Imports and Industrialization: China's 'War' Against American Flour Imports, 1895-1910 by Daniel J. Meissner The tremendous western migration during the mid-nineteenth century Gold Rush set the stage for the development of Pacific coast agriculture" industry and trade. As surface mines played out, legions of young men exchanged picks for plows, and began planting wheat in California's fertile valleys. A rapid increase in wheat production, reaching nearly two million bushels in 1854, stimulated development of a coastal flour industry. 1 •Sperry, Golden Gate and Starr flour companies formed the core of this modern steel-roller milling industry, whichby the mid-1860s was already producing surpluses of high quality flour.2 As wheat and flour production expanded, surplus flour was exported to Europe and across the Pacific to Chinese ports, where it found a ready market among a growing Western community and affluent natives. Although Chinese, millers had been relatively successful in meeting the basic flour needs of rising urban populations through proliferation of traditional technology, human- .oranimal-powered millstones were simply incapable of producing sufficient quantities of high quality flour} Exploiting this technological weakness, WestCoast millers gradually built an export trade to fill this market niche. , By the 1880s, Midwestern millers were advocating a more' intensive cultivation of the China flour trade in order to alleviate competition in European markets, where both East and West Coast millers concentrated their exports. Rooted in Western industrial chauvinism and framed in progressivism's expansionist ideals, Midwestern millers challenged the industry to awaken to the "startling possibilities of the Orient as a flour market, and ... with inspired belief and intrepid confidence-set about the work of exploiting it intelligently, courageously and with a broad appreciation of itsgreatness."4Pacific millers took up the gauntlet, and embarked on a mission to intensify flour exports to Asia. By the tum' of the century, they had conscientiously built the trade into a vital market for their surplus production, supplying flour to all,of China's coastal markets and beyond-from Vladivostok to the Straits Settlement. Escalating importation of duty-free American flour represented a significant financial drain and loss of economic control for China. After the SinoJapanese War, the Qing perceived foreign economic incursion~in terms of imports , concessions, factories, and loans-as a serious threat to Chinese soverTwentieth -Century China, Vol. 28, NO.2 (April, 2003): 1-40 2 Twentieth~CenturyChina eignty. Lacking the military or financial resources to confront Western powers directly, the Qing devised and implemented the ambitious rights recovery polic;y, a program designed to combat foreign aggrandizement in part through privately funded, import-substitution industrialization. Encouraged by government incen .. tives and motivated by patriotic convictions, the Chinese bourgeoisie began investigating the feasibility of investment in light industry. 5 At the turn of the century, one such entrepreneur-Sun Duosen, a minor official and businessman from Anhui province-determined to challenge American domination of China's flour market. Recognizing the technologicallimitations of traditional Chinese milling and responding to the Qing's industrial incentives , Sun founded the first modern flour mill in China. He imported the most advanced machinery from the United States and employed an American millerto supervise production. Using Chinese labor and native wheat, his modest-sized mill began manufacturing a low-priced flour, equal in quality to foreign imports. Under his innovative wheat procurement programs, hybrid business strategies, and aggressive marketing techniques, Sun's enterprise prospered and eXPanded, attracting other native entrepreneurs to the trade. Within a decade, the modern Chinese flour milling industry founded by Sun overwhelmed its foreign competition and secured the market for domestic producers. Sun's mill not only formed the nucleus of the modern Chinese flour industry, but also served as a succ;essful model for treaty-port commerce and import-substitution industrialization. Chinese industrial success stories like Sun Duosen' s are rare in scbolarly literature. Until recently, historians have concentrated on determining why Chi.. nese industrialization failed, citing such factors as competition from foreign imports, insufficient investment capital, outdated technology, an illiterate labor force, feudal management policies, deficient work ethic, underdeveloped transportation system, inadequate credit facilities, corrupt and ineffectual government , excessive taxation, exactions, and likin charges.6 While these factors 11ndoubtedly affected (to...
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Sep 1, 2004
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