Reviewed by: China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965 by Philip Thai Mao Lin Thai, Philip. China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. The study of state building has been one of the most prominent themes of the scholarship of modern Chinese history for the past decade. Philip Thai’s book, China’s War on Smuggling, is the latest and a much-welcomed contribution to this historiographical trend. While scholars typically focus on issues traditionally associated with state building such as the development of modern bureaucracies, Thai offers a fresh approach by examining the successive Chinese regimes’ efforts to battle against smuggling, “focusing on the expanded use of coercive policies and policing to discipline consumption, production, and exchange—the very imperatives that drove the fight against smuggling” (3). Drawing upon a wide range of archival sources, especially records from the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and its successor, the China General Customs Administration, Thai argues that “the fight against smuggling was not simply a minor law enforcement issue but a transformative agent in expanding state capacity, centralizing legal authority, and increasing government reach over economic life” (3). Covering the time period from the last decades of the Qing dynasty to the early years of the People’s Republic of China, the book [End Page 249] shows that smuggling and its suppression had indeed been a long-term issue underlining China’s struggle to establish a modern state with complete sovereignty over its territories, despite the numerous regime changes between 1842 and 1965. Thai argues that the problem of smuggling reflected the “dialectical” relationship between two developments in modern China, “the gradual extension of state authority into the economy and the unceasing resistance to such official intrusions” (4). Accordingly, the book examines both the changing anti-smuggling policies across different historical eras and how smuggling was practiced on the ground. “[S]tates certainly made smuggling,” Thai claims, “but smuggling also remade states” (11). The book begins with a survey of the treaty port economy during the last decades of the Qing dynasty. Thai regards the Qing government’s effort to fight smuggling as one of the regime’s survival strategies in a new age dominated by Western powers. But two factors effectively limited the Qing regime’s anti-smuggling efforts. On the one hand, extraterritoriality made foreigners involved in smuggling untouchable by any Chinese authority. On the other hand, China’s loss of tariff autonomy denied the regime useful tools of fighting smuggling. The Chinese Maritime Customs Service was established by the British in 1854 and since then had been controlled by foreigners until its last days. Not surprisingly, the agency was reluctant to fight China’s war on smuggling. However, since China’s tariff was a low, fixed 5 percent throughout this period, smuggling was mainly limited to certain prohibited goods such as opium and weapons. Thai devotes the next five chapters to the Nationalist period, the core period of his book. Thai argues that “Nationalist China made tariff autonomy the cornerstone of its ambitious state-building agenda” (61). The Nationalists believed that a strong Chinese state could only be possible with a strong economy. And a strong economy could only be possible with centralized state control, regulation, and guidance. Tariff autonomy was deemed essential in terms of protecting the economy from foreign competitions. While the Nationalist regime had some success in achieving tariff autonomy, its new laws and regulations broadened the definition of smuggling. Many legal commodities now suddenly became smuggled goods. “New tariffs and regulations—introduced with the goal of strengthening the central state—ironically transformed smuggling from a limited, if chronic, problem into a serious threat that undermined the Nationalists’ authority, finances, and vision of a self-sufficient China” (87). [End Page 250] Although the Nationalist regime, in a sense, created an artificial smuggling crisis, it continued to expand the reach of the state through suppression of smugglings. Mass media and intellectuals created a popular discourse on smuggling, which echoed the official line that smuggling hurt the nation’s economy. Meanwhile, the...
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Jan 1, 2022
Konstantin (Moshe) Yanovskiy 
Open Access