Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. ix, 268 pp. (Illustrations.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-4100-3.
Jiangsu Province’s Wuxi County is about eighty miles northwest of Shanghai in the Lower Yangzi Delta, a region that since late imperial times has been among China’s most advanced in terms of commercial and urban development. This monograph details the even more remarkable urbanization witnessed in Wuxi during the first half of the twentieth century, when it became thoroughly integrated into networks of international trade. By the early 1930s, the city of Wuxi lagged behind only Shanghai and Guangzhou in industrial output, and the size of its industrial labour force ranked second to Shanghai’s, making Wuxi China’s largest manufacturing centre outside the treaty ports. Industrial development, agricultural commercialization, and urban expansion did as much to transform Wuxi county as any other part of China, leading to what Lincoln calls an “urbanization of the countryside” (2) that made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the urban and the rural.
This book makes a major contribution by taking modern Chinese urban history beyond the city limits, exploring how the same historical processes affected urban as well as rural spaces. Eschewing the “urban-rural gap thesis” that has informed much of the existing historiography, Lincoln argues that a decisive shift in the “urban-rural continuum” took place in Wuxi county throughout the Republican period, reorienting society as a whole towards the city. By employing this framework, Lincoln avoids the analytical pitfalls that come with a simplistic binary opposition between the “modern” city and the “traditional” countryside. Instead, his history draws attention to the far-reaching economic, physical, political, and administrative changes that occurred as urbanization reshaped cities, towns, and villages, as well as the new relationships that it forged among them.
In the early twentieth century, Wuxi’s commercial and industrial elites took the lead in establishing factories and investing in infrastructure that remade the city and the countryside. Wuxi grew in population and size as increasing numbers of people migrated to the city to find employment in silk mills and other industrial enterprises, giving rise to tighter connections between the urban core and its rural hinterland. Communities of Wuxi sojourners in Shanghai, Nanjing, and other cities linked their native place to the Lower Yangzi’s increasingly interconnected urban system, helping it weather crises caused by warfare and natural disasters. Lincoln maintains that Wuxi elites, in tandem with local officials, secured a degree of “municipal autonomy” in the 1920s that gave them greater leeway in shaping urban expansion, but acknowledges that this urban autonomy proved fleeting. Under the Guomindang’s Nanjing government in the early 1930s, the state’s bureaucratic and regulatory apparatus assumed a greater role in guiding and managing the process of urbanization to reflect its developmental priorities.
In addition to assessing the role of the state and local elites, fully comprehending urbanization and its effects requires examining “how the rapidly changing physical landscape formed the spaces that constituted the horizons of daily lived experience for farmers and workers” (3). Lincoln presents rich information on the experiences of the women and men who worked in Wuxi’s factories (32–34), the character of urban street life (34–37), and the transformation of daily life in rural villages (50–54). Inclusion of additional material on these topics throughout the book might have further enlivened its presentation. The multifaceted impact of urbanization on the natural environment, touched upon in a section on the emergence of Lake Tai as a tourist destination (44–45), also merits more comprehensive investigation.
In the book’s most fascinating chapters, Lincoln demonstrates that even during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945, industrial development continued to drive the process of urbanization that he sees as an “unstoppable force” (145), albeit within the context of Japanese occupation. The initial trauma of Japanese invasion tore the “threads of silk that for decades had connected farming households to the international economy,” but “they were rapidly woven anew in the first few months of 1938 and once more linked Wuxi to Shanghai” (128) In the first few years under Japanese occupation, the revival of Wuxi’s silk industry enabled it to regain its status as one of China’s most important economic centres.
Lincoln’s nuanced account of Wuxi’s wartime travails clearly demonstrates the brutality of the Japanese presence as well as its limits. It was Chinese authorities who took responsibility for reviving silk production, thwarting Japanese efforts to establish a complete monopoly over the industry. Chinese officials oversaw wartime reconstruction, development, and management of urban and rural infrastructure, which gave them opportunities to implement prewar plans for expansion with little impediment from the Japanese. Lincoln asserts that “the speed with which the city recovered supports the argument that the Chinese collaborationist state was effective and legitimate” (148). Yet the assassination of Wuxi’s collaborationist county magistrate in 1940—and Japanese “village-clearance” campaigns that followed—underline the tenuousness of this wartime accommodation.
Lincoln has grounded his analysis firmly in exhaustive research conducted in the Wuxi Municipal Archives, the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Jiangsu Provincial Archives, and at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, along with a wide array of local newspapers, guidebooks, official publications, and Japanese survey reports. His mastery of these sources establishes his credentials as a top-notch historian of modern China. Future research should reveal the extent to which shifts in the urban-rural continuum that occurred in other regions of China during the early twentieth century resembled the history of urbanization in Wuxi, and Lincoln has provided a model for that line of inquiry.
This pioneering study is an absolute must-read for students of Chinese urban history, and will appeal to anyone interested in the historical roots of the massive urbanization that has taken place in tandem with contemporary China’s rapid economic development. The book would make a useful addition to reading lists for graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate courses on modern Chinese social and economic history, as well as classes on the history of World War II in East Asia.
Micah Muscolino
University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
pp. 124-126