-Tianjin line of communications in the summer and fall of 1900. Moreover, Western dreams of laying, landing, and controlling submarine cables on the China coast were finally realized in North China by the end of 1900. The British, therefore, were able to add a critical section to their planned global network of secure telegraphic communications. China’s recognition of the Western and Japanese right of protecting the Beijing-Tianjin line of communications was codified in Article 9 of the Boxer Protocol of September 1901. These losses of China’s telegraphic sovereignty would not be completely reversed until after 1949.
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Frugality and Luxury: Morality, Market, and Consumption in Late Imperial China
Margherita Zanasi
Front. Hist. China. 2015, 10 (3): 457-485.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-004-015-0022-4
This article contributes to a wider critique of the use of European capitalist, patterns of industrialization in studies of the economic history of modern China—patterns commonly assumed to be universally valid. This sort of analytical framework denies not only the value of alternative economic models, but also that of Chinese independent economic thought. In this context, the present article argues that most of the intellectual changes of seventeenth-century Europe that led to the formulation of liberal capitalism—resistance to government intervention, support for luxury consumption as well as a new understanding of the market and of the relationship between private interests and morality—had taken place in China more than a century earlier. The background against which the two processes emerged, however, varied significantly, leading to distinctive ramifications. Unprecedented population growth and a widening gap between hinterland and coastal economies led Chinese officials and intellectuals to discard ideas of free market and focus instead on solutions for increasing production, maximizing the circulation of resources, and fighting poverty. It was not, therefore, a lack of a “scientific” understanding of the economy that led China to turn away from European-style laissez fare, but rather an evaluation of the Empire’s circumstances, raising questions on whether the European model is indeed universally applicable regardless of local conditions.
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