Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2024. US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 9780674295889.
As many historians have shown, postal systems have played a transformative role in the economic and political development of nations. As vehicles for the dissemination of information and the transfer of money, postal systems have proved integral to increased connectivity among geographically dispersed communities, the promotion of commerce, the assertion of state sovereignty, and the dissemination of a sense of nationhood. Some countries, however, have had an easier time with postal modernization than others. In Japan, the existence of enlightened leadership and a strong centralized state facilitated the rapid introduction of a nationwide postal network within a few years of the 1868 Meiji Restoration. “The making of China’s post office,” by contrast, was a fraught, decades-long undertaking. As Weipin Tsai informs us in this exquisitely detailed book, the task was both shaped and disrupted not only by formidable geographic and demographic challenges but also by foreign pressure and conflict—both political and cultural—and a great deal of domestic infighting.
For Tsai, the slow, painstakingly negotiated process that preceded the 1896 establishment of the Great Qing Imperial Post Office (IPO) illuminates “the unsettling and dynamic nature of Chinese modernization and its accommodation of both local voices and foreign visions” (3). Key to that process were agency and timing. The idea of a British-style system was first floated during the early 1860s by Robert Hart, a well-informed, Chinese-speaking British official who served as the inspector general of ports in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS). But while Hart’s knack for cultivating allies among reform-minded Chinese elites and sensitivity to local customs established his bona fides as a trustworthy reformer, his ideas failed to gain traction within the Qing court, which viewed a modern postal system as an affront to socio-political traditions and a potential mechanism for foreign control. It was not until the 1874 Taiwan Crisis that the more reformist court warmed to the idea, ultimately agreeing by decade’s end to the establishment of a small-scale, experimental postal system under the auspices of the CMCS. Designed to connect the treaty ports with Beijing and Shanghai, the customs postal service developed haphazardly in reaction to public resistance while adapting to competition from China’s official military relay courier system, local private letter hongs, and an alternative postal system established by Chinese elites.
As it stepped up the pace of reform after the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War, the Qing finally set out to build a universally accessible, nationwide network of post offices. Now, China was in the driver’s seat, rather than foreign officials. Viewing the postal network as an instrument of state-building, the Qing expanded the postal network further inland and into the periphery, systematically mobilizing local elites behind the project, recruiting local shopkeepers as postal “agents,” and working to win the hearts and minds of ordinary people. These accomplishments may have done little to ultimately save the regime, but they effectively laid the institutional foundations for a modern postal system that survived well beyond the 1911 revolution.
To make her case, Tsai eschews simple chronological and thematic methodologies in favour of an approach that combines compelling overviews of historical context with narrative storytelling. In so doing, she effectively draws from a wealth of primary sources—from Hart’s writings and those of other CMCS officials to documents penned by pivotal Qing elites, provincial governors, and local officials—to highlight the “diversity of viewpoints” (16) involved in postal expansion, including at China’s periphery. Indeed, one of the major contributions of this book is its rich, original analysis of how the late Qing used the Post Office to extend not only its reach in distant provinces but also its sovereignty in the internationally contested regions of Tibet and Mongolia. Tsai also draws from those sources to convincingly reinterpret post-1911 Chinese historiography on Qing-era postal developments. While many of these histories assumed nationalist motivations behind the Qing’s early experimentations with postal modernization, Tsai demonstrates that nationalism—and the accompanying views of the post office as instruments of state-building and national sovereignty—did not significantly imbue reformist discourses until the 1900s.
To my mind, one casualty of this ambitious—and otherwise illuminating—methodological approach is the occasional loss of analytical focus to the book’s wealth of descriptive details. Some of those details, moreover, appear in surprising places; a history of the origins of the all-important CMCS, for instance, does not appear until chapter 6. Finally, while this study is full of brief observations about Chinese visits to foreign postal facilities, their rejection of certain foreign postal practices (e.g., mail delivery by stagecoach), and their struggle to introduce some of the institutional hallmarks of a modern postal system (e.g., the state’s monopolization of mail delivery), I would have welcomed more comparative analysis. What can we conclude about the impact of “foreign visions” on Chinese postal modernization? What, in the final analysis, was truly distinctive about the Chinese postal system? Addressing such questions would have further served the author’s key research objectives: to explain not only how the late Qing’s largest, nation-wide institution developed but also why it “emerge(d) in the form that it did” (11–12).
These are small concerns when compared to this book’s many strengths, from its outstanding use of primary sources, attention to broad historical context, and deft use of GIS to map the postal network’s expansion, to its fine-grained analysis of the timing and agents—both foreign and domestic—of change. In so doing, The Making of China’s Post Office contributes to recent scholarly arguments that the Chinese modernization process was far more complex and “fluid” than earlier scholars would allow. I encourage both China scholars and students of global postal history to give this important book a careful read.
Patricia Maclachlan
The University of Texas, Austin