Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 410. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2018. xii, 381 pp. (Table, maps, illustrations.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-98384-7.
Anne Reinhardt’s Navigating Semi-Colonialism is a comprehensive analysis of steam transport in China from the mid-nineteenth century up until the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Drawing on a wide range of primary materials in Chinese and Japanese, Reinhardt approaches “steam navigation as a wider arena comprising intertwined political, economic, social, and cultural elements” and examines the expansion of steam navigation in the Qing empire, the shifting organization of the steam shipping business and identities of its participants, and the steamship as a social space (7). During these years, China was often seen as a “semi-colonial” state. By scrutinizing the development of the shipping networks linking the Yangzi River and coastal areas, Reinhardt’s larger goal is to explore the interaction between Chinese and foreign powers in the formation of China’s semi-colonial status. As Reinhardt shows, these interactions, involving business elites, political activists, labourers, and passengers, also shed light on the broader process of European expansion, colonialization, and empire building at the turn of the twentieth century.
Thematically, the book is divided into two parts: a political and business history of the steam transport business and a social history of the steamship in the late Qing and Republican eras. To understand the transformation of the steam-shipping business and state power relations behind it, Reinhardt adopts the analytical framework of “collaboration” to explore “the assertions and limitations of Chinese sovereignty within semi-colonialism” (9). Following the Treaty of Tianjin, the Qing state and Britain carried out a series of negotiations over shipping regulations in the 1860s. The negotiations, only permitting steamships to travel between treaty ports, “formalized the foreign-flag shipping network in Chinese waters and made it part of the treaty system” (32). However, concerned with maintaining domestic political order and central-local financial balance, the Qing government decided to subject Chinese-owned steamships to the same set of regulations imposed on foreign steam navigation. This decision gave rise to an unintended consequence: “the future development of the steam transport network had to take place through the diplomatic channels” (35), which made steam navigation a good arena through which to observe the dynamics of semi-colonialism in China.
Collaboration was also reflected in the shipping conference that came to set freight rates, tonnages, and market shares of the Chinese and British shipping companies between the 1880s and the 1910s. Although initially devised to protect British firms’ business interests, the conference served as a collaborative mechanism that also “protected and sustained the China Merchants Company through a particularly turbulent period in its internal affairs and in its relations with the government” (105). It allowed the China Merchants Company to survive the intense business competition and political turmoil and eventually outlive the Qing state that originally sponsored its development. What is more interesting about the shipping conference is how it accommodated traditional Chinese business networks, which increasingly turned to steam navigation for the circulation of their goods and commodities since the late nineteenth century. Reinhardt’s stories show that Chinese shippers and traders relied on native-place guilds to organize boycotts and taboos against unfair rates, therefore effectively voicing their concerns to the conference system and forcing the steam-shipping companies to reach agreements with traditional merchants (103).
In the Republican period, nationalist politics, including the shipping rights recovery movement and boycotts and protests against foreign firms, reshaped the steam transport business in China. Under the banner of rights recovery, nationalistic activist-elites formed new shipping companies to compete against foreign companies, seeking to undermine the domination of foreign powers in Chinese waters. WWI created a golden opportunity for Chinese private capitalists to get a foothold in the shipping business. In the absence of a powerful central government, “the sector of private, Chinese-flag shipping expanded substantially” (187). This period witnessed the emergence of some famous Chinese “national capitalist” shipping enterprises, such as Zhang Jian’s Dada Steamship Company, Yu Xiaqing’s Sanbei Company, and Lu Zuofu’s Minsheng Industrial Company. Remarkable parallels can be found between the three businesses, especially in terms of the founders’ principles and pursuits, business organization and tactics, and modernization efforts devoted to their native places.
When examining the social experience of steam shipping, Reinhardt focuses as much on how the space was divided and managed between foreign captains and Chinese compradors as on how the resulting racial segmentation and hierarchization were perceived and experienced by passengers, especially the ordinary Chinese ones. Before the 1920s, foreign-flag ships’ extraterritorial status and the compradorial management made the Chinese accommodation an alienated space (173), which clearly mirrored “the racial ideologies of colonialism” (254) in China. During the late 1920s and 1930s, nationalism combined ideas of modernity and hygiene and practical concerns of cost, efficiency, and control to transform the ship’s social space. Lu’s Minsheng, a pioneer in the reformulation of China’s steamship space, managed to recast the image of Chinese steam transport through various modernizing programs and initiatives.
Overall, Navigating Semi-Colonialism is a welcome contribution to the political, economic, and business history of modern China. It joins some of the new works, such as Elizabeth Koll’s Railroads and the Transformation of China and Judd Kinzley’s Natural Resources and the New Frontier, to emphasize the important role of business history in understanding China’s political, economic, institutional, and social transition over the past two centuries. Transcending the conventional periodization and ideological boundaries, Reinhardt’s work also speaks to the larger academic concern on colonialism and sovereignty and motivates us to reconsider continuity and ruptures in China’s transformation from the Qing empire to the Republic.
Zhaojin Zeng
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh