The edited volume under review here is one of the most important to have been published on China's pre-war economy in recent years. Readers wary of this genre will be pleasantly surprised, since this compilation of studies penned by different scholars is a far cry from the all-too-common re-hashed conference proceedings. Rather, as the title suggests, the volume integrates much newly mined empirical evidence with intelligent analyses, and features numerous mutually-complementary insights into hitherto neglected aspects of the Treaty Port microcosm. Overall consistency clearly points to robust editorial feedback on earlier drafts and to subsequent author reflection.
The introductory essay by Billy So (pp. 1–32) trenchantly presents the binding thread running through the nine studies. All of the participants aim at bringing Douglass North's New Institutional Economics to bear on the classic paradigm of the Treaty Ports advanced by the late John K. Fairbank. Otherwise put, the Treaty Ports are depicted here as not necessarily bridgeheads of brute imperialism but as economic success stories grounded in Sino-foreign collaboration and institutional borrowing.
The Treaty Port rubric extends persuasively to the imperial capital Beijing. Though never ceded to the European Powers in the strict sense of the word, Beijing was where the foreign-run Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs was actually headquartered. So also stresses the importance of informal institutions to the making of the Treaty Ports. Whereas the rule of law in the West derived from an independent judiciary, it was the Consular and Mixed Courts that underpinned business in pre-war China's Treaty Ports. Not entirely free of political meddling or white supremacism, these Courts nevertheless allowed for less arbitrary dealings than was the case in Chinese imperial law, which was otherwise more punitive in orientation. Notably, consular protection also supported the slow introduction of modern joint-stock enterprise into the Chinese business mindset, whereas the imperial Chinese polity “… might have preferred for absolute ownership to exist so as to reduce the amount of litigation” (p. 21).
Couched within this theoretical framework, Part I features four studies focused on Shanghai's industrial and commercial growth and its impact on the Lower Yangzi Delta, and one study focused on Qingdao's hinterland. Part II features two studies exploring the impact of British legal precepts on customary land-rights and on traditional family-run firms in Hong Kong and on the Mainland.
Debin Ma (pp. 33–46) opens Part I with a wonderfully concise overview of the formal and informal institutions at work in pre-war Shanghai. Carefully drawing on several time-series, Ma contrasts Shanghai's industrial growth, which was perhaps even more impressive than in many Japanese cities in the early 1920s, with the sluggish growth in China's rural hinterland. In the absence of foreign semi-colonial protection, much of that hinterland was ravaged by wanton warlord exactions. Echoing So's essay, Ma then argues that the governance structure of Shanghai's flourishing and independently minded International Settlement was formed of a “taipan oligarchy” (p. 44). This cannot be neatly compared either with modern Western-style democratic principles or with outright colonial rule. In fact, that governance structure was “… reminiscent of the medieval European political tradition where incorporated urban communities practiced self-rule under merchant elite oligarchies often with charters granted by larger territorial rulers” (p. 39).
Yet, like many other prominent scholars, Ma insists that Shanghai's semi-colonial Mixed Courts did not merely benefit Shanghai per se, but eventually revolutionized notions of law in China's vast agrarian hinterland. In that sense, his position is a little more optimistic than in a few dissenting studies, including mine, which stress the paucity of civil cases adjudicated in the Mixed Courts.
Ma's impressive command of macrodata neatly paves the way for Tomoko Shiroyama's equally impressive and highly original chapter (pp. 47–74) on Shanghai's often-mystified property market. To my mind, this chapter constitutes a major contribution to Treaty Port research, as well as a major breakthrough in the study of pre-war Shanghai's Jewish community – few of whose luminaries became powerful landowners, and erected many of the city's famous lilong tenements for blue-collar workers. Interestingly, neither Jewish nor other foreign property developers mastered the local dialect, but were able to make a fortune by leasing tenements as a whole to Chinese entrepreneurs who then managed rent collection and tenant turnover.
The breadth of insight offered here by Shiroyama is difficult to encapsulate in a short review such as this. She aptly starts off by showing that average plots in Shanghai's International Settlement were worth 26.4 times more (!) than plots in adjacent Chinese jurisdictions during the 1920s. Yet, plots in Tianjin's British Settlement were only 2.25 times higher in value than plots in adjacent Chinese jurisdictions. There cannot be a better proof of Shanghai's exceptionality not just as compared with the Chinese hinterland, but across the Treaty Ports microcosm.
Shiroyama then provides a fascinating account of the yangshang guahao 洋商掛號 system whereby affluent Chinese subverted imperial prohibitions in order to purchase through foreign intermediaries quasi-official title deeds (quanbingdan 權柄單) in the International Settlement. Specialist readers will no doubt be tempted to draw analogies between the yangshangguahao system and Shanghai's fugu 附股 system whereby Chinese businesspeople bought into foreign corporate shells, as was first analysed by Wang Jingyu. One hopes that Shiroyama will some day expand her chapter to a book-length study so that pre-war Shanghai aficionados can know, once and for all, just how dominant, for example, Baghdadi-Jewish families like the Sassoons or Kadoories were in the local real-estate market, as compared with European or Chinese tycoons.
