Reviewed by: Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895-1937 Alison Dray-Novey (bio) Kristin Stapleton . Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895-1937. Harvard University Asia Center. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 186. Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. xii, 341 pp. Hardcover $40.00, ISBN 0-674-00246-6. In 1937-1938, war refugees arriving from eastern and central China saw Chengdu, Sichuan, as a backward, nineteenth-century city. While their impressions corresponded to surface appearances, the reality was more complex. During the twentieth century the city had experienced significant efforts at modernization. Yet political upheaval in 1911 and after interrupted these projects more than once; the vicissitudes of Chengdu urban reform reflected abrupt changes in power, personalities, and outside influences. In these decades Chengdu contained less than half the population of Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Canton, or Hankou. In Civilizing Chengdu, Kristin Stapleton lucidly traces the drive to "civilize" an inland Chinese city of modest size, from the point of view of participants at all levels of society. Her research sources include the archives of Chengdu and Sichuan, the First and Second Historical Archives of China, and early twentieth-century newspapers, guidebooks, and gazetteers. As a case study of a particular kind of modern Chinese city, and one that is less well known, this book provides much interesting material for students of comparative urban history. In demonstrating how reform in this southwestern [End Page 246] city proceeded in halting fashion, Civilizing Chengdu suggests, by way of counterexample, factors that facilitated faster, more continuous change in other places. Such factors perhaps included larger scale, the greater amount of contact with each other of the eastern and central cities, a prior history of more extensive bureaucratically organized policing (especially in Beijing), a more substantial community initiative in policing (especially in Hankou), and foreign models in and near the city (especially in Tianjin, Shanghai, and Canton). The Chinese word for the "civilization" that is suggested in Stapleton's ironic title is wenming, after the Meiji Japanese concept of bunmei. This word referred to all things modern, clean, hygienic (weisheng), spacious, and (above all) orderly. Reformers hoped that a community with these characteristics would foster a highly productive city population and thereby a powerful nation. In Chengdu, as elsewhere in China, this new international concept of a "civilized" city had to be built upon what remained of a much older pattern of urban social life and administration. At the turn of the twentieth century Chengdu was a garrisoned provincial capital of about three hundred thousand, a distant outpost of Qing order. (By 1937, before the wartime influx, the population would rise to four hundred thousand.) The city was surrounded by a rectangular wall with only four large gates. An interior walled garrison housed twenty thousand persons, mainly Manchu and Mongol bannermen and their families. As in the imperial capital at Beijing, multiple government agencies performed routine policing. These included the bannermen, increasingly impoverished in the nineteenth century; the Chinese army; and yamen runners from two districts (xian). From ten Chinese military battalions, which together officially consisted of about four thousand troops, an undetermined number of soldiers were assigned to patrol the city, especially during the winter months. Judging from Stapleton's description, pre-modern policing in Chengdu appears to have been more sporadic, less broad in scope, and conducted by fewer men in proportion to the population than was the case in Qing-era Beijing (pp. 34-45). During the formative New Policies (xinzheng) decade of 1901-1911, a young Qing official named Zhou Shanpei began urban reform in Chengdu with considerable success. In 1899 he had seen firsthand the results of the transformation that had taken place in Tokyo in the preceding three decades. The model for the Tokyo police force had been based both on Tokugawa-era practices in Edo (later Tokyo) and on the police system of Paris. For Zhou, the Tokyo example became the master key to modern urban order. While on the staff of the Sichuan governor-general in 1902 and 1903, he drafted police regulations for Chengdu, worked out a territorial division of labor for the city, and established a training academy. He envisioned a professional force...