China’s War on Smuggling
China’s War on Smuggling

Author: Philip Thai

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 023154636X

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Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.

War Without Rules
War Without Rules

Author: Robert Spalding

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-04-19

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0593331044

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In its fight for global dominance, Communist China has thrown out the old rules of war. China expert General Robert Spalding walks us through their new playbook. Many Americans are finally waking up to the alarming reality of China's stealth war on the United States and puzzling over how to push back against its insidious infiltration. What few realize is that we have one real advantage in this war: the Chinese Communist Party strategy for total war has been written out in Unrestricted Warfare, the Chinese book, well known there, that has become their new Art of War. In War Without Rules, retired Air Force Brigadier General Rob Spalding takes Americans inside Unrestricted Warfare. He walks readers through the principles of this book, revealing the Chinese belief that there is no sector of life outside the realm of war. He shows how the CCP itself has promised to use corporate espionage, global pandemics, and trade violations to achieve dominance. Most importantly, he provides insight into how, once Americans are aware of the tactics, we can fight back against CCP’s creeping influence. More than a vital read for those interested in China, War Without Rules is essential reading for anyone—from policymakers and diplomats to businessmen and investors—finally waking up to the stealth war. Knowledge is power, and it’s time to arm yourself.

Unrestricted Warfare
Unrestricted Warfare

Author: Liang Qiao

Publisher: NewsMax Media, Inc.

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780971680722

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Three years before the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center-a Chinese military manual called Unrestricted Warfare touted such an attack-suggesting it would be difficult for the U.S. military to cope with. The events of September ll were not a random act perpetrated by independent agents. The doctrine of total war outlined in Unrestricted Warfare clearly demonstrates that the People's Republic of China is preparing to confront the United States and our allies by conducting "asymmetrical" or multidimensional attack on almost every aspect of our social, economic and political life.

Imperial Twilight
Imperial Twilight

Author: Stephen R. Platt

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 0307961745

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As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.

The China Mirage
The China Mirage

Author: James Bradley

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2015-04-21

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0316196665

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From the bestselling author of Flags of our Fathers, Flyboys, and The Imperial Cruise, a spellbinding history of turbulent U.S.-China relations from the 19th century to World War II and Mao's ascent. In each of his books, James Bradley has exposed the hidden truths behind America's engagement in Asia. Now comes his most engrossing work yet. Beginning in the 1850s, Bradley introduces us to the prominent Americans who made their fortunes in the China opium trade. As they -- -good Christians all -- -profitably addicted millions, American missionaries arrived, promising salvation for those who adopted Western ways. And that was just the beginning. From drug dealer Warren Delano to his grandson Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from the port of Hong Kong to the towers of Princeton University, from the era of Appomattox to the age of the A-Bomb, The China Mirage explores a difficult century that defines U.S.-Chinese relations to this day.

The Ecology of War in China
The Ecology of War in China

Author: Micah S. Muscolino

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1107071569

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This book explores the interplay between war and the environment in Henan Province, a hotly contested frontline territory that endured massive environmental destruction and human disruption during the conflict between China and Japan that raged during World War II. In a desperate attempt to block Japan's military advance, Chinese Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek broke the Yellow River's dikes in Henan in June 1938, resulting in devastating floods that persisted until after the war's end. Greater catastrophe struck Henan in 1942-1943, when famine took some two million lives and displaced millions more. Focusing on these war-induced disasters and their aftermath, this book conceptualizes the ecology of war in terms of energy flows through and between militaries, societies, and environments. Ultimately, Micah Muscolino argues that efforts to procure and exploit nature's energy in various forms shaped the choices of generals, the fates of communities, and the trajectory of environmental change in North China.

Foreign Mud
Foreign Mud

Author: Maurice Collis

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780811215060

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Based upon selected anecdotal stories written by British observers, this text reconstructs the events of the illegal opium trade in Canton in the 1830s and the war between Britain and China that followed. The volume is illustrated with b & w maps, prints, and photographs. Irish-born Collis (1889-1975) served for many years in the Indian Civil Service in Burma and later became a writer and critic in London. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Smuggling, State-building, and Political Economy in Coastal China, 1927-1949
Smuggling, State-building, and Political Economy in Coastal China, 1927-1949

Author: Philip Thai

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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This study looks at Nationalist China's war on smuggling from 1927 to 1949 to explore the transformation of state authority and the larger socioeconomic impact of state-building. The recovery of tariff autonomy in the late 1920s empowered the Nationalist government to raise duties on foreign goods for the first time in nine decades. Higher tariffs and stricter controls on trade provided the new state critical revenues to meet an array of urgent domestic needs and foreign threats, but they also created a full-blown smuggling epidemic by making smuggling a very profitable enterprise. To meet this challenge to its authority, the state fought back with an extensive campaign to stamp out smuggling, created new definitions of legal trade, and asserted its prerogative to police borders. This study argues that the suppression of smuggling was more than a law enforcement issue: it was integral to broader state efforts to extract fiscal resources, broadcast central authority, and delineate new boundaries of legality. Merchants and other smugglers, meanwhile, did not passively accept growing state strictures but adopted a range of responses, from compliance to evasion, that helped shape the contours of an emerging legal regime. How the state asserted its prerogative to tax, regulate, and police trade--and how mercantile circles responded to this expansion of state power--are questions at the core this study. Using diverse sources such as customs records, legal cases, government correspondences, and popular press reports from ports along coastal China, this study chronicles both the campaign to fight smuggling from the top, as well as the range of reactions to official efforts from the bottom. In addition to issues in Chinese studies, I also engage with wider research in legal and economic history in examining the creation and enforcement of new legal categories as well as strategies merchants employed in response to changing business environments.