In Chapter 4 (pp. 75–95), Kai-Yiu Chan examines the extent to which steam-powered rice and flourmills impacted on manual stone milling in the Lower Yangzi between 1900 to 1936. He finds that Chinese-owned mills proved competitive with foreign-run mills (p. 81) at least until the outbreak of hostilities between China and Japan in 1932. Much of the grain conveyed to modern mills was from Southeast Asia (rice) and North America (wheat), thereby changing both trade patterns and the Chinese palate. Chan's treatment of this complex topic is commendable but gourmands might regret that a fuller discussion of how mechanized grain milling changed restaurant menus or Treaty Port diets is at the end left to a future study. It is also a little surprising that Chan's treatment of Sino-foreign competition in this important sector does not incorporate recent pertinent work by Daniel Meissner.
In Chapter 5 (pp. 96–117), Hon-Ming Yip examines the impact of railways on the cotton textile market economy of Wei county in Shandong, some 120 km due southwest from the Treaty Port of Qingdao. If Chan found that steam technology eventually swept aside manual grain milling in the lower Yangzi delta, Yip stresses the endurance of manual cloth weaving in Wei country in the face of mechanization and cheap foreign imports.
On the impact of commercialization on peasant household income, Yip seems to tread the middle ground between Philip Huang's pessimism and Loren Brand's optimism. After the 1920s, as machine-spun yarn became more popular in China, an intricate putting-out system for funding hand-spun yarn developed in Wei country. At the end, Yip seems to suggest that better transport infrastructure and the putting-out system may have left the Wei rural household a little better off.
In Chapter 6 (pp. 118–46), James Kung, Daniel Lee and Nasheng Bai shift the focus back to the Lower Yangzi Delta. Theirs is an approach somewhat more congruent with optimist appraisals of the effects of commercialization on rural standards of living. They find Wuxi peasants to have allocated labour in rational ways, and do not see a strong proclivity to confine females to domestic cottage industry. The originality of this chapter lies not so much in its optimism but in the fact that the authors deploy data from exactly the same locality, compiled as part of a survey conducted by Academia Sinica and revisited in the early 1950s by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. That said, Kung and Lee do nevertheless concede that the widespread practice of land pawning in Wuxi might suggest that many peasants did in fact suffer from financial if not existential “distress” (p. 139).
Part II opens with Kentaro Matsubara's treatment of traditional land rights in Hong Kong's New Territories (pp. 147–71). Matsubara outlines the tension between the traditional Chinese concept of land-holding, whereby the emperor was, at least symbolically, the owner of last resort, and whereby collective ancestral claims overrode individual claims, and British concepts of individual property rights and courtroom activism. Matsubara also does an excellent job of explaining the common Chinese distinction between perpetual land rights and short-term top-soil cultivation rights (i.e. “absentee landlordism”). Whilst China's mandarins were reluctant to intervene in land-rights disputes, Hong Kong's colonial system actively did away with absentee landlordism, turning residents in effect into Crown Lessees.
In Chapter 8 (pp. 172–85), Stephanie Po-yin Chung complements Matsubara. She delineates how virtual ancestral “halls” (called “Tong land trusts” by the British) eventually gave way to joint-stock holding firms in early twentieth-century Hong Kong. Chung stresses that many Chinese businessmen preferred, arguably due to considerations of tax avoidance, the ambiguity of Tong collective identity to the certainty of corporate registration. Thus, even in the early twentieth century, many Chinese businesspeople in the colony still shunned public share subscription, raising funds instead through family relatives and native-place networks.
Yet, a warlord fiscal crackdown on Tong possessions in neighbouring Guangzhou drove many of them to seek incorporation in the safety of the crown colony. Notably, Chung shows (pp. 180–81) that between 1924 and 1934 no fewer than forty-nine such hybrid Tong-firm entities were registered in Hong Kong with twenty-seven singularly involved in the property sector. Every one of the twenty-seven entities in question was made up of shareholders with precisely the same surname and the same place of origin.
If Chung's analysis might cast doubts as to the penetration of joint-stock praxis into Chinese mindsets in 1920s, the concluding chapter by Billy So and Albert Lee argues (pp. 186–210) that British corporate and common law principles had actually had far-reaching impact on the evolution of corporate law on the Mainland. So and Lee believe that the first Chinese thinkers to underscore the urgency of enacting indigenous corporate law, Wu Tingfan and Liang Qichao, were in fact inspired by the Anglo-American model just as much as they were stirred by Japan's Meiji legal reforms. The latter, in turn, had of course been themselves modelled in the main on German and Belgian advice.
Why then did so few firms seek incorporation and limited liability in Republican China? So and Lee believe that, on balance, Chinese corporate law evolved fairly well over time in terms of its provisions, and that the Nationalists’ ideology was actually pro-business (p. 206). Nevertheless, political disintegration, fiscal crisis and warlord excesses had arguably hollowed out the Republican tilt at the rule of law.
The copy-editing, graph and figure production standards of this volume come across as very high. I could spot only one transliteration error in the bibliography, where the famous pre-war economist Wu Baosan is rendered as Ou Baosan. This quibble aside, the editors, So and Myer, ought to be congratulated along with the other eleven contributors on producing this thoughtful, collective endeavour. Their work should be read by anyone seriously interested in China's pre-war economy.
