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.


Treaty Ports in Modern China

Treaty Ports in Modern China

Author: Robert Bickers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1317266277

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This book presents a wide range of new research on the Chinese treaty ports – the key strategic places on China’s coast where in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries various foreign powers controlled, through "unequal treaties", whole cities or parts of cities, outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese authorities. Topics covered include land and how it was acquired, the flow of people, good and information, specific individuals and families who typify life in the treaty ports, and technical advances, exploration, and innovation in government.


Treaty Ports in Modern China

Treaty Ports in Modern China

Author: Robert Bickers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1317266285

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This book presents a wide range of new research on the Chinese treaty ports – the key strategic places on China’s coast where in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries various foreign powers controlled, through "unequal treaties", whole cities or parts of cities, outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese authorities. Topics covered include land and how it was acquired, the flow of people, good and information, specific individuals and families who typify life in the treaty ports, and technical advances, exploration, and innovation in government.


Hygienic Modernity

Hygienic Modernity

Author: Ruth Rogaski

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-11-29

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 0520930606

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Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng—which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"—as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races: categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.


Shanghai

Shanghai

Author: Linda Cooke Johnson

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 9780804722940

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Contrary to pervasive conventional views that Shanghai was little more than a fishing village prior to its opening as a Western treaty port in 1843, this social history of Shanghai shows that the city was a major commercial port long before the arrival of the British. The author traces the development of Shanghai from market town in the Song dynasty and county seat in the Yuan period to a center of cotton production in the Ming era and important port city in the Qing dynasty. By the early nineteenth century, Shanghai was among the twenty or so largest cities in China. Drawing on diverse Chinese materials - gazetteers, tariff manuals, and other internal sources - the author presents a China-centered perspective that stresses trends and continuities in the history of the Chinese city and situates the arrival of the West in the context of existing Chinese institutions, government policies, and commercial establishments.


A Comparative Study of East Asian Capitalism

A Comparative Study of East Asian Capitalism

Author: Hong Yung Lee

Publisher: Institute of East Asian Studies University of California - B

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13:

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"This book represents an initial attempt to compare China, Japan, and South Korea, three close geographical and cultural neighbors whose developmental trajectories, though divergent in the past, have been moving more recently toward convergence"--


Development Centre Studies Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run

Development Centre Studies Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run

Author: Maddison Angus

Publisher: OECD Publishing

Published: 1998-09-25

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9264163557

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The study provides a major reassessment of the scale and scope of China’s resurgence over the past half century, employing quantitative measurement techniques which are standard practice in OECD countries, but which have not hitherto been available for China.


The Merchants of Zigong

The Merchants of Zigong

Author: Madeleine Zelin

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 9780231135962

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From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Madeleine Zelin's history details the novel ways in which Zigong merchants mobilized capital through financial-industrial networks and spurred growth by developing new technologies, capturing markets, and building integrated business organizations. She provides new insight into the forces and institutions that shaped Chinese economic and social development (independent of Western or Japanese influence) and challenges long-held beliefs that social structure, state extraction, the absence of modern banking, and cultural bias against business precluded industrial development in China.


Shaping Modern Shanghai

Shaping Modern Shanghai

Author: Isabella Jackson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1108419682

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An innovative study of colonialism in China, examining Shanghai's International Settlement as the site of key developments in the Republican period.