New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xiv, 396 pp. (Figures, tables, graphs.) US$50.00, cloth . ISBN 978-0-231-13738-6.
Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China by Hans van de Ven does indeed break with the past. It breaks with past approaches to modern Chinese history. It breaks with scholarship that neatly compartmentalizes Chinese, British Imperial and Treaty Port history. Instead, it offers an interconnected narrative that addresses the big present-day questions about the origins of China’s new position as a global power. This is answered through a long overdue reinterpretation of the significance of the often overlooked foreign-led state agency, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (1854–1949).
The book comprises seven chapters, together with an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction explains the significance of the Customs Service as a middle house for Chinese and foreign contact. The author states that the “aim of this study is to write the Customs Service back into the history of modern China and modern globalisation and so, more generally, to bring the foreign back” (5). Its approach to modernity attempts to be alert to its patchwork nature, to its improvisational aspects, and to the fact that what we might see as typically European or Chinese, in reality came about as the two met. He states his argument that the Customs Service was a chameleon because of the hybrid quality personnel it employed. As a “frontier regime” it gave commercial opportunities for advancement not just to reputable merchants, but also to adventurers, arms dealers, speculators, mercenaries, and sailors.
This book does really break with the past. This break is most noticeable in the author’s treatment of John King Fairbank’s notion of “synarchy.” While acknowledging Fairbank’s status in the historiography of this period, van de Ven does nonetheless revise the overly Orientalist and imperialist perspective that Fairbank had on Chinese history. He writes,
Fairbank was naïve about the political context in which the Customs Service operated and did not do what is an imperative for historians: follow the money. He failed to pay sufficient attention to conflicts among foreigners as well as between Chinese officials and Manchu aristocrats. Nor was he sufficiently alert to China’s long history of commercialisation and overseas trade, or of the fact that its officials and merchants often collaborated or that the weak, too, often have some sort of power (8).
Chapter 1 assesses Prince Gong and his cosmopolitan efforts to use the British and French as a counterweight to the Taiping. It combines that assessment with a study of the activities of Horatio Lay as first inspector general, whose more forceful approach tested Prince Gong’s willingness to accommodate British demands. Lay’s dismissal and the appointment of Robert Hart signalled a clear change in philosophy for the Customs Service, from being an instrument of British informal empire to one that was “more a Chinese institution” (63). This separation between trade and governance is today regarded as one of the modern principles of free trade. Chapter 2 discusses the contribution of Robert Hart to the consolidation of the Customs Service, not least by the construction of a network of lighthouses. Hart’s “panopticon,” then, was built as a centralized and disciplined administration that inhabited a space between the Qing and Western powers that was to become a modern and established bureaucracy on the Chinese coast. That space was, perhaps more accurately, a locum for interdependence, that is, the mutual need, commercial and otherwise, of the foreign for China and China for the foreign. This moment marks the start of economic globalization as we now know it and the place of China in the world economy.
Chapter 3 examines the ever-difficult relationship between China and Japan through the lens of the London office of the Maritime Customs Service. In the period between the Taiping Rebellion and the First Sino-Japanese War, China went from being the leading East Asian naval power to second fiddle to Japan as the terms of trade changed in the bilateral relationship: China exported agricultural and other primary goods to Japan while it imported industrial goods from Japan. Despite the best efforts of the London office to revitalize the Customs Service, the Japanese pressure proved too much and led to the collapse of Chinese rule in the seas and markets of East Asia.
Chapter 4 provides insight into the involvement of the Customs Service in the fiscal affairs of the country. As a lender of last resort, it underwrote loan bonds to pay dues to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War and guaranteed the Boxer Indemnity. Chapter 5 examines the role played by Francis Aglen at the helm of the Customs Service. His commitment to fiscal prudence ultimately paved the way for the Nationalist takeover of the country and his replacement by Frederick Maze. The Nationalists, in turn, used the Customs Service as a cash cow, a raiser of revenue with which to fund their revolutionary activities.
Chapter 6 traces the formation of the modern Chinese state through the development of a consistent tariff policy under the direction of the Customs Service. This administration provided a ready template for accountability, which would later prove useful for the governance of the Chinese polity. Chapter 7 outlines the collapse of the Customs Service under pressure from the horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Communist revolution. This was a time of great confusion that even saw the parallel appointment of two rival inspectors general, the Japanese-backed Kishimoto Hirokichi and the American Lester K. Little. The Korean War and the paranoia of “enemies within” was the final nail in the coffin for the Customs Service.
Once again, van de Ven wants—indeed, he needs—to write “about the Service largely as a way to bring the foreign back into China’s modern history” (309). He succeeds. He does so with the support of a relentless archival study that took him all over China and beyond, from Nanjing and its Second Historical Archives to Kew and the British National Archives. His admirable focus on the big picture combined with detailed archival analysis is underwritten with rigour, in telling the broader narratives from Old China to Young China to Nationalist China to Communist China to China today as the largest economy of the world. And out of this narrative, the colour green of Customs Service flags and ensigns triumphantly appears in postal services everywhere in Greater China as a visual reminder of the historical legacy of this great agency of the Chinese state, fittingly, in the green of Hart’s Ireland, not the vermilion red of China.
Stephanie Villalta Puig
Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
pp. 904-907